Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas

The book is Selected Writings Of Thomas Aquinas by Thomas Aquinas. I read Part 1 which is titled “Studies” and contains the works “The Principles of Nature,” “On Being and Essence,” “The Nature of Theology,” and “The Work of the Six Days of Creation.” Aquinas wrote this material between 1245 and 1256 AD. I read the 1998 Penguin Classics edition. I read it in January of 2023.  

The title is selected writings because it’s a collection of several works by Aquinas.  

I read this because from what I understand, Aquinas introduced the idea of there being two sorts of law, the spiritual law, and the natural law. He was obsessed with Aristotle and took his philosophy seriously. I believe that this lead him to think there is a divide between religion and science.  

I have very little idea what Aquinas was saying in the material. It was barely readable. He speaks with such academic prose it was very hard to follow. He gives no examples of what he’s talking about. He writes about the forms and matter and privation and potency. I feel like I need a degree in philosophy just to understand the terms he’s using. As a reader, I felt no buy-in as to why any of this is important or even relevant to anything in life. I assume he actually has something coherent and useful to say, but it’s buried under so much philosophical jargon, it doesn’t come through.  

This is a good example of the confusion that I think a lot of people have with Aquinas. Or at least the confusion that I have. 

“Thus the physician orders the pharmacist and uses the medicines made by him for his own end. So too, since the end of philosophy in its entirety is below the end of theology, and ordered to it, theology ought to order the other sciences and use what is taught in them.” (p43) 

 Here he is saying that the same way a doctor uses medicine made by pharmacists, in his treatment of a patient, so to should theology use philosophy towards its higher ends.  

The problem I have with this is I’m not sure if Aquinas is implying that there is any philosophy without theology. Are they two separate things? Can you have one without the other? The analogy of the doctor and pharmacist doesn’t work because the doctor and the medicine are separate, theology and philosophy are not.  

There is no divide between faith and reason because you cannot have reason without faith. Because of our limited knowledge and the problem of induction, there will always be an element of uncertainty in any logical or scientific endeavor, requiring some modicum of faith.  

This book was very confusing. Nothing was clear.  

I’m not sure I’d recommend this to anyone outside of philosophy academia. It’s some of the densest reading I’ve ever done. Unhelpful. Unreadable. 

******************************************************************************************************

Notable Quotables 

“It should be replied that we are said to be of the race of God with respect to the soul, not because the soul is of the divine essence but because it shares in the intellectual nature which is also in God; according to which it is also said to be in the image of God.” (Pxvi).  

Thus the physician orders the pharmacist and uses the medicines made by him for his own end. So too, since the end of philosophy in its entirety is below the end of theology, and ordered to it, theology ought to order the other sciences and use what is taught in them. (p43) 

“It is evident then that an intelligence is form and existence, and that it has existence from the first being who is existence alone, and that this is the first cause, God.” (p56) 

“when Thomas speaks of two kinds of truth about God, he is comparing the culminating achievement of philosophy as he found it in Aristotle with the starting point of Christian reflection on revelation.” (p70)