Thomas Aquinas

All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Catholic philosopher and theologian in the scholastic tradition, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis. He is the most famous classical proponent of natural theology. He gave birth to the Thomistic school of thought (Thomism), which has long been the primary philosophical and theological approach of the Catholic Church.

Sourced

Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,
Newer rites of grace prevail;
Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.

As the saints will rejoice in all goods, so will the damned grieve for all goods.

• Pange, lingua, gloriosi
  Corporis mysterium
  Sanguinisque pretiosi,
  Quem in mundi pretium
  Fructus ventris generosi
  Rex effudit gentium.
  • Sing, my tongue, the Savior's glory,
    Of His Flesh the mystery sing;
    Of the Blood, all price exceeding,
    Shed by our immortal King.
  • Pange, Lingua (hymn for Vespers on the Feast of Corpus Christi), stanza 1

• Down in adoration falling,
  Lo! the sacred Host we hail;
  Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,
  Newer rites of grace prevail;
  Faith for all defects supplying,
  Where the feeble senses fail.
  • Pange, Lingua, stanza 5 (Tantum Ergo)

• Thus Angels' Bread is made
  The Bread of man today:
  The Living Bread from Heaven
  With figures doth away:
  O wondrous gift indeed!
  The poor and lowly may
  Upon their Lord and Master feed.
  • Sacris Solemniis Juncta Sint Gaudia (Matins hymn for Corpus Christi), stanza 6 (Panis Angelicus)

• O saving Victim, opening wide
  The gate of heaven to man below,
  Our foes press on from every side,
  Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.
  • Verbum Supernum Prodiens (hymn for Lauds on Corpus Christi), stanza 5 (O Salutaris Hostia)

• Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.
  • Two Precepts of Charity (1273)

• Reason in man is rather like God in the world.
  • Opuscule II, De Regno

• If... the motion of the earth were circular, it would be violent and contrary to nature, and could not be eternal, since ... nothing violent is eternal .... It follows, therefore, that the earth is not moved with a circular motion.
  • Commentaria in libros Aristotelis de caelo et mundo

• All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.
  • Remarks on being requested to resume writing, after a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273, as quoted in A Taste of Water : Christianity through Taoist-Buddhist Eyes (1990) by Chwen Jiuan Agnes Lee and Thomas G. Hand
  • Variant translations:
  • All that I have written seems like straw to me.
    • As quoted in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1993), by Brian Davies, p. 9
  • Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.
    • As quoted in Sacred Games : A History of Christian Worship (1997) by Bernhard Lang, p. 323

Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

• Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.
  • Part I, Question 27, Article 1, Reply to Objection 3; tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920, New York: Benziger Bros.)

• Just as it is better to illuminate than merely to shine, so to pass on what one has contemplated is better than merely to contemplate.
  • II— II, 188
  • Variant: Better to illuminate than merely to shine; to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.

• As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.
  • Q92, art. 1, Reply Obj. 1

• Even as in the blessed in heaven there will be most perfect charity, so in the damned there will be the most perfect hate. Wherefore as the saints will rejoice in all goods, so will the damned grieve for all goods. Consequently the sight of the happiness of the saints will give them very great pain; hence it is written (Isaiah 26:11): "Let the envious people see and be confounded, and let fire devour Thy enemies." Therefore they will wish all the good were damned.
  • Supplement, Q98, Article 4

• I answer that, It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a "helper" to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation. This can be made clear if we observe the mode of generation carried out in various living things. Some living things do not possess in themselves the power of generation, but are generated by some other specific agent, such as some plants and animals by the influence of the heavenly bodies, from some fitting matter and not from seed: others possess the active and passive generative power together; as we see in plants which are generated from seed; for the noblest vital function in plants is generation. Wherefore we observe that in these the active power of generation invariably accompanies the passive power. Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female. And as among animals there is a vital operation nobler than generation, to which their life is principally directed; therefore the male sex is not found in continual union with the female in perfect animals, but only at the time of coition; so that we may consider that by this means the male and female are one, as in plants they are always united; although in some cases one of them preponderates, and in some the other. But man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation. Therefore directly after the formation of woman, it was said: "And they shall be two in one flesh" (Gn. 2:24).
  • Whether the woman should have been made in the first production of things

• If heretics be altogether uprooted by death, this is not contrary to Our Lord's command
  • II-II:11:3 Reply Obj. 3

unplaced by chapter

• If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.

• Law: an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.

• Concerning perfect blessedness which consists in a vision of God.

• All admit that indulgences have some value; for it would be blasphemy to say that the Church does anything in vain.

• Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in sound.

Unsourced

• Abuse does not rule out use.

• Beware the man of one book.

• Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.

• One cannot use an evil action with reference to a good intention.

• Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.

• Sure, for all our blindness; secure, for all our helplessness; strong, for all our weakness; gaily in love, for all the pressures on our hearts.

• The most hopeful people in the world are the young and the drunk. The first because they have little experience of failure, and the second because they have succeeded in drowning theirs.

• The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous.

Quotes about Aquinas

• This dumb ox will fill the world with his bellowing.
  • Albertus Magnus, in response to other of his students calling Thomas a "dumb ox" because of his quietude, as quoted in The Great Ages of Western Philosophy : The Age of Belief : The Medieval Philosophers (1962) by Anne Jackson Fremantle

• The difficulty of dealing with St. Thomas Aquinas in this brief article is the difficulty of selecting that aspect of a many-sided mind which will best suggest its size or scale. Because of the massive body which carried his massive brain, he was called "The Ox"; but any attempt to boil down such a brain into tabloid literature passes all possible jokes about an ox in a teacup. He was one of the two or three giants; one of the two or three greatest men who ever lived; and I should never be surprised if he turned out, quite apart from sanctity, to be the greatest of all. Another way of putting the problem is to say that proportion alters according to what other men we are at the moment classing him with or pitting him against. We do not get the scale until we come to the few men in history who can be his rivals.
  • G. K. Chesterton, in "St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Spectator (27 February 1932)

• St. Thomas confronts other creeds of good and evil, without at all denying evil, with a theory of two levels of good. The supernatural order is the supreme good, as for any Eastern mystic; but the natural order is good; as solidly good as it is for any man in the street.
  • G. K. Chesterton, in "St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Spectator (27 February 1932)

• As a highly Pagan poet said to me: "The Reformation happened because people hadn't the brains to understand Aquinas." The Church is more immortally important than the State; but the State has its rights, for all that. This Christian duality had always been implicit, as in Christ's distinction between God and Caesar, or the dogmatic distinction between the natures of Christ.
  But St. Thomas has the glory of having seized this double thread as the clue to a thousand things; and thereby created the only creed in which the saints can be sane. It presents itself chiefly, perhaps, to the modern world as the only creed in which the poets can be sane. For there is nobody now to settle the Manichees; and all culture is infected with a faint unclean sense that Nature and all things behind us and below us are bad; that there is only praise to the highbrow in the height. St. Thomas exalted God without lowering Man; he exalted Man without lowering Nature. Therefore, he made a cosmos of common sense; terra viventium; a land of the living.
  His philosophy, like his theology, is that of common sense. He does not torture the brain with desperate attempts to explain existence by explaining it away. The first steps of his mind are the first steps of any honest mind; just as the first virtues of his creed could be those of any honest peasant.
  • G. K. Chesterton, in "St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Spectator (27 February 1932)