Thomas Aquinas: My Perspective
So, I've reviewed how Copleston interprets Saint Thomas Aquinas and I think it is a useful way to consider the man's mind. There are some things I find very appealing about Aquinas.
The system of Aquinas has a basic physicality, an embodied understanding similar to what we find in Aristotle.
He starts with the physical world. Matter and form, potency and act, things that change. Not the self or memory or some inward turn toward God the way Saint Augustine begins the Confessions. Aquinas starts with what's standing in front of him, and works outward from there. Nothing is in the intellect that wasn't first in the senses. That's a useful insight whether or not you buy anything else in his works. A concept isn't the object of knowledge. It's the means. When I know a tree, the concept is how I reach the tree, the actual thing standing in the yard. The senses come first, and the mind builds on top of what they hand it.
He carries the same commitment into the passions. Love, fear, anger, hope, desire. All of it lives in the sensitive appetite, the same appetite that produces hunger. Aquinas doesn't split them into a lower animal category and a higher rational one standing apart from it, willpower against urge, mind against body. Reason doesn't override the appetite from outside. It works through it, guiding what he calls the particular reason, which is itself answerable to the universal reason above it. Anger and hunger are made of the same stuff. That's a better account of how desire and reason actually relate than the disciplinarian version most people assume Christianity handed down, and it's closer to what a good therapist would tell you today than to a monk gritting his teeth against temptation.
That's the Aquinas I find worth pondering further. And it is a big reason why he was so enamored with Aristotle, a Greek most Christian thinkers abhorred at that time. Corporeal first, appetite as the shared root of hunger and fear alike, reason arriving later and working with what the body already supplies rather than against it.
Then there are the proofs of God, the Five Ways, which are as unimpressive to me as all the other multitude of proofs people have come up with before and since. Apparently, there are almost as many different ways to prove God as there are philosophers and theologians doing the proving. Each one is tailored to the mind that produced it, built from whatever that particular philosopher already took as self-evident, and each one is fully proven on its own terms, valid within itself, convincing to its author.
But step back from any single proof and look at the whole array of them side by side, Anselm's, Aquinas's five, Descartes's, Leibniz's, hell, look at Ben Shapiro’s and dozens more besides, and something else comes into view. What's actually proven isn't in any one of them. The real revelation is the diversity itself. But the diversity is always (incorrectly) viewed as a problem more than revelation. Aquinas included.
Aquinas was inside his own proof, working out motion and causation and contingency, one mind reasoning within one system. He had no way to step back and see his five ways sitting alongside all the others before or since, the whole field of them at once, the way we can now, centuries later, with all the attempts finally laid out side by side. That diversity is revealing the human experience of the divine beyond any single proof, or any set of them, could be on its own. So the proofs are really more about the prover than the proven.
Why did this happen at all, dozens of philosophers across centuries each convinced he'd found the argument, none of them landing on the same one? It wasn't because the thirteenth century had shaky faith and needed convincing. If anything it's closer to the reverse. Belief wasn't a position you argued your way into back then, it was closer to the air. There was no real skeptic in the room for Aquinas to persuade.
The medieval university had inherited Aristotle's own standard for what counted as real knowledge, demonstration from self-evident principles, and if theology wanted to sit at the table as a discipline alongside logic and physics, it needed a proof of its own foundational claim.
The result is that everyone's proof starts somewhere else. Anselm said God is by definition the greatest thing that can be conceived, and a thing that exists is greater than the same thing merely imagined, so God must exist or the definition breaks. Aquinas read that argument and rejected it as pure logic chasing itself with nothing to check it against the world, which is exactly what it was. Instead, impressively, he built five of his own, starting from motion, causation, contingency, degree, and design, the physical world first, God as whatever it requires behind it. Centuries later, Kant traced the whole line back to where it started and found the cosmological proof still leaning on Anselm's definition to work at all. Kant didn't offer a sixth way. He concluded pure reason couldn't get you there and looked toward morality instead.
Which tells you something more about the time of Aquinas than the proofs themselves. Structural, sustained, genuine disbelief was not a psychological option. Not because people were less intelligent. Aquinas and everyone I've named were plainly not simple minded men.
But to consider all the many proofs of God through time as something in itself was not something that would have occurred to Aquinas. He had at least two of them in front of him. Anselm's, built from a definition alone, he rejected it as pure logic chasing itself with nothing to check it against the world. Augustine's, older still, argued from the mind's own encounter with eternal truths, mathematical truths, truths that don't change while the mind thinking them does, and concluded an eternal mind must be holding them.
Aquinas knew that argument too and passed over it, for the same underlying reason he passed over Anselm's: it didn't start in the senses, and for Aquinas nothing real starts anywhere else. Two proofs, two rejections, each one treated as a wrong turn to be corrected rather than a sign that the correcting itself might be the more interesting fact. Obviously, what we can see now, looking back across the whole span, is a long range of them, each seemingly sound to the man who made it.
We can also see that there's a cost to the bold Christianizing of Aristotle that goes beyond what the traditionalists of his own century objected to. They worried he'd given too much away to the presumptuous Greek. Aristotle's person becomes who he is through the polis, through a good life worked out among others. The individual is embedded in the collective from the start.
Aquinas retains that social understanding while giving the individual a destination beyond it. “Each human person is ultimately of more value than the whole material universe.” That's a remarkable, and very anthropocentric, assertion. We naturally belong to one another, yet each of us has a supernatural vocation whose ultimate fulfillment exceeds anything our shared world can provide.
Jürgen Habermas, who died earlier this year, gives me a way to think about that. His criticism of “the philosophy of the subject” concerns the individual conceived as standing over and against a world of objects and other people. He insists that individualization and socialization happen together. We become ourselves through ongoing relations with others. Read alongside Aquinas, that raises a question. What happens when the person formed within a shared world is assigned a significance greater than that entire world? Social belonging can remain part of the account while being overshadowed by the grandeur of the individual soul.
I'm drawing a comparison here, and Aquinas's commitment to social life remains real. But I disagree with the elevation itself. For me, it is absurd to think you and I individually are worth the whole material universe. Being told otherwise is marketing hype. Humans are the center of nothing. It gives the self an extraordinary place in creation, and I wonder how easily that place becomes a habit of putting ourselves above the world that sustains us. It can and does lead to all sorts of mischief.
I notice, writing this, that I've just done the thing I'm describing. I started with the senses passage, and that put me in mind of necessary Being, and that put me in mind of the appetites, one thing calling up the next because the last one was already sitting there. Nothing arrived out of nowhere. It's a portrait of how my own mind works, laid out by a man eight hundred years dead, and I didn't plan this essay with that in mind. I just noticed it happening.
That's the part of Aquinas the remains relevant. Not his proofs. His starting point. I’m glad to have touched base with him again after all this time. Through Copleston, who taught me of Aquinas in my youth, philosophy being one of my appetites.
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