Thomism
from 1270
Aristotle and Christian doctrine held together on the principle that grace does not abolish nature but completes it.
- Active
- from 1270
- Where
- Paris and Naples, then everywhere Catholic
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Christian
The claim
In God alone are essence and existence identical. Everything else is a nature that has been given being, which is why creation is not an event in the past but a dependence in the present.
What it held
The problem Aquinas inherited was urgent. The full Aristotle had arrived through Arabic, complete with an eternal world, a soul that might not be individually immortal, and no creation. It was too powerful to ignore and too dangerous to accept, and the University of Paris condemned parts of it repeatedly.
His solution turns on a distinction Avicenna had made: between what a thing is and that it is. In everything except God these come apart — a phoenix has an essence and no existence — so every finite thing must receive its being from something whose essence just is to exist. That single move lets him keep Aristotle's physics and biology entire while making the world dependent on God at every instant.
The consequences run everywhere. Reason can establish some truths about God and not others, so philosophy and theology are distinct and compatible. Human beings are one substance rather than a soul in a body. Law is fourfold, and human law that contradicts natural law is not law. And the good is what a thing's nature is for, which makes ethics continuous with biology.
How it argued
The scholastic quaestio, executed with unusual fairness — the objections in the Summa are often stronger than the versions his opponents actually gave.
What it was arguing against
Averroist readings of Aristotle on the unity of the intellect and the eternity of the world, and the Augustinian view that natural reason cannot get far without illumination.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether existence is really distinct from essence, which the Scotists denied. Whether the intellect or the will has primacy — Aquinas says intellect, Scotus says will, and the argument has never stopped.
Common misconceptions
That Thomism is the official philosophy of Catholicism and always was. Aquinas was condemned at Paris and Oxford three years after his death, and his elevation dates from 1879. And the Five Ways are not arguments from the beginning of the universe; they are arguments about present dependence, and would work identically if the world were eternal.
How it began
A Dominican who was kidnapped and held for a year by his own family to stop him joining a mendicant order, and who then wrote about eight million words.
What became of it
Condemned in 1277, canonised in 1323, made normative for Catholic teaching by Leo XIII in 1879, and now one live position among several rather than a required one.
Lasting influence
Catholic theology and canon law entire. Natural law theory in jurisprudence. Virtue ethics through Anscombe and MacIntyre. Analytical Thomism is a going concern in English-language philosophy.
Why it still matters
The natural law tradition remains a major position in legal and moral philosophy, and the essence-existence distinction is still argued about in metaphysics.
Put another way
A building where the foundations are pagan, the upper storeys Christian, and the join is the whole engineering achievement.
Where to start
On Being and Essence. Thirty pages, and it contains the metaphysics the rest depends on.
The surprising bit
Months before he died he stopped writing mid-sentence in the Summa, saying that all he had written seemed like straw compared to what had been revealed to him. He never resumed.
In their own words
Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
All that I have written seems like straw to me.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Augustinianism, Scotism, Averroism
- Influenced
- Neo-Thomism, Natural Law
The verdict
The most complete synthesis in Western philosophy, achieved by a man who then declined to finish it.