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Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford World's Classics)

par Thomas Aquinas

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St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) saw religion as part of the natural human propensity to worship. His ability to recognize the naturalness of this phenomenon and simultaneously to go beyond it, to explore spiritual revelation, makes his work fresh and highly readable today.While drawing on a strong distinction between theology and philosophy, Aquinas interleaved them intricately in his writings, which range from an examination of the structures of thought to the concept of God as the end of all things.This accessible new translation chooses substantial passages not only from the indispensable Summa Theologicae, but from many other works, fully illustrating the breadth and progression of Aquinas's philosophy.… (plus d'informations)
Récemment ajouté parJowPowOwl, Mippy14, rusnic2000, Chickentuna99, rbegley, bdvoracek, PsalterMark, seminary
Bibliothèques historiquesGillian Rose
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Just a little observation from a novice: I think that Aquinas choosing Aristotle over Plato is probably why mainstream Christian theology and philosophy is almost always—by the big names, the professionals, the mainstream—more rationalistic like Aristotle than spiritualistic like Plato. (Plato ends the Republic with What Happens When You Die; Aristotle ends the Politics with basically, On the Classification of Music—the latter being, if you’ll accept the anachronism, more Aquinas-y. If you’ll accept the adjective.) I’m not here to say (anachronistically?) whether it’s Plato or Aristotle who’s the better Christian, and whether or not Robert Frost was right about the road not taken. I’m just here. Not to advise you or tell you what to do. I’m just here.

…. “Rather (God) possesses every perfection of every genus—his perfection is without qualification, as Aristotle and Ibn Rushd both say—*possessing them more excellently than anything else can because in him is unified what in others is diverse*. And this is because all these perfections belong to him simply as existing; just as someone exercising the activities of all qualities through one quality would possess all qualities in that one, so God in his very existing possesses all perfections.”

~ Aquinas, “Essence and Existence” (emphasis added)

…. “…. So passions are desires rather than perceptions.”

~ Aquinas, “Feelings”

…. He seems a lot less “Platonic”, if you like, or hyper-spiritual, than he is sometimes represented as being, eg “Even soul depends somewhat on body, since it can’t achieve its complete specific nature without body. But it doesn’t so depend on body that it can’t exist without it.” As with many two-part statements, you could reverse the clauses in a different context to the one he gives.

…. I don’t really believe in God for the reasons Thomas gives; I just know he’s my friend. (And when I didn’t think he was my friend, I thought he was my enemy; I don’t know what it’s like to think he’s not around.) I actually believe what he argues against, that we cannot meaningfully know God from his effects, because the effects are so small compared to God. It’s like, I know my mother loves me because she baked me a potato—I guess it’s sorta true, but it’s not meaningfully true, because your worst enemy could bake you a potato if you gave him a dollar.

…. “I feel like I forgot to do something today. Did I forget to buy food; did I forget to go to the bank….”
*guy in conversation* “So Fred that’s why I’m fundamentally optimistic, because I believe that the Source of All is good, and he’s constantly bringing good out of all the apparent evil and misery in my life.”
*slaps forehead* “That’s what I forgot to do! I forgot to be optimistic!”

…. “The very fact that God contains in one simple unity what other things share in many different ways shows the perfection of God’s unity. And it is this that makes him really one and notionally complex, since our minds apprehend him in the many different ways creatures represent him.”

~ 1200s Thomas, “Do we Have Words for God?”

…. That is, God is infinite; God is One; God contains within himself what in non-infinite beings would be differentiation, but in him it is One. Most obviously: we call God “him”, out of habit and sometimes prejudice, and because he is a being and not a thing, but it’s not as though he were an infinite non-infinite being (the little god of the atheists and the bigots), the most macho man there is, who excludes all women as well as children and most men.

…. It seems, that Aquinas as a believer in God-given reason distinguishes himself from the hyper-spiritual by saying that some things ARE INDEED coincidence—‘incidental’—that they seem to exist, but have no real cause, as such, but only an underlying reality that is caused…. It is true that some things have hidden causes. Why is Where the Crawdads Sing popular? I don’t know anything about it, but it must speak to the American subconscious, so here, in the sense, this theatrical poster is the American subconscious trying to lure me in, to send a message. But other things are not symbolic but incidental. That I have to go to the bathroom has a cause, (even though we do not fully understand the body), and that other people are in the bathroom is caused by the population density of the mall. Not terribly interesting, but these things do have causes, and so, properly speaking, exist. But that the guy from the Salad Bowl (or whatever) walks out of the bathroom as I do is not a message from God (or the devil), since I don’t need salad (but fruit juices, once a week), to get my vitamins, (and salad is also not a tool of the devil, like as not). So then me and Salad Guy walking out of the bathroom at the same time, (and other schizophrenic messages, lol, although God and the devil have been known to message people from time to time, but you have to learn to strain out boredom and delusion; it’s not every day you save and/or murder your mother, or, say, kill your brother because he was a tyrant over Corinth, to take a life of Plutarch’s), has no cause because, properly speaking, IT DOES NOT EXIST—it is incidental. It only SEEMS to exist.

…. Re: Does God cause evil?

Sometimes I think that the ‘God’ of predestination, Calvin’s God, is Just Power, and Nothing Else. (Super-Duper Odin.)

Sorry, John.

…. “To 1: Although sinners don’t will the evilness of their sin as such it is still included in some fashion in what they will, since they rather choose to incur that evilness than to stop acting. But sin’s evilness isn’t in any way included in God’s will, but is a consequence of free choice abandoning its relationship to God’s will.”

…. I’m glad I’m not going to have children. I don’t think I’d be very good at it.

—(sneer) You’re boring!
—(aghast) I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard!

I would want my children to be like little books, you know, little ideas, but children…. And I can’t even imagine what their mother would think of me, when I couldn’t do this or that, be practical and handle stress, or pay someone to, you know…. No, that wouldn’t be right.

—(inviting) You are like a little book that God is writing.
—(embarrassed) Daddy, I need you to, I need you to—
—(disappointed in me) (holding out arm) Come with Mommy….

That said, it would be nice if women felt themselves good enough or whatever to associate with Aquinas, but I think we’re all still a little too caught in the prison of the codependent, the prison of the brightly colored cloud walls that don’t exist.

No, people don’t value that in me. And that’s what courtship or whatever and parenthood is—I’m a mature independent valued member of the community, and I can handle more responsibility. You probably want me to….

Data: I still do not have enough human emotion to understand philosophy.
Picard: (sighs) Well, Data, philosophy is about the only kind of human emotion I, Do, seem to understand today. (face palm)
Data: (confused) Then you can explain it.
Picard: (shakes head) No. (taps shoulder) It’s all a little beyond me today….

…. I’m also glad I’m not a working academic, a professional. I don’t think I’d be good at that, either. Wouldn’t fit in.

“So those are the feelings I had from reading Aquinas.”
Animus-dominated girl: (sneers) Feelings? (turns) Hey Barry, get a load of this!
No anima boy: (du canst nicht!) Oh Ho Ho! Santa Claus isn’t going to visit you this year! That’s a bad boy, a naughty boy, having feelings!
Sicko Number Seven: (undertone) Just keep them talking for another minute and we can get the weed in here….

Even as a full-fledged schizophrenic youth, I thought many university kids were base. I was interested in corrupt art; they took corrupt art for granted, and talked about the various ways to take alcohol…. They were thoroughgoing materialists!

I guess that the other thing about Aquinas is that he’s not “cool”; “Kevin I found an Indian who has mostly white friends!” “Screw you, James, I’m friends with a white kid who was friends with an Indian kid who had loads of white friends thirty years ago!”—but the nice thing about not being actively ill is that I don’t have to read “What the Cool Kids Think About Delusions In 175 Pages”, if I don’t want to…. I can read something else, and make up my own idea about life….

And, sure, I’m glad I don’t live in the Congo, waiting on some kind American kid to send me shoes so that I have something to put on my feet…. Maybe some day, some Congolese kid will write a book about Aquinas, the best book, living on remittances sent from his cousin in Berlin.

Although we’ll probably destroy each other; we’re irrational so that we can let ourselves be not nice, you know.

…. It’s easy to be skeptical of Matthew, who called his Aquinas book “Pure Joy”—guy probably thinks the whole ‘crucifixion of Jesus’ thing was a weird conspiracy story, an old myth—but it is significant that Thomas uses the word “bliss”: when you think that life is just sin and pain management, then when those things aren’t an immediate burden, you have nothing to do (in a way) but get nervous…. So you need to expect that God might give you bliss, even if you don’t plan on becoming fabulously wealthy like Paul McCartney or Harry Styles, right….

—I used to love girlie, until I realized that I was hurting her, and then I stopped loving her…. And now, I don’t need to be happy, not for myself, because she is…. (My life is actually very abstract.)

…. And when the—I mean these words very literally— God-damn sprinkler doesn’t get my books wet, well, that’s bliss.

And, you know.

—Hey, why have you been exercising? EYE I don’t exercise, you know!

When you can put a wall in-between yourself and the gossip and prattling, that’s bliss.

Pure joy.

…. What I want most is to ‘get things done’ (in my mind, I am very productive, as you can see, perhaps…. It’s not like I’m somebody’s wife {—For vacation I am going to a princess territory. —Why not stay home and read a book. —I cannot rest at home; it is another place I work. —So take a few days off and start reading feminist philosophy. —But EYE am a princess! —It’s all part of being a slave. —That is NOT what they say on television. Goodbye.}, but it’s not like I have a wife, or have no (albeit informal) schedule or rule of life, so….), but what I Enjoy most is the grace of contemplation, (bliss), repeating the mantra, the Name of Gladness…. But I like both. Life is not all bliss, but without any it gets a little unpleasant. Perhaps this is some of our modern view of contemplation—meditate twenty minutes for 2.5% more money guaranteed, you know, (or your money back!). Be happier…. You’ll produce more! But I’m poor, so people assume I’m lazy, so, I’m vulnerable like that. I was trained to be socially vulnerable, you know, in middle class kindergarten. Lol.

…. I like Aquinas—there’s two sides to every story. And in the style, even, despite being so Aristotelian, maybe it is a little Platonic, too, although I suppose there are three people instead of two, Glaucon on one side and Adeimantus on the other, and then Socrates steps in to resolve their little dispute about the meaning of words, and the meaning of Everything. ^^

…. Sometimes an age of corn meat science likes to poo poo the big questions, (the scientists can take it: they’ll still be scientists after we convert to veganism), but I think that, say, the question, “It seems the desiring of bliss has no merit”, is a very significant thing to discuss; certainly it’s a very intellectual stance: one can imagine the hyper-employed scientist saying it to the unemployed dropout sitting around listening to music all day, you know, What merit is there in….? And yet, on the other hand, it can be quite perverse not to want to be happy, which is why suicide is technically a crime, or at least has been considered such, you know, and clinical depression is an emotional disease. Although you could argue that depressed people do want to be happy, of course, but I mean, some psychiatrist offers you a med and you refuse because being suicidal is where it’s at, (maybe you’ve been reading The Collected Works of the Giant Ant in the original French), you know…. I don’t know. I know today everyone’s worried about Hitler and how natural racism can seem, but choosing misery is not natural, you know.

…. The question for discussion is: Are there really two sides to every question?

It seems that there are not:

1. Because some ideas are stupid, as is clear from the writings of the Fathers, who said, Screw Joey, he’s an idiot.

But against that:

1. Really there always is a discussion to be had, isn’t there? Isn’t there? I mean, really. Come on.

In reply:

Since even if one side is solid and the other side is cray, both sides have arguments, even if both are not equally valid, and also because sometimes the solid seems cray and the cray solid, it appears that in truth there are two sides to every question.

Hence:

To 1: I honestly forgot already what you were on about…. But you know I’m right.

….. And the love of God is virtue.

…. After-note: Don’t get me wrong: this book is staying. It was well over four hundred pages, almost five hundred, /difficult/ pages; achievement-pages, be-proud-of-yourself pages, in a good way. But a look back over what I wrote, and what I feel like the cost is to reading this, and my old friend who, well, he loved Aquinas, and, well…. I think I might have to give away the Étienne Gilson book. 😔 In a way, even history is better. If you can get past the fear, what woman doesn’t have some respect for power? Only a woman who’s narrowed woman-ness so much, accepted society so much, that she’s Nothing, not even Any kind of woman, really! But what kind of woman doesn’t want to just Exist in the material world with a normal human body, you know, and not…. You know, the language of the angels stuff. There’s stretching the under-exercised personality and snapping it until it breaks, you know. I guess that’s almost the point for some people, but it’s a big risk. Who wants that? The kind of person who will be your friend—who will make a good friend?

People say that there’s another life, so I guess I’ll come this way again, but….

…. (The after after note with Hermes the goosecap) I read two volumes of the Catena Aurea—Matthew & John—2/3 of my Aquinas books, and at least 3/4 of the pages, right…. but the thing is, Aquinas didn’t think good thoughts (Judaism is bad; heretics are evil…. Evil I tell you! Evil!), but for a long time I felt //obligated// to make excuses for him, because he was so intelligent and so respected, just like the other Thomas, Thomas Merton, did, at at least one point in his life’s journey, right….

But think-think can’t be an end in itself, (as even many of the no-thought/God’s Mind people seem to believe in practice), and Christian philosophy and systematizing Jesus isn’t always good in practice. Jesus himself seems to resist systematizing; sometimes I wonder, now, whether a single consciousness could have really created all those different sayings, you know…. I dunno, right. Deepak C said once that if consciousness is true, you should be able to have the same saying ready for the bride on her wedding-day and the old man on his death-bed, but, I dunno; I dunno…. In practice, people have held that view, and it hasn’t always worked out. I don’t even want to re-read what I wrote here, because I almost remember it, you know: I can’t live in the world; I’m too pure; I can see that now—I’m sorry…. Like in a sci-fi B-movie, you know….

…. And I guess it was kinda a turning point when I deleted that free will vs no free will theology book I didn’t read, because it was like, the elitist liberal, you know; “I want it to be good for you, but I have no idea how it is for you”—the 0.25% that agrees with me has to respect the 0.25% that disagrees with me in the free will or not battle, you know: because once we accomplish as much as that, we can pretty much call the game—slam dunk. We win. It’s like, most intellectuals aren’t about “knowing everything” regarding the common life, just avoiding it; the only way most of them know to even engage with the common life is fear, fear and resentment, and by ignoring it, you know…. It’s easy to make fun of the people just living their lives, but at least they’re living their life, you know. I feel like it ought to be a lot easier to make fun of these people who get more respect and never help anybody else, and poo poo everything else, and feel like they’re not respected enough, you know. In spite of everything from the Jazz Age forward, it’s still a lot easier to make fun of an ordinary person. A thinker—people don’t identify with that but they’re usually a little afraid, too afraid to mock, directly at least, and more often than any sort of opposition they just look up to them, but say, you know, Well, but too bad I’m shit, and then go watch someone jump into a pool on TV, (or do it themselves), you know.

…. But I notice it’s easier to accept my fathers antics with fewer philosophical/theological ideas:

—“Being a real man means vacationing in Florida! I am a real, man!” How does that make you a real man? The real man should be wise and love the people; he should expand the system’s energy and his own energy. You guys just don’t like anything. I don’t get it. Result: unhappy

To: —“Being a real man means not enjoying your vacations.” When I’m more established, I intend to enjoy any traveling I do. It’s too bad he doesn’t let himself enjoy. Oh well. Result: 🥱

…. And I used to make excuses for Luther, too, who had very violent lips, you know; it was almost indecent. And the Catholics taught him how; all those height-of-religious-violence 16th century guys grew up in the cradle of the Church.

You don’t get that directly from the Philosophical Aquinas, which is why I kept this book on this site, but….

But, you know, be careful, right…. The international brotherhood of the holy knowledge of God seekers don’t always find God. Sometimes, they find…. God-sin, you know. And then they blame each other, obviously…. Was it a Geico commercial series that had the tagline, “Because that’s what you do”?

Anyway. I’m serious, be careful.

(worried mother) Don’t spend too much time debating with angels. Oh! And don’t stay out too late!

Even philosophy, considered separately from religion, can be unhelpful. Philosophy is thinking about the meaning of life using reason alone, or primarily, at least—more or less, that’s philosophy. (I guess it can also be using reason to think about reason itself, if you dislike more practical philosophical pursuits—ethics, politics, aesthetics.) But eventually you have to figure out what the meaning of life is and move on—it’s to be happy, and make others happy, and to live a good life. And it is not accomplished solely through reason, or with good reasoning as the primary goal.

Ordinary people are usually a little neurotic and sometimes flagrantly psychotic, but they are often sounder on fundamentals than Bible thumping know-it-alls and philosophers, really.

…. I know this is turning into a Great Litany, you know; I hope this is it, but I also deleted my record of having read Augustine’s Confessions. When I read it, I tried to link him with Jane Austen—linked revelations, discoveries, the unveiling of the truth—but I realized awhile ago this doesn’t work, even though it would have been a better world if he had not made it so impossible, you know…. Augustine would have become violently ill to have his revelation, which was his mother’s comfort, linked to the young gentleman’s daughter realizing that her judgment of a young man had been prejudiced; much to his discredit, he would have flown into a rage, you know…. Augustine, if he is someone to Jane, is the dead hand tyrannizing over that other book Jane wrote, where you SIMPLY CANNOT stage a play, ANY play, no matter how you wring your hands and try to get purity and earnestness and lovers’ vows, you know…. If Augustine is someone to Jane, he is her tormentor. He was a very intelligent man, who knew some holy and true things and tried his best to live admirably and according to his lights, and he wrote intelligently and sometimes beautifully, so I didn’t want to admit that for him at the end of the day you must, like everyone else, say that the female is inferior to the male because she is and must be feminine, which is just not as good as masculine, you know, but—well, what else are we left with? And in the end, if I must make my choice between Augs and Jane, must I not choose “the least of these”? “The children of this world are more wise in their generation, than the children of light.” Jesus could give each sort of person her due, but the church-goer faction, like everyone else—and doesn’t that justify it! Even though we //are// the Best!—has been a club for the support of its own faction, from a very early date; it really has.
  goosecap | Aug 25, 2022 |
I always forget that Thomas is surprisingly funny. ( )
  reganrule | Feb 22, 2016 |
Extremely glad I read this. Some arguments are unstable(very few), but for the most part very sold. ( )
2 voter DanielAlgara | Sep 26, 2014 |
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St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) saw religion as part of the natural human propensity to worship. His ability to recognize the naturalness of this phenomenon and simultaneously to go beyond it, to explore spiritual revelation, makes his work fresh and highly readable today.While drawing on a strong distinction between theology and philosophy, Aquinas interleaved them intricately in his writings, which range from an examination of the structures of thought to the concept of God as the end of all things.This accessible new translation chooses substantial passages not only from the indispensable Summa Theologicae, but from many other works, fully illustrating the breadth and progression of Aquinas's philosophy.

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