This section is devoted to essays on Thomistic theology, philosophy, scholarship, and topics related thereto.
The debate between Universalists and Perditionists ultimately hinges on conflicting understandings of God’s will, justice, and the purpose of creation. Given the lack of Universalists’ ability to demonstrate the impossibility of hell, the only solution—as in the situation of the eternality of the world—is to look at the tradition and humbly ponder it.
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Professor Knasas has kindly responded to my rejoinder to his reply to my review of his book. He considers, once again, Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of motion from time, discusses the limits of natural philosophic speculation when it comes to imagining realities beyond those limits, discusses the limits of the considerations of natural philosophy in regard to the human soul as a subject of contemplation, and concludes with a reminder to a text central to his aforementioned book (ST, Ia, q. 44, a. 2) as emblematic of his interpretation as part of the project of existentialist Thomism.
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In a previous Thomistica posting I contended that Aquinas reformulates Aristotle’s third argument for the eternity of motion. The third argument is the argument from the eternity of time. In this third argument the now of time is characterized as middle such that there is always a now before and a now after. The argument includes the unfortunate comparison of the now of time to the point of a line. The comparison invites the easy rebuttal that the end points of a line are not middles and so perhaps not all nows are middles. The third argument can, then, proceed only by begging the question about all nows being middles.
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In this essay, I respond to various points and counterarguments made by John F. X. Knasas in his reply to my review of his book. (In what follows, all quotations unless sourced otherwise are from Knasas’s reply.) Knasas’s main focus is my contention that it is not necessary to deploy metaphysics to defeat the Aristotelian arguments for the eternity of motion and time. In particular, he disputes the end of §4 of my review, beginning with “Absent from this analysis, however, ...”.
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The purpose of this article is to analyze Scotus and Ockham’s voluntarism from a specific perspective, which allows us to clearly visualize how it leads to the destruction of natural law, and to its full replacement by conventional justice, divine or human.
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John F.X. Knasas responds to John Brungardt’s review of his book, Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning.
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Daniel Shields briefly responds to the review by John Brungardt of his book, Nature and Nature’s God.
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For too long has Aquinas’s motion proof languished in the gaol of a contemporary Thomistic metaphysics unwilling to fully countenance the debt which Aquinas’s metaphysics owes to Aristotelian natural philosophy and unable to recapture the ground taken by materialist, naturalist, or positivist accounts of the cosmos. Shields’s book represents a real jail-break and counterattack.
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The martyr can let himself be conquered by physical death; the doctor must hold fast to true knowledge so that he is not conquered by intellectual death. And if he does not have such knowledge, he should not become a doctor in the first place. For the theologian, not fortitude, but the truth, will set him free.
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Given St. Joseph's pre-eminent nature in the Church and among the angels and saints, second only to the Mother of God, God would bestow the honor of accompanying Him to Heaven as He did for His Blessed Mother.
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Hylomorphic dualism manages to keep the best insights from both hylomorphism—its unified account of the human being—and dualism—the immateriality of the intellect—, building a cohesive account of human beings that avoids the problems that arise for other forms of dualism.
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RANDALL B. SMITH
Randall B. Smith (Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas, Houston) replies to Michèle Mulchahey’s Review in The Thomist 83.3 (2019) of Smith’s book, Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Emmaus Academic, 2016).
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CHRISTOPHER J. THOMPSON
In a small section of his famous work, the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas provides us with a basic tutorial on human flourishing. This well-known “treatise on human happiness” forms the skeletal outlines of the dominant desire at the core of every human heart: the inescapable need for happiness, fulfillment, bliss.
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EDMUND WALDSTEIN, O.Cist.
The Greek historian Herodotus recounts that Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, travelled through the world and saw many things. On travelling through Asia Minor, he visited the fabulously wealthy king Croesus of Lydia. Croesus had his servants show off his many treasures to Solon. Then Croesus asked Solon who the happiest man…
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JOÃO PINHEIRO DA SILVA
After all, it is a common place in the history of philosophy that Aquinas was, following Aristotle, a realist in various philosophical domains. At the same time, Aquinas helped consolidate “intentio” in the philosophical grammar. We can then pose the question: does Aquinas use of “intentio” lead him down a representationalist path?
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URBAN HANNON
Our Lord played a great many different roles at the Last Supper. Inasmuch as he was celebrating a Passover seder, he was just another observant Jew—whereas foretelling his betrayal, he played the prophet, and offering sacrifice, the high priest. He was a parting friend to his apostles…
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In this paper, Dr. Glen Coughlin of Thomas Aquinas College discusses the views of Charles De Koninck about the necessity of proving the existence of immaterial beings before beginning metaphysics.
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After presenting the “first and more manifest way” of proving the existence of God by reason alone (without the aid of God revealing himself in Sacred Scriptures), in Summa Theologiae Ia, 2, 3, Saint Thomas Aquinas continues this project by turning in the “Second Way” to what he somewhat enigmatically calls “the nature of the efficient cause.” The greatest obstacle to understanding his Second Way, though, is determining precisely what Aquinas means by “the nature of the efficient cause” and “an order of efficient causes,” and how the Second Way is distinct from the First and Third Ways. This essay attempts to do so.
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By JOHN BRUNGARDT, Ph.D.
In the following review-essay, I explore in some detail Knasas’s argumentation and some of its consequences. First, I will look at some of the background to the issues regarding the contemporary Thomistic schools of thought so as to set forth what is at stake in the debate (§1).
By WILLIAM MATTHEW DIEM, S.T.D.
Although David Bentley Hart admits we can reject God, he insists that “we cannot do so with perfect knowledge and perfect freedom.” Although it’s true that no sane person is able to choose eternal misery as such, that is not relevant to the question: one need not choose misery to merit misery.
Read MoreUnder the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
