Understanding Reality, Knowledge, and Society in Aquinas
Reality
The world exists because God has created it out of nothing; that is, it simply creates from Himself, without pre-existing matter. It might be objected, however, that God can create the world from nothing but is then no longer involved in its creation, allowing the world to develop according to its own internal laws. This forces Aquinas to assert that God creates the world out of nothing and retains its creation through continuous creation. This is the idea of creation from eternity.
Knowledge
All knowledge starts from sensuous experience, the aisthesis or sensation. However, when dealing with intellectual knowledge, Aquinas introduces some nuances in the Aristotelian doctrine. The immediate object of understanding is the universal, while the particular is known only mediately. When understanding turns to its imaginative representation, according to Aquinas, it is empty. Therefore, to know something, one must come into contact with the data of experience. The understanding gap needs to be filled with sensitive data that provides empirical evidence. However, these sensitive data are not knowledge. There are two aspects of understanding:
- Understanding only knows directly the universal; the intellect abstracts universal data contained in sensible representations.
- The understanding can, in turn, be the ability to understand universally known concepts, if the intellect is able to abstract the universal conditions of sensitive data.
Humans
The human being is a unique substance composed of body and soul, with the soul being the form of the body. If this were the case, it could be assumed that when the body dies, the soul dies with it, which was the thesis held by the Averroists. However, the soul can exist independently of the body. If the soul can exist independently, then it would be an independent substance, contradicting the assertion that the soul is both form and substance. To overcome this contradiction, Thomas Aquinas maintains that the soul has a natural inclination to join the body, as this is its way. The natural inclination of the soul is given only in its union with the body; the soul is able to display all its perfections and capacities in this union. Thus, Thomas Aquinas states that the soul, when separated from the body, is a substance that is incomplete, while the full substance that is the human being is composed of both body and soul. All creatures tend toward an end that is good and which will achieve happiness, and this end is God. This Divine Law is present in creatures as natural law. The first precept of natural law is “do good and avoid evil.” Aquinas states, “everything to which man is naturally inclined, the reason considers morally good.” Because man is inclined to God, all that drives human beings toward God is good. From this principle of natural law, all other principles of moral law can be derived, including the preservation of self, the inclinations that human beings share with animals, and the properly human inclinations.
Society
The political conception of Thomas Aquinas is rooted in Aristotelian philosophy. Thus, Aquinas considers that man is sociable by nature, and society is necessary for him to develop in all his fullness. With this in mind, the politics of Thomas Aquinas cannot be understood without considering the power struggles between church and state that developed over the 12th and 13th centuries. In this context, Aquinas aligns himself with the Church. As we have seen, the supreme good toward which human beings strive, the ultimate purpose of their existence, is the contemplation of God. Moreover, human beings must develop as such, and this development must reach the ultimate goal, which is naturally inclined toward society. It is clear that the only institution that aligns with this human inclination is the Church. In this way, Aquinas concludes that the State should be subject to the Church. On the other hand, he maintains that all law derives from natural law, just as all power derives from divine power. Thus, the political order exists within the universal order established by God, and it is identified with the moral order.