Sophia Dei

When I was in the process of joining the Catholic Church, I asked myself, why Catholic and not Orthodox? They both have the Real Presence and succession back to the apostles. But it didn’t take long for me to know: my mind was Western; I needed the Western Church. My heritage is Western; I already belonged to the Western Church and her daughters.

The Eastern Church is comfortable resting in mystery; the Western Church wants to dissect and categorize. Both lungs have their scholars and mystics, but the Western Church maintains that Roman heritage of rational inquiry. We like to study and define and order. The Church teaches, contrary to popular opinion, that faith and reason work together. How could truth contradict truth? Faith without reason leads to superstition and blind following. Reason without faith leads to relativism and nihilism. If you think you’ve thought of something original regarding Christianity, there’s a saint to thought it and said it better in the third century, and it’s cited in the catechism.

St. Thomas Aquinas is often considered the epitome of Catholic rationalism. He was a thirteenth-century philosopher and mystic whose writings still instruct the Church on faith and reason. But that also makes him intimidating. Can I really understand his logic? How can I ever get through such long, dense treatises? I often joke that even Thomas Aquinas couldn’t get through the Summa Theologiae (he died before he finished writing it, and the last section was pieced together from his notes).

I want to know the rational arguments of the faith. I want to know them so well that I can explain and integrate them. But, I never had a formal logic or philosophy education, so the format or language of works like the Summa can be challenging. A few weeks ago, I started attending a new study group that is studying Aquinas, and I’m so exited to actually learn some of the most basics arguments.

Although Thomas Aquinas lived in the 1200s, his arguments are rooted in the Western scholastic tradition. The earliest Western philosophers (pre-Socrates) sought rational explanations of the universe, specifically the cause (or first principle). They observed the material world for solutions. Pythagoras added numbers—materials could be sorted into formal, delineated categories. The observed classical elements (fire, air, water, earth) could also be combined and subtracted. Sophists added rhetoric, so that there was a formal way of debating the studied topics.  Many philosophers of this time argued that there was no objective truth and that morality was ever-changing and only useful in specific contexts.

Next came the Classical period of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates developed the critical method of questioning one’s thinking and applying logical checks to arguments. Plato studied knowledge and how it is acquired. He also wrote extensively on virtue. Aristotle applied logic to each branch of inquiry. He is considered the father of empiricism (sensory observation), proposing four types of causes—material, efficient, formal, and final. Their influence affected the philosophers of the Roman Empire. By the fall of the Romans and the rise of Christianity, schools of thoughts such as the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists had emerged. In particular, the Neoplatonists argued that mind exists before matter, and the universe has a cause (more on that later), thus the material universe must have a singular mind.

Early Christian thinkers were influenced by the Greek/Roman tradition. St. Augustine in particular has a lot of Neoplatonist influence in his arguments for the existence of the soul, nature of the material world, and concept of God as one.

In the 1100s, scholasticism rose as the new school of thought. It emphasized dialectical reasoning to analyze and critique. St. Anselm argued that God could be proved using logic. Aquinas’ mentor St. Albert the Great, was one of the most influential thinkers of the time and now patron saint of the natural sciences. He made contributions to logic, theology, psychology, metaphysics, meteorology, mineralogy, and zoology. Albert studied Aristotle and synthesized pre-Christian and Islamic thought into Christian philosophy. For him, and later Aquinas and other Thomists, natural philosophy, logic, and reason have universal elements (experiment, observation, deduction) and a pantheistic or an Islamic scholar is capable of contributing to those areas as well as a Christian.

While we treat the Renaissance of as a rediscovery of ancient thought, there has always been a tradition of philosophy rooted in the classical thinkers. The observance of nature, the search for God, the understanding of virtue and truth, and the knowledge of knowledge have always been a part of the Christian faith, and they are all intertwined. They are different aspects of the same grand search.

“The study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.” -St. Thomas Aquinas