My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of my nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot…
My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of my nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot…
Unabashed Aquinas fanboy here. I could prattle on and on about the triumph that is the Summa Theologiae, a massive work that is astonishing for its lucidity, erudition, coherence, and comprehensiveness, or about the sheer brilliance of the Summa Contra…
St. Thomas has an interesting thing to say about a certain hierarchy of values that seems like a real poke in the ribs. But a man’s will is not right in willing a particular good, unless he refer it to…
Self-hatred is not an option for the Christian. God says we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, which completely rules out hating yourself: you have to love your neighbor, so in the first place you must love yourself. In…
It is hard, if not impossible, for our small brains to really grok what it means to be eternal (well, at any rate, it is hard or impossible for my small brain). A while ago I was reading St. Thomas…
It’s amusing to me when I come across answers to questions like that in philosophical works. People think that Aristotle, Aquinas, and Plato have nothing to say to them today, or that philosophy is dry as dust and lacks anything…
In a recent episode we saw that God’s existence is not self-evident to us. I said at the end of that post that I wanted to take a closer look at what St Thomas has to say about this subject…
And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness, and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature…
In ST I q5 a1, St Thomas writes: Goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea; which is clear from the following argument. The essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable. Hence…
In the first question of the Summa Theologiae St Thomas addresses some preliminary issues relating to the value, nature, and extent of sacred doctrine (the science of divine revelation). With the second question he begins to treat of theology proper…