The writings of Thomas are of great importance for philosophy as well
as for theology, for by nature and education he is the spirit of
scholasticism incarnate. The principles on which his system rested were
these. He held that there were two sources of knowledge - the mysteries
of Christian faith and the truths of human reason. The distinction
between these two was made emphatic by Aquinas, who is at pains,
especially in his treatise
Contra Gentiles, to make it plain that
each is a distinct fountain of knowledge, but that revelation is the
more important of the two. Revelation is a source of knowledge, rather
than the manifestation in the world of a divine life, and its chief
characteristic is that it presents men with mysteries, which are to be
believed even when they cannot be understood. Revelation is not
Scripture alone, for Scripture taken by itself does not correspond
exactly with his description; nor is it church tradition alone, for
church tradition must so far rest on Scripture. Revelation is a divine
source of knowledge, of which Scripture and church tradition are the
channels; and he who would rightly understand theology must familiarize himself with Scripture, the
teachings of the fathers, and the decisions of councils, in such a way
as to be able to make part of himself, as it were, those channels along
which this divine knowledge flowed. Aquinas's conception of reason is in
some way parallel with his conception of revelation. Reason is in his
idea not the individual reason, but the fountain of natural truth, whose
chief channels are the various systems of heathen philosophy, and more
especially the thoughts of Plato and the methods of Aristotle. Reason
and revelation are separate sources of knowledge; and man can put
himself in possession of each, because he can bring himself into
relation to the church on the one hand, and the system of philosophy, or
more strictly Aristotle, on the other. The conception will be made
clearer when it is remembered that Aquinas, taught by the mysterious
author of the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius, who so marvellously
influenced medieval writers, sometimes spoke of a natural revelation, or
of reason as a source of truths in themselves mysterious, and was always
accustomed to say that reason as well as revelation contained two kinds
of knowledge. The first kind lay quite beyond the power of man to
receive it, the second was within man's reach. In reason, as in
revelation, man can only attain to the lower kind of knowledge; there is
a higher kind which we may not hope to reach.
But while reason and revelation are two distinct sources of truths,
the truths are not contradictory; for in the last resort they rest on
one absolute truth - they come from the one source of knowledge,
God, the Absolute One. Hence arises the compatibility of philosophy and
theology which was the fundamental axiom of scholasticism, and the
possibility of a Summa Theologiae, which is a Summa Philosophiae as
well. All the many writings of Thomas are preparatory to his great work
the Summa Theologiae, and show us the progress of his mind
training for this his life work. In the Summa Catholicae Fidei contra
Gentiles he shows how a Christian theology is the sum and crown of
all science. This work is in its design apologetic, and is meant to
bring within the range of Christian thought all that is of value in
Mahommedan science. He carefully establishes the necessity of revelation
as a source of knowledge, not merely because it aids us in comprehending
in a somewhat better way the truths already furnished by reason, as some
of the Arabian philosophers and Maimonides had acknowledged, but because
it is the absolute source of our knowledge of the mysteries of the
Christian faith; and then he lays down the relations to be observed
between reason and revelation, between philosophy and theology. This
work, Contra Gentiles, may be taken as an elaborate exposition of
the method of Aquinas. That method, however, implied a careful study and
comprehension of the results which accrued to man from reason and
revelation, and a thorough grasp of all that had been done by man in
relation to those two sources of human knowledge; and so, in his
preliminary writings, Thomas proceeds to master the two provinces.
Continued on page three.
This article is from the 1911 edition of an encyclopedia,
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