Summa Contra Gentiles By Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas’s first cosmological argument, the prime mover, defines things in the world as being either in a state of potentiality or in a state of actuality. Those things that are in potentiality are things that have the capability of being reduced to another form. Such as a boy is potentially a man, or tree is potentially a house. Things that are in a state of actuality are things that are currently reaching their potential; such as that boy becoming a man, or that tree becoming that house. Aquinas observed that all things in a state of actuality had to have been put into that state by something that was already in actuality. In thinking about this he concluded that there would have to be an infinite regress of actual things making potential things actual. He concluded that this would be impossible because given that, there would be no first mover. He instead, postulated that there must be a first mover. A being that never had potential but only has existed in a state of infinite actuality. That what we call God.

Aquinas argued the existence of God with five main points. Aquinas began by saying that nothing can be a cause of itself; rather every event was caused by some prior event. Therefore event A causes event B that leads to event C and so forth. He believed in this cause and effect relationship but believed that there must be a first cause as a starting point. When contemplating this starting point Aquinas rejected the possibility of an infinite series of events. This means that the universe has not existed forever and there must have been something from which every single event stems. There must be an uncaused first cause, which Aquinas concluded to be God. The first cause is called the unmoved mover. The unmoved mover is what set all other events and beings in motion.

In Aquinas’ view, knowledge of God could be reached in two ways; one through revelation for example, through the words of the Bible and the other is through our own human reason. Aquinas thought that if we applied reason to the evidence that

The first tension, as previously mentioned, is the love of oneself—the magnanimous person loves to do good things, but finds satisfaction in being superior to others. Another tension that the magnanimous person experiences is that although he desperately tries to focus his life on doing great deeds, at the end of the day, he is left with emptiness. However, Aquinas believed that the virtues of gratitude and humility in particular could overcome these tensions. In his writings, he brought up human interdependence. At the essence, he believed all humans needed each other, and that this was a good thing. He asserted that humans are not self-sufficient, and we must be comfortable with this idea because we are a part of a society in which even the

But in this life every evil cannot be excluded” (Aquinas, page 3). It is within human nature to have faults and sins. As much as a person will try to live a life that excludes all evils, he/she may hold onto a sin or regret within their lifetime. To Aquinas, he believes that though a person can have an earthly happiness, it holds him/her back from reaching a true happiness. The other type of happiness that can be achieved is perfect happiness.

Also, unlike the Anselm’s portrayal of God, St. Thomas Aquinas’ portrayal of God is merciful and wants humans to reach eternal salvation. This God wants to restore humanity from sin in order for them to gain true happiness by living with their Creator in harmony. However, in very similar theology to

The ideas that God is altogether simple and that he has complete knowledge of himself and all things form the foundation for much of Aquinas' arguments for the existence of a world of contingent beings, deriving from a necessary being. Aquinas continues this line of reasoning in his argument that God's knowledge is the cause of things. Aquinas likens this relationship to the artificer and the art. The artificer, working through his intellect, creates the art. As Aquinas says, "Hence the form in the intellect must be the principle of action." Aquinas also says, "Now it is manifest that God causes things by his intellect, since his being is his act of understanding; and hence his knowledge must be the cause of things, insofar as his will is joined to it." Aquinas is saying here that if God's intellect creates things, i.e. human beings, then he must also be the cause of those things because his intellect is the same thing as his will. Keeping in mind that God is altogether simple, this conclusion naturally follows a logical sense of reasoning.

Aquinas was deeply influenced by Aristotle and agrees with him that happiness should be our primary focus. According to Aquinas, happiness is based on God and our desires. He argues that there are both higher and lower desires, the higher being one in accordance with faith and God where the lower is our Earthly pleasures. Aquinas asserts that it is society’s duty to satisfy our material wants, allowing us to endeavor for the rational parts of our nature. It is impossible to be completely happy without fulfilling both of these desires according to Aquinas, this means that it is impossible to be completely happy on Earth without faith. He says, “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of Divine Essence” (Summa Theologiae 2). Aquinas argues that as a society we seek to know the essence of things. To achieve that objective, we must

having this capacity, he is able to acknowledge God’s wisdom. Thus, for Aquinas, in each human person the image of God is resides in the soul, not in the body. The human body, like all other created realities, bears

He believed in natural theology and thought that man could not understand God without God's assistance and guidance. The foundations of his proofs of God’s existence were based on his five basic beliefs about God. Aquinas wrote that God was: 1) simple as in having no parts, 2) perfect therefore lacking nothing, 3) infinite having no beginning and no end, 4) immutable as in never changing, and 5) one in essence and existence.

The Aquinas' thesis is that for any being endowed with intellectual knowledge only the knowledge of the essence of God is a truly complete and self-sufficient good, in which the will is completely satisfied. Therefore, perfect happiness cannot be achieved in this life, but we can also speak of an imperfect happiness that is the participation of perfect happiness because as human beings we seek to lead a moral life in order to reach perfect happiness; people cannot talk about reaching perfect happiness because as human beings we make mistakes and lead an imperfect life but also as human beings we try to do good and lead a moral life although we cannot perfect these actions in their entirety. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that man and any being endowed

Aquinas then goes on to say that they have created the mistake by not making the distinction between good insofar as it is simply good and what is good to an individual. It is also here in his argument that I find myself agreeing heavily with Aquinas because what is good to an individual can be used in varying degrees and there is no one correct answer to this dilemma. It goes without saying that what is good to one individual is not good to another or two people can agree what is good based upon a certain situation or extenuating circumstance but not in another situation or ever again for that

To support Aquinas’ claim that money, honor, fame, power, goods of the body, or pleasure is not required for human happiness, one may cite they share ends for the sake of human beings. That is, their ends are meant only to fulfill human capacities

In this context, charity is much more. It does not fit within our narrow definition, but rather charity is the ultimate source of what it means to be real and is the ultimate goal of human life. Because Aquinas was a theologian and a man of strong faith, he believed that all relationships were closely related to our view of love for God. Aquinas states that “charity is the friendship of man for God” (Aquinas Question 23, Article 1). Since he believed that to truly love God means to truly love our neighbor because our neighbor is the immediate image of God, Aquinas also believed that friendship is only charitable if “we love someone as to wish good to him” (Article 1). For if “we do not wish good to what we love, but wish its good for ourselves, it is love not of friendship, but of a kind of concupiscence” (Article 1). According to Aquinas’ logic, just as all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares, similarly all true charity is friendship, but not all friendship is charity. Charity is something much larger than us and something which we must continually strive to acquire. Because of this, we strive for charitable, friendly love to become a virtue. It is human nature for us to practice anything we want to get better at—especially if we have a goal to reach. Since charitable friendship is the ultimate goal, we must make a habit out of loving. As we discussed in class, the only way to get better at something is to

St. Thomas Aquinas is a famous philosopher from the medieval period who believed there was a god. One of Aquinas significant works in philosophy was his argument that God exists. In Aquinas' argument, or also known as Summa Theologica, he uses five arguments to support the claim that God exist and four of them are cosmological argument. Cosmological arguments are arguments that try to reason that god exists because of the universe or cosmos leads to the conclusion that god exists. His first argument is the Argument From Motion. In the argument of motion Aquinas observed that we live in a world and universe that things are continuously moving, and he also noticed that to make something move something has to move or start it moving. To Aquinas this means that everything that is moving must have been moved by something or someone and there had to be a time when the thing wasn't moving. The mover for the beginning of everything in Aquinas' argument is God. The second argument is the Argument From Causation which is very similar to the Argument From Motion. Aquinas thoughts were that everything that is caused had to be caused by something else. Nothing can cause it's self so there must be an thing that is uncaused and to Aquinas that thing is God because it can't go back forever. The Third argument is The Argument From Contingency. Contingency is a future or thing that could have not existed and Aquinas believe that the world can't always be contingent because then it could have