Thomas Aqui-nasty

I’m here to kind of go over our boy Thomas Aquinas and (hopefully) shed a little more light on his work.

Thomas Aquinas, while being completely revolutionary to the world of philosophy and theology, leaves much to be desired in his manner of writing. Believe it or not, chapter 3 of Kors & Peters’ Witchcraft in Europe has excerpts from some of his most prestigious and well-read works. The Summa theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles helped shape and mold the way in which religion was practiced and taught within the Roman Catholic Church. It is important to note that prior to Aquinas’ melding of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology, there hadn’t been a significant change in the Roman Catholic Church since Augustine some 900 years prior. A lot of the time I think people assume that the Medieval Era was the dead period in time between the Classical Era and the Renaissance, when this obviously wasn’t the case.

<http://www.stpeterslist.com/11585/aquinas-is-not-impressed-11-memes-of-the-angelic-doctor/>

But wait, how does all this religion stuff fit in with magic? Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.

The excerpts taken from the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae don’t explicitly deal with the inner workings of magic, but more on the origins of magic and how it relates to a divine hierarchy. You’re not going to get obscure details on spells and potions from Aquinas, he was God’s #1 fanboy, so everything he wrote was in reference to God or how things worked within His plan.

Aquinas lays out a hierarchy of beings/institutions within the divine and mundane world – how they interact, who has control over what, what things are off limits to who, etc. You can look at this almost like an elaborate board game or an RPG. So the players in this hierarchal game are as follows: God, Devil/demons, heavenly bodies, nature, and humans. God is the man on top with the knowledge of everything that is going on. For my fellow nerd-folk, he’d be your Dungeon Master. Within God’s spectrum there is nature – for lack of a better comparison, nature is like the setting of a book and God is the narrator, he fills up the space with stuff. Within nature (and therefore God’s plan) you have the Devil/demons, heavenly bodies, and humans. These three things overlap at varying degrees because they all take place in tandem, within nature. The Devil/demons have more knowledge of nature – that is why they are able to distort a human’s perception of it (oh wow that sounds a lot like magic!) There is some overlap with heavenly bodies (basically astrology) and humans as well, but from the excerpt we have of Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles we can infer that heavenly bodies have a more passive role in the lives of humans.

Lastly, the final player in the hierarchal game is free will. This is something that humans have (only humans) that somehow manages to fit into God’s will. The debate on whether or not that is possible should be something saved for another time, but it’s there according to Aquinas and I can’t bring myself to argue with him.

<http://www.stpeterslist.com/11585/aquinas-is-not-impressed-11-memes-of-the-angelic-doctor/>

P.S. And as my gift to you, here are helpful (and reputable) links. Explore them, use them, love them. Become one with the links.

http://www.bluffton.edu/~humanities/1/st_tips.htm

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/