Exam on Guide to Thomas Aquinas by Josef Pieper

Question 1

Where was Thomas Aquinas sent at the age of 5?

Answer 1

The Abbey at Monte Cassino

Question 2

Who founded the Order of Preachers? When were they confirmed as an order?

Answer 2

the Spaniard Dominic

confirmed as an order in 1216

Question 3

The ancestry of the Order of Preachers goes back to which two movements? Describe key characteristics of each.

What movement did these culminate in?

Answer 3

Catharism - manichees, ascentism (fasting to death), seemed good and right in light of secularization of Christianity, attracted misguided fervor
Waldenianism - poverty, Bible-reading, itinerant preaching

culminated in Albigensian movement

Question 4

Name four things Dominic did when he came into southern France.

Answer 4

St. Dominic came into southern France, where so much violence had been done (the “earthquake territory”). They took the injunction of evangelical poverty seriously and they took the heretics seriously – as people sharing a common humanity with themselves. The Albigensians didn’t stand like defendants, but as disputants with equal rights. They sought truth with the stipulation that he who could not prove his thesis from the Bible would be regarded as defeated.

Question 5

Dominic saw that the Albigensians could only be conquered if…

Answer 5

…their valid demands were acknowledged and carried out within the Catholic Church.

Question 6

Name 3 ways the Dominicans were different from the Franciscans.

Answer 6

1. Order of priests 2. Rational and sober complexion 3. Did not reject culture and science in principle

Question 7

The Dominicans turned their attention to _____________and _________ poured into the newly founded order

Answer 7

first universities of the Western world

university students poured into the newly founded order

Question 8

Why did Thomas move to Naples?

Answer 8

“moved” to Naples to flee citadel at Monte Cassino between imperial and papal territories

Question 9

Why was Thomas’ family against him becoming a Dominican?

Answer 9

(father and brothers members of the court nobility of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen) mendicant orders constantly under suspicion of working on the Pope’s side against the Emperor’s power

Question 10

What was the most telling aspect of the mendicant orders?

Answer 10

The Biblical, the “evangelical” aspect was the most telling characteristic of that movement

Question 11

What attracted Thomas to the Dominican movement?

Answer 11

Thomas came to Naples less than two decades after the death of Dominic. He was attracted to this movement which was dominated on the one hand by the passion for the enunciation of the truth and on the other hand was evangelical with a radical return to the Bible and a renewed dedication to the idea of poverty. All of this was very attractive to Thomas and can be seen throughout his writing and his life.

Question 12

What two specific things led Thomas into the Order of Preachers?

Answer 12

What led him into it

1. yearning for the guiding light of evangelical Christianity – his love for the idea of poverty
2. passion for teaching (Dominic had replaced interrogation by dialogue between equals)

Question 13

Name two defining characteristics of the voluntary poverty movement.

Answer 13

Rediscovered the Bible and made it the guide to Christian doctrine and Christian life
Fierce urge to investigate, on the plane of pure natural philosophy, the reality that lay before men’s eyes

Question 14

How did Thomas regard the principles that underlay the voluntary poverty movement?

Answer 14

Thomas yearned for the guiding light of evangelical Christianity – his love for the ideal of poverty.
He tramped through all of Europe on foot.
When writing the Summa Against the Pagans, he did not even have enough paper available and wrote on small scraps.

Thomas was passionate about teaching.

Question 15

Name 5 things which describe the nature of teaching as Thomas understood it.

Answer 15

1. Real teaching takes place only when the hearer is “taught.”
2. Being taught means to perceive what the teacher has said is true and valid, and to perceive why this is so
3. Teaching therefore presupposes that the hearer is sought out where he is to be found. It proceeds from the existing position and disposition of the hearer.
4. The hearer’s counterarguments must be taken seriously and the elements of truth in them recognized – for aside from the products of feeble-mindedness or intellectual gamesmanship, there are no entirely false opinions.
5. The teacher must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the hearer to the fuller and purer truth as he, the teacher, understands it.

Question 16

The old socratic-Platonic conception at work: that truth develops only…

This is what Dominic had striven for when…

Answer 16

in dialogue, in conversation

shocked by the violent methods being used against the Albigensians, he replaced interrogation by dialogue between equals.

Question 17

How did Thomas take the idea of dialogue even further?

Answer 17

Thomas took this further. When he took up the already well-developed instrument of the scholastic disputatio in order to play his own melody upon it, he simplified it. The framework of the disputation governs the form of his entire written work. First he formulated the question, then he gives the voices of the opposition and then he carefully replied to each of the opposing arguments. Thomas was so good at this that sometimes people get confused reading his works. He argues so well from the standpoint of the opposition, he sounds like he agrees with them. He also brought this principle into oral disputations. No one was permitted to answer a point until he first restated the opposing argument in his own words, thus proving he had actually understood.

Question 18

Thomas’ concern to dig for the truth was exemplified in the case where…

Answer 18

he was preparing to refute Augustine because he thought they completely disagreed, and then ended up realizing that the agreed almost entirely and the difference was actually quite minimal.

Question 19

What was the Inquisition?

Answer 19

In 1230 or 1231, ten years after the death of Dominic, Pope Gregory IX assigned to the Dominican Order, the task of providing Inquisitors for the trials of heretecs.

Question 20

What two things was the Inquisition meant to counter?

Answer 20

1. Directed against the emperor Frederick II, who had initiated the practice of having heretics tracked down by officials of the state – thus leaving the primary condemnation of heretics to men who were ill-equipped to deal with the problem
2. Meant to counter vagaries of “popular feeling” – “the mob” would always demand the harshest, cruelest measures in acts of savage lynch law. Inquisitio means investigation. The goal was a real investigation, a judicial procedure, instead of outright lynching, or simplistic police brutality.

Question 21

How did Thomas regard the Inquisition in principle?

Answer 21

In principle, Thomas agreed that if counterfeiters could be put to death (and the general harshness of judicial procedure must be taken into account) then surely counterfeiters of the faith had committed a far worse crime and should certainly be put to death.

Question 22

How did Thomas regard the inquisition in procedure?

Answer 22

In procedure, Thomas’ view is not in accord with the Inquisition itself. For Thomas believed that no man could be forced to believe. People can do many things under compulsion, but that cannot believe. Thomas taught that a Superior could not order that the accused should confess. If he does, he sins gravely. And the accused is not required to expose himself. Rather, he may say: Let the accuser prove what he has said; otherwise I demand a judgment (against him) for defamation. The accuser could answer along these lines or simply keep silent.

Question 23

Give 3 evidences that Thomas was not a genuinely Aristotelian thinker.

Answer 23

1. Frequently defends Plato against Aristotle and points out that Aristotle, in his polemics, often did not consider the substance of what Plato said
2. Thomas never presents a quotation from Aristotle with the implication that the statement is valid because Aristotle made it. Thomas very often takes issue with some opinion of Aristotle’s. He never assumed that the doctrine of Aristotle was invariably compatible with Christian doctrine. This attitude was quite prevalent with medieval Aristotelians; Thomas himself was never of this number.
3. Ultimately, Thomas was not interested in what Aristotle thought, but how the truth of things stands.

Question 24

What principles from Aristotle did Thomas put to use?

Answer 24

Aristotle, he says, refuses to withdraw from the realities present to the senses, refuses to be distracted from those things that are evident to the eyes. Thomas emphatically accepted this principle and saw those things which are evident to the senses as not just shadows or symbols, but as valid in and of themselves.

Thomas, in his early work defined the study of theological point of view as considering fire not as fire, but insofar as the sovereignty of God is represented in it and insofar as it is in some sense referred to God.

What the twelfth century lacked, and craved, was the concrete reality beneath this world of symbols.

Question 25

In what 3 ways did Thomas employ the philosophy of Aristotle in service of the church?

Answer 25

the reality behind the world of symbols, the sense of seeking after the truth, the logical framework for constructing thoughts

Question 26

Name 3 characteristics of the structure of medieval universities.

Answer 26

1. The university, in the sense of corporation, was not a hierarchical institution. The word originally denoted the assemblage of teachers and students. It was not integrated into the hierarchical framework of the Church, like a cathedral chapter or a monastic order. This was something new in the West and didn’t happen in the East in the same way.
2. The medieval university was by its nature an institution for the whole of Christendom. In practice it was a rule restricted to the West, but in principle it was open to the entire Christian world. No matter what country you were in, you had no difficulties of language or communication.
3. The medieval university stood in the current of urban life. These pupils were itinerants moving from one urban university to the next, freely joining together and terrorizing the citizens of the city and often their professors as well. This took the form of a new secularity, an emphatic independence of feudal lords, a new sense of freedom.

Question 27

What as the particular role of the University of Paris?

Answer 27

The University of Paris in the thirteenth century, then, took the lead in philosophical and theological examination of the world, thereby achieving a sort of supremacy.

Question 28

Describe Thomas’ initial coming to the University of Paris.

Answer 28

Around 1245, then, twenty-year-old Thomas Aquinas came to the University of Paris, first of all as a learner. Later, as one of its greatest teachers, he would represent in exemplary fashion the university of this Academy of the Christian West.

The university initially refused to admit him to the faculty and forbade attendance at his inaugural lecture because he was a Dominican. The existing order quite naturally ranged itself strongly against the mendicant orders.

Question 29

What was the source of antagonism between the university and the mendicant orders? How was this resolved?

Answer 29

The antagonism grew all the stronger as the Dominicans exerted an ever stronger pull on the younger generation”

The Pope then intervened, ordering the university to place a church or monastery at the disposal of the Preaching Friars. They then formed a sort of student corporation within the university which exerted a tremendous vitality and dynamism which inevitably changed the structure of the entire field of force surrounding them. They very quickly grew in numbers, became an intellectual center, and people flocked to hear Dominican sermons, the likes of which they had never heard.

Question 30

Name 5 aspects of Thomas’ role at the university.

Answer 30

At the University of Paris, Thomas cultivated the oral disputatio to an extent hitherto unknown. No one was permitted to answer directly the interlocutor’s objection; rather, he must first repeat the opposing objection in his own words, thus explicitly making sure that he fully understood what his opponent had in mind.

Thomas loved to teach and this is what he was most passionate about. (We see this in the very nature of his most famous work. The Summa Theologica was a work meant to lay out the basics.) In addition to teaching, at the University of Paris, he also organized a number of faculties, founded schools, drew up and approved curricula. He was not really an administrator though. He remained a teacher to the end.

Question 31

Thomas lived the life of a teacher. Name two things he said that fully illustrate this.

Answer 31

Thomas lived the life of a teacher and flung his full energies and talent into the role. In the period shortly before his death, he confided to his friend Reginald that he hoped to God, if his teaching and writing were now over, that the end of his life would come quickly.

Teaching, says Thomas, is one of the highest manifestations of the life of the mind, for the reason that in teaching the vita contemplative and the vita active are joined.

Question 32

Name 5 ways of evaluating a teacher according to Thomas and Pieper.

Answer 32

The teacher, then, (1) looks to the truth of things; that is the contemplative aspect of teaching. On the one hand, there is his relationship with truth, the power of silent listening to reality; o the other hand, there is (2)his affirmative concern for his audience and his pupils. And we may say that Thomas personally accomplished both these activities with extraordinary intensity.

For Thomas, this concentration upon the partner in discourse, the listener, the reader and pupil, was profoundly characteristic. He devoted his best energies and the longest period of his life, not to a work of “scholarship,” but to a textbook for beginners, although it was, to be sure, the fruit of the deepest absorption with Truth. The Summa theological expressly sets out to be a beginner’s textbook.

Precisely this characterizes the teacher, it seems to me: he possesses (3) the art of approaching his subject from the point of view of the beginner; he is able to enter the psychological situation of one encountering a subject for the first time. He sees the reality just as the beginner can see it, with all the innocence of a first encounter, and yet at the same time with the matured powers of comprehension and penetration that the cultivated mind possesses.

Thomas combined his love of the task with a masterly command of the didactic craft. Thomas points out that it is necessary to avoid aversion which is engendered by overfamiliarity and constant repetition of the same things… all knowledge of any depth, not only philosophizing, begins with amazement. (4) Everything depends on leading the learner to recognize the amazing qualities.

(5) It is genuine questioning that inspire all true learning.

Question 33

What do Thomas’ contemporaries testify about his teaching?

Answer 33

Thomas’ contemporaries testify that Thomas captivated the students of the University of Paris by the newness of his teaching. The great teacher demonstrated his thesis that the truth can only be kept alive and present in a living language which continuously grasps and puts a new stamp upon what has long been known and thought.

Question 34

What did Sigar of Brabant maintain?

Answer 34

Sigar of Brabant maintained that one must “rather seek to discover the meaning of the Philosopher than the truth.”

Question 35

Van Steenberghen, who has written an imposing monograph upon Siger of Brabant, summarizes his career as follows:

Answer 35

A young ringleader without scruples, resolved to put his point of view across with all the means at his commant”; fiery of temperament, vehement, inclined to go to extremes.

Question 36

What did Siger of Brabant do at the University of Paris? How did that end?

Answer 36

Teaching at University of Paris and writing a considerable number of books, all commentaries on Aristotle. He was constantly involved in doctrinal disputes. He fled from France when summoned before an Inquisitional tribunal and was then stabbed to death by his own secretary at the age of forty.

Question 37

What school of thought did Sigar of Brabant become the spokesman for? What did these men understand and propound?

Answer 37

He became the spokesman for a school of thought which had become established in Paris around 1265 and which is usually referred to in the literature as “Latin Averroism.” These men understood and propounded Aristotle in such a manner that from the start they felt themselves exempt from any concern with the truth of the Christian revelation. Gilson has called this basic attitude “philosophism.”

Question 38

Name two aspects of philosophism.

Answer 38

Philosophism:

1. the thesis that philosophizing is in principle independent of and separate from theology and faith. For the first time in the history of Christendom the principle of uniting ratio and fides, which had been established since the days of Augustine and Boethius, was formally abrogated
2. this newly autonomous philosophy was considered to be wisdom itself, a doctrine of salvation. “There is no state superior to the practice of philosophy.” – such was one of its tenets

Question 39

Thomas was fighting a battle against which two fronts?

Answer 39

Thomas was fighting a battle against the absolutizing of Aristotle, on the one hand, and against the exclusiveness of a supranaturalistic Biblicism, on the other hand.

Question 40

What three arguments did Thomas make against both extremes to make his Thomistic synthesis?

Answer 40

First, Thomas demonstrated that affirmative acceptance of the natural reality of the world and of the natural reality in man himself can be ultimately established and justified only in theological terms. The natural things of the world have a real, self-contained intrinsic being precisely by reason of having been created, precisely because the creative will of God is by nature being-giving.

This argument was addressed to both opposing sides. The chief objection of the anxious traditionalists in theology was that Thomas allowed creation too great independence of God, and that by defending the rights of natural things he infringed upon the rights of God. To them, Thomas cried: The very autonomy and intrinsic effectiveness of created things proves the truly creative powers of God. And to the extremist Aristotelians he said, to set the record straight: You are right; the natural world is a reality in its own right, but there would be no such independent and at the same time nonabsolute reality if the Creator did not exist.

Thomas’ second argument runs as follows: Things are good – all things. The most compelling proof of their goodness in the very act of being lies in their createdness; there is no more powerful argument for affirmation of the natural reality of the world than the demonstration that the world is creatura. Because all things, including the angels, including men, are created, it is for that very reason inconceivable that they themselves should be able to alter essentially their own being or the being of the world; even if they wanted to, they could not destroy being, neither their own nor that of other things. In concrete terms this means: sin, whether on the part of the angels or on the part of men, cannot have essentially changed the structure of the world. Therefore, Thomas argues, I refuse to consider the present state of the world as a basically unnatural state, a state of denaturalization. What is, is good, because it was created by God; whoever casts aspersions upon the perfection of created things casts aspersions upon the perfection of the divine power.

3. It has been said that Thomas might never have had the courage to defend natural and visible reality, in particular man’s corporeality, as an essential part of man, and would never have had the courage to draw the ultimate conclusions from this conviction, had he not thought in terms of the Incarnation of God. The Gospel of John, Thomas says, makes itself so clear on the point that the Logos “became flesh,” in order to exclude the Manichean opinion that the body is of evil. One who believes that the Logos of Go has, in Christ, united with the bodily nature of man, cannot possibly assume at the same time that the material reality of the world is not good. And how can visible things be evil if the “medicine of Salvation” deriving from that prototypal Sacrament is offered to man in the same visible things, per ipsa visibilia, when the Sacraments are performed!
   Thus the line of reasoning by which Thomas, now appealing strictly to his theological opponents, justified his affirmation of the material world and above all of the human body, was a profoundly theological one. Not only did Thomas justify the right to affirm, but he even insisted on the duty of such affirmation. To sum up, then, Thomas’ resolute worldliness set him apart from the spiritualistic, symbolistic, unworldliness of the age’s traditional theology. At the same time he differed with the radical, secularistic worldliness of heterodox Aristotelianism by the determinedly theological foundation he gave to his ideas; he justified his worldliness by the theology of creation and by the strictly “theological” theology of the Incarnation.