Aquinas 101: Lesson Seven

Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, downloaded from Wikipedia

Lesson 7: The Science of Theology

The video concentrates on theology as a science (re-visiting the question whether theology is a science). We have certain helps that help us determine whether the Christian revelation is true: 1) we can look at the revelation and find the internal coherence of it; 2) we can see how this revelation illumines the human condition; 3)  we can see how revelation dovetails with human reason (such as proofs of the existence of God); and 4) God gives us confirming signs (such as miracles, or the endurance of the Church and her teachings). Fr. White succinctly states that theology is "science made possible by grace." Fr. White highlights the two most important principles of Christian theology: 1) the doctrine of the Trinity by which we can understand all else, and 2) the doctrine of the Incarnation. From the selected readings Fr. White writes, "Theology is a science in the sense that it has a proper object of study: the mystery of God made available in divine revelation."

The audio lecture, "Aquinas on the Three Wisdoms: Philosophical, Theological, Mystical" by Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, builds the foundations for rightly ordering the sciences. He begins with the common human experience of wonder, which is a prerequisite for wisdom. He gives three broad questions we all ask: 1) What is? 2) Who am I? (what does it mean to be human?) and 3) How shall I act? Fr. Legge then moves to the causes of things in understanding "what is" and provides Aristotle's four causes for deeply understanding a thing: 1) the material cause (what is it made of) 2) the efficient cause (what caused it to come into being) 3) the formal cause (the idea of what that thing is, it's intelligibility) and 4) the final cause (that for the sake of which it is).The four causes take us into a deeper understanding, and with deeper understanding we can see the order of things.

Here Fr. Legge moves into the ordering of the sciences. He discusses how we can know things. As animals we can perceive things through the senses and remember those sense experiences. As rational animals, we can "see" the form of things. This leads us into the various modes of inquiry. Fr. Legge gives the example of an orange. We can see it's color (science of optics), we can see that it can be thrown (physics), we see that it's healthy to eat (medicine), and we can see that it's round (geometry). And Fr. Legge then proceeds to order these sciences into practical (ordered to activity) and speculative (ordered to truth). From my own education and experience, I know that we're utilitarian as a culture, and so we value the practical sciences (engineering, medicine),  but in the selected reading from the Summa (ST Ia Q.1 a.5) objection two talks of of lower sciences depending on higher sciences. The example given is of music (ordered to activity, practical) depending on the higher science of arithmetic (ordered to truth, speculative). Fr. Legge then tells us the speculative sciences are further divided into those which deal with matter and change (e.g. biology) and those that abstract from physical things like mathematics (abstracting to deal with quantity) and the highest abstraction of  dealing with being as being or metaphysics. Up to this point, Fr. Legge has been talking about wisdom through the light of human reason. But there is also the light of faith or grace, which we can obtain wisdom beyond which we could obtain through the light of human reason. This is where one obtains wisdom through the science of theology, or one may be given the gift of the Holy Spirit of wisdom which would be mystical wisdom. The third and highest light is that of glory, where we hope that we'll reach heaven and there we will see God face to face. Thus ends the ordering of the sciences.

Related material can be found in this lecture, "Introduction to Metaphysics - Part Three: Philosophy as Wisdom" by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP. Again Fr. White speaks away from the microphone, but most of it can be heard. He speaks about the hierarchy of being and objections to the metaphysics of St. Thomas. He thinks that Thomistic philosophy can account for the theory of evolution.

It the other parts can be found here on SoundCloud (I did not listen to the other lectures).