Aquinas 101: Lesson Fifteen

Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, downloaded from Wikipedia

Lesson 15: Universals and Particulars | Genus and Species

The video by Fr. James Brent, OP. is short. It is devoted to the definition of the terms in the title of this lesson. The individual things around us are called particulars. The forms or essences of these things, because they applicable to many particulars of the same kind, are called universals. And he states, "A genus is a general category containing many kinds and a species is a more specific category within a genus." There are species which can not be further divided except into particulars are called most specific species, and the particulars in a most specific species are called individuals.

The selected reading from Aquinas is his commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, where Aristotle disagrees with Platonists that universals are substances themselves. In the other selected reading, Lear also comments on Aristotle, but on how we come to sense universals through our experience:

Through repeated encounters with items in the world, our sensory discriminations develop into memory and then into what Aristotle calls 'experience.' Experience Aristotle characterizes as 'the whole universal that has come to rest in the soul.' From repeated perception of particular men, we form the concept of a man, and the knowledge that this thing we see is a man is experience. If the universal, or concept, were not somehow already embedded in the particular, we could not make the transition from bare sensory discrimination to knowledge of the individual. As Aristotle says, 'though one perceives the particular, perception is of the universal.'

The audio lecture, "Seeking Universality in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty" by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP, is looking at the universality of knowledge or unity of knowledge in the university. He states that the two protagonists of the lecture are St. Thomas Aquinas and Gottlieb Söhngen. He takes us back to the formation of the early universities, and brings out two active questions: 1) How are the diverse forms of natural learning, although truly distinct, also coordinated and unified among themselves and in turn open to the mystery of divine revelation, and 2) Is theology really a science in the Aristotlian sense? If so does it relate to our natural forms of learning and how does it relate?

Fr. White recommends the reading of Aquinas' commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate. He talks about the three purely speculative sciences, philosophy of nature (study of change in being), mathematics (quantity), and metaphysics. From the latter, we can study the transcendentals, present in all being, and so move on the an understanding of being beyond the material world, toward some knowledge about God. Philosophy studies this world, with God on the horizon or summit. He goes on to state that God does not immediately unify knowledge but God is the proximate and transcendent subject that unites all learning as the cause of all created being.

He moves on to the second part of his lecture toward the modern problem of unity of knowledge and states that now the questions are: 1) whether philosophy can be used in theology at all, and 2) can there be Catholic theology in the secular university. He gives the problem in a historical context. As a result of the French Revolution, it became illegal to teach theology in the university (or for a priest to be a professor) and a parallel development in northern Europe and North America where theology in secular universities were marginalized. He points out four causes for this lack of unity: 1) loss of reference to divine Revelation in the Eighteenth Century, 2) philosophical skepticism, 3) ambient despair of universal knowledge, and 4) hyper specialization and consumerism in the Twentieth Century. 

Fr. White directs us to two articles by Gottlieb Söhngen on the analogy of faith (The Analogy of Faith: Likeness to God from Faith Alone and The Analogy of Faith: Unity in the Science of Faith). This brings out four points: 1) ultimate explanations (unity in the mystery of God), 2) unity of the canon between Old and New Testaments, 3) the unity of Church proclamations (teachings) and biblical witness, and 4) the correlation with analogia entis (analogy of being), and philosophical considerations of transcendentals, evoke the possibility of natural knowledge of God. That is, the Logos of divine Revelation meshes well with the logos of the world, hence a unity of truth and knowledge.

This lecture is found on SoundCloud.com, which goes on further past the 38 minutes (and I have not listened to that). This is part of the larger set at SoundCloud, Catholic Theology and the Modern University.