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Thomas Aquinas: life of the week
00:44:20
Robert Pasnau explores the life of one of the most influential philosophers and theologians of medieval Europe
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- [00:00]
Emily Brifitts
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Emily Brifitts
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- [02:32]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah, he was the greatest philosopher theologian of the High Middle Ages, at least in Europe. If you're going to focus on European philosophy, he was the great figure. He was the person who took the traditions of antiquity, joined them together with a Christian worldview and created a new philosophy that really carried forward in its broad outlines all the way to the early modern period. In the 17th century, Aquinas was the formative force who pulled these things together.
- [03:06]
Emily Brifitts
That's quite the sales pitch there for him now as we get to know him. Obviously, we're going to come on to some of his works later as we talk, but we need to go right back to the beginning here. What do we know about Thomas's early life, his family background, his upbringing?
- [03:23]
Robert Pasnow
Right. As it happens, he was born 800 years ago. This is the 800th anniversary of his birth. We don't know the exact date, but it's pretty clear that it was in 1225. He was born in the little village of Aquino. His given name was Thomas, and Aquinas is the Latinate form of saying that he was from the village of Aquino, that's halfway between Rome and Naples. He was the youngest of nine children. He was born into a wealthy family. You can still visit the castle of Roccasecca, where he was born and where he grew up. And at some point he got interested in philosophy and he went off and that was sort of the beginning of the career.
- [04:05]
Emily Brifitts
He was educated at the University of Naples. How did this shape his intellectual developments?
- [04:11]
Robert Pasnow
Well, what his family wanted is they wanted him to join the very famous local monastery, Monte Cassino. And they figured that because of the prestige of his family and he was clearly intelligent, that he could rise up to a high level and become the abbot of the monastery there. And that would be sort of a wonderful career for him and wonderful for the family and very befitting of the dignity of their family. Instead, what happened, as seems to so often happen with young people when they go off to study someplace else, is that he fell under the, to his parents eyes, disreputable influence of the Dominican order. The Dominicans were a relatively new religious order. They weren't a monastic order. The monastic orders, the monks would hide away in monasteries. This was what was known as a mendicant order. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were the two great orders that were just starting up at this time. And they believe that members of their order should go out into the community, should preach, should teach, should be involved with people, should work on converting people, should work in guarding against heresy, should lead active, engaged lives, but also should lead lives of very austere poverty. To Thomas family, this was just disastrous. This was not what they wanted for him at all. His education in Naples, of course, gave him a chance to show off his formidable intellectual inclinations. But the thing that really mattered was he fell in love with the Dominican order. And he decided for himself that he wanted to become a Dominican and wanted to sort of part ways from the very careful path that his family had plotted off for their star young son.
- [05:53]
Emily Brifitts
This is where we get to one of those slightly bizarre moments in his life where his family, they're very strongly against this, aren't they?
- [06:02]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah, they lock him up. He wants to go off to Paris, which was the great center of higher education at this university of Paris. And his family says, uh, you're not doing that. And so they put him under a kind of house arrest. I mean, I think it's possible to have a kind of an exaggerated romantic conception of this, as if you were locked in a high tower, living on bread and water for a year or something like that. Probably it wasn't like that. But, you know, this was a very traditional culture. If your parents didn't give you permission to do something, well, you had to honor your parents. And they told them, no, you're not leaving. You're staying here with us. And so for a year, he was grounded and lived with his family, was, of course, you know, studying and living very devoutly that whole time. There's a very famous incident where supposedly his brothers, remember he was the youngest of nine children, lots of brothers and sisters. His older brothers hatched this plan where they brought in a prostitute to come visit his room, thinking, okay, we'll see how serious this kid is about this mission of becoming a priest and a Dominican friar and all of this. And as the story has it, she comes in, he picks up a burning log from the fireplace and, like, forces her out of the room, brandishing this burning log. That's the story, you know, make what you will of that. You can sort of see how this year was going. And at the end of the year, his parents relented and said, all right, you win. Go off with your Dominican buddies. Go to Paris. And that was the start of his real academic career.
- [07:34]
Emily Brifitts
And so he ends up in Paris. Then he meets also scholar Albertus Magnus as well. Where does this path go?
- [07:42]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah, so Albertus Magnus, or Albert the Great, as he's called in English, was at the time the great figure in philosophy and theology. And he was a Dominican. And so it must have been obvious to everyone that Aquinas was a genius. And for him to come into the Dominican order was a huge coup for them, because this order hadn't been around for all that long, just a few decades. And so when they discovered Aquinas, they thought, okay, we've got to take this guy, like, right to the top. We've got to bring him to our best people. So they brought him to Paris. They put him under the guidance of Albert the Great. And for some years he worked as a kind of student and then a kind of a teaching assistant, if you like, of Albert the Great's, collaborated with Albert on some of Albert's publications. He would have been in his late teens, early 20s by now. He went to Cologne with him for a little bit of time, and this was the sort of formative period in which he developed the kind of philosophical inclinations that governed his career over subsequent years.
- [08:46]
Emily Brifitts
It really appears that Thomas is moving around all over the place, really, taking up different positions. Could you just chart a timeline of this for us?
- [08:56]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah. So in 1252, he was at Cologne. At this time, they sent out a call saying there's a position open back at the University of Paris to study theology. Now, I need to give you a little sort of parenthetical explanation. I've been speaking of philosophy and theology. Philosophy was the undergraduate degree. The universities were new at this time. The two great ones were at Paris and Oxford. Everyone who studied at the university studied philosophy. So when Aquinas first went to Paris, he was studying philosophy, learning the fundamentals of philosophy, working under Albert the Great. At that time, he went off to Cologne with Albert, studying a mix of philosophy and theology. The call went out in 1252 to the Dominicans. You can send a student to pursue what we would think of as a doctoral degree in theology. Theology was the advanced degree they sent Thomas aquinas. So in 1252, he went back to the University of Paris. He was actually too young, strictly speaking, to do it. He was a few years younger than the statutes of the university stipulated you had to be to study for the doctorate in theology. But somehow they got permission to do it. So Aquinas went back, he studied theology. He then became a Master of Theology. This would have been around 1256 or so. So that is to say, he got his doctorate and he started lecturing as what we would now refer to as a professor of theology at the University of Paris in the late 1250s. And this is when he started to write some of his great works. At this period of time, I say he was a professor of theology, but at the same time, one of his distinctive features is that he's extraordinarily interested in the philosophical foundations of theology. This is very important to the subsequent really the whole subsequent intellectual history of Europe, Aquinas thought, you can't just do theology without really understanding the philosophy that underlies it. And he thought, he had this tremendous confidence that if you get the philosophy right, the right theology will follow. You don't have to worry that these two are going to go out of sync and that the philosophy will lead you to materialism and atheism and who knows what else. Aquinas thought, no, if you get the philosophy right, the theology will follow. But if you don't have the philosophy, then your theology will just be groundless and just a kind of unsatisfying intellectual exercise. And the reason this is so important is that it leads to subsequent Christian thought embracing that confidence. So that within the European tradition of philosophy, there's just never been a perceived tension. Well, rarely has there been a perceived tension between philosophy and theology. And there's been this kind of confidence in European traditions that philosophy's not a threat to religion. Philosophy is an essential foundation for religion. And in other traditions, that's really missing other traditions of thought, there's this great uneasiness about the place of philosophy. And philosophy is very often kind of regarded as a bit of a disreputable enterprise that's maybe going to just lead to trouble for the faith. Europe didn't have that attitude. And in large part that's because of the influence of Thomas Aquinas.
- [12:22]
Emily Brifitts
How did Thomas reconcile the two, that faith and reason? And what impact did this actually have?
- [12:29]
Robert Pasnow
His famous slogan is that the truth can never conflict with the truth. And so if there's a perceived tension between philosophy and theology, which of course there was, there were various kinds of arguments, you know, that someone like Aristotle had made, that were not compatible with Christianity, where you see that kind of conflict. The proper way forward is not to ignore philosophy or even worse, suppress philosophy. The proper way forward is to do philosophy better and figure out intellectually where the philosophy went wrong. And so that was always Aquinas attitude. And so from his early days, I sort of got into this whole sort of topic from talking to you about his first years as a professor in Paris. From his very earliest days, he mixed together sort of straightforward theological work, like commenting on the Bible, with straightforward philosophical work, like commenting on various philosophical texts, writing treatises that were straightforwardly philosophical treatises. He just thought these two things had to be done hand in hand, and that if you do them both right, they'll fit together. It'll be like a hand and a glove. And that was the conviction of his entire career.
- [13:43]
Emily Brifitts
What were his major influences, both philosophically and theologically?
- [13:48]
Robert Pasnow
In a way, there was a bit of fortuitousness in the time in which he was born. Maybe it's always this way with great figures in history. In Aquinas case, he had the fortune of being born just at the time when the full works of Aristotle were finally available to European Christians. It's not exactly that they'd been lost previously. It's that they hadn't been translated into Latin. Aristotle wrote in Greek, and knowing Greek in Western Europe at this time, particularly at least in northern Western Europe, in France or even in Italy, was a very unusual thing. Almost nobody did, and scholars wouldn't have been expected to learn Greek. So there was no sort of ability to read these Greek texts on their own because the texts just weren't around. Nobody had them because nobody could read them. They got translated, and at the same time, also being translated was this wonderful rich philosophical tradition growing out of Arabic philosophy. People like Avicenna Ibn Sina and Averroes Ibn Rushd. Their work was being translated into Latin, and it was also extraordinarily philosophically sophisticated. And so Aquinas came along at just the right time to absorb all that material. And he had a kind of genius for synthesizing philosophical ideas. He's extraordinary in any number of ways. But I think the thing that made him most influential and makes him so interesting to this day is the way he could take seemingly disparate ideas and just he puts them together in a way that you sort of think, wow, that sounds right. Like, that could really be true. When I teach this stuff to my students, and this will sometimes be students that really didn't think they had any interest in religion or the history of philosophy or anything. But they'll wander into my class and they'll spend some time with Aquinas, and just invariably they start to think, wow, this all actually makes a lot of sense. Like, this all fits together so beautifully. Maybe it's true, and that's why he's had such a lasting influence on history and on religion and on philosophy.
- [15:59]
Emily Brifitts
Could you share some examples of his thinking in this way?
- [16:03]
Robert Pasnow
Well, let me start right at the start. His great work is the Summa Theologiae. It's a very large piece of work comprised of, depending on how you count, maybe four different books. And he begins with God and the nature of God, as you might have expected. And he thinks you can prove God's existence. That's not so distinctive or original. A lot of folk had thought that, but not Everybody. So it's a kind of a mark of his sort of mindset that he thinks a lot of the fundamental truths of religion can be proved. But he goes very quickly through the proofs of God's existence. They're known as the five ways. He gives these five proofs. He rattles them off in just about a page. And then he goes into great and fascinating detail about the nature of God. Here he's really mixing together all kinds of philosophical influences. He's mixing together Aristotle's conception of God, which is, as a first mover, really kind of outside the universe, setting the whole thing in motion, but not deeply engaged with it. That's Aristotle's conception of God that gets disharmonized with a Platonic conception of God. Platonism gets melded with Christianity. And you get this kind of Christian Platonic conception of God as much more intimately involved in the universe and as the creatures of the universe participating in God. Then, in addition, Aquinas brings in from the side Maimonides, who was the great figure of Jewish philosophy and theology, who lived about a century before Aquinas. Maimonides thought that there's very little, in fact, that we can truly say about God. Maimonides was a proponent of what's known as apophatic theology, which is negative theology, which is the idea that all we can say is what God is not. Now you might think, how is Aquinas going to make any sense of that? Well, he does, because Aquinas says there's plenty of true things we can say about the world around us. If we try to use that language and apply it to God. We're no longer saying something that's true because the words we use to talk about the world around us do not apply in the same way to God. That's Maimonides, negative theology. You can't say anything true and positive about God. But then Aquinas says, aha, but we can understand this Platonic notion of participation. Participation and understand ourselves as participating in God. And that opens up the door to a different way of talking about God through something that Aquinas calls analogy. And he develops this theory of analogical talk about God that's true and meaningful at the divine level and related to the way we talk about the things around us in this world, even though there's still. Still a kind of distance between the way things are in this world and the way things are for God. So that's an attempt to try to distill a very large topic. And I could just go on and on for days about you know the different aspects of Aquinas views.
- [19:13]
Emily Brifitts
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- [20:45]
Emily Brifitts
There is so much that we could talk about here. Certainly. Are there any other of his views that you'd particularly like to point us to?
- [20:54]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah, well, we could go in all sorts of directions at this point. He wrote at immense length on all kinds of different topics. One thing I've been thinking about a lot lately that might be fun to talk about is his conception of morality and how he founds morality in the pursuit of happiness. This is an idea that goes back to antiquity. Aristotle had argued that our ultimate end is happiness. That's a view that medieval philosophers tended to move away from. And one of Aquinas more audacious ideas is to think that, yeah, Christian ethics can also be grounded in the idea that we pursue happiness. But the way Aquinas does it is very interesting. He doesn't think you can ground morality in an individual's pursuit of their own happiness. He thinks that the story needs to be told in terms of our pursuit of really what amounts to the happiness of the cosmos. That we are just a part of a larger universe and our moral duty is to try to contribute to the good of the whole. And Aquinas thinks that makes rational sense for us as individuals, because if the whole doesn't flourish, we can't flourish as a part of that whole. And so in our moral concern, we should be thinking not just narrowly and selfishly of ourselves, but we should be thinking of the country in which we live, of the community in which we live, of the family that we're part of, and then sort of expanding back outward. We should be thinking of the whole ecosystem that we're a part of. We need to think about that flourishing widely as something essential to our flourishing as well.
- [22:40]
Emily Brifitts
And we've gone from talking about the proof of God's existence. Aquinas also talks about the nature of God and also human nature, and this is part of his ethical belief, Is that correct?
- [22:51]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah, that's right. Aquinas is an amazingly systematic philosopher. That's probably his most striking philosophical characteristic, is the way that his ideas just kind of proceed seamlessly from one topic to another. And so from the proof of God's existence, you then get a story about the nature of God, and you can then understand human nature in terms of. Well, it makes sense for God to have created beings that are, on the one hand, bodily, but also are beings that have minds. And then when he starts to think ethically about human nature, he thinks about what it is for a being with a mind and a body to flourish in the world. And that means having some sort of concern for ourselves as having a bodily nature. But also because we're intellectual beings, we need to think about our ultimate end and what it is for an intellectual being to achieve happiness. And that's where you get the possibility to think more about the environment we live in and the flourishing of this material world in which we live. So the whole thing is interconnected in a wonderful way.
- [23:54]
Emily Brifitts
He covers so much, it seems, before we talk about his influence on those around him and his legacy. We left Aquinas at the University of Paris in the late 1250s. For the next 10 years or so, he seems to travel through Naples, Orvieto, Rome, taking up a variety of professions. Could you talk us through some of these?
- [24:18]
Robert Pasnow
He was always a Dominican friar. And so it's not as if he was at loose ends and undecided about what he wanted to do next. What he did next was what the Dominican order told him to do. And he was, of course, highly valued by the order. He was their star. And after his first term in Paris, which he would have assumed would have been his only term, because typically that's the way it was done. He was sent back to his native Italy where he took over the education. Education in various provincial houses of study. So there was the big university in Paris and also Oxford and other universities were getting underway. But for the Dominicans, an important part of their mission was to train young friars. And so Aquinas spent about a decade in various houses of study in the mid-60s in Italy, and also he was involved in larger business of the Dominican order. And he was very busily writing during this time, writing one of his most important works, the Summa Contra Gentiles. This was the period at which he began to work on the Summa Theologiae. And he also began to write a very influential series of commentaries on Aristotle's work. But in terms of his trajectory, I suppose the big event happens in 1268 when he's sent back to the University of Paris for a second term. It seems that part of the reason he was sent back is there was a lot of turmoil at the University of Paris at this time. There was some resistance to the mendicant orders at this time, both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, there was hostility against them because they had kind of special privileges, and there was some resentment over that. And so part of Aquinas mission when he went back to Paris was to respond to that sort of hostility. He was also sent back because the role of Aristotle within the university was falling into some dispute. It was becoming a bit disreputable because certain people were advancing an understanding of Aristotle that was pushing Aristotle kind of away from the Church and making Aristotelianism look as if it was at odds with church authority. Aquinas was, of course, the great master attempting to reconcile these things. And so he went back to Paris in 1268 with the project of trying to explain, okay, here's how we need to understand Aristotle to make his thought as consistent as possible with the teaching of the Church. But it was a delicate kind of operation because Aquinas couldn't, and he didn't even try to say that Aristotle was in every respect reconcilable with the teachings of the Church. And so in various sorts of places, he had to kind of say, well, we don't have to, to accept Aristotle here, but in all of these other places we can accept Aristotle and can use Aristotle as a foundation for the Church's thought.
- [27:20]
Emily Brifitts
So where did Aquinas think you could follow Aristotle and where did he think you couldn't?
- [27:25]
Robert Pasnow
Right. So famously, notoriously, the one place Where Aristotle's very clear and very unchristian concerns the eternity of the world. Aristotle had thought that the world had always existed. There's never been a time in the past in which there wasn't a world. There were some early Christians who thought that maybe that sort of worldview was compatible with Christianity. But by Aquinas time, it was clear orthodoxy that said no, there was a moment of time in which the world comes into existence, created by God. This Aristotelian idea that the world had always existed, existed had to be refuted. And Aquinas got into those disputes. But Aquinas position is very subtle. Aquinas doesn't think that there are arguments to show that the world had always existed, which is what Aristotle thought. What Aquinas thought is that there were no proofs on either side. You can't prove that the world was eternal, but you can't prove that it was not. And so this is a matter in which we should just follow the authority of the Church, because philosophy can't decide the matter one way or another. So that's one place in which Aquinas just has to part ways with aristotle.
- [28:42]
Emily Brifitts
Now, in 1272, he took his leave from the University of Paris. What happens in his later years beyond that point?
- [28:51]
Robert Pasnow
So he did another term in Paris in 1272. That term was over. He went back to Italy. He had a ton of work still left to do. At this point, he was in the middle of the Summa Theologiae, which was clearly becoming his magnum opus. It was his great life's work and he had written thousands and thousands of pages, but he wasn't done yet. He also hadn't yet commented on all of the works of Aristotle. And so he went back to Italy and he was continuing to teach in various houses of study down there. He was working furiously on trying to finish these works. And then in late 1273, he stopped writing. And so his life had this kind of mysterious concluding chapter in which he seems to have just thought the work I was doing as a philosopher and theologian here on earth was done. And sort of his thoughts turned elsewhere.
- [29:47]
Emily Brifitts
I'd like to ask you about the impact and influence Aquinas had.
- [29:52]
Robert Pasnow
Yeah. During his lifetime, it quickly became very clear that he was the big deal. He was the figure who was doing what they wanted the university to do when they created it. He was bringing together Christianity and philosophy and he was massively influential. And as you mentioned earlier, he spent a lot of time, you wouldn't say wandering, it was just that the order because they prized him so highly, was constantly sending him to places. And all of this travel was very laborious because, of course, means of transportation then were rather slow. And the Dominicans, because of their vow of poverty, riding a horse for them would have been inappropriate. That would have been putting on too many, like, airs of wealth and privilege. So they walked, or maybe they could have a donkey on special occasions. So that's all to say Aquinas, during his lifetime was already extraordinarily important. He was made a saint. He's, of course, St. Thomas Aquinas. He was made a saint around 50 years after his death. This is at a time at which the Church very rarely made saints, and for it to happen so quickly is again a mark of the impact he'd left on the Church. Now, interestingly, and I need to say this in case I have any philosophical colleagues of mine listening, I need to stress that after Aquinas death, he was in some circles, controversial to the point of really not being the central figure in some areas of philosophy. Among some schools of philosophy, there are also people who were dead set against Thomas Aquinas views. So his views became somewhat controversial. And depending on who you're studying from the later medieval period, you can get the impression that Aquinas wasn't even that important a figure, because some people just thought, oh, no, yes, he was a very saintly person, but he wasn't that great a philosopher. So it really, it depends on where you're looking in the history of philosophy to assess his influence. And then once you get to the early modern era, there's a general turning away from medieval philosophy and away from the Aristotelianism of the medieval universities, what's known as the Scholastic movement. So all of that fell into disrepute in the 17th century, and it's been sort of slowly making its way back. Even in the 19th century, it was tremendously important to Catholicism and it remains tremendously important to Catholicism. Aquinas remains regarded as the central figure within Catholic scholarship, and he's regarded as the figure who really provides the philosophical and theological foundations for Catholicism. More recently, philosophers, folk like me teaching at academic philosophy departments, have returned to Aquinas and recognized what a brilliant figure he is. And so he's starting to have the kind of wider influence in purely secular philosophical circles that he had during his life and in the years after his life.
- [33:05]
Emily Brifitts
With such a changing legacy and changing understanding of him, how do you think we should be thinking about him today? From your view, at least, I've come.
- [33:15]
Robert Pasnow
To Think that when we talk about a Renaissance in philosophy, we should really look to Aquinas and his period as the figures that made the Renaissance and philosophy happen. In other areas of intellectual history and history more widely, the Renaissance is put later. It's put into the 15th century, into the 16th century, depending on what you're looking at. But in philosophy, if you look to the 15th and 16th century, it's not so interesting. Why is that? I've come to think it's because the Renaissance in philosophy had already happened. It had happened back in the 13th century. Albert the Great, who we talked about, was an important kind of primitive figure in this movement. And then Thomas Aquinas comes along and is really the great dominant figure who gets it going. But then also after Aquinas, various very important figures like John Duns Scotus and William Occam come along, and they're very different from Aquinas in their views, but they share the central sorts of presuppositions that we can understand religion by putting it on a firm philosophical foundation. And these figures really revolutionize philosophy, and their influence lasts from the 13th century to all the way into the 17th century. So for four centuries or so, the movement that Aquinas really began is absolutely the dominant movement within European philosophy. And there's a lot of ways in which the ideas of that period have stayed with us to this day and continue to dominate both our conceptions of philosophy and our conceptions of human nature in general.
- [34:55]
Emily Brifitts
If we were to retrack back slightly, Thomas Aquinas died as a reasonably young man. What do you think we might have seen? Had he lived that bit longer, he.
- [35:08]
Robert Pasnow
Would have finished the Summa Theologiae. That's one thing for sure. He got nearly to the end of it, but it fell to his students to finish the last, maybe one eighth of it. On the basis of kind of cobbling together things he had written earlier, There's a wonderful story about the end of his life. This is probably the most famous story of all the stories about Thomas Aquinas. He had been going along, doing his thing, working tremendously hard, I should say. He wrote a great deal. His writings are extremely voluminous, despite only living for around 50 years, because he just worked so, so hard every day. But towards the end of his life, one day he just stopped writing. And his secretary, a man who had been living and working with him very closely for decades, came to him and said, what's happened? And Thomas said to him, he said, I had a vision last night. And compared to What I saw, everything that I've written now seems like straw. And from that point forward, he essentially didn't write anymore, and he only lived for about six months longer than that. But you can make what you want of what he might have experienced and exactly what he was thinking about all of this. But it's clear that at some point he looked at everything he'd done and he felt like he had achieved some new perspective from which for him it was no longer worth doing. Now, I've never taken that as a kind of indictment about his work. For the rest of us, right? I mean, for the rest of us who haven't seen what he saw, his writing is still wonderful and imminently worth studying. But something happened to him that changed the course of things. You could cynically say, ah, he burned out. Or you could call it a mystical experience, you know, you could call it a nervous breakdown. But that's how his life ended. Very clearly, if he had lived longer and hadn't had that experience happen, he just would have gone on. He left all kinds of works incomplete, not just the Summa Theologiae, but he was embarked on a project of commenting on all of Aristotle's writings. He got a long way through that project, but he left certain commentaries unfinished. He would have finished those. So this is a rare case where we more or less know exactly what he would have done if he had kept on going. He did the same thing in a very kind of systematic way for his whole adult life. And presumably he would have kept on doing it, but that's not the way it went.
- [37:43]
Emily Brifitts
With all that in mind, how close can we actually get to Thomas Aquinas, the man beyond the works?
- [37:50]
Robert Pasnow
That is extremely hard. In fact, I've told you some stories and I've tried to tell you the stories that are best attested. But even the best attested stories, it's possible to have some doubts about their truth, particularly when you consider that a lot of these stories come from the canonization hearings, the procedures that led to him becoming a saint. And notoriously, those sorts of processes led to a lot of stories being told about the figure that are a bit dubious because they're campaigning to make the man a saint. And, well, maybe you're going to exaggerate a little bit on some of the stories. So there's a lot of stories like that where you just think, really. And even the ones that are best attested, like the ones I've been describing, we're not totally sure about them. And the main reason we're not totally sure about them is that Aquinas himself never wrote about himself. His writing is quite austere in that way. Whereas most other figures in the history of philosophy, you can learn something about their lives and their sensibilities by reading their work. Aquinas is very, very sober. Everything is sort of on a level, even keel, very impersonal. And he just systematically goes through his topics with only very, very rarely any sort of flash of emotion or personality or witticism. It's as if he thought that he should remove himself from his work, perhaps as kind of the ultimate manifestation of his Dominican commitment to austerity and poverty, that to put himself into his work would be a kind of self aggrandize that he wouldn't have. And so if you really want to be a careful, sober historian on the subject of Thomas Aquinas, you don't have a lot to work with other than the texts themselves that he left us.
- [39:47]
Emily Brifitts
As a final question to you then, for listeners who want to find out a little bit more about Aquinas, where would you direct them? Where would be the best place to start in finding out more about him and also his works?
- [40:02]
Robert Pasnow
Let me mention a few things. If what you want is very clear and accessible expositions of Aquinas philosophy, then one of the masters of that in recent decades has been Anthony Kenny. He's a great Oxford scholar who has for his whole life been writing in very beautifully accessible and clear minded ways about the philosophical importance of Aquinas work. And he's got many books and articles you could easily find. If you're interested in Aquinas texts, there's a couple of options. They're not the easiest thing to read, but he's wonderfully clear. And so if you have an appetite for it and you're willing to spend some time digging into it, sort of with each subsequent page, the systematic nature of the thing will come clearer and clearer into view. There's an American group called the Aquinas Institute that has been putting out a of series of volumes that give you both a nice English translation and give you the Latin on facing pages. So if you've ever had any Latin in your educational background and have been wanting to see if you remember any of it, Aquinas is a great place to try to look at the Latin, compare it to the translation and see how you do as Latin goes. Aquinas Latin is very straightforward and very clear. And even if you ignore the Latin, the English translation is quite nice. In these volumes there's also a series of that Hackett publishes of very affordable paperback volumes that give you Aquinas central works in translation and also gives you a running commentary on the works. And that can be a very helpful way to try to get into what's going on in these works.
- [41:42]
Emily Brifitts
That was Robert Pasnel, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, speaking to me. Emily Brifitts.