Thomas Aquinas

In our introductory lecture, we encounter the life, times, and cultural context of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Dominican friar and theologian who represents the height of medieval scholastic thought. We examine his embrace of Aristotelian philosophy, his formation from a Benedictine monastery to the University of Paris, and his innovative teaching methods through disputed questions that shaped his masterwork, the Summa Theologiae. The lecture concludes with insights into Aquinas’s personal sanctity, including his mystical experiences and his famous declaration that all his writings seemed like “straw” compared to what had been divinely revealed to him shortly before his death in 1274.

In lecture two, we study Thomas Aquinas's approach to God, the central focus of his life. We examine why Aquinas rejects Anselm's ontological argument, preferring empirical proofs drawn from worldly observation. We analyze three of his Five Ways: the argument from motion (showing God as unmoved mover), from contingency (God as necessary being), and from teleology (God as supreme intelligence). Aquinas calls these "ways" not proofs, acknowledging human limitations in comprehending God. Each argument reveals God's present activity in the world, not merely past creation.

In lecture three, Robert Barron explores Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of God’s attributes beyond his famous Five Ways. Through the via negativa (negative way) and via positiva (positive way), Aquinas develops a vision of divine simplicity in which God’s essence and existence are one, making God not simply a being among beings but “ipsum esse subsistens” (the subsistent act of being itself). The discussion concludes by examining God's perfection, goodness, immutability, eternity, and knowledge, demonstrating how these attributes flow from the principle of divine simplicity and reveal God as the ultimate ground of being who draws all creation back to himself.