Sublime

This, in a certain respect, is not in contradiction with the arguments of Aristotle; for it makes no difference whether with Plato we come to a first mover that moves itself, or with Aristotle to something first which is altogether immovable.

A thing is not moved by itself if it is moved accidentally, since its motion is occasioned by the motion of something else.

In connection with the intellect, the problem of universals is discussed. Saint Thomas’s position is that of Aristotle. Universals do not subsist outside the soul, but the intellect, in understanding universals, understands things that are outside the soul.

FOUR men are called the Doctors of the Western Church: Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Pope Gregory the Great.

the other portrayals were, in a phrase of Fergus Kerr, “unavoidable anthropomorphisms.” See Kerr, After Aquinas, 77;

There is an old Scholastic distinction between religious treatises written “de Deo uno” and those written “de Deo trino”: between, that is, those that are “about the one God” known to persons of various faiths and philosophies and those that are “about the Trinitarian God” of Christian doctrine.

This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know. Our great tragedy is that we know too much. We think we know, that is our tragedy; so we never discover. In fact, Thomas Aquinas (he’s not only a theologian but also a great philosopher) says repeatedly, “All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence

Aquinas replies that God knows singulars as their cause; that He knows things that do not yet exist, just as an artificer does when he is making something; that He knows future contingents, because He sees each thing in time as if present, He Himself being not in time; that He knows our minds and secret wills, and that He knows an infinity of thing