Saint Thomas Aquinas: What is God?

In the year 1225 a life began and so did a quest to answer the question: what is God? Saint Thomas Aquinas could be described in many ways: as a theologian, a scientist or a biblical scholar, but he was defined by the fact that he was in love with Christ. This pursuit of the second person of the trinity has increased our understanding of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas pointed out that the greatest act of God’s goodness was God giving himself away. The incarnation is the most charitable thing our Lord could have ever done for us. 

Saint Thomas Aquinas was born into a family of Italian nobles, he got his early education in Saint Benedict’s stomping grounds: Monte Cassino. He was the sixth son in his family, and when he was young, he was sleeping in the same room with his little sister when she was struck by a lightning bolt and killed. As a teenager, he became somewhat of an intellectual rebel: he went to college at one of the new secular universities, the University of Naples. In this university was a renewed interest in the writings of Aristotle. People in the church worried that this would make theology too dry and rationalistic.

In Saint Thomas Aquinas’s time, the Franciscan and Dominican orders were gaining steam. They were orders designed to bring the gospel outside of the monastery walls and into the streets. Both of them championed the poverty of Christ. While still at Naples, Saint Thomas Aquinas became a Dominican, breaking both the Benedictine tradition of his family and their hearts. His family tried to discourage him from joining this order with less-than-savory techniques. In 1246, Saint Thomas Aquinas was released from the captivity of his home and allowed to study in Paris. Albert the Great, a master theologian, became his mentor and teacher. Saint Thomas Aquinas went with Albert to Cologne to the newly created Dominican house of studies.

Saint Thomas Aquinas soon earned his theology doctorate. He was very modest about his scholarly talents. At times his classmates were misled into thinking that he wasn’t very bright. St. Albert the Great read Saint Thomas Aquinas’s thesis and defended the man by saying “We call this young man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world!”

Saint Thomas Aquinas spent his post-education life traveling, teaching, and preaching. A major contribution he made to Christian thought was his teaching on faith and reason. People couldn’t figure out how faith (knowledge gained through revelation) and reason (information gathered through the mind and the senses) could co-exist. It was thought that these two types of knowledge were in direct opposition to each other. Aquinas argued that both faith and reason came from God, and were therefore compatible. Furthermore, they could work together. Faith could guide reason and keep it from error, while reason could clear up and demystify faith. 

Saint Thomas Aquinas’s work showed how faith and reason could explain that god exists. He had five proofs for this:

1. Movement in the world proved that there was an immovable mover.
2. Cause and effect showed that God was the cause of all things.
3. The fact that we aren’t permanent proves that there needs to be a necessary being, which is God, who came from himself.
4. Different levels of perfection in humans mean that a supreme being must exist.
5. Natural beings have intelligence, but that has to be granted from a source, and that source is God.

Aquinas’s masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae, came late in his life. In it, Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches theology not only through Biblical examples and through the Church fathers but also through theological questions. Aquinas was a master of formulating questions about God and then finding a balanced answer to counter the objections. His witness as a theologian surely answered the first theological question he ever had: What is God?