Do you like Thomas Aquinas, Veeky Forums?

Do you like Thomas Aquinas, Veeky Forums?

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No, his work is devoid of spirituality, it's all Islamic-style theology. Although it inspired Dante, whose work is quite beautiful and spiritual.

no, I'm still upset about the christposting guy at Veeky Forums who constantly poisoned threads with his bullshit, was happy to see that he didn't migrate to Veeky Forums.

No, it's the highest expression of everything wrong with Scholasticism.
All of his deductions are utterly detached from reality, and are ultimately completely useless

He was a really great philosopher and theologian. It would be nice to see other scholastics get more than just a mention from lay-theologians on Veeky Forums though. He is often overrated by people who think that he has the perfect rational-theology, but is often underrated by those who have never actually studied him in any depth. I also find that I personally lean more towards the theologians of the post 1277 period than Aquinas.

He was a retard

Scholasticism killed Christianity in the West (it would have killed Islam as well, where it not for Al-Ghazali). Making reason the yardstick of the truth of what was founded as a school of mystical revelation, was simply a bad idea. Buddhism likewise would have gone down the drain if that sort of methodology became dominant in their school.

Lol, and you are brilliant. Go away.

I read The Confessions because of the Veeky Forums memes.
The biographical parts were interesting, particularly the details of historical Christianity before the Catholic Church imposed its brand of orthodoxy on the West.

If you want some theology though, stick with the Bible.

I like them as philosophers more than anything, due to their logical rigor and the inventiveness that having to deal with said school of mystical revelation on rational terms fostered

Still you act as if the scholastics did not admit that the articles of faith were true irrespective of reason's dictates. Thomas was quite clear that the articles of faith were true whether or not we could prove them rationally - like that the world was created rather than eternally existing. He only ever claimed that no doctrine of faith would ever contradict reason.

On top of that Christianity really began to die with the abandonment of reason from its theology. Once Christianity had nothing to offer to the most innovative and intelligent members of society it was bound to destroy itself. It was the focus on less rigorous and rational theology that destroyed Catholicism in the 20th century. A truly universal religions will have means for people of all walks of life to engage with it - having no intellectual branch of a religion just demonstrates that it is not really universal, and probably false. Historically it was the skepticism involving reason in the late medieval period that lead to increased fideism and eventually the Reformation, which was one of the most important forces for destroying Christianity as well. All the historical evidence points to a lack of rationality being the prelude to the death of Christianity in the west.

Augustine =/= Aquinas

If this post is intended to be ironic, it's pretty quality.

Even as an atheist, I appreciate him for what he is. I'm much more an Augustine guy when it comes to theology, but Aquinas is cool in my book. Summa is a hell of a work, I went through it once and I'd like to do it again one of these days.

>Still you act as if the scholastics did not admit that the articles of faith were true irrespective of reason's dictates
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting that their methodology for understanding the truth better is warped. The Christian path toward understanding God better before them was always about living the Christian lifestyle, the most dependable theologians were those who applied themselves most radically to this lifestyle. Elders and sages of this lifestyle recorded the wisdom they found in their devotion to Christ, and those were the sort of writings you studied, along with Scripture. But more important than these writings, and learning about the faith, would be living the radical Christian lifestyle; through that, you would actually garner much more clarity in understanding these writings. Aquinas--not to be judgmental--was fat, he clearly was not any sort of serious ascetic. In fact, obesity among monks became so common in the West, during the Middle Ages, that it even became a stereotype.

Your extremely Western dichotomy of rationalism vs. fideism is a symptom of the cancer scholasticism proliferated. Christianity is not about that anymore than Native American religion or Buddhism.

meant for

>The Christian path toward understanding God better before them was always about living the Christian lifestyle, the most dependable theologians were those who applied themselves most radically to this lifestyle.

But their conceptions were obscure and confused. Through reason the Scholastics actually elucidated the beliefs of the faith in such a way that they were precise and people actually knew exactly what it was they believed. You can essentialize Christianity however you want, but Greek philosophy has influenced the faith for as long as we have written accounts of it, and most of the early church fathers were more than friendly with philosophy (Augustine,Origen, etc).

The kind of Christianity you are treating as essential is just one face of it - a less appealing one for many. If that was all there was to Christianity it would be a limited and false religion. God gave us our reason as a gift to use to come to know him and his creation better, if one lacks intellectual ability then there are other avenues for them, but if we have it we ought to use it for the highest good we can derive from it.

>But their conceptions were obscure and confused.
Mysterious, not confused. And the more you practice the Christian lifestyle, the more you understand them.

> and most of the early church fathers were more than friendly with philosophy (Augustine,Origen, etc).
They were outlier, the former had very little influence on us Orthodox (and similarly did not read many of the Greek Fathers, for though he could read Greek, he much preferred Latin), and the latter was anathematized. It is certainly true that the Greek Fathers actually held Greek philosophy as useful, but more for training wheels. Saint John Chrysostom (who is to us as Augustine is to the West) actually hated Plato, though, and called his work garbage.

> a less appealing one for many.
Probably because it requires they actually live how Christ commanded, which is very hard.

>Mysterious, not confused. And the more you practice the Christian lifestyle, the more you understand them.

If you can't clearly explicate something in words then you don't understand it, you just have confused cognitions of something, who knows what ? At the very least no one else has any reason to believe that you actually know anything in that case.

>They were outlier, the former had very little influence on us Orthodox

Ok but why should I care about Orthodox believers believe ?

And how can you justify to me that what Orthodox believers believe even matters without getting into a rational debate about it ?
As it stands I only buy into Christianity insofar as there are rational theologies that have justified many parts of it in ways that make it come out better than naturalism, and because it comes out better than the other lives options like Islam.

>Probably because it requires they actually live how Christ commanded, which is very hard.

No, because it tells you that your reason has to be restrained, even though it is a great gift of God's and it can allow us to understand him and his creation. It is totally arbitrary, where doe Christ tell us to abandon our reason and never inquire into God's works rationally? Without reason we can't even understand what Christ actually commanded, let alone follow it. This is why you need a clergy trained in logic and philosophy - so they can guide others because they have the tools to properly understand the faith.

>If you can't clearly explicate something in words then you don't understand it,
That's a non sequitur, especially if you reject univocity of being.

>Ok but why should I care about Orthodox believers believe ?
Our theological approach is basically the same as the Apostles and all the famous ascetics from before the schism.

>And how can you justify to me that what Orthodox believers believe even matters without getting into a rational debate about it ?
I can only tell you it's the more ancient approach. Whether or not you think that matters is up to you.

>No, because it tells you that your reason has to be restrained
No, it tells you that your reason is limited and certain spiritual truths have to be directly experienced through the path to holiness, as opposed to apply algorithms.

>This is why you need a clergy trained in logic and philosophy
None of the Apostles were.

>That's a non sequitur, especially if you reject univocity of being.

I really hope that you haven't been reading Millbank, but what do you think the univocity of being entails in this case?

>No, it tells you that your reason is limited and certain spiritual truths have to be directly experienced through the path to holiness, as opposed to apply algorithms.

But all the scholastics agreed with this, some articles of faith can't be proven by reason and you either can have direct experience of them or believe the on authority( God's Omnipotence or the creation of the world are good contenders for this). How does the fact that some spiritual truths are beyond rational proof mean that we can never use reason to explicate them properly or use reason to prove other ones that are not beyond reason?

>None of the Apostles were.

So do Orthodox then believe in other things that the apostles believed in that the later church did not. For example, creatio ex nihilo was an innovation in early church history- do Orthodox believers hold that God created the world out of a pre-existing chaos rather than nothing, like the Apostle's did ?