Thomas Aquinas: Synthesis of Faith and Reason

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), born to a noble family near Naples, joined the recently founded Dominican order against his family's wishes and studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne before becoming the towering intellectual figure of thirteenth-century Scholasticism, composing, among a vast body of work, the incomplete but monumental Summa Theologiae and the earlier Summa Contra Gentiles. Aquinas undertook the systematic project of integrating the newly recovered corpus of Aristotle, by then transmitted through Arabic and Jewish commentators as well as fresh Greek translations, with Christian doctrine, treating Aristotelian philosophy not as a rival to be resisted, as more conservative Augustinian theologians of his day feared, but as a powerful and largely trustworthy instrument for understanding both the natural world and, up to a point, God himself. Central to this synthesis is Aquinas's careful distinction between truths of natural reason, accessible to unaided human intellect (such as that God exists, or that the soul is immortal), and truths of revelation, exceeding reason's grasp and known only through faith (such as the Trinity or the Incarnation), since Aquinas held that grace perfects rather than destroys nature, and, correspondingly, that faith perfects rather than destroys reason.