Disputation WithThomas Aquinas
Copyright © 2005 by R. Blade All Rights Reserved
rblade@sbcglobal.net
Thomas Aquinas is considered the greatest philosopher and theologian of Catholicism.
Contents
The fictional disputation in this book was created from selected treatises in:
Great Books of the Western World
Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, 19
Thomas Aquinas, Volume 2, 20
To provide supporting information for the fictional disputation, selected events in Thomas Aquinas’ life introduce and in summary follow the disputation. The events, as well as quotations, were selected from the above and following referenced books:
Butler’s Lives of Saints, Thurston and Attwater
Guide to Thomas Aquinas, J. Pieper
Latin-English Booklet Missal, Coalition in Support of Ecclesia Dei
Lives of Saints, J. Crawley & Co.
New Catholic Encyclopedia , Second Edition, Volume 14
New American Bible, Saint Joseph Edition
I hereby acknowledge my reliance on and appreciation of the above named books and to the Instituto Italiano Di Cultura for help with background information.
R. Blade
Introduction
The fictional disputation in this book is between an atheistic modern American host and the reconstituted Catholic and saintly Thomas Aquinas. The fictional disputation was created from and elaborates upon Aquinas’ masterpiece Summa Theologica (Synthesis of Theology) hereinafter called Summa. The Summa is a compilation of philosophy and theology for promulgating Catholic doctrine and dogma. In collecting information for this book different sources ascribed different dates to the same event in Thomas Aquinas’ life. In this book the description of dates and their associated events have been compromised from among disparate sources. (Today even with the modern media tools of Internet, print, and TV journalists report different versions of the same event.)
NB: This book is not a biography of Thomas Aquinas or a scholarly analysis of his Summa. This book does not attempt to explain Catholic philosophy or theology or makes any pretension at a formal disputation of Catholicism.
Ancestry
Tomas Aquinas’ father was Landolfo d’Aquino, whose bloodline can be traced to Lombardia circa 1000. He was Count of Aquino, Acerro, and Belcastro. He was nephew to Emperor Frederick 1, King of the Holy Roman Empire, and related to King Louis 9 of France. His mother was Countess Teodora Carraciolo a Neapolitan noblewoman ascendant of the victorious Normans who liberated Sicily from Saracen (Moslem) rule. Their ancestral home was Castle Roccasecca (dry rock) halfway between Rome and Naples. It’s located in the Lazio region in the northernmost border of the Kingdom of Naples, an area bordering the Papal States that separated Italy into northern and southern kingdoms. From his throne in the Papal States the pope ruled over the world of Christendom. South of Castle Roccasecca is Monte Cassino, the mountaintop site of the famous Benedictine abbey founded in 530 by Saint Benedict. The abbey was the center of European monasticism and its abbot was a close relative of the d’Aquino family. The mountaintop abbey occupied a strategic site with panoramic views of the surrounding area.
At that time Italy, except for the Papal States, was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which extended from Germany on the North Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The precise borders of Landolfo’s properties were constantly disputed by Emperor Frederick 2 (1215-1250). Thomas’ father and older boys were in the service of the emperor but they were also loyal to popes. The father and boys were engaged in the dangerous game of taking sides with the emperor or pope depending on the reward for their allegiance. Within the Papal States popes held curiae (councils) at their favorite cities because at that time Vatican City didn’t exist (it was established in 1626).
Tommaso d’Aquino
About 1225 the aristocratic Tommaso d’Aquino was born in Castle Roccasecca the ancestral home of the counts of d’Aquino. Thomas is the English equivalent of Tommaso. It’s assumed that Aquinas is the English equivalent of d’Aquino. If true where are the English equivalents of d’Annunzio,da Vinci, d’Iorio, and many other Italian names. There’s not necessarily an English equivalent of each Italian name. In the books I’ve reviewed there’s no mention of when and who converted d’Aquino to Aquinas; the conversion remains a mystery. To avoid confusion the name Thomas Aquinas is used throughout this book.
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas was a southern Italian who inherited French and German bloodlines. He was born into a large aristocratic family of nine children, four boys of which he was the youngest and five girls. When Thomas was a toddler he slept in the same room with his younger sister and their nurse. One night during a thunderstorm his sister and nurse were struck by lightning and killed but Thomas was spared and remained unscathed. Because Thomas was unscathed by the lightning strike his mother believed that God had future plans for him, especially at the nearby Abbey of Monte Cassino. As an adult Thomas inherited his father’s large rugged physique and the fair complexion and hair of his parents. He looked more Norseman than a southern Italian. Thomas had dark penetrating eyes and developed a large Roman nose. He moved and talked slowly. He was shy, indulgent, and compromised his responses so as not to offend anyone.
1228-1230
Count Landolfo and his sons engaged in constant struggles between Emperor Frederick 2 and popes over their territorial boundaries. In an attempt to wrest the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino from papal control Frederick 2 dispatched his troops and took it over in 1228. In the struggle to regain control of the abbey, Count Landolfo and his older sons joined with the soldiers of Pope Gregory 9 (1227-1241).
In 1230 the emperor, pope, and count reconciled and signed a peace treaty. The pope also ordered Dominicans to provide judges for the Holy Inquisition in trials of heretics. At that time 5-year-old Thomas was matriculated at the Benedictine school adjoining the abbey. He was placed under the care and tutelage of a superior monk. His family hoped that Thomas would one day become abbot of the famous abbey.
1239
Emperor Frederick 2 again attacked the abbey of Monte Cassino and wrested it from papal control. Thereafter Thomas 14 returned to Castle Roccasecca. To continue his education he was sent to a Benedictine Priory associated with Naples University. There he was placed in the care of a tutor who supervised his studies and activities. At the university Christians, Jews, and Moslems studied in harmony. While studying there he was introduced to Aristotle’s philosophy and that of the Moslem Averroës. Thomas exhibited a great interest in philosophy and theology. He combined his Biblical knowledge with that of ancient philosophers (mostly Aristotle) to form his own view of God and the natural world.
At the university Thomas became interested in the Dominican Order, a mendicant order founded by Saint Dominic in 1215 (Toulouse, France). Dominicans did not support themselves by farm labor or revenues from properties as did other Catholic orders. They instead abandoned commerce and begged for alms to evangelically preach and teach the Gospels. While at the university Dominicans in France burned to death 180 Cathars, members of an ascetic Christian sect, judged heretics simply because they didn’t believe in purgatory. Thereafter Christians and pagans demonstrated in protest against Dominicans priories.
1243-1244
In 1243 while in studying in Naples his father died. That year Thomas entered the San Domenico Priory in Naples. When his mother was notified that her aristocratic son was interested in the socially scorned Dominican beggars, she was offended that he chose them over the rich and renowned Benedictines. His mother tried to change his mind, reminding him that his aristocratic inheritance would serve him well as a Benedictine. At 19 contrary to his mother’s strident objections, Thomas clothed himself in the habit of the Dominican Order, a white tunic covered by a black cloak. Thereupon his mother was determined to rescue him from the grasp of beggar Dominicans. With her two elder sons she headed south to Naples. When Dominicans got word that Thomas’ mother and sons were on their way to rescue him, they immediately dispatched Thomas with a party of friars instructing them to take refuge at their Santa Sabina Priory (college) in Rome.
Approaching Naples friends of d’Aquino informed his mother that a party of friars had stopped at their village begging for food. The friars were given bread, cheese, and wine. After their repast they were seen traveling north towards Rome. Mother and sons turned about and headed North for Rome. When they arrived they were informed the friars were on their way to Bologna. Outraged that nefarious Dominican beggars were forcing Thomas to take refuge from his mother, she ordered her sons to intercept the friars and return Thomas, forcibly if necessary, thereby ending the game of escape and pursuit. Riding their horses to near exhaustion the sons waylaid the friars near Siena and apprehended Thomas. When the sons ordered him to remove his habit he refused. The eldest son tried to take it off by force but Thomas resisted. The sons returned Thomas to castle Roccasecca. His mother begged him to remove his habit but he again refused. She protested that he was as stubborn as an ass. When all her entreaties failed she ordered her sons to confine Thomas in the family’s other castle at Monte San Giovanni until he changed his mind. Visitors were prohibited except for his sisters. His sister Marotta begged him to free himself from confinement by removing his habit but he refused. In the final effort to rescue Thomas from beggar Dominicans, the sons sent him a young prostitute who would first feign confession and forgiveness of her sins and then attempt to seduce him. When she tried seduction, he cast her from his room. That night Thomas dreamed two angels girded his loins with a cord emblematic of chastity. The next morning he prayed that God would grant him perpetual chastity. During his 2 years of confinement Thomas studied Aristotle and the Bible memorizing certain parts of both. He also memorized parts of Sentences, the popular theological handbook prepared by Church Fathers.
1245
In 1245 intervening in Thomas’ behalf Pope Innocent 4 (1243-1254) convinced Aquinas’ mother to release him, an act of Catholic forgiveness. She relented, forgave her recalcitrant son, and ordered him released on his 20th birthday. Thereafter he continued his travel to the Dominican Priory in Bologna, which immediately dispatched him to the Dominican Priory Saint Jacques in Paris. His master there was Albertus Magnus the great German philosopher, theologian, and champion of Aristotle. Albertus Magnus noted that his young humble friar expounded with a great knowledge far beyond his years.
1248
When Albertus Magnus was transferred to the ancient Roman city of Cologne, to preside over the Dominican Holy Cross Priory, he took Aquinas with him as his assistant. The college was populated by young European clerics eager to learn. Teachers and students considered the humble reticent Aquinas a dullard. Because of his large rugged physique students called him the dumb ox. But when he had occasion to explain with elucidation a vexing theological issue, teachers and students were amazingly surprised. After testing his comprehensive knowledge Albertus Magnus exclaimed "We call brother Thomas ‘the dumb ox’; but I tell you that he will yet make his lowing heard to the uttermost parts of the earth". (Butler’s Lives of Saints, p510)
1250-1255
In Cologne Aquinas earned a Bachelor of Theology degree and was ordained a Dominican priest. He became a celebrated preacher attracting large German congregations. Albertus Magnus recommended that Aquinas return to the Dominican Priory Saint Jacques of Paris University to earn a Master’s Degree in Theology. Aristotelian philosophy was required at the university. There and at Oxford University most professors of theology were Christian monks but Dominicans were not welcome because of their beggar status. In 1255 while Thomas was preaching and teaching at Saint Jacques his mother died.
1256-1258
At 31 Aquinas earned a Master of Theology degree and was granted a license to teach. He applied for the mastership of one of two Dominican Priory chairs associated with the university. However university policy required that a Master be at least 35 years old. Because of family ties to the papacy Aquinas received a papal dispensation of the age requirement from Pope Alexander 4 (1254-1261). As Master professor Thomas lectured on Sacred Scripture and became an admired and prominent teacher. He introduced an objective method of scholarly investigation using philosophic reasoning to synthesize conflicting theological arguments to their logical conclusions. Some remarked that his method was like substantiating a mathematical theory by proving certain related corollaries. Aquinas presided over and successfully argued in numerous theological disputations. He frequently wrote treatises on his conclusions. In 1258 Thomas began writing his Summa Contra Gentiles (Summary Against Pagans) to explain Catholicism to Jews, Moslems, and other non-Catholics having a knowledge of Aristotle. It was completed in 1264. The writing helped priests by refuting the theological errors of Jews and Moslems against Catholics.
1259-1265
In 1259 Aquinas was recalled to Italy by Pope Alexander 4 to lecture on philosophy and theology at the pope’s curia at Anagni. He lectured also at the curia of Pope Urban 4 (1261-1265) at Orvieto. There he composed a liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi and wrote the Exposito de Ave Maria (Commentary on Hail Mary). He wrote numerous treatises on Aristotle, the Old Testament, Gospels, and Acts of the Apostles. Pope Urban assigned Aquinas to supervise the building of the Dominican Priory of Santa Sabina in Rome. There Thomas continued to write and teach.
1265-1268
Aquinas lectured at the curia of Pope Clement 4 (1265-1268) at Viterbo. The pope then offered and he again refused the Archbishopric of Naples. Later he was offered and still refused the prestigious position of Abbot of Monte Cassino, the prestigious position his mother had always wanted for him. He rejected his family’s and the pope’s entreaties to be abbot because he didn’t want to be an administrator. He was offered also a cardinalate and again he refused. He declared he was only a humble friar who wanted to teach and write. About 1266 Aquinas began writing his Summa Theologica (Summa). He intended it to be handbook, a sort of Catholic Catechism, for young Dominicans who didn’t have a university education. The Summa would provide for young friars engaged in disputations with non-Catholics the philosophical and theological answers to their questions.
1268-1271
Aquinas was ordered to Paris University to resolve the heated irresoluble disputation between Averroists, Augustinians, and secular priests. Averroists believed that God is the Creator and that Jesus the man was mortal. They believed also in a universal intellect having one collective soul. These views conflicted with the Catholic dogmas of God’s personal qualities and the resurrection of an individual soul. Augustinians believed in God’s personal qualities, in predestination, and in immortality through resurrection of an individual soul. They renounced Aristotle and compelled Aquinas to defend his Summa littered with Aristotelian logic. About the Augustinians Aquinas wrote "they speak as though they alone were rational beings and wisdom had originated in their own brains"(New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 14, p21). Secular priests lived with the general public in towns and cities. They were not members of religious orders and had no obligation to comply with the vows of those orders. Secular priests in Paris were envious of the growing popularity of religious orders and the special privileges dispensed to them by popes. They protested the appointment of mendicants, Dominican beggars such as Aquinas, to positions of authority at the university. Aquinas wrote treatises against their intransigent positions and they promptly condemned him. Later by applying his objective method of investigation, called Thomism, he resolved their internecine disputes in a manner acceptable to the three parties.
Paris University appointed Aquinas Professor of Theology. He lectured on Aristotle’s philosophy, the Gospels, and engaged in numerous religious disputations. Aquinas resolved several vexing theological mysteries (1) whether Jesus Christ was present during the ritual of the Blessed Sacrament and (2) during communion was there really the transmutation of Jesus’ body and blood in fact or faith only. He resolved those disputes with such great clarity his treatise was accepted first by the university and then by the papacy.
1272
Aquinas returned to Italy during Easter time to reorganize the Dominican Priory at Naples University where he continued to teach and write his Summa. He also lectured and conducted disputations at the Priory of San Domingo Maggiore next to the university. To the people of Naples he delivered numerous sermons on the Nicene Creed, Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary prayer, and wrote his own prayers. In nearby Salerno Aquinas continued writing his Summa.
Summa Theologica (Summa)
The Summa integrates philosophic investigative methods with Aquinas’ unshakable faith in God’s revelations. It’s Aquinas’ masterpiece because of its comprehensive synthesis of philosophy and theology. The Summa was written in Medieval Latin in the structured scholastic style of schoolmen. Aquinas was habituated to simultaneously dictating to several scribes barely able to keep pace with his agile and encyclopedic mind (reminiscent of another famous Dominican writer Giordano Bruno 1548-1600).
In Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, the English translation of the Summa is organized in two Volumes. Each volume is divided into Parts, Parts of Parts, and Supplements to Parts. Each Part consists of treatises, each of which is outlined by multiple Questions, each of which is answered by multiple Articles, each of which is countered by multiple Objections, each of which is countered by multiple Replies. For example:
Volume 1, Part 1
Treatise on God
Outlined by Questions 1-26
Question 1 answered by 10 Articles
Article 1 countered by 2 Objections
Objection 1 countered by 2 Replies
Reply 1 to Objection 1
… and so on until each of the 26 Questions has been answered. Happily the fictional disputation in this book is not outlined by and avoids the convoluted and incestuous scholastic style of medieval schoolmen.
Aquinas’ synthesis of philosophic reasoning and theology’s divine revelations is called Thomism. Aquinas believed that philosophic reasoning and revelation were compatible. The synthesis of the two begets truth. In Thomism philosophy relies upon reason (logic) to determine truth; theology relies upon faith in God to reveal truth. Some Catholic theologians (eg Augustinians) criticized him for adulterating revelation, pure faith in God’s truths, with the logic of philosophy. But Aquinas taught that God provides harmony between knowledge of philosophy and knowledge through revelation. He was greatly influenced by the ancient philosophers, especially Aristotle. In the Summa Aquinas quotes many Catholic scholars as well as New Testament writers. During the 1200’s Thomas Aquinas was the most prolific and influential philosopher and theologian of Catholicism. His writings fill about 25 thick volumes. Today he remains one of the most honored scholars, teachers, and writers of Catholicism.
Glossary
agnostic God’s existence (if any) is not knowable
atheist denies God’s existence
Bible Old Testament and New Testament
black friar member of Dominican Order
Christ Jesus’ surname applied after His death
Church Roman Catholic Church
creed Nicene Creed approved by Constantine the Great at the council Of Nicaea (325)
Docta Ignorantia learned ignorance defined in negative terms: in-finite, in-comprehensible
doctrine Church authorized precepts (eg baptism)
dogma Church authorized revelation from God (eg Incarnation of Blessed Virgin Mary)
friar member of Dominican Order
Godist one who believes in God
heaven abode of God, angels, and resurrected souls
ibid in the same page
Jesus the Jewish rabbi deified to Son of God
man man or woman, men or women, or society
Mysterium Fidei Mystery of Faith
omni’s omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient
opcit in the book last cited
priory equivalent to college
schoolmen teachers of philosophy and theology in Medieval European colleges and universities
Summa Summa Theologica (Synthesis of Theology)
theology study of the unfound and unseen God
Thomism synthesis of philosophy and theology
Trinity God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
HOST Thomas Aquinas I welcome you to the year 2005. You’re considered the greatest Catholic scholar of your age, the 1200’s.
AQUINAS There are many other scholars among them my teacher Albertus Magnus.
HOST But you only are considered the greatest philosopher, theologian, teacher, and writer of your age or perhaps any age. In fact your masterpiece Summa Theologica is considered the greatest exposition of Catholicism. Your teachings are included in the curricula of Catholic schools and are even parts of Catholic canon law.
AQUINAS You’re very kind but I’m just a humble friar who devotes his life to the service of God.
HOST In fact we are here in each other’s presence, you a devotee in the service of God and I an atheist, to debate whether that God exists as described in your Summa.
AQUINAS I’ve had that dispute many times. I wrote the Summa to clarify for non-Catholics such as you and others my conclusions on the nature of God, His works, and His teachings.
HOST I found your Summa very difficult to read.
AQUINAS It’s not meant to be read like a narrative. It’s a textbook to be studied under the tutelage of a superior brother friar. It’s a handbook for young friars to prepare them for theological disputations with Jews, Moslems, pagans, and other non-Catholics.
HOST A sort of catechism?
AQUINAS I never thought of it as such but I suppose a superior friar could use it in that manner.
HOST In your detailed expositions I noticed you avoided the use of God’s omni’s - omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.
AQUINAS Our young friars had to be prepared to answer in detail any question from non-Catholic disputants. A skilled disputant would not accept the paralipsis of an omni.
HOST As disputant I probably shall do the same. You need to be aware that since your time the meanings of some words have changed. In your time cell meant a small room in a monastery. Today it means the millions of invisible organisms in our bodies or small room in a prison. To you charity meant unity with God; today it means giving aid to the poor and unfortunate. Our modern scientific words might be as confusing to you as the English translations of Medieval Latin confused me. I’m hoping such word changes will not hinder the progress of our disputation. Speaking of changes when did you change your family name from d’Aquino to Aquinas?
AQUINAS I never changed my family name.
HOST Today we know you as Aquinas, not d’Aquino. Is Aquinas the Latin version of d’Aquino?
AQUINAS I doubt it.
HOST Before we begin our discussion of your Summa I’d like you to know my position on religion. For example, I think religion is more about emotion than intelligence.
AQUINAS Religion requires both, emotion in the heart and intelligence in the mind.
HOST To me it appears that in your Summa you set off on an impossible mission, to describe the undiscovered, unknowable, and unseen being of God.
AQUINAS God is knowable through reason by His visible creations and through the revelation of His invisible works. Revelation is knowledge directly from God or transmitted by His angles.
HOST It’s written that when you engage Aquinas "You eat meat and drink wine" (Is 22, 13).
AQUINAS You’re much too kind to honor me with the words of Isaiah, the greatest of prophets in the Old Testament.
HOST You begin your Summa with the Treatise on God. I expected that treatise to begin with a description of God, instead you begin with the nature and extent of sacred doctrine.
AQUINAS My treatise proceeds from sacred doctrine, which is the divinely inspired scripture in the Bible, the Holy Writ, and from the teachings and writings of ancient philosophers and theologians.
HOST Before we discuss sacred doctrine, can you speculate on who or what God is?
AQUINAS How can one describe what is above and beyond human intellectual capacity? God is the creator of all there is.
HOST I understand God is divine essence but what is it?
AQUINAS God resides in the divine essence of the Godhead. Only a fool would attempt to define God’s essence as an entry in a textbook or glossary.
HOST Where’s the Godhead?
AQUINAS The Godhead is in supreme heaven, boundless, and eternal.
HOST Where’s supreme heaven?
AQUINAS Supreme heaven is not a location on a map. It’s a spiritual existence.
HOST Is divine essence an undefined ethereal hypostasis like a rare powerful gas rising up to and beyond the outer limits of the universe?
AQUINAS Divine essence is beyond human knowledge. Out of ignorance I answer again in the negative.
HOST As a man interested in philosophy and science you’re aware of the elements earth, air, fire, water and gases lighter than air. You’re probably aware of Democritus’ atoms. Can you speculate on whether any of those are constituents of divine essence?
AQUINAS Divine essence is spiritual not material.
HOST Today scientists entertain the theory that the universe consists of invisible strings of energy. Do you think God’s divine essence consists of invisible strings of energy?
AQUINAS No one knows the makeup of divine essence except to surmise it’s God’s all-powerful and all-knowing power. If your scientists discovered invisible strings of energy, God created them.
HOST Is God a substitute for our lack of knowledge?
AQUINAS Knowledge consists of man’s understanding that God is the creator of all there is.
HOST God precedes all there is including sacred doctrine. Shouldn’t you have written about God’s divine essence before you expounded on sacred doctrine?
AQUINAS I answer that I have no knowledge of the nature of divine essence except to conclude it’s Gods power.
HOST But your treatise assumes that God is knowable.
AQUINAS My treatise describes God’s creations and from them I make certain assumptions about God’s nature.
HOST But then you go on to define God’s existence.
AQUINAS No, not define, only describe.
HOST But you do so by describing God’s attributes in terms of personal qualities. Divine essence a priori cannot have personal qualities.
AQUINAS God is the God of true love. That love is personal and therefore Catholicism is a personal religion. I describe in personal terms what I believe is true of God.
HOST Do you spend your life trying to describe the unknowable God?
AQUINAS I dedicate my life to the works of God, His teachings, and sometimes the revelations He offers me. I say again that I cannot describe what is unknowable such as divine essence.
HOST I think the Church devised divine essence and the Godhead because they satisfy all the requirements of the all-everything God who doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be disproved.
AQUINAS The Godhead consists of divine essence and is God’s abiding residence. Divine essence is a wholly spiritual existence without the composite parts of matter. It’s not a physical entity and is not constrained by the constituents of matter.
HOST Before continuing I must ask you the following question because I need to hear your answer. Where did God come from?
AQUINAS God is unborn. He’s the innascible self-existent being. He is that He is.
HOST But the great Aristotle says that from nothing comes nothing.
AQUINAS He concludes also that to exist is to be whether corporeal or spiritual.
HOST The universe is not simple; it’s so complicated astrophysicists are just beginning to understand it. God’s divine essence must emanate from a physical existence just as electricity results from electron flow.
AQUINAS Electricity and electron flow? I’m familiar with the Greek word elektron but don’t understand its use as you describe it.
HOST Consider electricity a spiritual energy. On earth its man’s exemplary energy.
AQUINAS Have you ever seen electricity?
HOST No but I use, see, and feel its effects every day. Your brain’s activity is controlled by electrical action as is your imagined soul.
AQUINAS My soul exists; it’s God’s spiritual gift to me. I feel it’s presence and through it communicate with God. You see electricity’s results in the same way I see God’s results.
HOST Unlike God electricity can be sensed, displayed, and measured. Furthermore it can resuscitate the dead duplicating the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus.
AQUINAS You said resuscitate. Lazarus had been dead four days when Jesus’ miraculous power raised him from the dead.
HOST Unfortunately we cannot do that yet.
AQUINAS You acknowledge electron flow and I acknowledge God’s divine essence. If you can think scientifically you can think spiritually. I believe the two are compatible.
HOST Acknowledgement is not the same as proof. You’re trying to prove the negative of God’s existence.
AQUINAS I answer as follows. Look around you; the proofs are all there. God created all there is. It’s written "God who rules this world has blinded the minds of nonbelievers. They cannot see the light, which is the good news about our glorious Christ, who shows what God is like" (2Cor 4, 4). Light means all of God’s creations, visible and invisible.
HOST We see the visible but the soul is invisible. It’s a spiritual existence no one has ever seen, displayed, or measured.
AQUINAS The soul is God’s immanence in living creatures.
HOST Can you define soul?
AQUINAS It’s God’s gift to living creatures. The soul animates the body and energizes the intellect and will.
HOST Did God infuse souls in animals and plants?
AQUINAS God infused a soul in all living things but only in man through his intellect does his soul have a relationship with God.
HOST Living creatures have bodies, therefore the soul emanates from matter and cannot be purely spiritual. If there were a soul it would have to emanate from the brain, mans’ primary corporeal organ. Any spiritual existence results from the activity within matter, such as electrical action in the brain.
AQUINAS Aristotle says "whatever is the greatest in heat is the cause of all heat" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, p238). God is the greatest spiritual existence, therefore He is the cause of the soul. The souls of the faithful experience God’s infinite love.
HOST The soul, a disembodied spirit, is nothing but a phantom. Let’s get back to your exposition of sacred doctrine?
AQUINAS The aim of sacred doctrine is to teach man’s knowledge of God. Knowledge is obtained from the logic of philosophy combined with revelation from God.
HOST Revelation is the output of an exuberant and fantastic imagination. Coupled with philosophy, revelation constructs the montage of overwhelming fictional narrative called theology.
AQUINAS Revelation is a gift from God to certain holy men.
HOST It’s a euphemism for fantasy. Lightning is not a symbol of divinity, neither is revelation.
AQUINAS Aristotle holds all knowledge comes from the senses through which the intellect forms abstract ideas.
HOST Yes and God is one of those abstract ideas.
AQUINAS An abstract idea cannot create all there is.
HOST In your treatise you declared God is knowable using Aristotle’s distinctions of actual, potential, and form. What do you mean by those distinctions?
AQUINAS Actual means that God is that He is. God’s acts arise from His pure simplicity, which pervades the universe. God acts without need of potency. God is completely actual without need for the potential to act. Potency is the agent enabling matter to create a variety of forms. In man the body is the actual matter of being. The soul is the form whose potentials animate the body, energizing the intellect and will. Form is the acting out of potency in all things animate and inanimate. Man is a mixture of actual and potential. For example a child is an actual being but with expected or unfilled potential.
HOST Man uses potential to fulfill his expectations.
AQUINAS Man’s philosophical knowledge comes from below, from his potential for reasoning. Knowledge from revelation comes from above, from God. Man strives to implement his potential toward God’s perfection. The Bible transcends all other writings because its author is God.
HOST There’s no evidence God ever wrote anything. Man contrived everything written about God. As for knowledge of revelation, writers of the Bible weren’t familiar with Tully’s Rhetoric in which he recommends seven requisites to be satisfied in good reporting: "who, what, where, by what aids, how, and when (opcit p653). It’s apparent that in their reportage of Jesus the New Testament writers did not follow Tully’s requirements.
AQUINAS The Bible nourishes the Church, which flourishes because of it. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the sole custodian of faith and its sacraments. The Bible transcends and rises above and apart from all other writings. In the Old testament God spoke through prophets to prepare the way for the Messiah. In the New testament God spoke through the prophet Jesus.
HOST Prophets can be wrong. Sibyls were divinely inspired to prophesy coming events. They prophesied that the self-appointed emperor and tyrant Maxentius would be victorious in the battle for Rome. Instead Constantine the Great defeated him, liberating Rome and Italy from the tyrant. Furthermore the Old Testament doesn’t provide any factual evidence for the existence of God. The New Testament continues that fictional narrative by making Jesus the Son of a nonexistent God. That fiction metastasized like a giant honey mushroom spreading out over generations of Christians.
AQUINAS In the New Testament God spoke through Jesus the expected Messiah. Sacred doctrine rises above its literal meaning to the metaphysical and spiritual knowledge inspired by God. Sacred doctrine has more authority than the highest human intellect.
HOST But it was humans who wrote the Bible.
AQUINAS It’s written "the eye hath not seen, O God, besides thee, what things thou hast prepared for them that wait for thee" (opcit p3).
HOST The Bible, or sacred doctrine, was written by men 75-100 years after Jesus’ death. None of those writers was a contemporary of Jesus. None of those writers saw the putative resurrected Jesus. Those writers knew nothing of science, and wrote the New Testament by embellishing hearsay and anecdotal evidence about Jesus.
AQUINAS Their writings were inspired by God’s supreme intellect, which rises above all human intellect, and by His revelations.
HOST Today the average school student knows more about the world than the Bible writers. Today those writers would be euphemistically called reporters or bloggers. Most of what was believed in your time is not believed today. There are many things I don’t believe about God. One of them is that He’s male. The Bible refers to God as He, Him, Himself, His etc. How can divine essence have the physical attribute of sex? Perhaps what’s believed today about God will not be believed in the future, at which time God and the Bible will be irrelevant.
AQUINAS Implanted in all men is God’s knowledge waiting to be cultivated by them. God is eternal; therefore writings inspired by God and His revelations are eternal.
HOST God must have ended His revelatory largesse because no one I know was ever inspired by one of God’s revelations.
AQUINAS You are an admitted atheist and furthermore do not know everyone.
HOST There’s no evidence that the God of the Godhead ever manifested Himself on earth.
AQUINAS Sacred writings were certainly inspired by those in communication with or blessed with revelations from God.
HOST Aren’t revelations communications with an imagined God?
AQUINAS No. There are men whose love of and deep devotion to God are graced with His revelations and His knowledge. We know from sacred doctrine that many of God’s chosen heard His words.
HOST Not directly but always disguised, such as a burning bush in the case of Moses.
AQUINAS Of course, lest Moses be consumed by God’s divinity.
HOST Speaking of Moses the Old Testament is about God. The New Testament is about Jesus, not Christ or God.
AQUINAS Jesus and Jesus Christ are one and the same.
HOST Early Church fathers made them the same only after Jesus’ death. Jesus was the human who was crucified and presumed resurrected. You know better than I that the followers of Jesus became Christians only after the Greeks named Him Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of God.
AQUINAS I emphatically declare Jesus and Christ or any combination thereof are one and the same, the Son of God the Father.
HOST That leads us to Trinity but we’ll discuss Trinity later. Catholicism proceeds from the New Testament, which is laddered from earth to heaven with selected theological rungs from the Old Testament. At this time I’d like to give you some of my thoughts on the Bible.
AQUINAS Please do.
HOST In the Old Testament God interacts with the people. In the New Testament it’s the man Jesus who interacts with the people. Scattered throughout are occasional references to God. In the gospels Jesus never claimed to be God. You know the details better than I.
AQUINAS In Mark14, 62 Jesus admits He’s the Son of the Blessed One.
HOST Yes but who’s the Blessed One? No one is superior to God so it cannot be that some being or spiritual entity blessed God. Could it be that the Blessed One was the Blessed Virgin Mary?
AQUINAS The Blessed One is presumed to be God. The holy gospels are revelations from God. What are you proposing? There’s only one God but there are different interpretations of Him as described in the Bible.
HOST Why didn’t you at least summarize God before you expounded on sacred doctrine? Can you give me a statement summarizing God?
AQUINAS There’s only one God, the creator of all there is, the God of enduring love absolute, immutable, infinite, and eternal.
HOST He’s also the God of the common omni’s such as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient?
AQUINAS Although applicable those words are generally used to avoid the specifics of debate. God’s creations can be described but there are no words to describe His divine essence. Words used in attempts to describe God’s divine essence are collectively called docta ignorantia, man’s learned ignorance. In ignorance man attempts to define God using words with the negative prefix in-, such as in-comprehensible, in-effable, in-finite. Recall that Jews declared Yahweh ineffable.
HOST You go on to say the study of sacred doctrine is properly called sacred science. The phrase sacred science is an oxymoron. Science is not holy; it’s the opposite of sacred and certainly not devoted to a dubious God. Science is the objective investigation that tests for proofs of our natural world. Science and religion are at different ends of the knowledge spectrum. Religion is imaginings in which phantoms become supreme beings or gods. Science demands proofs while religion asserts its proofs to be revelations from God.
AQUINAS There are two kinds of science, philosophic and sacred. Philosophic science proceeds from man’s natural intelligence, which covers many disciplines such as arithmetic and physics. Sacred science is a single science proceeding from a higher intelligence as revealed and nourished by God. Sacred science is the body of all the Catholic knowledge accumulated from sacred scripture, philosophy, theology, and revelation.
HOST Sciences such as arithmetic and physics have useful results.
AQUINAS Those sciences derive results from human reason which can err. Sacred science is devoted to the knowledge of God and doesn’t err because it rises above science. The wisdom of God rises above human wisdom. Another name for sacred science is theology whose principles are articles of faith in God.
HOST But theology is the pursuit and study of the unknown and unproved God.
AQUINAS Theology proceeds from sacred science whose articles of faith rest upon philosophy and truths from divine revelation.
HOST Theology is the philosophy of Godists. Divine revelation rests upon phantasms. Your theology attempts to make those phantasms acceptable and reasonable. That is to make revelation as acceptable as scientific proofs.
AQUINAS Heretics and others who argue against articles of faith cannot demonstrate anything contrary to the truths of divine revelation.
HOST On the other hand faith can theorize the existence of God but cannot disprove scientific results. You declare the existence of God is self evident, how so?
AQUINAS Is a child required to intellectualize the recognition of his parents? In any proposition in which the predicate is the same as the subject, it’s self evident the subject exists. In the proposition "man is an animal", animal is contained in man. In the proposition "That God exists is self evident", self evident is contained in God.
HOST Can you demonstrate God’s existence?
AQUINAS I answer that God’s existence can be demonstrated in two ways, cause and effect. You must agree that cause precedes effect. When an effect is better known than its cause, we proceed to understand the cause. In the knowledge of God "the cause" can be demonstrated by "His effects"; that is the natural world and its creatures. John says of God "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (opcit p11).
HOST John had a very vivid imagination.
AQUINAS When Moses dared inquire about God’s name, God replied "I am who am" (opcit p12).
HOST A quotation from the Bible written by men, not God. That’s not sufficient confirmation of God’s existence. Today’s knowledge maintains it’s unreasonable to believe in God or any Supreme Being.
AQUINAS I answer that God’s existence can be confirmed in five ways: supreme intelligence, first efficient cause, first necessity, first mover, and gradation.
A supreme intelligence is required to direct a being to a preferred end, just as an archer directs an arrow to a target. A being achieves a preferred end by design, not by chance. God is the supreme intelligence whose preferred end for all things is death.
HOST Why is death the preferred end?
AQUINAS God only is immortal.
HOST If God made man immortal God wouldn’t have to make any judgements. As for man’s preferred end, you’re correct. God’s will and faulty design of man’s body achieves God’s preferred end which is death. You impute supreme intelligence to God but intelligence was created over the billions of years of evolution.
AQUINAS It was God’s supreme intelligence through His will that gifted man with intelligence. Next is God as the first efficient cause. A being cannot be its own efficient cause because it would be prior to itself. Therefore it’s obvious that God the creator is the first efficient cause.
HOST No one has yet proved what began all there is. We have theories of hot plasma and atoms. You have the God theory. Today your first efficient cause lies beyond our knowledge horizon.
AQUINAS It’s God that lies beyond your knowledge horizon. As for God’s first necessity it was not created from a previous necessity, which in turn causes in others successive necessities. It follows that God the creator is the first necessity. Now in matter potency acting out is called motion therefore God is the first mover who moves all things. He’s the previous mover Who moved whatever is in motion. God the creator by act of His will was the first mover giving motion to living creatures and things. Therefore God is the first mover of all things.
HOST We call movement energy. Our atomic energy evolved from a theorized beginning.
AQUINAS Your theory may be resolved by having faith in God, the creator of all there is. Lastly to prove that God exists there’s gradation. In any genus there’s a cause and gradation to perfection, such as fire is the cause of gradation to the perfection of heat. In beings there’s gradation such as more or less, generous or selfish. Man’s gradation proceeds towards God’s perfection.
HOST A well structured Aristotelian presentation whose narrative logic offers no proofs or even evidence to confirm God’s existence. You might as well have answered with the omni’s. Your concatenated answers are like the closed loop of rosary beads, which takes one back to the beginning.
AQUINAS My answers concern a spiritual process without beginning or end.
HOST You used the word genus. Can you tell me if God is in a genus?
AQUINAS A genus is prior to what it contains, animal is prior to man. Nothing is prior to God, therefore God is not a genus.
HOST Is God a kingdom?
AQUINAS No, God is the creator of kingdoms. God’s Kingdom is for redeemed souls.
HOST You declare God is the first mover. Today there’s a new scientific theory claiming that the universe is composed of strings whose energies are constantly vibrating like those of a violin. Is it possible that God as first mover consists of vibrating strings?
AQUINAS I answer again, I do not speculate on the mystery of God’s divine essence.
HOST Can you tell me if God is a physical body?
AQUINAS A corporeal body is either animate or inanimate. An animate body has a soul and a before and after. An inanimate body has a before and after but no soul. God is not an animate or inanimate corporeal body. God is the pure spirituality of divine essence.
HOST Without scientific proof that God exists, is there any way you can confirm His existence?
AQUINAS I answer that God is not corporeal but wholly divine essence, which can be confirmed in four ways: Godhead, potency, animation, and motion.
Godhead – God exists in the Godhead which is divine essence pure, simple, without corporeity or composition of parts.
Potency – In matter potency is prior to the act of form as physical body. Potency in matter proceeds to act only by another body already in act. I’ve previously stated that God is the first necessity already in act by His will. Therefore it’s impossible that God’s divine essence is a body of matter having potential to act. Potential infers a range of limits. There are no limits in God. He alone has the existent fullness of pure being and actuality. God is pure act and any act is the outcome of His will.
Animation – We know that bodies achieve animation from a previous animator. We also know that God is the first mover or animator through His will.
Motion – I’ve previously stated that a body already in motion moves another body. As the first mover by act of will, it’s impossible for a body to be in motion previous to God’s will.
HOST In your arguments supporting divine essence you referred to its lack of corporeity and potency for form. Can you elaborate on those features?
AQUINAS In that context form is inappropriate because it relates to matter. There is physical form and spiritual being. A physical form consists of the composition of many parts. Matter in act is posterior to form, which exists as a composite part. Matter relates to potential as form relates to actual. In matter potency proceeds to physical form, one of an infinite number of bodies. Plant relates to shape as bud relates to bloom. God has not matter and form and is therefore spiritually infinite.
HOST Therefore God’s spiritual nature is the same as His divine essence.
AQUINAS It is. The relationship between God’s spiritual nature and His divine essence is the same as that between life and living, will and act. A spiritual being requires an agent to act. God must be the first agent because in act He’s the first efficient cause. However I prefer to speak of God’s spiritual nature rather than His spiritual being.
HOST Why the convoluted integration of ideas such as form, being, agent, and act?
AQUINAS Recall my caution to you about young friars in disputations. They are required to have elaborate philosophical answers to satisfy opponents of Catholicism.
HOST Has anyone ever seen God’s divine essence?
AQUINAS I answer that the sun is visible to all but the blind. What’s knowable to some might not be to others. The rational intellect wants to know its creator; the child wants to know its parents. The happiness of a man of faith consists of his knowledge of God in order to know Him.
HOST Do you imply that atheists cannot be happy?
AQUINAS Faithful souls are blessed with God’s grace. They feel God’s presence even though they do not see Him. It’s written "Man shall not see Me and live" (opcit p60).
HOST What kind of creator would not want to be seen by His creation?
AQUINAS By the grace of God holy men see Him through revelation. They know God because His excellence and perfection are not found in any kingdom or genus. Mathew says "Be you perfect as also your heavenly father is perfect" (opcit p20).
HOST Is there any evidence that God’s perfection experiences unwanted acts?
AQUINAS God is not subject or vulnerable to external events.
HOST If that’s true it follows that no writer of the Bible or holy man ever saw or talked to God. But Moses’ had an encounter with God, wasn’t that an external event?
AQUINAS Moses was blessed with a revelation from God.
HOST But what about the two tablets?
AQUINAS Dionysius says "Niether is there sense, nor phantasm, nor opinion, nor reason, nor knowledge of Him" (opcit p50).
HOST That means God doesn’t exist.
AQUINAS You misinterpret the quote. Dionysius was speaking of God as a mystery not wholly comprehensible to man. It remains for holy or saintly men to participate in and experience God through revelation.
HOST You maintain that God is immutable?
AQUINAS As previously stated God does not change.
HOST That means His presence does not change.
AQUINAS God is in everything He created giving it being and place. God is everywhere and in every place at the same time.
HOST Didn’t the Church change God from one to three, as in Trinity? That means God is mutable.
AQUINAS No, Trinity is in God; they are one and the same. God is immutable. It’s written "I am the Lord and I change not" (opcit p38). Furthermore Augustine says "God alone is immutable; and whatever things He has made, being from nothing, are mutable" (opcit p39).
HOST What about eternity?
AQUINAS Time measures all beings and things from the begining, through succession, to the end. But time and eternity are not the same. Time has a before and after, eternity has not. God is immutable and lacking change lacks time and is therefore eternal. God is the alpha and omega of all there is.
HOST What about God’s infinity?
AQUINAS Aristotle holds that a thing is infinite because it’s not finite.
HOST An example of docta ignorantia.
AQUINAS Finiteness concerns limits or boundaries. God is boundless and therefore infinite. Aristotle says form receives its being from measurable matter so that form is not infinite. I answer that there are two kinds of infinity, relative and absolute.
Relative infinity – Everything created by God has relative infinity because potency in matter has many forms. Wood has relative infinity because its potency has many forms or shapes.
Absolute infinity – God is self subsistent. He does not receive His being from anything and does not change therefore God is infinite. As the first principle, first efficient cause, and first mover it’s clear that God has absolute infinity. Damascene says "God is infinite and eternal and boundless" (opcit p31).
HOST You go on to expound in interminable detail about God’s love, justice, mercy, and other human attributes. If we were to discuss all of God’s attributes we’d be engaged in a lifelong debate ad infinitum. But what about God’s will?
AQUINAS God’s will follows His supreme intellect. God infused will in every intelligent being.
HOST You declared in God there’s no before or after. If so, how can will come after or follow intellect?
AQUINAS Sometimes a figure of speech is best used for analogy. God’s intellect and will co-exist in His being.
HOST Are there any examples of God experiencing accidents or unwilled acts?
AQUINAS In philosophical terms an accident is a happening, which results when potency in matter creates a form. But accidents without matter are possible, the lingering odor of fried fish long after it has been eaten. Recall that God has a spiritual not matteral nature. In God there cannot be any accidents in the supreme intellect of His will.
HOST You go on to expound on providence and predestination.
AQUINAS God’s providence orders men to their just ends. Through the good of providence the direction of those ends is called predestination. God’s mercy gifts certain men to the grace and glory of predestination. All things are subject to God’s providence, so it’s fitting that He should predestine certain men. Augustine says that predestination is "the foreknowledge of God’s benefits" (opcit p133). Moreover it’s written "Whom He predestined, them He also called; and whom He called them He also magnified" (ibid).
HOST Your God is a very discriminating God, some He predestined others He didn’t. Today in a court of law He would be accused of discrimination and tried in absentia by liberal lawyers and a progressive judge who makes law rather than interpreting law.
AQUINAS God predestines by conferring on His chosen the grace and glory of eternal heavenly bliss.
HOST I’m well aware that life is discriminatory but what of those who aren’t chosen?
AQUINAS The predestined are entered in the Book of Life; the reprobated are blotted out. God reprobates the sinful, those who have rejected His commandments and teachings. Accordingly it’s written "He that shall overcome, shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot his name out of the Book of Life" (opcit p143).
HOST It’s God who created the reprobates, so why does He blot them from the Book of Life?
AQUINAS God created man. Reprobates are those that disobey God’s teachings and commandments. The Lord said "I have loved Jacob, but have hated Esau" (opcit p134). Augustine says "Why He draws one, and another He draws not, seek not to judge, if thou does not wish to err" (opcit p137). God is the divine person who predestines and reprobates.
HOST There’s something pervasively contradictory in some of your answers. You impute to God personal qualities such as excellence, perfection, and grace. Personal qualities emanate from man. God cannot be divine and human.
AQUINAS God’s qualities must be described using the words of our human vocabulary. God has not yet revealed to me his divine vocabulary. We are mere humans trying to understand God.
HOST But you call God a person. How can the creator of all there is be a person?
AQUINAS God represents love and love yields personality. I do not speak of physical love such as that of Venus or Apollo but of spiritual love. God is a personal God therefore Catholicism is a personal religion. The Divine Mystery is that out of love God created man. When man recognizes this he’ll appreciate God’s love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness.
HOST Whatever created all there is cannot be love, or a person, or act like a person, or have personal qualities. Modern science consistently proves that all there is was created by electrical charges, energy of the electromagnetic spectrum, photons, gravitons, gases aggregated to solid bodies, stars, planets, moons. The proofs are readily available, incontrovertible, and all without intervention or even mention of God.
AQUINAS I have no knowledge of that. You are living in a different time. When your science gets to the point beyond which it cannot advance its proofs, it will encounter God.
HOST We identify energy with an infinite number of values from plus to minus. Are there values describing God’s power?
AQUINAS A rhetorical question frequently asked by Jews, Moslems, and pagans intended to trap young friars not experienced in disputation. I answer that among God’s many powers are the active, passive, and multidimensional.
Active power – is God’s first principle, the first mover acting upon something else. Active power is in God in the highest degree; it is absolute, eternal, and infinite.
Passive power – is the thing acted upon by something else. Passive power does not exist in God because He can never be acted upon. Luke says "no word shall be impossible with God" (opcit p145).
Multidimensional power – includes God’s length which signifies the eternity of His being, height His supreme intellect, and depth His will.
HOST How can you possibly assign any kind of power to that which you cannot define, such as divine essence. If imaginings can be assigned multidimensional values perhaps we should add energetic strings to God’s powers.
AQUINAS You mentioned strings several times. What are energetic strings?
HOST Today scientists are investigating a multidimensional universe consisting of strings of energy. Do you think these energetic strings are another of God’s dimensions?
AQUINAS I have no knowledge of them but whatever they are they were created by God.
HOST If God has omnipotent active power can He change the past?
AQUINAS To declare that the past did not happen infers contradiction. There’s no contradiction in God therefore God does not change the past.
HOST Does that mean God is active only in the present?
AQUINAS After the six days of creation God rested. God remains in His blessed state of rest.
HOST Having made all things for His own pleasure, God rested on the seventh day to admire all that He made.
AQUINAS God was pleased with all He made and rested in supreme happiness.
HOST Being in a state of rest, how does God enter into man’s daily life?
AQUINAS Through devotion and prayer men of faith may assimilate His love unto themselves. People with no faith in God must learn to live with their worldly doubts because they divorced themselves from Him.
HOST I don’t believe that a personal God, or any God, created all there is no matter how exalted and deified by stilted Biblical language. Personal qualities are the result of evolution, not the cause. I believe that God answers man’s imaginings probing for the purpose of life and for knowledge.
AQUINAS For man life is but a point on the circle of birth and death. The purpose of life is to establish a relationship with God in order to pursue individual happiness for the common good of society.
HOST A personal loving God is impossible. Today everything we know points to a physical universe whose constituents, energy, and motion are calculable, displayable, and provable without God.
AQUINAS The agent intellect is the ability to acquire knowledge. The receptive intellect is the ability to retain acquired knowledge. In recognizing his parents a child uses his receptive intellect. Philosophers and theologians employ the agent intellect and receptive intellect to recognize and confirm God’s existence.
HOST But unlike children recognizing parents, philosophers and theologians must intellectualize God because there’s no proof of His existence.
AQUINAS It’s written "the fool said in his heart, there is no God" (opcit p11).
HOST In ending you Treatise on God, I’d like to give you my conclusions of God.
AQUINAS Please do.
HOST The ancient Greek and Roman gods are male and female, personal and supernatural. Their exploits are described in narrative myths.
God 1 is the God of the Old Testament; the God of Jews is male. He’s ineffable, angry, jealous, and a narcist. He’s described in narrative and poetic myths.
God 2 is the God of the New Testament; the Christian God is male. He has many the personal qualities augmented by the divine powers of redemption, salvation, and resurrection. He’s described in philosophical and theological myths.
God 3 is the God of the Quran; the Islamic God is male. His militant prophet-soldier Muhammed led armies that slaughtered tens of thousands of infidels including Christians, Jews, and peaceful Moslems who tolerated infidels. He’s described in myths also.
The three Gods represent the current triumvirate ruling over the Kingdom of Humanity. Today God is fungible, updateable, and a chromosome away from extinction.
AQUINAS I know the Greek word chroma but what has color to do with God?
HOST Chromosomes are another of those invisible organisms in our evolutionary process discovered by man. They transfer life to create a new human being. I’ll have more to say about them when we discuss creation.
AQUINAS Whatever is in man was created by God. God’s supreme intellect created man with superior intellect and whatever is in man, or is the result of man’s intellect, was created by God.
HOST God is a mythological journeyman shuttling among the realms of pagans, Jews, Christians, and Moslems.
AQUINAS I understand your agnosticism but God made all you speak of possible. I repeat "the fool said in his heart, there is no God" (opcit p11).
HOST Having discussed God I’d like to continue with your Treatise on Creation.
AQUINAS Are you neglecting my Treatise on Trinity?
HOST No but I think Trinity inserted after God is misplaced.
AQUINAS How so? Trinity and God are one and the same.
HOST That being so, why did you write a separate treatise on Trinity?
AQUINAS My dear friend Trinity is the foundation of the Church. Trinity deserves its own treatise to explain the three divine Persons in God.
HOST In my opinion Trinity juxtaposed to God is anachronous because I believe Trinity was contrived after Jesus died.
AQUINAS Contrived? I’m afraid you’ve been greatly misinformed. Trinity and God are one and the same and Trinity is rightly placed after God.
HOST With your kind indulgence I’d like to discuss Trinity later.
AQUINAS Very well but you’re not using my Summa as intended.
HOST As a textbook?
AQUINAS As a handbook for young friars to be studied in the order written under the tutelage of a superior brother friar.
HOST I assure you we’ll have a definitive discussion of Trinity later. Now about your Treatise on Creation, it’s based only on the Old Testament’s First Story of Creation.
AQUINAS The second story tells of the fall of man. I wrote a separate Treatise on Man.
HOST True but before we discuss creation I need to ask you the following question. How was the Godhead created?
AQUINAS The Godhead is a metaphor for the eternally subsistent residence of God.
HOST Therefore God preceded the Godhead?
AQUINAS God and the Godhead are one and the same.
HOST I thought the Godhead was God’s abiding residence.
AQUINAS It is but they’re the same. When you speak of the Godhead you speak of God.
HOST How can a residence be the same as the occupant?
AQUINAS I answer again that God and the Godhead are one, as are the mind and intellect.
HOST Have you an opinion on where supreme heaven is located?
AQUINAS Supreme heaven does not have a location like a star. It is a real place whose location is a mystery. There are many real things that are mysteries such as why we dream, why there are diseases, why some persons are blind, why things fall to the ground.
HOST Diseases are caused by invisible things God created such as bacteria and viruses. As for dreams, during deep sleep we dream because of the spontaneous and introverted neural activity originating in the brain stem. The neural activity creates unreal experiences we call the dream world. The dream world of Old Testament and New Testament writers became the Bible.
AQUINAS Angels and demons may also cause dreams.
HOST But they don’t answer your question of why we dream. Things fall to the ground because of gravity. The earth’s gravitational force originates in its molten core which attracts anything having mass, including a feather. Returning to creation, how did creation begin? What action caused the beginning?
AQUINAS The beginning was an act of God. God acts out of will as described in the First Story of Creation. Does modern science know how creation began?
HOST No but science developed the proof for the creation process from a possible beginning.
AQUINAS What possible beginning?
HOST Science surmises it was from a massive big bang, probably a supernova of immense proportions.
AQUINAS You use words such as surmise and possible; they are not the proofs science demands.
HOST Science has proofs of the evolutionary process that created the universe but not of how it all began.
AQUINAS Do you have faith in science?
HOST Faith cannot be part of science.
AQUINAS Perhaps it should. I have faith in God, that He is without beginning, and that He created all there is.
HOST An evasive answer whose principles cannot be tested.
AQUINAS And cannot be disproved.
HOST You also wrote the Treatise on the Work of the Six Days. For our discussion on creation, I’ve combined the commonality of those two treatises.
AQUINAS You’re presenting my treatises in a different order than written in my Summa. You’re reorganizing them to suit your own needs.
HOST True. I’ve combined material on similar subjects in one place to avoid debating bits and pieces of those subjects scattered over and throughout several treatises.
AQUINAS Keep in mind the two treatises you combined expound on the ‘how’ and ‘what’ God created. My Treatise on Creation expounds on the method or the "how" of God’s creative process. My Treatise on the Work of the Six Days describes ‘what’ God created. The ‘why’ of creation is self-evident, to create all there is.
HOST Both treatises expound on the same subject, that of creation. Do you have a definition of creation.
AQUINAS To create means to make that which does not exist from that which is already in existence. In the words of Augustine "To make concerns what did not exist at all; but to create is to make something by bringing forth something from what was already" (opcit p242).
HOST Let’s begin at the beginning with Genesis and bereshit. In the beginning was a formless earth, darkness, and wind. Where did they come from?
AQUINAS The beginning is a metaphor for choas out of which God created an orderly world to benefit man.
HOST That means chaos preceded God, so that there was a beginning before God.
AQUINAS No, nothing precedes God.
HOST Where did the chaos come from?
AQUINAS Chaos is a metaphor for the disordered state rescued by God’s supreme intellect in creating and orderly universe.
HOST If God is the creator of all there is He created the chaos of the beginning.
AQUINAS You’re confusing a material process with a spiritual process. A material process has a beginning, middle, and end. We do not know, and might never know, the inner workings of God’s spiritual process except to acknowledge that He created all there is.
HOST Do you believe in the First Story of Creation?
AQUINAS Of course its part of our sacred doctrine. However it’s open to interpretation.
HOST Meaning?
AQUINAS As we gain more knowledge alteration of certain details may be acceptable providing God’s original creative intent is maintained.
HOST In the New Testament there’s no story of creation at all.
AQUINAS John alludes to the creation story by the ‘Word’ through which all things were created (Jn 1,1-4).
HOST In the Old Testament the God of Jews created all there is. In the New Testament John says the ‘Word" created all there is. Are there two Gods of creation?
AQUINAS John says "the Word was God" (Jn 1,1). In the creation of all there is, God and the ‘Word’ are synonymous. It’s a matter of interpretation, two versions of the one God of creation.
HOST Speaking of interpretation how do you interpret the word bereshit?
AQUINAS The Hebrew word bereshit means ‘in the beginning’.
HOST The beginning before creation?
AQUINAS Yes. The Church interprets bereshit as ‘in the Word or in the name of the Son’ before which was only formless primordial matter without time. In the beginning God infused primordial matter with time and potency to create primary matter, a fungible physical entity having potenial for creating forms. Ancient philosophers understood the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form. Primary matter has the potential of unlimited form. For example bronze is matter that can be heated and worked to many forms. By act of God the potential in primary matter is activated to create an infinite variety of forms such as living creatures and inanimate things. God gifted to living creatures spirituality and intellect. In this context creative power belongs to God the Father and creative wisdom to the Son. It’s written "thou hast made all things in wisdom" and "In Him – the Son – were created all things" (opcit p255).
HOST You mentioned the Father and the Son, what about the Holy Ghost?
AQUINAS Had you followed the order of my treatises as written you would have had the answer to that question. I now answer that during creation the Holy Ghost was in a passive relationship with the Father and Son.
HOST That’s another way of saying the Holy Ghost did not participate in creation, which supports my contention that Trinity was posterior to creation.
AQUINAS In our discussion of God I confirmed that in God there’s no before or after. Trinity is in the oneness of God therefore it cannot be posterior to creation.
HOST The original writers of the creation story had to imagine how Yahweh created the Hebrew world and adorn it with all there is. Those writers had no scientific knowledge of the world. They enhanced their writings with phantasmata which became the First Story of Creation. Briefly summarized that story informs us that God created the heavens and earth, light and darkness, dome in the sky with waters above and below, seas, vegetation, day and night, stars, living creatures, birds, and lastly man and woman having dominion over all living creatures. Those writers had God create all there is by assembling exterior constituent parts without the supporting details of any interior process. Examples are heavens without astrophysical details, earth without geological details, and man without anthropological details.
AQUINAS Not true, God removed the first man’s rib to create the first woman.
HOST That account of creation continues ancient mythology does it not?
AQUINAS With the aforementioned interpretive reservation, I believe God created all there is as described in sacred scripture.
HOST God created a multitude of living creatures having distinctions, which imply inequality.
AQUINAS God created all those creatures in order that His love and goodness were adequately distributed and represented throughout the multitude of the living.
HOST Which means God created some living creatures without His love and goodness; that’s discrimination.
AQUINAS No, no. God created all living creatures with souls having individual distinction.
HOST Distinction infers discrimination such as good and evil, black and white, more and less.
AQUINAS God created each living creature with a soul to distinguish it from inanimate things. He gifted man with superior intellect to be aware of his soul.
HOST The gift of intellect in which unrestrained imaginations and phantasms created God.
AQUINAS Are you claiming God is an imaginary being?
HOST You have said it.
HOST Free will includes the choice to sin.
AQUINAS And the choice to follow God’s precepts. Those who turn to God are saved and blessed with merit. Those who turn their backs to God are condemned according to their sins. God gave man intellect and free will for choosing good or evil.
AQUINAS And the choice to follow God’s precepts. Those who turn to God are saved and blessed with merit. Those who turn their backs to God are condemned according to their sins.
HOST God created good and evil before He created man. Did God do that purposefully in order to entrap and masochistically punish man when man did evil?
AQUINAS God is loving and forgiving. Through Christ’s sacrifice sinful man is redeemed. God gave man intellect and free will for choosing good or evil.
HOST Yes, and then God placed man in earth’s vast public storage, abandoned him, and flew away leaving him to his own devices. Even animals nurture and protect their young but God forsook man on this dangerous earth. Man cries out to God for an explanation of why he’s suffering. It appears God is an aloof and delinquent parent. On the cross the crucified Jesus cried out to His Father "why have you forsaken me".
AQUINAS Man cannot probe the depths of the divine mind and always retrieve a satisfactory answer. But we have God’s exemplary life, His teachings, and commandments.
HOST Today most adults, except for those whose income depends on God, believe the six days of creation are pure fiction. Furthermore the creation stories, and even your Summa, make no mention of time. Can you describe the era in which God created all there is?
AQUINAS There was no time prior to creation. God created time coincident with creation.
HOST Yes but approximately what year was that? Some scholars claim it was 10,000 BC others 6,000 BC.
AQUINAS I do not wish to speculate about when God created what. To me it’s irrelevant because God created all there is. In fact some theologians claim that God in his omnipotence created all there is in one day, which is another example of the Biblical interpretation I spoke of. The precise year of creation doesn’t alter the fact that God created all there is.
HOST Here’s a brief outline of what modern geologists and scientists have proved about life on planet Earth. Imprinted in rock fossils are life forms about 5 billion years old, such as blue-green algae. About 2.5 billion years ago appeared bacteria and multicellular life forms. Thereafter in succession appeared fish, insects, animals, reptiles, volcanoes, dinosaurs, birds, flowering plants, mammals, primates, and then upright man.
AQUINAS The First Story of Creation includes all those creatures and more.
HOST You might be interested in knowing that a modern Christian cult of Creationists, or Godists, claim that by divine design God created all there is about 10,000 years ago. In reinterpreting the Genesis stories Creationists claim that God’s superior intelligence designed and created the world substantially as it exists today. Their claim not only ignores scientific knowledge but contradicts the evidence in rock fossils millions of years old. Anthropologists have discovered human remains about four million years old. Those fossils are the remains of the ape that stood up and walked like man. About 10,000 years ago appeared the first modern humans such as you and I. Creationists completely ignore the movements of tectonic plates that separated Earth’s continents. This brief outline accentuates the differences between the phantasmata of the first story of creation and facts proved by modern science. The claim that God created all there is was certainly disproved by archeological and geological evidence.
AQUINAS God is the first exemplary mover who moves others, therefore God created man fully operable as described in the Second Story of Creation.
HOST Our telescopes nightly search deep space for astrophysical evidence billions of years old. In those searches neither God nor heaven has been encountered.
AQUINAS How would modern science know that it encountered heaven or God? Stars are composed of matter, heaven and God are not.
HOST Perhaps God dwells in a heaven before the beginning of time or secreted in a galactic heaven too distant to be seen. Perhaps God will be encountered signaling man from a distant quasar or found in an immense black hole ingesting and consuming the intellectual emotion of Godists. The more science discovers new galaxies or universes the less likely God created all there is.
AQUINAS Obviously I have no knowledge of modern science. About the details of your summary, I say with assurance that "God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good" (opcit p329). Through the grace of God life is created for each new living being, animal or human, both of which conceive new life.
HOST Conception is a common but incorrect idea. Since the Archean period life has never been conceived nor recreated; it’s been transferred across genera and within species. I’ll have more to tell you later when we discuss man and reproduction.
AQUINAS God created man and woman to procreate for His kingdom.
HOST I’ll have more to say about genetics when we discuss your Treatise on Man. Returning to Genesis, the fact is that the first two stories in Genesis have more to do with the history and behavior of early Jews than of the creation of the world.
AQUINAS But the ascendants of those early Jews prophesied the coming of the Messiah, the necessary prelude to the New Testament.
HOST Why didn’t patristic writers develop their own Christian story of creation.
AQUINAS Because it’s told in the Old Testament. In my Treatise on God I confirmed that God does not alter or obsolete past events, such as the creation stories. Recall that the Church interprets bereshit as ‘in the beginning, or in the Word, or in the Son’. Of the Son it’s written "Of Him, and by Him, and in Him are all things" (opcit p238). The Church declared the interpretation of that quotation to be sacred doctrine.
HOST The Church made that declaration hundreds of years after Jesus’ death.
AQUINAS Truth endures irrespective of time.
HOST In describing God’s creative power you expound on the principle of exemplary cause.
AQUINAS That principle is in God only. Ancient philosophers concluded that God’s exemplary cause transmuted His will to the creation of primordial formless matter before He created primary matter.
HOST From nothing comes nothing, so how did God’s exemplary cause create formless matter from His will?
AQUINAS God is not man; He’s the creator of man.
HOST In man will emanates from the brain, an organ of matter.
AQUINAS I repeat that God is not man; He’s the creator of man.
HOST Man’s his will emanates from his brain which moves bone, muscle, and sinew. God is purely divine essence without matter so how can God have will?
AQUINAS You’re contrasting God to man, the defective result of an impossible comparison. God is the creator; man is the created. In God will is used metaphorically as the creative process of His all-powerful divine essence. In that process God converted primordial formless matter without time to primary matter with potency and time for an infinite variety of forms. The forms of all things are in God. Alluding to forms Augustine concluded "the master forms which are contained in divine intelligence" (opcit p240).
HOST Exemplary cause does not necessarily create exemplary forms. What about the flawed form of the human being? It’s not exactly one of God’s exemplary forms.
AQUINAS God created man having a soul integrated with intellect and will. To create is to make something from what was already, namely God as the first exemplary cause.
HOST So God creates and man makes? Both make and create require an existing entity from which to make or create.
AQUINAS Keep in mind God is the creator because He’s the first exemplary cause.
HOST Because He’s the first being?
AQUINAS No, not first as in being or number but as creator. First indicates number or posterior succession. In God there’s no number, no first or second, no before and after. He is that He is.
HOST But you frequently used the word first to describe God’s qualities.
AQUINAS I used it as an adjective describing quality, not as a noun indicating number.
HOST In the creation story God adorned the earth but not the heavens.
AQUINAS I interpret the word heavens as luminous high bodies having incorruptible natures and therefore without the need for adornment.
HOST How can a heaven be incorruptible? Now you’re giving human quality not only to God but also to space.
AQUINAS Incorruptible means not decaying as in living matter. God created at least three heavens the empyrean, starry, and aqueous each with distinction:
Empyrean heaven – is the luminous fiery abode of angels.
Starry heaven – is divided into eight spheres. The 1st sphere is the firmament and dome of fixed stars, part luminous and part transparent. The 2nd– 8th spheres are those of planets.
Aqueous heaven – contains the waters above and below the dome and the transparency of space mottled by clouds.
HOST You said at least three heavens.
AQUINAS There might be more we are not aware of.
HOST Such as the supreme heaven of the Godhead?
AQUINAS Supreme heaven was not created; it is that it is, the residence of the Godhead.
HOST Yes but where is it? Our modern telescopes have penetrated deep space back in time, back past the 6,000 years of Jews, back past the 10,000 years of Creationists, back past to the 15 billion years of science, and yet found no trace of heaven. There are no known coordinates of any heaven. Not a single heaven is listed in the New General Catalog.
AQUINAS Spiritual entities do not have physical coordinates or dimensions. Your modern science will never find heaven because it’s not a place. In man it’s a state of mind. In the universe it’s the reality of a spiritual existence.
HOST Are you implying Catholics having faith in God live a good life so that upon death they can ascend to an unknown place that’s a state of mind they had on earth?
AQUINAS If you’ve ever heard the expression ‘heaven on earth’ it means a state of happiness with Christ. As for death, I wrote a separate treatise covering resurrection.
HOST The phrase ‘heaven on earth’ is another of religion’s oxymorons. As for death and resurrection we’ll discuss those later. Some ancients believed that stars are the departed souls ascended to eternal life in heaven, others thought stars to be souls of those not yet born.
AQUINAS I agree with Damascene who says ""Let no one esteem the heavens or the heavenly bodies to be living beings, for they have neither life nor death" (opcit p365).
HOST God adorned earth with living creatures, vegetation, and other visible things but did not mention invisible things.
AQUINAS How can one describe what’s invisible?
HOST God cannot be seen yet the Bible and your Summa describe Him.
AQUINAS Not true, the Bible and my Summa describe God’s works.
HOST I was thinking about invisible microorganisms.
AQUINAS I know the Greek word mikros. Are the organisms you speak of so small that they’re invisible?
HOST Yes, microbes such as bacteria and viruses. Your knowledge in the 1200’s universe had not the benefit of modern science, especially of molecular biology.
AQUINAS In fact my honored and great teacher Albertus Magnus told me "most of what exists in the realm of knowledge remains still to be discovered". (Guide to Thomas Aquinas, J. Pieper, p13)
HOST Magnus was prophetic. In your time scientists investigated the visible or macro world. Today scientists investigate macro and micro worlds. Astrophysicists investigate macro space, biologists and physicists investigate micro space.
AQUINAS My life’s work has been in praise of God. Knowledge is based on education and experience. You have the advantage of knowing the secrets of modern science but behind that science is God.
HOST Getting back to your treatise on creation, you expound on the qualities of light. I understand Christians believe light to have spiritual qualities. Light is always seen as auras surrounding God and angels.
AQUINAS Light is not corporeal; it’s a spiritual entity whose qualities are place, instantaneity, and corruptibility.
Place – is light’s contiguity or concatenation of places throughout space.
Instantaneity - is light’s instantaneous appearance through intervening space.
Corruptibility – is the absence of light corrupted to a dark body.
HOST You say light is instantaneous but light traveling in space infers succession.
AQUINAS An instantaneous succession.
HOST Not true. Today your medieval interpretation of light is totally irrelevant. Light travels through space so fast it appears to be instantaneous.
AQUINAS Light and air cannot occupy the same space because it would then be a composite body, not a spiritual entity. Whenever light is withdrawn air becomes dark making uncertain a thing’s position and movement.
HOST Your conclusion reminds me of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of the 1930’s. His principle states that any measurement of an atomic particle’s position and motion generates uncertain results because the act of measurement intrudes upon the particle’s space.
AQUINAS I know nothing of atomic particles but everyone knows that light illumines air, warms earth, and grows vegetables.
HOST You might be interested in knowing that light can be separated into different colors called its spectrum.
AQUINAS What? Light is luminous, white, and transparent.
HOST Perhaps believed in the 1200’s but not today. Physicists proved that light consists of radiation in the color spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Are you interested in what modern scientists are saying about our universe?
AQUINAS I’ve studied science and have always been interested in its findings.
HOST I’ll give you an outline summary of what scientists are saying today about our universe.
AQUINAS You keep saying our universe as if there’s more than one.
HOST I’m sure you’re familiar with the philosophy of Democritus. About 480 BC he believed there was more than one universe, and that each one was reducible to atoms. In the 1200’s you believed God’s essence created the universe. In 2005 we believe some kind of radiation created the universe. Democritus was derisively known as the laughing philosopher but he was right and Aristotle was wrong.
AQUINAS God created only one universe, the one we live in.
HOST Some modern scientists think there’s more than one universe. Now in order to understand the rudiments of modern cosmology you need to be aware of certain facts about light and distance. Light appears to be instantaneous because it travels at a speed of 186,282 miles a second, that’s 299,272 km/sec. Cosmological distances are so vast, so immense, they are calculated to the base light-year, the distance light travels in one year or 6 trillion miles. Our Sun is 93 million miles from Earth so it takes about 8 seconds for sunlight to reach Earth. 93 million miles is a proverbial drop in the cosmological ocean. For example most stars are more than 100,000 light-years from Earth. To most people that’s an incomprehensible distance of 6 quadrillion or 6 quintillion miles from Earth, numbers having 18 or 21 zeros. Using modern telescopes we have the means and methods for calculating the vast distances of light-years.
AQUINAS It’s difficult for me to relate those distances to my limited scientific knowledge.
HOST Suffice it to say that for you to expound on those cosmological distances is like me trying to understand your Summa or your description of God. Continuing my summary most cosmologists agree on two theories for the probable creation of our universe.
AQUINAS Two theories to supplement the story of creation?
HOST No, to replace it. One theory is that our universe began with an enormous starburst, or supernova, that spewed into space all the radiation which eventually cooled to matterals in space – atoms, photons, gravitons. They eventually became our universe. The other theory is that gravity condensed spatial matter to a single entity, a black hole, of such enormous density and pressure that it exploded and eventually had the same result.
AQUINAS You correctly say the two new beginnings are only theories.
HOST Astronomers have observed supernovas throughout history. Perhaps both theories are correct. In both theories explosions spewed into space a fiery dense radiation of about 10 trillion degrees.
AQUINAS What is the fiery radiation you speak of?
HOST Consider it a kind of fiery energy or spirituality, perhaps like the fire of your empyrean heaven. That radiation cooled to form atomic particles, examples of the invisible matter Democritus spoke of. Modern scientists have repeatedly proved those particles exist.
AQUINAS We believe in two different beginnings. I believe in God’s divine essence and you believe in radiation.
HOST The big difference is that a beginning of radiation is provable. Today we know all there is evolved from invisible matter in radiation. Over the eons atomic particles cooled condensing to immense gas clouds. Over many more eons gravity aggregated the dust and detritus in those gas clouds to the stars and planets in our universe. I refrained from using more technical terms because they would present you with an exotic vocabulary as difficult for you to understand as are some of your medieval terms for me to understand.
AQUINAS Your summary brings to mind God’s first exemplary cause which, acting out, causes the creation of other things such as the universe.
HOST Our universe was created about 15 billion years ago, our Earth about 5 billion years ago. None of this is in the story of creation.
AQUINAS How could writers of the first story know the years in which God created the universe? God did not reveal it to them.
HOST They could have imagined the timing as they had the entire First Story of Creation. The fact is they had not the science to measure astronomical distances and geological expertise to date fossils. Today we have a New General Catalog of astronomical bodies such as galaxies, clusters, and black holes.
AQUINAS But God did reveal to those writers the creation stories. Our creed says "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible" (Latin–English Booklet Missal, p19).
HOST That creed was written long after the death of Jesus, the result of the bitter disputation at the Council of Nicaea (325).
AQUINAS My dear friend please understand that God created all there is including all the cosmological phenomena you mentioned.
HOST We think there are multiple universes. There might not have been a beginning such as in the story of creation, therefore no Genesis and no bereshit.
AQUINAS In my time that concept would have been blasphemous, heretical, punished by excommunication or even burned in holocaust at the stake until consumed to ashes.
HOST Do you have an opinion on how the papacy would have reacted when informed that our astronauts explored the moon?
AQUINAS Our astronomers have also studied the moon.
HOST I don’t mean astronomers viewing the night sky. I mean astronauts actually on the moon. In Greek mythology Argonauts sailed the ships. Today astronauts pilot space ships. They rocketed up to the moon, landed on the moon, walked on the moon, explored its surface, retrieved its rocks, and returned to Earth. Their moon expedition confirmed our theory that the universe was created from the aggregation of dust particles and space debris, not God.
AQUINAS I tell you this, when modern science ends its investigation of the universe it will encounter God.
HOST Speaking of Argonauts and astronauts, this might be a good time to discuss God’s creation of man and woman on the sixth day.
AQUINAS God’s first exemplary cause is male, so He created man. It was not good for man to be alone so God created a partner for him, a woman.
HOST Why didn’t God create another man? A man would have been more help to him in farming and shepherding.
AQUINAS God made woman to conceive for the purpose of procreating. Two men cannot procreate.
HOST That was God’s choice. God created asexual reproduction in plants. He could have done the same for man.
AQUINAS It’s natural for man and woman to bond as one to multiply and populate God’s Kingdom.
HOST God’s Kingdom on earth?
AQUINAS No, earth is only man’s sojourn. God’s Kingdom is His kingdom of redeemed souls.
HOST What other kingdoms did God’s create?
AQUINAS God created two animate kingdoms, animals and plants and one inanimate kingdom, minerals.
HOST Modern science added a fourth kingdom, that of microbes such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses.
AQUINAS It’s obvious fungi belong in the plant kingdom. In order to supplement alms and food, young friars are instructed on how to distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. I know the Greek bakteria meaning staff and also the Latin virus meaning ooze or slime but how are they reckoned to be kingdoms?
HOST Bacteria and viruses are more of God’s invisible creations. Some bacteria are staff-shaped as you suggested but many more have other shapes. Viruses are microorganic agents whose infections might create poisonous ooze or slime you mentioned. Some of these microorganisms make us sick with chills, fever, trembling, vomiting, and finally death. God was not very considerate of man when He created the diseases that afflict, infirm, make man suffer, and eventually kill him.
AQUINAS Diseases and suffering are parts of man’s life on earth.
HOST The earth created by the God you declare created all there is. However if you believe in human evolution as I do, diseases are easily explained by the evolutionary inheritance of bacteria and viruses.
AQUINAS Whatever is in you evolutionary process was created by God.
HOST Reverting to kingdoms, biologists say evolution created sexual reproduction to assure a great diversity among plants and animals.
AQUINAS God created perfect man and woman with sexual distinction for procreation.
HOST But God also created the hermaphrodite and homosexual who are imperfect and cannot procreate.
AQUINAS God’s perfection does not make mistakes.
HOST How do you explain the creation of homosexuals and hermaphrodites?
AQUINAS The result of imperfect human intercourse.
HOST Sexual intercourse results in the human evolutionary process that produces billions of chemical combinations creating a great diversity of humanity such as man, effeminate man, woman, manly woman, the hermaphrodite, homosexual, and others. This diversity cannot be explained by God’s perfection in creating straight man and woman for procreation.
AQUINAS I answer that God’s perfection does not make mistakes or play dice during creation.
HOST On that point we have some agreement because God did not create man perfect or imperfect, rather man created God.
AQUINAS That’s heresy! In my day the Church would consume your heresy burning you to death at the stake.
HOST I’m fortunate not to have lived in your time. I must tell you that in intelligent Primates like chimpanzees there’s no sign of religious devotion to God.
AQUINAS Of course, they’re lower animals without the higher intelligence needed to recognize God.
HOST Don’t you think God would have wanted all His creations to recognize Him as their maker?
AQUINAS It’s impossible for man to comprehend the mind of God. Moreover the chimpanzee doesn’t realize it has a soul and lacks the intelligence of a child who recognizes his parents.
HOST If I concede your declaration that God is the creator, that through His grace He creates a new being, and that His perfection does not make mistakes, how do you explain God’s imperfection in creating infants with birth defects and deformed infants?
AQUINAS Birth defects and deformity are the result of man’s imperfections and evils transmitted to woman during sexual intercourse.
HOST If a woman conceives life through God’s creative power, how do you explain the fact that she can abort at will and with impunity a creation of the all-powerful God?
AQUINAS God created woman with free will. As for impunity, I leave that up to God’s judgement.
HOST Abortion is possible because we have the ability to interrupt and destroy a developing human at any point in its evolutionary process.
AQUINAS Infanticide is the voluntary act of killing one of God’s creations. It’s a mortal sin.
HOST If as you declare God creates new life infants will continue to be born with birth defects or deformed because we can’t fix God. But with life transferred in the evolutionary process, genetic engineering can find and remedy the causes of defects and deformity.
AQUINAS God has a purpose for everything. I do not know or question the mind of God.
HOST Given that conclusion, let’s move on to creation details. In the first story God created man in His divine image. How can God have an image? His divine essence is purely spiritual, without chemical composition. You declared only potential in matter acts out creating form or image. How can divine essence be imaged as corporeal man which is not God’s image. Furthermore God is eternal but He made man mortal. When God created man why did He replace eternity with time making man mortal?
AQUINAS Keep in mind that God, the first mover, gave motion to all He created whether visible or invisible. God created time to monitor the movements and longevity of all He created.
HOST It’s clear God did not create woman in His male image.
AQUINAS There’s no contradiction in God, therefore He didn’t create woman in His image.
HOST It’s not clear to me whether God created man "in" or "to" His image.
AQUINAS It’s impossible for anything to be equal to God. Those prepositions are the result of different interpretations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. On this matter Augustine proclaimed:
In image there’s likeness
In equality there’s image therefore
In equality there’s likeness.
I answer that God made man "in" His image and woman "to" His image, signifying an approach to His likeness. Nothing is impossible for the all-powerful God creator of all there is.
HOST God gave man pre-eminence and dominion over all He created but there are animals that have dominion over man.
AQUINAS No, sacred doctrine says God gave man dominion over animals.
HOST God created animals that disease and kill us such as flies and mosquitoes, snakes that poison and kill us, crocodiles of the Nile that consume infants and adults .
AQUINAS God gave man the intelligence to avoid and rid the world of those creatures.
HOST When God crated animals He also devised the procreation of like for like – fish to fish, ox to ox, man to man. But God broke His own rule when he didn’t procreate divine essence to divine essence for man.
AQUINAS Recall that God is the first exemplary cause. Any creation is a secondary cause having a before and after and therefore cannot be God.
HOST In the Second Story of Creation God formed man from clay and breathed life into His nostrils. God then made woman from the man’s rib closest to his heart, not farthest from it.
AQUINAS To signify carnal union between them. On that matter the Church holds as follows:
Woman was not made from man’s head to avoid her having equal intellect with him or authority over him.
She was not made from man’s feet to avoid contempt for her as a slave.
She was not made from man’s blood and water because they once flowed from Jesus’ side.
HOST God placed the man and woman in paradise, which is the Garden of Eden. But God also placed there the serpent that tempted the woman to sin. Except for the First Story of Creation the entire Bible is the mythical narrative evolved from the animated talking serpent God created.
AQUINAS The serpent is a metaphor for the devil.
HOST That’s the problem with the Bible isn’t it? Nothing in the Bible is real. The Bible is a metaphor for the fiction of God.
AQUINAS The Bible is sacred doctrine as revealed by God. Recall that God gave Eve free choice to resist the serpent’s guile.
HOST You know the rest of the story better than I.
Another problem I have with the creation stories is that the second story is older than the first story, therefore it was written before the first story. Why didn’t early Church fathers reorder the stories to their proper time sequence?
AQUINAS They didn’t write those stories. They followed God’s example of not changing past events. Moreover it would be heretical to change sacred doctrine.
HOST Neither of the creation stories identified the man and woman by name.
AQUINAS In Hebrew the first man is referred to as adam, therefore in the Bible he’s called Adam. When the man and woman were expelled from Eden Adam called the woman Eve, mother of the living. When God punished the man and woman for eating from the tree of knowledge He expelled them from paradise.
HOST Modern archeological digs discovered the oldest human remains in eastern Ethiopia, not in the paradise of Eden in southern Mesopotamia. God punished them because He was fearful that by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge they might become as knowledgeable as He.
AQUINAS God punished them because they disobeyed His commandment not to eat the fruit from that tree. It’s impossible for anyone or anything to have an intellect equal to God’s supreme intellect and His pure simplicity.
HOST How was it possible for God’s pure simplicity to create complex man?
AQUINAS God’s simplicity is not confused by disparate parts. God’s creative acts proceed from simplicity directly to complexity absent the need for potency to act. Therefore from a simple thought man must proceed to see and hear complexity.
HOST What are you talking about?
AQUINAS The visions and voices God offers us through revelation.
HOST But science not revelation discovered man’s complexity. Modern science discovered in man’s deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the macromolecule of life and the extraordinary chemically complex structure of its double helix. I apologize for using those technical terms unknown to you.
AQUINAS The fault is mine for not understanding your complex new frontiers of science, a discipline in which I’ve always had an interest.
HOST If God is the pure simplicity you declared, what’s your explanation of the physically and chemically complex structure DNA?
AQUINAS God’s pure simplicity doesn’t preclude Him from creating matter with potential for complex forms.
HOST Persons born with superior intelligence, such as geniuses, have the ability to simplify the complex. So why did God, with His supreme intelligence and pure simplicity, create man having such complex physiology?
AQUINAS Man does not and cannot know the mysteries of God’s powers and supreme intelligence.
HOST Speaking of intelligence science is just beginning to understand man’s bioelectrics, macromolecules, enzymes, peptides, cells, amino acids, brain, spinal cord, etc. All of which originate in an individual’s DNA blueprint. Those scientific terms are unknown to you but they are part of today’s vocabulary.
AQUINAS I have no knowledge of any of that. If one man does not know what’s in the mind of another man, how can we possibly comprehend the mind of God until revealed to us through His works?
HOST Some claim that God abused His power when He created faulty man who is weak, sinful, and vulnerable to diseases; in other words a reject.
AQUINAS There’s no fault in God’s perfection. He created man perfect for procreation and with free will to choose good or evil.
HOST Choosing good does not prevent man from contracting a deadly disease, or being bitten by a deadly insect, or swallowed whole in the cleavage of an earthquake.
AQUINAS God’s perfection does not make mistakes. The debilities you speak of are not the fault of God but of the vicissitudes life on earth.
HOST But God created the earth with many faults. Speaking of creation some declare that God is the biggest maker of rejects. In man they cite sin, demons, disease, murder, genocide, etc. In God’s flawed construction of the world they cite floods, earthquakes above and below its oceans, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. Modern manufacturing managers declare they would shut down God’s creative process and prohibit Him from assembling any more rejects. An unhappy artist hides his mistakes never to look at them again. God did the same with man. God not only abandoned man, forsaking him in earth’s public storage, but continues to punish him because man reminds God of His mistakes.
AQUINAS God is perfect therefore it’s impossible for God to make a mistake or create rejects.
HOST Lastly why didn’t you include angels in your two treatises on creation?
AQUINAS I wrote a separate Treatise on Angels because God did not create angels during the first or second story of creation.
HOST When did God create angels? Let’s discuss angels next.
HOST Ending our discussion of creation you mentioned that angles were not created during the six days. When do you think God created angels?
AQUINAS God’s creation of angels is another of those subjects open to interpretation. If God did not create angles during the six days He must have created them either before or after the six days.
If before the six days – God probably created angels to fill empyrean heaven thereby adding a protective layer for the Godhead.
If after the six days – God created angels after the fall of Adam and Eve to be mediators between Him and humans.
HOST Some Biblical scholars claim God created angels so they could admire His work of the six days. You proposed that God could have created angels before the six days. If so, do you have an opinion on whether angels helped God create all there is during the six days?
AQUINAS God is the first exemplary cause and anything created by God is a secondary cause. It’s impossible for angels, all secondary causes, to act on behalf of God the first exemplary cause. God is the one and only creator of all there is.
HOST You also proposed that God created angels to protect the Godhead. Why would the all-powerful God need angels to protect the Godhead?
AQUINAS God does not act without purpose. We cannot fully comprehend the mind of God.
HOST You said mind. Mind evolves from a corporeal organ, the brain. How can there be a mind in divine essence?
AQUINAS Mind is symbolic of God’s supreme intellect. Mind and intellect are synonymous.
HOST You begin your Treatise on Angels by describing their spiritual nature.
AQUINAS Angels are not corporeal creatures composed of visible matter and form. They are in the category of the invisible things God created, the purely spiritual beings without divine essence. Angels are extraterrestrial spiritual beings intelligent, incorruptible, and immortal. God endowed angels with superior intellect and will, imprinting in their minds the images of all He created. God granted angels also the privilege of seeing His countenance called the Beatific Vision. Angels respond to it by assimilating some of God’s grace and holiness. Augustine concluded that from divine essence God created angels and placed them in heaven.
HOST You said angels were created without divine essence.
AQUINAS God used divine essence to create angels but they don’t consist of divine essence because they would be equal to God.
HOST Isn’t it obvious that God used divine essence to create all there is?
AQUINAS That’s the general assumption. Of angels Strabus says "heaven denotes not the visible firmament, but the empyrean fiery heaven" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, p347). Strabus’ fiery heaven means God’s brilliance and glory, not his divine essence.
HOST In your treatise you expound on the heavenly hierarchy of angels.
AQUINAS You’re referring to the Celestial Hierarchy, part of God’s divine government.
HOST Isn’t the phrase divine government another oxymoron? Divine pertains to God and government to man’s societal need for order. Why does God need a hierarchy or any kind of governance to assist Him?
AQUINAS Does the created answer for the creator? We do not comprehend the mind of God.
HOST There’s no mention of a Celestial Hierarchy in the six days of creation.
AQUINAS God’s Celestial Hierarchy is another event resolved by the interpretation of Genesis. Most theologians agree that, as the Overture to the six days, God created the Celestial Hierarchy consisting of three orders of angels, each order having three grades.
HOST What, a trinity within a trinity? God’s Celestial Hierarchy must have been the model for the world’s bloated governmental bureaucracies.
AQUINAS As in the life of man the Church favors the number 3 because it has a beginning, middle, and end. The three orders are prioritized by their importance to God. The first order is taken from the Old Testament. The first angelic order and its three grades are Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones.
Seraphim – are superior angels, they excel in their closeness to God.
Cherubim – are angels subordinate to the Seraphim, they know God’s secret powers.
Thrones – are the heavenly seats for those nearest to God.
HOST Where do I begin? If the superior Seraphim do not know God’s secret powers by what logic would the subordinate Cherubim know?
AQUINAS I cannot explain why God acts in this or that manner. I make attempts to describe His works and occasionally to successfully explain His works.
HOST Seraphim are the closest to God, so are Thrones the heavenly seats for them?
AQUINAS Alluding to Thrones Paul says "God has set the man Christ above all principality and power, and virtue, and dominion" (opcit p553).
HOST In that quotation Paul is twice wrong. First because the order Thrones is beneath the Seraphim and Cherubim. That means the Father, Christ, and Holy Ghost are inferior to angels. Second because there was never the man Christ, only the man Jesus.
AQUINAS Paul alluded to Thrones in the Godhead, not in an angelic order. God the Father is seated in the center Throne, Christ in the right Throne, and Holy Ghost in the left Throne. Sometimes a thought in a writer’s head is not described by the words he writes. The second angelic order and its three grades are Dominations, Virtues, and Powers.
Dominations – rule over corporeal living creatures and miracles on earth.
Virtues – Virtues are from the New Testament. They
provide the perfect active power for Jesus to perform miracles.
Powers – Powers are from the Old Testament. They provide the perfect active power for Dominations and Virtues, and coerce demons to do good.
HOST Dominations were surely devised by the Church. They are not mentioned in the Old Testament or New Testament.
AQUINAS The third angelic order and its three grades are Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.
Principalities – watch over good spirits and rule over messages from God to man. Angels are from the Old Testament and
Archangels – communicate God’s messages to man.
Archangels are from the New Testament.
Angels – also communicate God’s messages to man. Angels are from the Old Testament.
HOST In the matter of angelic orders I must say the Church took an eclectic Biblical approach.
AQUINAS Furthermore there’s linkage between a higher order’s lowest grade and a lower order’s highest grade. Thrones are linked to Dominations and Powers are linked to Principalities.
HOST I do appreciate your detailed presentation but Celestial Hierarchy is as incomprehensible to me as modern science is to you. Those angelic orders remind me of the civil service departments of our bloated government bureaucracies. The difference is that all angels mentioned in the Bible are male. Modern women protest for equality with men and demand that God now create female angels.
AQUINAS To no avail, God already created all there is.
HOST What’s needed is for an archeologist to find in a cave a shard of pottery inscribed with the name of a woman. Biblical scholars will argue over its importance and then conclude she was a female angel with the mandatory consequence of updating the Bible.
AQUINAS Sacred scripture cannot be changed.
HOST Not true. In your time there were two popular versions, the Septuagint and Vulgate. Today there are many versions. Among them are the Douay, King James, American Standard, Revised American Standard, Revised Revised Edition, Second Edition of Revised Revised Edition, etc. God and the Bible are constantly being updated to satisfy the religious mores of the times. That being said, and without expounding in detail on convoluted angeology, why does God need angels?
AQUINAS I answer that God sends angels on missions to earth.
HOST Do you really believe that?
AQUINAS Of course, they’re part of sacred doctrine. An angel inseminated the very old Sarah who birthed Isaac. An angel announced to the Blessed Virgin Mary her Immaculate Conception of Jesus and also His birth. It was an angel who rolled away the huge stone to expose Jesus’ empty tomb and announced His resurrection. The Archangel Gabriel was God’s divine messenger.
HOST I understand that Augustine separated the angel’s intellect to morning and evening knowledge? Do you have an opinion on that separation?
AQUINAS Augustine related morning knowledge to the Word, the Son, to the primordial formless matter before creation. Evening knowledge relates to God’s creative acts during the six days.
HOST Are angels distinguished by their intellects as are men?
AQUINAS In Celestial Hierarchy the first order of angels is superior in every respect to the second and third orders. In each order the species named first is superior to the subordinate two species. For example in the first order the Seraphim are superior to the Cherubim and Thrones in status and intellect.
HOST You declare that superior angels enlighten inferior angels but didn’t mention any order.
AQUINAS It’s obvious that a higher order always enlightens a lower order. Within an order superior angels enlighten inferior angels. A teacher understands more than pupils who learn from him.
HOST What do superior angels teach?
AQUINAS They teach the grace, holiness, and blessedness of God’s perfection.
HOST Have you discovered any exception such that an inferior angel teaches a superior one?
AQUINAS No, there’s never an exception in the Celestial Hierarchy God created.
HOST Have you an opinion on the total number of angels?
AQUINAS Concerning the Seraphim and Cherubim it’s written "thousands and thousands ministered to Him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before Him" (opcit p272), that is to protect Him.
HOST I understand the thousands to minister to Him but a million to protect Him? I still don’t understand why your all-powerful God needs protection. In any case, do they protect God by surrounding the Godhead?
AQUINAS I have no knowledge of that.
HOST God sends angels on missions to earth, which means angles are mobile.
AQUINAS Being purely spiritual beings angels occupy virtual space, not physical space. However God grants them the will power to move through physical space as if they were corporeal beings. There’s general agreement that their movements relate to a succession of moves from one physical place to another physical place.
HOST For example?
AQUINAS Angels can move to local or remote locations. Angels move locally through physical space by a succession of nows. They move from departure now, through the nows of intermediate space, to the destination now. But in moving to remote locations angels do not move through the nows of intermediate space. They have the extraordinary ability to jump from departure now directly to a destination now such as earth.
HOST Do you really believe there are angels and that they move like that?
AQUINAS My personal opinion doesn’t matter. God works in many wondrous ways. What’s important is that the Church authorizes sacred doctrine as truth.
HOST In that case let’s talk about bad angels. Why did god create them?
AQUINAS God created all angels full of grace and holiness. Roundness is to circles what holiness is to angels.
HOST Holiness is also a personal quality of man.
AQUINAS Holiness is a personal quality transmuted from divine essence. Keep in mind God imprinted in the minds of angels all that He created, including human qualities.
HOST If angels full of holiness sin, then sin is greater than God.
AQUINAS Impossible! Nothing is greater than God. God is perfect, therefore it’s impossible for God to be the cause of sin. Sin is the abuse of God’s gift of free will. There are two ways angels may sin, by excessive affection for God or by assuming man’s guilt.
HOST How is it possible for excessive affection to be sinful?
AQUINAS It‘s not affection itself but what it might beget. Having excessive affection for God might, in a pernicious turnaround, make an angel so envious of God’s power that the angel yearns for some of it.
HOST What about angels assuming man’s guilt?
AQUINAS If an angel assumes the guilt of man that angel incurs also man’s obscenities including carnal sins.
HOST Such as sexual lust?
AQUINAS Concupiscence is an animal sensitivity existing in man. Angels are purely spiritual beings and do not experience concupiscence. On this matter Augustine says "the devil is not a fornicator nor a drunkard, nor anything of the like sort; yet he is proud and envious" (opcit p326).
HOST That’s the first time you mentioned the devil, the most famous fallen angel.
AQUINAS He was the leader of the Seraphim, the chief of the highest order. He fell from grace because his excessive affection for God made him yearn to be like God. That affectionate angel’s grievous sin was that he confessed to God his envious desires in terms of likeness, equality, and demeanor.
In likeness – he wanted to dwell with God in the Godhead, not in empyrean heaven.
In equality – he wanted some of God’s power.
In demeanor – he wanted to assume some of God’s glory and perfection.
God cast him from heaven and condemned to him to hell. He was thereafter called devil. About the devil it’s written "I will ascend into heaven … I will be like the Most High" and Augustine concludes "he wished to be called God" (opcit p327).
HOST God is a jealous God who, like a Roman emperor, inflicts punishment on those who yearn to usurp His power. Is the devil also a demon?
AQUINAS A demon is a very sinful angel or person. God punishes demons in two ways, He exiles them to the dark atmosphere of the night sky or condemns them to hell. Demons who committed venial sins are exiled in the dark and cold atmosphere of the night sky. Demons who committed mortal sins are condemned to the custody of the devil in the searing and eternal fires of hell.
HOST Calculations by modern scientists predict there’s dark matter in deep space. I’m wondering if your dark atmosphere is the same as the predicted dark matter.
AQUINAS God only knows that.
HOST What’s the difference between demons and the devil?
AQUINAS Demons are evil men enslaved by and in the service of the devil. Jesus claimed Judas was demonized by the devil "Yet one of you is the devil" (Jn7 70).
HOST Did God create man’s evil and malediction?
AQUINAS God created man without blemish or fault. A man having faith in God has the intellect for doing good. A man possessed by demons has the intellect for doing evil. Good and evil are choices man makes.
HOST Do angels ever enlighten humans?
AQUINAS Angels are superior to humans and when missioned by God inspire humans with revelations of God’s divinity.
HOST How can purely spiritual beings inspire humans?
AQUINAS Divine revelations occur in two ways, during prayer or by apparition.
During prayer – using their superior intellect angels implant the idea of divine revelation in the mind of the prayer.
By apparition - the angel’s spiritual being is transmuted to a corporal manifestation clothed in white robes, in an aura of fiery vapors, and surrounded by radiant glory. Angelic apparitions speak directly to humans revealing God’s message. This is the manner in which angels appeared to Abraham, Lot, and Tobias.
HOST Have you an opinion of how God determines whom to choose for His missions?
AQUINAS God selects the most appropriate being. He sent the archangel Gabriel to tell Mary that she would birth Jesus. He sent the Holy Ghost to sanctify Mary and infuse her womb with the life and love of Jesus. When arrested Jesus told his captors that He could ask His Father to send Him more than twelve armies of angels to protect him. There are many examples in the Bible.
HOST Do angels have the ability to speak?
AQUINAS Angels speak to each other by spiritually transmitting their concepts to each other. An angel contemplating God’s magnificence might communicate to another angel his concept of ‘God the king of glory’.
HOST How can angels deliver messages if they’re spiritual beings without voices.
AQUINAS Obviously through divine intervention.
HOST Getting down to earth, do souls of holy men ever become angels.
AQUINAS Although angels and men were created to serve God only angels dwell in empyrean heaven.
HOST In the Celestial Hierarchy there’s no mention of Trinity, which would certainly rank above angels. This makes credible my conclusion that Trinity was created by early Church fathers solely to explain their deification of Jesus from human to Son of God.
AQUINAS God does not create Himself. He is that He is.
God need not create what already exists because Trinity is subsistent in the Godhead. I explained that in my Treatise on Trinity, which you have thus far omitted.
HOST We will discuss Trinity in due time.
HOST You begin your Treatise on Man by expounding on his soul rather than on his birth.
AQUINAS God created man with an immaterial rational soul. The soul is a spiritual emanation that transcends matter. The soul is a gift from God through the intervention of the Holy Ghost. Keep in mind God only grants life through the Holy Ghost the giver of life and love.
HOST You declared God created all living creatures with a soul.
AQUINAS True but God created man with superior intellect so that only man is aware of his rational soul. The rational soul is associated with man’s intellect, the source of being and will.
HOST Man’s assumed soul emanates from his brain a corporeal organ. Today we know the soul to be a phantom of chemical reactions in the brain.
AQUINAS The soul does not arise from corporeity; it does not occupy space or have bulk. The soul is pure spirituality graced with God’s simplicity. As fire is the source of heat the soul is the source of life and intellect.
HOST Life and intellect are in the brain. There’s nothing spiritual in the corporeal organ of the brain, unless electrical activity is considered spiritual.
AQUINAS Might we agree that spirituality of the intellect might be likened to your brain’s electricity?
HOST Perhaps as two strangers speaking different languages trying to converse with each other. Man’s brain maintains him and controls his movements. If injured the brain’s electrical network is damaged with the appropriate loss of bodily functions. Your spirituality comes from God. The brain’s spirituality are the electrical charges of + and –.
AQUINAS I’m aware of the elektron and arithmetic values of + and – but they are not parts of man’s dual nature, soul and body.
HOST That’s the old Manichean duality of spirit and body, good and evil, light and darkness. The fact is that man is all matter, a purely physical being without spirituality or soul. We have modern electrical machines, such as PET and MRI scanners, capable of diagnosing every part of the body including its invisible parts and their electrical activity. Those machines have never detected a soul. When man dies all the physicals in him die, including your assumed soul.
AQUINAS God gifted man with a soul whose spirituality strives for unity with God’s perfection whence it came. When the body dies the soul survives in order to return to God.
HOST Does that mean souls are dispersed all over the heavens in immense galactic distributions whose intellects populate deep space?
AQUINAS All men have intellect but not a collective intellect. Each man has a soul but there’s not a collective soul representing all men. That’s the mistake Averroës made. Men’s intellects are distinguished by the diversities of their imaginations. Moreover God privileges certain souls to receive His revelations.
HOST The intellectual differences you speak of are generated by capabilities of the brain’s electrical network. Do you believe that man has a passionate soul created during coition and associated with the heart?
AQUINAS I believe there’s passion in the heart but not a passionate soul. I believe as Augustine does that the rational soul controls the passionate heart for good or evil.
HOST In today’s computer systems we call Augustine’s conclusion control over data.
AQUINAS Computer as in computare?
HOST Yes, a machine that does computations. You described also the soul separated from the senses in life and from the body in death.
AQUINAS The soul yearns to return to God, it’s creator. In life the more a soul is separated from the senses of its animal genus, that is from the secular world, the nobler the souls is and the closer its relationship to God. That’s why the noblest souls are those of holy men who devote their lives to God. Death is the true separator of the soul from its body. Upon death man’s body becomes corrupt and decays but there’s no corruption in the soul because there’s no corruption in God.
HOST It’s obvious that when man dies everything in him dies.
AQUINAS No, souls survive death. Upon death merited a soul is raised to heaven ascending through the firmament to join the Father for the experience true joy. However lower animals have mortal souls that die when their bodies die.
HOST Do souls in heaven retain memories of earth?
AQUINAS Souls in heaven do not retain memories of earth or what’s happening on earth except through God’s divine intervention.
HOST Is divine intervention the same as fate?
AQUINAS Where fate is concerned there are two causes, unchangeable and changeable. God is the first cause and last end of all things, which is the exemplary order in the universe. His decisions are called unchangeable fate. Man is a secondary cause and his fickle decisions are called changeable fate.
HOST Is fate the same as predestination?
AQUINAS Predestination includes fate because of God’s immutable unchangeable decisions in which He preordains man to salvation.
HOST Do you think your lifelong devotion to God is due to fate or predestination?
AQUINAS I was always devoted to God even as a child. I cannot think of a time when I was not. Therefore, may God forgive me, I believe I was predestined to serve Him.
HOST Do you think that’s the purpose of life, to serve God?
AQUINAS We must be as servants to God our master to Whom we shall return. The purpose of life is not only to serve God but to live as He intended. What is your answer to the purpose of life?
HOST Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Obviously the purpose of life is to stay alive. The dead have no purpose.
AQUINAS Your simplistic answer avoids the philosophical reasons for living.
HOST Living got cave man from his environment to yours in the 1200’s and from your dark ages to the current enlightened environment today.
AQUINAS That progress was made possible because of God.
HOST No, irrespective of God. Neither cave man nor our environment were aware of God. Individual diversity created today’s environment. That diversity was and is created by the vastly different and chemically complex patterns resident in humans. You mentioned that the purpose of life is to live as God intended. What are God’s intentions? God never wrote anything or spoke directly to anyone.
AQUINAS God makes His intentions known through His prophets.
HOST God’s prophets were superstitious; they believed in magic, miracles, and phantoms none of that is believed today.
AQUINAS Those devoted to and in the service of God achieve their goals by having a relationship with Him.
HOST And also achieve their ghouls as in the Holy Ghost.
AQUINAS What?
HOST A bas-relief, a little levity.
AQUINAS In God lightness rises to the joy of heaven. Man must recognize God, establish a relationship with Him, and live by His precepts so that upon death man returns to Him for eternal bliss in heaven.
HOST If returning to God is life’s purpose, why not simply commit suicide for a quick short-cut return?
AQUINAS Suicide is a pagan rite and a mortal sin. You should know that a soul does not call itself. God only calls each soul to Himself at the time He chooses.
HOST So man is vulnerable to the beck and call of a dogmatic God?
AQUINAS A loving God Who calls man to Himself.
HOST In your treatise you go on to describe that free will emanates from the rational soul.
AQUINAS God created free will to enable man to choose good over evil. An object in the intellect or will is higher than an object in the senses. The more abstract an object is the nobler it is because it’s closer to God. Man’s intellect controls his senses because he has dominion over them through free will. Brute animals do not have free will so they act instinctively but rational man exercises free will to seek or shun, acquire or reject.
HOST Today many contend there’s no free will because choice is the result of chemistry acting on brain physiology. Those choices might even include disavowal of God. When God gifted man with free will, He might have created His own demise.
AQUINAS God created man with free will to choose faith over doubt and good over evil.
HOST That choice is not wholly free because chemistry operating on the brain programs man to particular dispositions. Once gratified the brain requires more and more stimulation for more and more gratification. That gratification might maintain, enhance, or ruin man.
AQUINAS I answer that those choices are a matter of free will.
HOST You expound on man’s knowledge. Among ancient philosophers there’s no agreement on matters of knowledge. Aristotle claims that knowledge derives from the sensual appetites. Democritus holds that knowledge is caused by phantoms entering the soul. Plato declares that knowledge derives from phantoms, apparitions, and revelations. What do you say?
AQUINAS Sometimes agreement does not lead to truth. Plato claims there are different souls such as a nutritive soul in the liver, a lustful soul in the heart, a knowledgeable soul in the mind, etc.
HOST According to him if a doctor removes an organ the patient would die. In today’s world Plato’s claims are ridiculous. Today doctors remove organs all the time to make patients feel better or keep them alive.
AQUINAS I believe as does Aristotle. He says the soul has two kinds of knowledge, appetitive and intellectual. Appetitive knowledge derives from the senses that make use of corporeal organs. Passions arise from intense emotions. Among brute animals conflicts arise from the passions for food and sex. The satisfaction of those passions relieves their anger for food and sexual lust. Man desires what he apprehends and appreciates, therefore the appetitive power is necessarily assigned to the passionate soul.
HOST I say appetitive knowledge derives from the brain as do the emotions of passion.
AQUINAS Intellectual knowledge derives from the rational soul. Intellect and memory have different functions but are intertwined in knowledge. Intellect has active power and memory has passive power. Intellect in potency actively places an object in memory. When called upon memory’s passive power retrieves the object for the intellect.
HOST Therefore the intellect’s active power is aware of an object’s activity even though the passive power is not.
AQUINAS The intellect is aware of external objects before it understands their activity and places them in memory. Conversely God’s understanding is the same as His divine essence. Augustine mimics this precept when he says "I understand that I understand" (opcit p467).
HOST Fortunately science understands external objects and their activities without God’s intervention. You go on to say that knowledge of God comes through prayer and teaching.
AQUINAS That God is self-evident is knowable through His works. God’s knowledge may be acquired by one’s interior principle through prayer or by exterior principle through instruction from a teacher. Prayer enables man to acquire knowledge of God by communicating with Him. A teacher leads his students from the little knowledge they know to the grater knowledge the teacher knows. All knowledge proceeds from previous knowledge. If a student knows only Latin and the teacher speaks Greek, the student at first learns nothing but will eventually learn Greek.
HOST In that situation it’s better for the frustrated student to depart the classroom and find a teacher who speaks Latin. There are teachers who lack the intellect for truth, such as those who teach that life begins at conception when it’s really transferred through sperm and egg.
AQUINAS Averroës taught that all men have a common intellect so that one man doesn’t have the knowledge distinct from another. He was wrong. Each man has his own intellect as determined by God. A good teacher rouses his students to recall what they already know.
HOST Do you think God as teacher taught man how to govern himself?
AQUINAS God governance brings all to a just and good end. Boëthius says "God dispenses all for good" (opcit p533).
HOST Some say God does not govern at all because after the six days He rested, and remaining in that state of inertia abandoned all He created. Parents care for their children but God abandoned man on earth to fend for himself.
AQUINAS God gave man intelligence and free will to make choices in order to cope with the vicissitudes of life on earth.
HOST How can man cope with a tidal wave that destroys villages and cities and kills all the inhabitants?
AQUINAS Man cannot predict what God has in mind. But after a storm the vegetation is nourished; it grows greener and more plentiful.
HOST The more an argument is intellectualized like that the more it slouches toward myth.
AQUINAS Not true. Dionysius says " for no one acts intending evil" (opcit p534).
HOST Not true. Many act out of evil – lies, thefts, murders, and wars are among a multitude of evils.
AQUINAS Persons who perpetrate such evils are under the spell of demons.
HOST Demons such as your fellow churchmen who persecuted and martyred dissenters? In those persecutions the Church was the demon.
AQUINAS The Church Militant must punish dissenters and heretics because they’re intent on destroying Christ, the head of the Church of Rome. Dissenters have free will to do good but they do evil. Damascene says that free will is the same as choice. Free will empowers the intellect to choose between good and evil. Whatever good man does is by the grace of God. Whatever evil man does is due to his moral weakness in submitting to evil.
HOST If God created all there is He created evil.
AQUINAS God cannot be the cause of evil because of His infinite goodness, love, and perfection. In god here’s no contradiction.
HOST If that’s true what’s the cause of evil?
AQUINAS The cause of evil is the deprivation of good in nature and man. A negative agent acting upon a form creates an accident depriving that form of good thereby causing evil.
HOST For example.
AQUINAS In a wood house fire can be the negative agent creating the accident depriving the house of the goodness of shelter, thereby causing the evil of consuming heat and suffocating smoke. There’s no negative agent or accident in God therefore He cannot be the cause of evil.
HOST Can you give me a human example?
AQUINAS A demon is a negative agent acting upon man depriving his soul of goodness which is the cause of evil.
HOST Are you inferring deprivation leads to evil?
AQUINAS No, deprivation is the absence of good. That absence might cause a negative agent without being evil.
HOST For example.
AQUINAS A man deprived of strength or sight has the negative agent of weakness or blindness but those debilities are not evil. Evil corrupts a man’s free choice for goodness. Dionysius says "To be punished is not evil; but it is evil to be made worthy of punishment" (opcit p264).
HOST That means a pacifist who doesn’t support arbitration might be worthy of punishment.
AQUINAS Augustine says "Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence or goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil" (opcit p13).
HOST Wasn’t it Mathew who claimed a good tree doesn’t bear evil fruit. Aren’t those two very different conclusions reason enough not to believe wholly in sacred doctrine?
AQUINAS Only Mathew is part of sacred doctrine. I say that the infinite goodness of God allows evil to exist so that from it can arise good. In that conclusion I agree with Augustine.
HOST I don’t believe any good can come out of evil. When evil is done it cannot be undone and man suffers its consequences and ravages.
AQUINAS There are circumstances in which demons assault some men so that good can come out of evil. A demon might assault a man to hinder his progress towards God but it’s God who actually orders the assault.
HOST That doesn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t God simply order good? When evil is done it remains evil without any good being produced.
AQUINAS The purpose of the assault is to tempt those men to disavow God. However most tempted men resist by converting the evil assault to the good of virtue. Therefore God triumphs once again in the conversion of evil to virtue.
HOST Evil is a choice of free will.
AQUINAS In their mutual sin Eve tempted Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit. She blamed the devil for her choice to eat the fruit. Eve’s free choice could have rejected the devil’s temptation. Free choice might redirect one’s sensual appetite from sin to virtue.
HOST But in that situation God deliberately set out to entrap Eve by giving the superserpent language and voice. God deliberately put Eve, and also Adam, in harm’s way. I don’t know any parents who would deliberately put their children in harm’s way.
AQUINAS It was the devil who entrapped Eve by changing himself to the serpent. It’s assumed the devil still wanted to usurp some of God’s power. The devil beguiled Eve to test his power over man.
HOST Are you saying the devil performed a miracle by transmuting himself to talking serpent?
AQUINAS Miracles are works outside and beyond the power of the devil or any creature. Contrasted with God’s divine power nothing can be called a miracle. Miracles are acts that surpass nature’s power, the more nature is surpassed the greater the miracle. God alone performs true miracles.
HOST What about the miracles of Pharaoh’s magicians and the fire from heaven that consumed Job’s servants and sheep?
AQUINAS False miracles claimed by the devil. God only performs true miracles.
HOST We recently had a sort of miracle. A doctor saw a corpse, a certified dead body, moving on a cold slab. When uncovered the presumed corpse spoke asking "where am I?" Was that a miracle or did the certifying doctor make a mistake?
AQUINAS How can I answer such a proposito? I know nothing of the life of the presumed corpse. It could have been a holy man whom God miraculously resuscitated to continue his holy work.
HOST You expound on man’s habits good and bad. You say habits arise from the will to do good or evil. Habits arise from man’s individual behavior, which might be influenced by beliefs other than God or the devil.
AQUINAS Habits are man’s acts habituated in the mind. Good habits lead to virtue, bad habits to vice and sin.
HOST Assume that a hermit’s personal habits result in a foul body odor. If he leaves his hermitage and mingles with society his foul body odor would not be tolerated. Do you consider his foul body odor to be a vice or sin?
AQUINAS If a man wills intention for a good habit but then falls to a bad habit he wills vice and sin. Augustine says "it is by the will that we sin, and live righteously" (opcit, Volume 2, p129).
HOST That being true, let’s begin with good intentions and good habits.
AQUINAS Good habits establish virtues that are devoid of evil. Virtues move towards man’s perfection. Virtue can arise from the will or soul, both are resident in the intellect. Augustine says "No one can doubt that virtue makes the soul exceeding good" (opcit, p28)
HOST What are the causes of good habits and virtue?
AQUINAS By nature and to varying degrees good habits and virtue arise from man’s belief in God. It’s written "virtue is that which makes its possessor good" (opcit p31). According to Divine Law there are three species of virtue – theological, cardinal, and intellectual. The Church designates Seven Virtues, three theological virtues and four cardinal virtues.
HOST Let’s being with theological virtues.
AQUINAS The three daughters of Job signify the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. God infused these virtues in man. These virtues are the building blocks of Catholicism. Dionysius says "faith is about the simple and everlasting truth" (opcit p380).
HOST What’s everlasting truth?
AQUINAS it’s the first truth which is the Divine Truth.
HOST What’s Divine Truth?
AQUINAS Divine Truth is known materially by its formal aspect of helping man in his journey to God. The proofs of geometry are known materially by the formal aspects of arithmetic analysis. The worth of a physician is known materially by the formal aspect of the health of his patient.
HOST All that being so how does that concern faith?
AQUINAS Of the virtue of faith it’s written "no man believeth unless he will" (opcit p32). God infused man with certain supernatural principles such as believing without seeing. It’s written that "faith is the evidence of things that appear not" (opcit p382). Jesus told His followers that it was God who gave them heavenly bread and that those who believe in Him shall have eternal life. A short prayer summarizes the act of faith:
I firmly believe, O my divine Jesus, that Thou are truly present in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. I believe that it really and substantially contains Thy Body and Blood, thy soul and divinity. I acknowledge these truths; I believe these wonders; I adore the power that hath wrought them, the same power that said: "Let there be light", and light was made. Verily, thou art a hidden God, the Savior. Amen. (Latin-English Booklet Missal, p5)
HOST That prayer begins with the oxymoronic phrase ‘divine Jesus’. Do you really believe in that prayer?
AQUINAS A servant of God having unshakable faith, I answer with my mind and heart yes and absolutely.
HOST Let’s proceed to the virtue of hope. What does hope mean theologically?
AQUINAS Hope is the intellectual attainment of faith. Hope is traceable to the lingering confidence of Jews who believed the words of the prophets would be confirmed by the coming of the Messiah. For Catholics hope is the expectation that upon death there’s salvation and resurrection. Hope infers God’s works strive for goodness in the world and perfection in man. We hope in two ways, absolutely and supposedly:
Absolutely – pertains to the movement towards one’s own good for union with God.
Supposedly – pertains to the movement towards someone else’s good for his union with God. A short prayer summarizes the act of hope:
Since Thou dost deign to come and dwell within me, O my Redeemer, what may I not expect from thy bounty! I therefore present myself before Thee with that lively confidence which Thine infinite goodness inspires. Thou not only knowest all my wants, but Thou art also willing and able to relieve them. Thou hast not only invited me, but also promised me Thy gracious assistance. Amen. (ibid)
HOST Which came first faith or hope?
AQUINAS In order to hope man must first have something to hope for which is faith. It’s written "He that cometh to God, must believe that He is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 2, p461).
HOST I believe faith was inserted first and foremost to assuage Christian doubts about the existence of God. Furthermore having blind faith in Church dogma relieves Christians of their doubts about God and Trinity. For those reasons it’s clear to me faith was given priority over hope.
AQUINAS Faith means faith in God. Trinity is in God. Trinity and God are one and the same.
HOST I’ll have more to say about Trinity later, when we discuss your treatise on it.
HOST What about charity?
AQUINAS When faith and hope combine for the
spiritual union with God it’s called charity. Charity is love having the
qualities of benevolence and friendship. Those qualities are founded on
communication between man and his love for God, as shown by early
Christians who performed services in their homes. Charity is the greatest
virtue because in communicating with God we attain His truth and eternal
happiness. It’s written "I will not now call you servants … but my
friends" (opcit p483). A short prayer summarizes the act of charity:
O God, Who art Charity! Behold, he who abides in charity abides in Thee. I desire to receive Thee in this Sacrament, that I may be more strongly united to Thee in the bond of love. Who shall separate me from the love of Christ my Savior? Oh, that neither life nor death, nor any accident of fortune, nor any creature may ever be able! (Latin-English Booklet Missal, p5)
HOST Today charity is called helping and almsgiving to the poor, the less fortunate, and victims of natural or man made disasters. In December 2004 there was tsunami, a massive sea wave, that destroyed villages and killed hundreds of thousands of God’s children. In an act of charity the world helped survivors maintain life.
AQUINAS In each charitable event there’s union with God. Charity to the poor shows God’s affection and mercy to all his children.
HOST Death can be merciful to those in unbearable pain but never affectionate. You mentioned cardinal virtues.
AQUINAS Of cardinal virtues there are four – prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.
Prudence – is the reasonable fulfillment of doing good.
Justice – actually brings about the practice of doing good.
Temperance – curbs and represses the temptation of bad habits such as drunkeness and sexual excess.
Fortitude – protects the temperate mind in its struggle against bad habits.
The four virtues are interrelated for the common purpose of good habits. For example there’s no real justice without prudence, temperance, and fortitude. The Church places prudence before justice because it’s not wise to tempt God. But justice is also important because humans err, their sins deserve equal justice.
HOST Those cardinal virtues are applicable to society not God.
AQUINAS They’re applicable to God and society. A virtuous man strives for the perfection that moves him closer to God.
HOST You mentioned also intellectual virtues.
AQUINAS Intellectual virtues arise from man’s habitual desire for goodness and his struggle for perfection, such as his love for God.
HOST There’s another kind of love, sexual love. You’ve chosen to be celibate but do you have an opinion on sexual love
AQINAS For purposes of procreation God intends sexual love to be between a man and woman . However man’s habitual and appetitive desires of the flesh, such as sexual gratification, might be given to bad habits and cannot be virtuous. The cause of all love is an appetitive power in the passionate soul, which is by nature passive.
HOST How can the appetite in a passionate soul be passive? It’s by nature aggressive to satisfy itself.
AQUINAS The appetitive power in a lover remains in a passive state until he yearns for the knowledge of the thing loved. Augustine says "none can love what he does not know" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, p738).
HOST Not true. Married couples petitioning for divorce overwhelm our courts because they don’t know each other.
AQUINAS You’re referring to sexual love which knows the sight of the body but not of the mind. There’s another kind of love, spiritual love, a love for goodness in the thing loved. In a passionate soul the cause of spiritual love is goodness, in which there’s a twofold union between the lover and thing loved. That spiritual union is appetitive and ceremonial:
Appetetive – the indwelling passion of the lover proceeds towards God the loved one.
Ceremomial – the external acts from the lover for union with God the loved one.
But keep in mind that only in spiritual love can there be true ecstasy.
HOST There’s ecstasy in sexual love.
AQUINAS In sexual love the act of love might lead to ecstasy or renunciation.
HOST How is that possible?
AQUINAS Excessive sexual love goes beyond the need for procreation and therefore finds evil in the act of love. However in a ceremonial act of spiritual love the passionate soul is transported outside the body. In that detached state the soul may suffer the ecstasy of separation for union with God.
HOST How can one suffer while in ecstasy?
AQUINAS The soul hovers over its body in the guise of the life and love of the Holy Ghost. In such incidents the soul suffers by being separated from its body while at the same time experiencing the intense love of the Holy Ghost, therefore the suffering ecstasy.
HOST Do you believe that?
AQUINAS In union with God, nothing is impossible.
HOST After that detour, returning to your treatise, you inserted the theological virtues before the four cardinal virtues. Why?
AQUINAS Faith in God is first because one cannot establish a relationship with God unless he has faith that God exists.
HOST Having discussed good habits and virtues, let’s now engage bad habits.
AQUINAS Contrary to good habits, bad habits lead to vices which lead to sins. Augustine says "vice is a quality in respect of which the soul is evil" (opcit, Volume 2, p106), and of course evil begets sin.
HOST The subject of sin is inexhaustible because anyone at anytime might do something designated as sin. Let’s begin at the beginning with man’s first sin, original sin. In Eden God forbid Adam and Eve to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and bad. But Eve couldn’t resist the serpent’s guile and ate the fruit. She gave some to Adam and he ate it. You know the story better than I.
AQUINAS Thereupon God punished Adam by staining his soul with original sin.
HOST Did God stain Eve’s soul? She also sinned.
AQUINAS There was no need to stain her soul.
HOST Discrimination against Adam?
AQUINAS No, because God infused Adam’s semen with original sin for transfer to Eve during intercourse.
HOST What, a transfer from Adam’s stained soul to Eve’s pure soul? How was the stain of original sin in Adam’s soul transmuted to his semen?
AQUINAS We cannot fully comprehend the mind of God. He stained Adam’s soul for the transfer original sin to their children, Cain and Abel, and to all future generations.
HOST It’s obvious to me the Church devised original sin for sacramental reasons.
AQUINAS No, it’s part of sacred doctrine as inferred in the Second Story of Creation.
HOST Are you inferring all humans are doomed unless they cleanse original sin from their souls?
AQUINAS The Church does not sit in judgement of man.
HOST But that’s precisely what the Church does.
AQUINAS Baptism is a sacramental rite removing original sin, thereby enabling the baptized to become Christian for possible entrance to heaven.
HOST I thought Jesus’ sacrificial death saved man from original sin.
AQUINAS Jesus’ sacrifice saved man from all sins.
HOST Those sins resulted from God’s creation of imperfect man.
AQUINAS Damascene holds that, in effect, God realized the weakness of His own handiwork.
HOST How can a God of perfection create a weak and imperfect man, a reject? As creator God was a failure.
AQUINAS You misinterpret Damascene. The weakness he speaks of is not man’s physical nature but his will, which sometimes eschews good for evil.
HOST The Church designates a host of sins, so I ask you what is your interpretation of sin?
AQUINAS Sin is a calamity of the soul comparable to a disease of the body. Sin is a deliberate disobedience of the known teachings or will of God.
HOST You mean Church teachings.
AQUINAS Teachings as derived from sacred doctrine. Man sins when he disobeys God’s teachings.
HOST Which God, God 1 or God 2?
AQUINAS The teachings of the one God as described in my Treatise on God. Augustine says "Sin is a word, deed, or desire contrary to eternal law" (opcit p193).
HOST That statement is so general it’s meaningless. What’s eternal law?
AQUINAS It’s God’s law.
HOST What’s God’s law?
AQUINAS All the doctrine and dogma described, taught, and promulgated by the Church.
HOST I thought God’s Law was the Divine Law you previoulsy described.
AQUINAS Two phrases without a difference.
HOST Well, back to your interpretation of sin. Where do we begin?
AQUINAS Perhaps with the three species of sin.
HOST Another trinity, this time of sins?
AQUINAS The Church declares that when man sins he sins against God, his neighbor, or himself.
Sins against God – man disobeys God’s teachings, particularly Commandments 1-3.
Sins against neighbor – man disobeys God’s teachings, particularly Commandments 4-10.
Sins against himself – man departs from the rule of reason such as gluttony, sexual lust, or prodigality.
HOST How can man sin against himself when his free will tells him to sin?
AQUINAS He sins against himself and Divine Law as taught by the Church.
HOST Are we back to Divine Law?
AQUINAS Divine Law encompasses the body of sacred doctrine, Church doctrine, and Church dogma.
HOST But the Church exercises its free will by indexing sin at will. Sin in one country or diocese might not be sin in another country or diocese. The pagan Roman emperor Diocletian laid out diocesan administration. Constantine the Great continued it as does the Church today. Furthermore sin in one generation might not be sin in a future generation.
AQUINAS The power of the Church is that its precepts are consistent and that if change is necessary it acts only after deliberate consideration. The Church recognizes two genera of sin, venial and mortal. Venial sin is a lesser transgression of God’s teachings and Church precepts. Man commits venial sin through cowardice or theological ignorance. The venial sinner is liable for temporal punishment only after which he is pardoned.
HOST For example.
AQUINAS Not regularly going to confession, missing mass, or eating meat on Friday.
HOST In the 1920’s eating meat on Friday was a sin. The Church demanded Catholics eat fish because fishermen had to make a living. Today eating meat on Friday is no longer a sin. Today the sins you mentioned are no longer sins.
AQUINAS Missing Mass is not a sin?
HOST No, in fact a Mass can be televised into one’s home.
AQUINAS Televised, what’s that? I know the Greek and Latin derivations of that word but cannot comprehend its application to the Mass.
HOST In this instance to televise means to transmit the Mass, its images and voices, into the homes of Catholic viewers. The televised process is called TV.
AQUINAS But during Mass the congregants feel the presence of Christ, as represented by a priest.
HOST Today the Christ passion has been replaced by telepassion by which Christ is transmitted via television into the homes of viewers.
AQUINAS I don’t understand any of that.
HOST Telepassion enables Catholics to view and participate in a televised Mass. In TV for example the ritual of the Mass is televised as a spiritual message delivered by the Holy Ghost directly into houses, where a TV receiver converts the message to images of the Mass itself. The TV substitutes as an altar. The rituals of kneeling, sitting, and standing are replaced by the viewers, the congregants, getting up and down for any number of reasons. During communion the preferred snack and a red wine spritzer substitute for the body and blood of Christ. In the ritual of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself is transmitted over a wire or through air into the homes of viewers. In these sacramental rituals divine essence is transmitted and converted to human attributes for the benefit of the home-Massed viewer.
AQUINAS As a man of science I’m interested in your modern developments but I must confess I don’t understand any of what you’re saying.
HOST Today’s bishops, with the Vatican’s blessing, have approved the practice with Nihil Obstat, proclaiming that electricity is akin to God’s spirituality and that His messages can be transmitted without sending angels on missions. Electricity as spiritual intervention enables the sick or handicapped to attend and view Mass in their homes.
AQUINAS If the sick and disabled cannot attend Mass the forgiving Church mercifully pardons them.
HOST Think of the Mass as being celebrated in one’s home rather than in a church. It’s transmitted spiritually through the air or celebrated by a series of moving pictures as the priest moves about the altar. The televised Mass must be as confusing to you as your version of creation is confusing to me.
AQUINAS The Mass is the bulwark of Catholicism.
HOST The Mass ritualizes God using the names of Jesus, Jesus Christ, Lord, and Trinity. For special occasions such as funerals, weddings, or commemorations the significance of the Mass depends on the amount of money Catholics pay for a Low Mass or High Mass. It has more to do with money than communion with God.
AQUINAS A Low Mass has only one server and the ritual is not sung. You must understand that in a High Mass the priest sings the ritual, there are several or many servers, and a choir, etc. The Church is generous but someone must pay for all those services.
HOST Very well but you should know that popes have approved televising the Mass.
AQUINAS Please, I beg you, enough. This is too much for me to comprehend or bear.
HOST Speaking of popes I’m reminded there’s no succession plan for an incapacitated pope.
AQUINAS Are you suggesting popes who approved televising the Mass were incapacitated?
HOST No, no. But certain popes, even when incapacitated, act like dictators who refuse to relinquish power. Today there’s an incapacitated pope who refuses to abdicate. He should follow Diocletian’s advice and retire to the luxury of the papal palace.
AQUINAS But two popes claiming the papacy might inhibit or even temporarily suspend the authority of the Church.
HOST There, you’ve said it. It’s all about power. The prestige of the papacy is too great to give up, especially for a pope constantly in need of attention. Now, returning to venial sin, how is it remitted?
AQUINAS Venial sins may be remitted by prayer and fasting but especially by prayer. Life is about a relationship with God through prayer.
HOST How can corporeal man relate to God’s divine essence?
AQUINAS Through prayer.
HOST But prayer is communicating with one’s inner self. Does God suddenly appear in a bright cloud of divine essence to hear one praying?
AQUINAS God gifted man with a soul, the medium for communicating with Him through prayer.
HOST How can fasting remit sin?
AQUINAS God rewards fasting as suffering in His name. God rewards all suffering in His name therefore martyrs are the most highly rewarded.
HOST So self-imposed suffering bribes God for reward?
AQUINAS Obviously you jest. The Father understands that His only begotten Son suffered for the redemption of sinful man.
HOST On the matter of suffering, I’ve read that on Good Friday there are Catholic pilgrims who wear a crown of thorns, are scourged, and profusely bleeding walking in Jesus’ footsteps on the Via Dolorosa.
AQUINAS Suffering is a form of worshipping God.
HOST In reliving the Passion there are masochistic zealots who are actually crucified for the experience of the suffering passing them into the dulling twilight of pain’s sensitivity, to be thereafter transported into the ecstasy in which they behold the Beatific Vision. Fortunately they are rescued before dying.
AQUINAS Saints who suffered in the name of God have experienced the ecstasy of viewing the Beatific Vision.
HOST Secularists eschew God for the ecstasy of alcohol, drugs, and pornography. Well, for all that suffering and ecstasy let’s continue with remission venial sin.
AQUINAS If upon death venial sins remain unpardoned the sinner is not prevented from seeing the Beatific Vision.
HOST You need to explain that.
AQUINAS Unremitted sins may be remitted through prayer or intercessory acts of the living.
HOST Why would a sinner or anyone want to look upon the countenance of God? God told Moses not to look at Him lest he Moses be consumed by God’s divinity.
AQUINAS That’s the vindictive God of the Old Testament. Our God is a personal and loving God.
HOST But you God also punishes sin.
AQUINAS If a child out of innocence commits venial sin he’s forgiven without punishment. Also venial sin such as habitual drunkenness cannot become a mortal sin.
HOST What about mortal sin?
AQUINAS One commits a mortal sin if with free choice and full knowledge of Church authority he deliberately transgresses the will of God, His commandments, or Catholic teachings.
HOST For example.
AQUINAS Heresy, blasphemy, adultery, murder.
HOST Are those the distinctions between venial and mortal sin?
AQUINAS The sins differ in aforethought, intent, and subsequent punishment. Mortal sin stains the soul; venial sin does not. Mortal sin is a deliberate confrontation of God or Church authority with intent to do evil. Sinners are liable for permanent punishment and if upon death they remain unpardoned they are prevented from seeing God’s Beatific Vision.
HOST I understand the Church condemns mortal sinners to hell. How can the Church, a group of priests, condemn anyone to hell or any other place?
AQUINAS On earth the Church is God’s vicar and priests are its representatives. The Church condemns mortal sinners to hell, depriving their souls of sanctifying grace.
HOST What about remission of mortal sins?
AQUINAS Mortal sin stains the soul; venial sin does not. Mortal sin cannot be remitted through fasting or prayer as can venial sin. Only the Church can remit mortal sin.
HOST Today there are mortal sinners, such as those bearing false witness in courts of law and habitual adulterers such as those in Boston. There it’s common for Catholic adulterers to bribe bishops and even cardinals for absolution of their adulteries. Will those absolved mortal sinners see the Beatific Vision?
AQUINAS The Church has full authority for pardoning sins through absolution. The Church is loving, forgiving, and pastors its flocks as shepherds of God’s lost lambs.
HOST Therefore the control of sin is under the purview of the Church. To comply with societal mores the Church can add, change, or delete sin at will.
AQUINAS Not at will, only through careful and prolonged consideration of a proposed absolution or change.
HOST Seven being the favorite number of Hebrews, you expound also on the Seven Deadly Sins as defined by the Church.
AQUINAS The seven deadly sins are pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. These sins are called deadly because they’re fatal to man’s progress towards God.
HOST Why are pride and covetousness prioritized first and second?
AQUINAS Recall that the chief Seraphim angel full of pride coveted some of God’s power. God punished him and condemned him to hell. It doesn’t pay to challenge God.
HOST Today anger tops the list. Individual anger leads to self-mutilation of one’s body and the murder of other bodies. Today angry mothers commanded by God murder their infants and children. More mothers than fathers hear the voice of God commanding them to murder their children by a variety of means including drowning, scalding, and dismembering. The dastardly acts performed over the tears and frantic shrieks of children begging mom to stop. Today Eve’s corruption still lives.
AQUINAS I’ve heard of such acts by demonized women. They are not commanded by God but assuredly by the devil.
HOST In ethnic and political cleansing dictators full of societal anger have order the mass murder of hundreds of millions of people.
AQUINAS Did you intend to say hundreds of thousands?
HOST No, hundreds of millions. Today’s population is reckoned in the billions. There’s also gluttony. It’s due to the exuberant consumption of junk food, which leads to obesity and disease. Today it’s a venial sin to be fat and a mortal sin to be obese.
AQUINAS Friars needn’t be concerned about being fat. We have a limited but sufficient diet.
HOST One of the deadly sins is lust. Sexual lust is required for procreation, for survival of the species. But there are humans who eschew procreation in order to engage in acts of homosexual lust.
AQUINAS Humans are liable to error that leads to corruption. God only is free of and uncontaminated by error and corruption. It’s written "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and the men gave up natural intercourse with women and burned with lust for one another. Men did shameful things with men, and thus received in their own persons the penalty for their perversity" (Rom1, 26-27).
HOST Men having sex with men is one thing but it’s dastardly for priests to have sex with innocent, young, and vulnerable altar boys under their tutelage. I’m referring to the widespread corruption in today’s Church. Corruption by pedophile priests raping cherubic and sexually innocent altar boys. It’s a common practice among homosexual priests because the corrupt Church tolerates it. Pedophilia begins in seminaries, the semenary source of lust, and continues in parishes all over the world.
AQUINAS You should understand that, in order to consolidate schismatic Christian sects into the Church of Rome, pedophilia was tolerated by the early Church especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Pedophilia is one reason why the Western Church broke away from the Eastern Church. Keep in mind that Rome did not fall because of pedophilia in the Church, Rome fell because Constantine the Great abandoned the city, its people, and culture for Byzantium his new capital in the Eastern Empire.
HOST There were other reasons why the Western Church of Rome separated from the Eastern Church.
AQUINAS In 1054 the Eastern Church believed the five patriarchal bishops ascended from Jesus’ apostles. Those bishops were considered rulers of the Church, not the pope in Rome. The more serious split was that they believed the Holy Ghost proceeds directly from the Father, not from the Father and Son. Also they did not believe in the Mary’s Immaculate Conception or in saint’s intercessory acts with God. I covered most of this in my Treatise on Trinity. But the Western Church and Eastern Church shared the same beliefs in the Bible and its sacred doctrine. Eventually the pedophile priests were punished and the practice drastically reduced in the two churches.
HOST Today rather than defrocking pedophile priests the Church enables Cardinals to cover up pedophilia by shuffling those priests from one parish to another. In their new parishes pedophile priests have new contingents of altar boys from which to choose for servicing themselves and their demonized Mass. In those parishes fellow confessors absolve pedophile priests by requesting from them the penance of revealing the names of the victimized boys, thereby adding them to their own stable of altar boys. Moreover the Church incites pedophilia by continuing to install altar boys rather than alter the practice with altar girls.
AQUINAS God will punish those pedophile priests who are too weak to resist the spell of demons.
HOST Until judgement days those priests live in earthly bliss. It’s obvious to me the Church is a closed society determined to retain power at any cost. Its toleration of pedophilia supports the Cabalistic Society of Jesus. Sexual lust in homosexual priests reduces God to pimp serving pedophile priests. I must tell you that in today’s Church pedophilia is greater than God.
AQUINAS Heresy! Nothing is greater than God! That declaration in my day would have been punishable by death. In my day your heresy would have been burned from your body and your soul condemned to hell. I must tell you that I’m in favor of such punishment.
HOST The Church would punish me instead of pedoaphile priests?
AQUINAS Pedophile priests and heresy would be punished. Your great antipathy is understandable but you must know that, even if said in jest, it is impossible for anything to be greater than God.
HOST Is pedophilia a mortal sin?
AQUINAS Yes but remember that even angels have fallen because they’ve grievously sinned.
HOST If angels sin and humans sin, what’s wrong with God’s creative process? He keeps making rejects like pedophile priets.
AQUINAS Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
HOST I don’t understand Latin but it sounds ominous.
AQUINAS Quite the contrary. Using sacramental holy water the priest begs of God: Thou shalt sprinkle me , O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed; Thou shalt wash me, and I shall become whiter than snow.
HOST Burdened with the weight of all those sins on their shoulders it’s no wonder Christians need to be saved. We haven’t discussed the physical act of reproduction, man’s primary purpose on earth. Let’s begin at the beginning with man’s birth.
AQUINAS Catholics believe that through the grace of God life begins at conception. As the heat of the sun generates life on earth, God makes possible for the heat of semen to penetrate woman to conceive man. The male agent, the generator, provides the active force in semen. When potency in semen acts out it enables the female agent, the incubator, to conceive. Therefore a new being comes into being through the grace of God in the two principle agents, generator and incubator.
HOST Are souls transferred from male to female?
AQUINAS During conception God creates a rational soul in the intellect and a sensitive soul in the heart. Soul’s are created, not transferred. It’s heretical to claim that any soul is transmitted in semen. God infuses souls in man. You should note that even during rapes and adulterous acts, God enables the conception of souls because it’s part of His creative scheme.
HOST In the first story of creation God made a male and female. In the second story God made woman from the first man’s rib. Following God’s example modern medical procedures today can transsexualize man to woman and woman to man.
AQUINAS In God there’s no contradiction, therefore God does not change man to woman or woman to man.
HOST Because of the great progress we’ve made in understanding human reproduction, I can assure you life is transferred, not conceived. During reproduction man provides sperms and woman eggs. A sperm and egg each have 23 chromosomes containing their personal characteristics. They’re combined during sexual intercourse to transfer life to a new human being having qualities personified in the 46 chromosomes. Life is transferred, not recreated, when a living male sperm is fused with a living female egg. The fused sperm and egg combine their living chromosomes in a single cell called a zygote. Sorry to use that term but that’s what happens.
AQUINAS No need to apologize, I’m fluent in Greek and know the word zygotos.
HOST The zygote divides beginning a series of divisions and in about two months the evolutionary process differentiates to an embryo which grows to a fetus, and in about nine months is birthed as infant. The words embryo and fetus mean …
AQUINAS I know the meanings of those Greek and Latin words.
HOST Contrasted with God’s pure simplicity the transfer of life from zygote to embryo to fetus is a very complex chemical and evolutionary physiological process.
AQUINAS You keep saying transfer of life rather than conception of life.
HOST A thing can be conceived only once. Life was conceived in microorganisms about 5 billion years ago. Since then life has been transferred within species and across genera. Even asexual reproduction begins with microorganisms that evolve to living creatures or things.
AQUINAS I assure you that my mother conceived me.
HOST That’s no longer true because of the proved evolutionary process I just described. If God created man we’d all look the same and nothing on earth could change His image. In human evolution man adapts to his environment which is why people have different skin colors and blood types. The evolutionary process precedes by billions of years the creation dates claimed by Godists. In fact it’s obvious to me that evolution created man and that man created God.
AQUINAS No! That’s heresy! In my time you would be burned to death at the stake. God made all that you speak of possible. God is the first principle, first cause, and first mover. God created all there is. God is that He is.
HOST In like manner evolution is that it is. Moreover evolution is more creative than God. God created one universe only. Evolution created many universes, millions of galaxies, billions of stars, and perhaps innumerable celestial bodies yet to be discovered. We no longer attribute all there is to God, especially to a God having the qualities developed by man. Every living creature comes into existence through an evolutionary process, from microorganism to adult being.
AQUINAS Your modern science makes progress by developing instruments for seeing the invisible made by God. It has identified man’s composite parts and given them names. It has documented all the stages of man’s development but it has not found the first principle, first efficient cause, and first mover. God’s divine essence cannot be detected. There’s only one creator of all there is and that’s God.
HOST Given the proper chemical combination an animating electric spark begins the chemical reaction that produces amino acids the building blocks of life. Your dark ages were dark because you had no electricity to enlighten it. As a man interested in science you might be interested to know we can transplant parts of one person into another. The same is true of course of animals.
AQUINAS Our viticulturists have been doing that for years to improve vino.
HOST Using genetic engineering we can make designer babies, make copies of living humans, and even make entirely new humans without using male sperm. These procedures begin their life cycles in a glass petri dish, test tube, or flask.
AQUINAS You live in a wonderful age of science but no container of any kind can create a human life without God’s help. As for your parthenogenesis, recall that the Holy Ghost came upon the Blessed Virgin Mary who conceived Jesus by Immaculate Conception.
HOST Today in science labs immaculate conception is performed daily during parthenogenesis and cloning.
AQUINAS Man cannot recreate himself in either a woman’s womb or glass womb without God’s help.
HOST Our research scientists develop molecules …
AQUINAS I don’t know that word.
HOST Molecules are invisible groups of atoms, the very ones that Democritus spoke of. Molecules are used to formulate drugs and medicines. Molecules act upon our electrical bodies whose bioelectric systems switch + and – to operate our physiology for the reduction of pain, mitigation of disease, and even to beautify skin.
AQUINAS I know the roots of bioelectric and the arithmetic values + and – but I don’t understand their application to our bodies.
HOST Recall that Democritus envisioned matter made of atoms. What he couldn’t possibly know was that atoms are powered by invisible + and – electrical charges. You declared that God’s invisible powers are known by His visible works. In like manner we cannot the see the + and – electrical charges in molecules of drugs but we know of their visible works. Recall I once mentioned that you might consider electricity as being akin to God’s spiritual power.
AQUINAS But God’s power created all there is including electricity.
HOST Our bodies are run by electricity whose charges are in the molecules that have taken over God’s creative powers.
AQUINAS You are mistaken. Nothing can take over God’s power; it’s impossible. God is the first principle, first exemplary cause, first mover, and creator of all there is.
HOST We have drugs to make one happy or sad, induce pain or relieve it, maintain life or end it. We have drugs that make one senseless, grow dwarves to giants, and bulk puny men with muscle, sinew, and bone. A chameleon can change the color of its skin to adapt to its environment or protect itself. For whites entering black neighborhoods our pharmacologists concoct drugs for darkening white. The procedure is reversed for blacks wanting to enter white neighborhoods. The dosages can be adjusted to lighten black skin, make it brown or beige, or even yellow.
AQUINAS If what you say is true, it’s being done with the superior intellect God gifted to man. Moreover the + and – values assigned to things visible and invisible might change in the future. Isn’t that possible.
HOST True and today’s science might be considered outmoded in the year 3005.
AQUINAS In our journey to God all of man’s efforts, discoveries, and scientific marvels will point to Him the last end.
HOST Until then we are experimenting with stem cells to regenerate nerve conduits in spinal injuries thereby enabling those who’ve lost the use of their limbs to regain that use. Aborted fetuses and their placentas are good sources of stem cells.
AQUINAS Do your doctors abort fetuses, killing God’s creations, just to obtain stem cells for human experiments?
HOST Modern women freely abort fetuses to control their bodies’ reproduction. Some pregnant women, who want to defer birthing, and have their fertilized eggs frozen for future use or for sale to infertile women.
AQUINAS Frozen as in alpine ice?
HOST Yes, frozen in a cryonic container. Cryo meaning …
AQUINAS Yes, yes. I know the Greek word kryos. But what you callously call frozen fertilized eggs are the result of human conception through the grace of God.
HOST But God’s perfection does not create perfect infants. Some are born with birth defects such as disease or deformity. Some are born blind, deaf, autistic, with Down syndrome, with stubs for limbs, twins whose heads or bodies are joined, etc. We can’t improve on God’s perfection but we can dismiss His faults by remedying the mistakes in the human reproductive process.
AQUINAS Your proud scientists must not interfere in God’s creative process. Recall what happened to the proud Seraphim who tried to covet God’s power.
HOST It’s scientific research, not God, that’s going to remedy birth defects. It’s obvious that God’s imperfection will continue until corrected by man.
AQUINAS But keep in mind that God is supervising that research. I’ve had a pathetic request from a sick man begging me to pray for God’s intercession on his behalf. Of course I did pray for him with all my heart.
HOST With what result?
AQUINAS I don’t know. At the time I was traveling from Naples to Rome. However I was recently asked to pray for a sick woman dying of a mysterious disease. I did so and the next day was informed she got up and walked to Church to thank God for His intervention.
HOST Mentioning Church reminds me of its esoteric rituals, especially it’s sacramental rites.
AQUINAS Sacraments were established by the Word incarnate for the delivery of man from the damnation of sin and for making man holy.
HOST Wasn’t it the Church that instituted the sacraments? The Church gives itself the authority to create, change, or delete a sacrament at any time.
AQUINAS No, all sacraments derive from the Word incarnate.
HOST As interpreted and ritualized by the Church.
AQUINAS As determined by Divine Institution. They are rituals celebrating God’s invisible power made visible to man, thereby sanctifying man making him holy.
HOST How can a priest make anyone holy? Doesn’t holiness come from within?
AQUINAS Sacraments ordain sanctification in consideration of the passion, grace, and glory of Christ. Sacraments derive their efficacies from visible signs for invisible acts. Augustine says "the visible sacrifice is the sacrament, that is, the sacred sign, of the invisible sacrifice" (opcit p847). There are two sacraments of the altar, Christ’s mystical body and Christ’s human body. The sacrament of the Mass represents Christ’s mystical body and a priest is the visible sign representing Christ’s human body. The sacrament of the Church is called Order. It’s written "where there is no governor the people shall fall" (opcit p884). Order makes possible other sacraments of which there six:
Baptism – infuses spiritual life making possible other sacraments.
Confirmation – spiritually perfects the baptized.
Eucharist – indulges in the body and blood of Christ.
Penance – expiates sin.
Extreme Unction – removes any remnant sin not expiated in penance.
Matrimony – controls sexual lust for necessary repopulation due to death.
HOST Are those sacraments prioritized in the order given?
AQUINAS Baptism must be the first sacrament, from it flow all others. But the highest sacrament is the Eucharist in which the visible sign of communion is the invisible act of the Last Supper. Consecration is the sacramental blessing of the host and wine.
HOST Is consecration a sacrament?
AQUINAS Consecration is not a sacrament; it’s a ritual. During communion the visible host and wine are transubstantiated to the invisible body and blood of Christ.
HOST It’s Jesus’ body and blood commemorating the Last Supper or Passover, not Christ. To specify that it’s Christ’s body and blood is a contradiction of the New Testament, part of your sacred doctrine. Furthermore I believe that during communion transubstantiation is impossible.
AQUINAS Transubstantiation is symbolic of the Last Supper, an intellectual and invisible miracle. You need to realize that God’s miracles never contradict His divine powers. Communion means to partner with God. The transubstantiation takes place in the mind of the faithful receiving the host. Also in the Mass, during the Blessed Sacrament, the congregation actually feels God’s physical presence blessing them.
HOST Sacraments are Church procedures for indoctrinating, confirming, and maintaining Catholics from the beginning to the end of their lives.
AQUINAS There are also counsels of perfection that flow from the grace of the Holy Ghost. They include prescribed acts such as confession and forbidden acts such as the denial of faith.
HOST Those acts are reminiscent of entitlement programs for incumbent politicians whether in imperial Rome, the papacy, or Washington.
AQUINAS Unbelievers such as you cannot possibly experience or presume to know the feeling of elation and blessedness of the acts, rituals, and sacraments prescribed by canon law.
HOST That proclamation of canon law brings us to the general discussion of man and law.
AQUINAS I wrote a separate Treatise on Law.
HOST Law concerns man so I thought it proper to include law in our discussion of man.
AQUINAS You’re imbedding my Treatise on Law in my Treatise on Man.
HOST Law is all about man.
AQUINAS You’re again reordering the sequence of my carefully planned treatises, mixing them up like ‘un grande zuppa’ (a great soup).
HOST Your Treatise on Law concerns Biblical law, most of it irrelevant. Today secular law is replacing Biblical law to promote self-reliance, not reliance on a fictional God.
AQUINAS It’s impossible for God and His laws to be replaced or irrelevant. Law had its roots in the Bible because God is the supreme lawgiver. God’s laws are eternal, supreme, and thereby supervene all other laws.
HOST Why don’t we begin by defining law, which concerns man’s involvement in society.
AQUINAS Well, generally, laws induce man to do good for society. Laws must apply to commonality of society, not to one’s individual diversity. The essence of law is its reasonableness in commanding or forbidding humans acts. Isadore says "laws are enacted for no private profit, but for the common benefit of the citizens"(opcit, Volume 2, p206).
HOST What about individual diversity versus societal commonality? Suppose a hermit having a foul body odor ventures into a society whose customs include bathing. The people would shun him with right complaints and might have him arrested. Which is the greater fault, the offending hermit or intolerant society?
AQUINAS In your porposito there’s opportunity for compromise. Perhaps a bath and repast would be appropriate for he who departs from his hermitage. Laws are customs established by a ruler. To be efficacious a ruler must establish laws with coercive and judicial powers over lawbreakers. The commonality of law induces people to congregate into societies, such as Christians, and nations.
HOST Nations believe in different laws from different Gods. The prophet Mohammed was a mass killer of infidels.
AQUINAS Mohammed lived a contradictory life. He killed infidels while teaching tolerance.
HOST Today, following Mohammed’s example, Moslems are still killing infidels – Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and even Moslems tolerant of infidels.
AQUINAS Biblical law is intended to avoid such conflicts.
HOST Or engage in conflicts depending on whose God is threatened. Before and after your time there were a series of Crusades to liberate the Holy Land from Moslems.
AQUINAS Those conflicts were the result of different interpretations of the one God.
HOST Different interpretations make laws in one society not apply to another society. Perhaps secularists should form their own societies.
AQUINAS The intention of law is to grow good citizens who comply with the reasonableness of the lawgiver. Good laws suppress the fomes of the wicked.
HOST What are fomes?
AQUINAS Fomes are agents that transmit wickedness, such as the urges for sexual excess or for coveting the goods of one’s neighbor. Isadore says "Laws were made so that in fear of them human audacity might be held in check, that innocence might be safeguarded in the midst of wickedness, and that the dread of punishment might prevent the wicked from doing harm" (opcit p226).
HOST Sometimes wickedness is a compelling emotion that can’t be controlled even under the threat of punishment of death.
AQUINAS It’s written " the wicked feed on evil as flies upon feces".
HOST You began be expounding on Biblical law.
AQUINAS Biblical law is eternal; it does not change with the times and is therefore the true law. Augustine says "the eternal law is the sovereign type, to which we must always conform" (opcit p216). Eternal law may be likened to the sun. It comes from God as does the sun. We know God’s law by its effects just as we know light is from the sun.
HOST That simile is proper if you believe God created the sun.
AQUINAS God created all there is. His law was revealed through his prophets. There’s the Old Law in the Old Testament and New Law in the New Testament. Both laws are from the one God. In any genus is a subordinate species having a last end. In the genus law the subordinate species is goodness leading to its last end beatitude.
HOST But the Beatitudes of Mathew (MT5, 3-12), the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, are totally irrelevant today because they extol the poor, the submissive, and weak over the self-reliant hard workers for worldly goods.
AQUINAS In the New Law worldly goods do not open the gates to heaven. Augustine concluded that the Beatitudes are spiritually uplifting. Moreover he proposed that man follow all the Beatific precepts for a good Christian life.
HOST Today the Beatitudes would probably lead to low self-esteem, depression, and perhaps suicide. Today our country is being invaded by tens of millions of poor Christians, illegal aliens, who have faith in God but are nevertheless determined to get some of our worldly goods.
AQUINAS I know nothing of your country or of the time in which you live. Returning to our discussion of law, in any given species under law a thing may be imperfect or perfect. A boy, for example, is imperfect until he becomes a perfect man. Paul compares "the state of man under the Old Law to that of a child under a pedagogue; but the state under the New Law, to that of a full grown man, who is no longer under a pedagogue" (opcit p211).
HOST Let’s begin with the Old Law.
AQUINAS The Old Law arises from levitical priesthood. In the Old Law people are directed to earthly pursuits in the land of Canaan. The law is called old because it promises temporal things, as opposed to the New Law which promises eternal life in heaven. The Old Law is summarized in the Ten Commandments (Ex 20, 2-17). It’s written "the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man is wont to speak to his friend" (opcit p241).
HOST Not face to face, God was secreted in a burning bush.
AQUINAS The phrase face to face is a metaphor for God’s voice speaking to Moses.
HOST God directed Moses to warn the common people not to break through to the mountaintop where he was or God would strike them down. That was not an example of a loving God.
AQUINAS The God of Jews predestined Moses, not the common people.
HOST More Godly discrimination. It’s assumed that on that momentous occasion God eschewed sending an angel to deliver the commandments. Instead God delivered them by secreting Himself in a bush burning with His divine essence. A voice speaking from the burning bush delivered to Moses the Ten Commandments for man variously interpreted as follows:
I am the Lord thy God you shall worship me only.
You shall not have strange craven gods before you for I am a jealous and vindictive God and will punish you.
You shall not take in vain the name of the Lord thy God.
Keep holy the Sabbath day.
Honor thy father and mother.
You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
You shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.
Now I ask you, how is it possible for divine essence to speak or graven ten commandments in stone tablets?
AQUINAS God’s works are innumerable, mysterious, and sometimes incomprehensible to man.
HOST Another example of docta ignorantia. Another evasive omni answer for the mysterious and unknown God.
AQUINAS Mysterious yes, but unknown to you because you have no faith.
HOST Commandments 1-3 are those of a dogmatic, insecure, and self-promoting narcistic God.
AQUINAS Those commandments are moral precepts directing man towards obedience to and worship of God. They are intended to assure the people that He is the true God and the only God of all the people.
HOST Conversely those commandments do not show God’s love for man. Commandments 4 and 5 are ceremonial precepts but there’s no mention of prayer or ritual.
AQUINAS Prayer and ritual are implied. Ceremonial precepts derive from Ceres the Roman goddess of fruits because fruits were among the first offerings to God. The ancient Roman worship of Ceres was called ceremony.
HOST Commandments 6-10 are directed towards man’s behavior in society.
AQUINAS Man shows his love for God and his fellow man by obeying those commandments.
HOST Number 6, You shall not kill, doesn’t say whether it means oneself or one’s neighbor.
AQUINAS That commandment applies to both. God only determines the time of death. At that determined time God recalls the soul.
HOST A man should not kill another. But if a man is suffering intolerable pain unremitted by prayer, unanswered by God, unpalliated by drugs, or unmitigated by other intervention he should have the right to take his own life.
AQUINAS You shall not kill means oneself or one’s neighbor.
HOST Murder breaks the 6th commandment but if one is attacked with deadly force, murder is justified to maintain one’s life. To defend itself the Church murders heretics at will irrespective of God’s commandment.
AQUINAS The Church is Christ’s vicar and must defend itself against demons such as heretics. To defend Judaism against Roman paganism and slavery, Jews in fortress Masada were murdered by their zealous leader who then committed suicide (or escaped unseen).
HOST As for suicide and euthanasia, killing oneself depends on the circumstances. Suicide might result from depression, self-abnegation, and be executed using violence to punish oneself. Euthanasia is a peaceful, quick, and dignified manner of ending one’s life.
AQUINAS Suicide and euthanasia are against God’s commandment because He only reserves the right to call the soul at the time of His choosing.
HOST Leaving someone to suffer to ‘reductio ad absurdum’ until death do him part from this earth?
AQUINAS God will call each of us at the time of His choosing.
HOST History proves that human needs for survival surmount the need for God.
AQUINAS It’s written "Love the Lord thy God, and observe His precepts – ceremonies, His judgement and commandments (opcit p249).
HOST You go on to expound in incongruous detail about ceremonial precepts – whether they should be few or many, figurative or literal, natural or mystical, sacramental or sacrificial, etc. All that is irrelevant today.
AQUINAS I disagree. Ceremonial precepts are derived from the Old Law and are relevant for obedience to and worship of God. But the Old Law is a temporal law that espouses the pursuit of worldly goods such as animals, children, land, and wealth.
HOST Perhaps it’s the reason why today so many Jews accumulate wealth.
AQUINAS The Old Law is supported by ceremonies such as Circumcision, holocaust, and Passover. It’s written "the priest shall offer it all and burn it all upon the altar, for a holocaust, and most sweet savour to the Lord" (opcit p273).
HOST During World War 2 Jews and others were sacrificed in holocausts, surely not sweet odors to the Lord or anyone else.
AQUINAS I have no knowledge of that war.
HOST It was a war fought for political supremacy of the world. Free nations under democratic rule fought against nations enslaved by brutal dictators. Fortunately, despite the sacrificial death of millions, the forces of freedom triumphed over the brutal and evil dictators.
AQUINAS Speaking of sacrifices the mystical causes of Abraham’s sacrificial ceremony foreshadowed the coming of Christ who, in the greatest sacrificial ceremony of all, delivered Himself for man’s redemption.
HOST With the coming of Jesus perhaps it’s time to discuss the New Law.
AQUINAS The Old Law and New Law are alike in man’s devotion and subjection to God for His glorification. But they differ in that the Old Law espouses worldly pursuits whereas the New Law espouses faith in God for everlasting life in heaven.
HOST The Church deliberately made faith in God the first of all virtues. Without faith God doesn’t exist.
AQUINAS The New Law arises from Jesus’ priesthood. In the New Law believers are directed to the heavenly kingdom through faith in God. The Gospel installs the eternal law of faith in our hearts. The Lord said "My laws into their mind, and in their heart will I write them" (opcit p321). Those laws come from love of God and faith in Christ. On this matter Augustine says "as the laws of deeds was written on tables of stone, so is the law of faith inscribed in the hearts of the faithful" (ibid).
HOST It’s obvious the New Law rests on faith in God and the promise of everlasting life in heaven. I’m suspicious of faith or anything else that’s believed without evidence. If the New Law is eternal law where was that law before the Gospel was written?
AQUINAS It was in the custody of God who alone determined the time, event, and place of its publication and promulgation – the sacrifice of His only Son. The New Law was brought into fruition in time, in the same manner that a boy becomes a man. It’s written "The law was our pedagogue in Christ that we might be justified in faith. But after faith is come, we are no longer under a pedagogue" (ibid).
HOST The pedagogue being the Old Law.
AQUINAS The perfect fulfills the imperfect just as the New Law fulfills the Old Law. To the Jew who kept the Old Law for attaining worldly goods, Christ advised "one thing is wanting to thee: If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell whatever thou hast, etc. (opcit p328).
HOST That advice extols poverty which never makes anything perfect except hunger, misery, and dependence on welfare through self abnegation.
AQUINAS I answer that there’s a circle within a circle, the New Law within the Old Law. A circle may be in another circle actually or virtually. The genus of the Old Law has within it the species of the New Law, just as a seed has in it a whole tree. That proposition may be articulated as follows: "He brought forth first the blade, that is, the law of Nature; then the ear, that is, the Law of Moses; lastly, the full ear of corn, that is, the law of the Gospel" (opcit p329).
HOST Which means the New Law is in the Old Law as in nature corn is in the ear.
AQUINAS And in the nature of man the Gospel nurtures the life of Christ. Throughout the Gospel the New Law is implicit and is called the law of liberty because it provides man with discretion through free will. Conversely the Old Law prescribes nearly every point of law leaving man with little or no choice for individuality.
HOST You cited examples of ceremonies in the Old Law, what about ceremonies in the New Law?
AQUINAS In the New Law are ceremonies such as Baptism, Communion, and Confirmation.
HOST We discussed those as sacraments.
AQUINAS Sacraments are ritualized as ceremonies.
HOST For the remainder of our discussion are your treatises on the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Trinity.
AQUINAS You’ve again reordered my treatises. The treatises are to be studied in the order written because the knowledge in a previous treatise is used to support a following treatise.
HOST I grouped them because I consider they were devised by the Church, not God, after Jesus was deified to Son of God.
AQUINAS All treatises in my Summa originate with and are about God.
HOST You are justified in that complaint but I’m not a young friar about to engage in disputations with Jews and Moslems. I must confess that reordering the three treatises makes our discussion easier for me.
AQUINAS You’ve dissembled my treatises for your own purposes.
HOST True but it doesn’t give me an advantage because you are more knowledgeable than I about the substance of your own treatises.
AQUINAS Do you think I should have reordered my treatises?
HOST No, no. Your Summa is considered one of the greatest books ever written. It has been studied and survived per se for centuries and still being read by those of us interested in the God problem.
AQUINAS God problem, what do you mean?
HOST The idea of God as creator has been disproved by scientific findings. The insertion of certain of God’s commandments and teachings are irrelevant in today’s societies. For example, the devotion to and worship of God and evil of homosexuality.
AQUINAS Science cannot disprove that which is not known or identifiable, God’s divine essence. Also the laws of man cannot replace or obsolete God’s divinely inspired eternal commandments, laws, and teachings.
HOST With your continued kind indulgence, I’d like to discuss next the Incarnation. By the way why didn’t you write a treatise on Jesus, the source of the New Testament and Christianism?
AQUINAS That treatise had already been written; it’s called the New Testament.
HOST In your Treatise on the Incarnation you describe the mystery of the Immaculate Conception in the Blessed Virgin Mary. That leads to the mystery of the man Jesus and His resurrection.
AQUINAS You’re confusing the Incarnation with Trinity. You’ve just delivered the proof that my treatises must be studied in the order written. My treatise expounds on the mystery of the Incarnation, not Trinity.
HOST True but you used the Father and Son mystery of Trinity to support the mystery of the Incarnation. The two mysteries are interdependent, as are the two stories of creation. In those creation stories the second story was written before the first story. In your Summa, Trinity was written before the Incarnation to justify the Father having a Son to send to earth.
AQUINAS It wasn’t necessary for the Father to send His Son to earth because the Father could have restored man to his pristine sinless state of grace anytime.
HOST Why didn’t He?
AQUINAS It happened that the conditions on earth made it convenient for the Father to incarnate His Son for the redemption of sinful man.
HOST But early Church fathers had to solve the problem of creating the Son, without whom there would be no Jesus, no Son of God, and no New Testament.
AQUINAS No, the Son exists in Trinity and was sent by the Father to rescue man from the devil. On this matter Augustine says "We shall also show that other ways were not wanting to God, to whose power all things are equally subject, but that there was not a more fitting way of healing our misery" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 2, p703).
HOST Does Augustine’s misery cover all the sins heaped upon man, including original sin?
AQUINAS John says "God so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but have life everlasting" (ibid).
HOST Early Church fathers had to incarnate the Son in order to become the expected Messiah and deliver man from the stain of eternal sin through His crucifixion.
AQUINAS Recall that angels sinned before God created man, therefore sin existed before man. It was decreed that the Father would send His Son at the most fitting time.
HOST That supports my opinion that the fitting time to write of the Incarnation was after Jesus died in order to support the son’s purported existence in Trinity.
AQUINAS No. The fitting time was that of the Son’s incarnation, which can be substantiated in five ways – faith, hope, charity, righteousness, and divinity.
Faith – that God the Father missioned His son from Trinity to earth to be incarnated in the Blessed Virgin Mary
Hope – humanity of the Son gave man hope that God loves man.
Charity – what greater love is there than for God to sacrifice His only-begotten Son?
Righteousness – God who cannot be seen sent His Son who can be seen as man.
Divinity – the Son’s spirit and grace was bestowed upon man.
Augustine says "God was made man, that man might be made God" (opcit p704).
HOST An aphorism far beyond the capability of man. Is Augustine saying its’ acceptable for man to be like God? Previously he declared that God punished the Seraphim who wanted to be like God.
AQUINAS It’s written "Where sin abounded, grace did more abound" (opcit p706). Also Mathew says "They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill … For I am not come to call the just, but sinners" (opcit p707).
HOST Let’s talk about the incarnation itself, an unnatural and impossible physical event.
AQUINAS Unnatural only in that it was divinely inspired and supervised. The word natural comes from nature meaning nativity, the begetting of humans, so in that sense the incarnation is perfectly natural.
HOST The man Jesus needed a mother, so early Church fathers decided to incarnate the Son of God into the womb of the Virgin Mary.
AQUINAS The sexual lust of a married woman cannot be the incubator for the Son of God. The mother must be a virgin. During the incarnation itself the Son’s divine essence was not transmuted to humanity, rather it was retained.
HOST Moreover Church fathers created the Holy Ghost solely for the mission of fertilizing Mary.
AQUINAS God sent the Holy Ghost as intercessor, or Paraclete, to sanctify Mary and incarnate the Son in her womb. Mary the mother of Jesus was not fertilized like a common woman.
HOST Did the Father send the Holy Ghost, the giver of life and love, to come upon the Blessed Virgin Mary while she slept?
AQUINAS No, God sent an angel who announced to her "Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus" (Latin-English Booklet Missal, p48).
HOST But that announcement cleverly skips over how Jesus was conceived.
AQUINAS God sent the Holy Ghost as intercessor, or Paraclete, to perform two miracles. First the Paraclete removed Mary’s original sin to sanctify her thereby filling her with grace. Then He infused her womb with the Son’s divine essence, the Immaculate Conception, which transmuted the Son’s divine essence to flesh.
HOST With deference to your vast knowledge, I say no rational person believes a spiritual squirt made a woman pregnant.
AQUINAS Incarnation is another of God’s mysterious works.
HOST That’s the problem, it’s all about mystery and not reality. How is it possible for Jesus to be divine and human at the same time?
AQUINAS Christ assumed the duality of being divine and human because God’s spirit was infused in Mary before the Son became flesh.
HOST Are you saying Jesus was hylomorphic?
AQUINAS That was the exemplary cause of Christ’s dual nature, divine and human. Divine in the Immaculate Conception but human in the flesh. Devoid of that dual nature Christ would be sub verso, under the Word and not the Word itself, thereby subverting Christianity.
HOST I understand your passionate devotion to Christ but don’t you mean Jesus?
AQUINAS I’ve devoted my life to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus and Christ are one and the same.
HOST Surely you know better than I that Jesus was incarnated not Christ, and that it was Jesus who was born in Bethlehem not Christ.
AQUINAS The Church considers Jesus and Christ, or any combination thereof, to be one and the same person.
HOST That’s not only wrong but anachronous. You know better than I that after Jesus’ death apostles and others appended the surname Christ, meaning Messiah, to the first name Jesus. Jesus only was man, not Christ, yet you continue to use the two disparate names as if they were the same.
AQUINAS God authorized Peter to build the Church of which Christ, not Jesus, would be its head.
HOST Why do you subordinate your vast knowledge to that of the Church?
AQUINAS I’m a humble friar and do not question God’s will. I remain subordinate to the authority of the Church of which Christ is the head.
HOST Very well. Assuming that the Son and Holy Ghost descended to earth the Father would have been alone in the Godhead. That means God is not the pure simplicity you declared because He consists of the component parts of Jesus and Holy Ghost.
AQUINAS No. The three persons of Trinity cannot be separated. They are the oneness of God.
HOST That being true Trinity would have descended to earth. So how was it possible that the Son and Holy Ghost descend to earth leaving the Father alone in Trinity?
AQUINAS Recall that God is pure act and that there’s no act beyond His power. The Son and Holy Ghost descended to earth in the glory of their temporal manifestations, leaving in Trinity divine essence intact.
HOST Most of your treatise describes Christ’s qualities in inexhaustible minutiae. Throughout your treatise you refer to Christ as man. You burdened the Incarnation by expounding on Christ’s varied knowledge - learned, beatific, infused, acquired, assumed - on the real and assumed powers of His soul - on His prayers, priesthood, etc. Why did you expound on all those subjects when they are irrelevant to the Incarnation?
AQUINAS Because in disputations with non-Catholic theologians young friars had to answer in detail all their questions relevant or not. Otherwise non-Catholics would remain doubtful that Christ was the Son of God.
HOST You mentioned Christ prayed. Is it fitting for the Son of God to pray like an obedient man? Pray to whom?
AQUINAS The Son’s divine essence is in constant communication with His Father. As human on earth it’s fitting that the Son should pray to His Father.
HOST You described Christ’s priesthood but it was Jesus’ priesthood. It’s written "We have therefore a great high-priest that hath passed into the heavens, Jesus, the son of God" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 2, p827).
AQUINAS I have made my position quite clear on the synonymy of the Son’s names.
HOST As if the excess of Christ’s details weren’t enough, you further burdened the Incarnation with irrelevant subjects such as Christ’s subjection to the Father. If the Father and Son are equal how can the Son be subjected to the Father?
AQUINAS In the Godhead the Father and Son are equal but on earth Christ as human is subject to the Father. Of that relationship John quotes Christ "The Father is greater than I" (opcit p821). As human Christ has a threefold subjection to the Father – goodness, power, and obedience.
Goodness – Divinity is the essence of goodness, which in the flesh Christ cannot attain. Mathew says of Christ "Why asketh Me concerning good? One is good, God" (opcit p821).
Power – human nature is subject to the all-powerful Father. Dionysius says "Christ is subject to the ordinance of the Father" (opcit p822).
Obedience – Christ the Son obeys the Father’s commands. It’s written "I do always the things that please Him" and Christ became "obedient to the father unto death" (ibid).
HOST A fine piece of philosophical logic but it doesn’t answer why one part of Trinity should be subjected to another part and why the Son should be subjected to the Father. Besides there’s a problem with that last quote. Christ never died, Jesus died. Facts can’t be replaced with synonymy.
AQUINAS The Son as man on earth is not part of Trinity. You need to separate the divine from the human.
HOST But you claimed the Son was both, divine and human.
AQUINAS Yes, divine in the Immaculate Conception in the womb before becoming flesh. The Son must be considered in the context of His manhood while on earth.
HOST You then went on to describe Christ’s adoption by the Father. Why would the Father need to adopt His own Son?
AQUINAS A father adopts a son to make him heir to his estate. The Father adopted Christ His Son to make him worthy of His heavenly estate.
HOST The Father is one of the three persons of Trinity. You declare that the three are one, so isn’t it prerequisite that the other two persons also adopt Christ?
AQUINAS When we pray to ‘Our Father’ we pray to Trinity, therefore it’s proper that Trinity adopt Christ.
HOST But that means the Son adopted Himself.
AQUINAS No, it’s the oneness of Trinity that adopted Christ. There’s a difference between the Son in Trinity and Christ on earth, the adopted Son . In Trinity the Son proceeded from the Father but on earth the Virgin Mary begot Christ.
HOST It was Jesus who was begotten. You went on to ponder whether it was fitting that Christ should be predestined. It’s obvious to me that the Father who sent His Son to earth should predestine Him.
AQUINAS It’s true that the union of God as man, and man as God, places Him under the preordination of the Father. Therefore the Father predestined Christ worthy to rejoin Him in the eternal bliss of His heavenly estate.
HOST You continued your inexhaustible exposition by proposing whether Christ should be adored as divine, human, or both.
AQUINAS Christ the Son is adored for His divine essence, His hypostasis. He is also adored for His humanity. But there are some who declared that to adore two distinct persons is anathema.
HOST Therefore is your Christ adored as one or two persons?
AQUINAS To adore the divinity of Christ is to adore the Son in the Godhead where He is equal to the Father. To adore the Son’s humanity is to adore Christ in the flesh subject to the Father. Therefore Christ’s divinity is adored as latria and His flesh as dulia.
HOST I’m not familiar with those words.
AQUINAS The Church declares there are three levels of adoration.
HOST Another trinity, this time of adoration?
AQUINAS There are three levels of adoration – dulia, hyperdulia, and latria.
Dulia – is the veneration of angels and saints.
Hyperdulia – is the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Latrai – is the highest level, the adoration of God.
HOST It’s certain that hyperdulia does not venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary in the light of a blue lady or a sophisticated lady as was Mary Magdalene.
AQUINAS I’m not sure what you mean?
HOST My fault, I mistakenly segued to modern times.
AQUINAS The Virgin Mary was chosen for her innocence, purity, and devotion to God.
HOST You end your treatise by considering whether Christ is the mediator between God and man. Previously you said angels were the mediators.
AQUINAS The mediator unites extremes, such as God and man, to a common mean. What better mediator is there than Christ, Himself consisting of the extremes of divine and human. Christ is the perfect mediator. His death mediated the reconciliation between man and God.
HOST I must insist that Christ never died, it was Jesus who died for reconciling man to God. On this matter we continue to disagree
AQUINAS It’s written "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (opcit p845).
HOST It’s obvious to me that the incarnation of Jesus was prerequisite to the contrivance, promulgation, and the acceptance of the mystery of Trinity.
AQUINAS The seed of the mystery of Trinity is in the New Testament.
HOST True, but it was planted there after the deification of Jesus as Son of God.
HOST We now continue with your Treatise on the Resurrection. The New Testament claims that on the third day after death Jesus was resurrected. I doubt that. In all recorded history no man has ever been resurrected.
AQUINAS Man is not the Son of God.
HOST Are you implying that it was the Son’s divinity that was resurrected?
AQUINAS No, no. Divinity is eternal; it need not be resurrected. It was Christ’s temporal version on earth that was resurrected. Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John all agree that God the Father resurrected His Son Jesus Christ.
HOST That’s what they claim but I say resurrection is impossible. Besides those gospel writers declare it was the crucified Jesus of Nazareth that was resurrected, not Christ. Christ was never man, never crucified, and never resurrected.
AQUINAS We continue to have that disagreement. So be it but remember Jesus and Christ are one as are Jesus Christ and Christ Jesus.
HOST The crucified in losing blood and becoming dehydrated, it normally took days of excruciating pain and suffering to die. But Jesus died in a matter of hours.
AQUINAS When Jesus cried out to the Father "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"? (MT27 46). The Father mercifully ended His Son’s suffering. Keep in mind the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Through His crucifixion the Son of God paid man’s debt of sin, liberating man from the damnation of sin, and therefore man triumphs over the devil.
HOST If Jesus died for man’s sins then man dies sinless, so what’s the use of pretending there’s a purgatory and hell?
AQUINAS Crucifixion is a metaphor for man’s salvation. Upon death God will judge each of us.
HOST Wasn’t Jesus’ crucifixion the payment for the redemption of our sins? If true why do you still believe in the fictitious punishments of purgatory and hell?
AQUINAS Disobedience to God’s teachings and commandments are punishable in purgatory or hell.
HOST God created diversity in which there are believers and nonbelievers. Are all nonbelievers going to hell?
AQUINAS If you’re asking me to make a judgement about your future, I dare not. But consider this, would a father bequeath his estate to an ungrateful son who disavows him?
HOST Dying on the cross why did Jesus cry out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"? Jesus prayed to His Father to raise Lazarus from the dead. Why didn’t Jesus pray for His Father to save him from death?
AQUINAS You’re missing the purpose of Jesus’ sacrificial crucifixion. His death was the price for man’s redemption.
HOST That dramatic entreaty by gospel writers was meant to engender sympathy for Jesus and it’s still affective today. The Son of God knew a priori that He would be crucified and resurrected. He knew also that He would ascend to heaven to join His Father.
AQUINAS When crucified the Son of God was human, not divine. His entreaty was perfectly normal for a dying man.
HOST Let’s begin at the beginning with the death of the man Jesus and his resurrection. In your treatise you write that upon man’s death the soul separates or departs from the body.
AQUINAS Death occurs through predestination or when God calls the soul.
HOST Death occurs when mitochondria in cells stop generating bioelectrical power.
AQUINAS I know the Greek roots of that word but cannot make any connection to the body or cells you speak of.
HOST The life in our bodies is organized in cells and in them mitochondria provide life’s energy.
AQUINAS The sensitive powers of the living body are not in the soul. Therefore death means the end of man’s body but not of his soul, which is a spiritual entity exposed to God’s judgement. During life man might have several ends leading to his last end which is death.
HOST Isn’t death the only end to life?
AQUINAS Some lives have several ends – the end of doing good or evil, the end of happiness, the end of suffering, etc. Death is man’s last end in which he’s resurrected to find true happiness in returning to God for eternal bliss in heaven.
HOST I’ve heard priests say that upon death the soul rises to heaven to rejoice with the Father. If that’s true, how does a soul do that?
AQUINAS God Himself takes up the soul through the sky and firmament to heaven. Merited souls rejoice with God the Father. Demerited souls are punished.
HOST After death the body is ritualized with funeral rites and is either buried or cremated.
AQUINAS Buried not cremated. Cremation is a pagan rite and a sin. The Son of God was entombed and we must follow His example.
HOST Today the Church allows cremation because cemeteries are consuming too much expensive land that’s more profitable as real estate.
AQUINAS Out of chaos God created order. Out of death God created redemption, salvation, and resurrection.
HOST Those words can be confusing and sometimes used interchangeably. For my edification can you briefly describe your understanding of each?
AQUINAS Redemption is the retrieval of the departed soul for the kingdom of God. Salvation is the saving of the soul from the eternal damnation of sin. Resurrection recombines the saved soul with its body. On earth the disposition of an inanimate body is determined by its lightness or heaviness. In death the disposition of a soul is determined by its goodness or evil, its merit or demerit, and is thereby conveyed to heaven, purgatory, hell, or limbo.
HOST The words purgatory and limbo aren’t in the Bible. Those words infer a state of mind for the living only.
AQUINAS Purgatory and limbo are real places and their use is authorized by Church doctrine.
HOST Purgatory and limbo are fictitious places contrived by the Church to maintain its authority and control over Catholics. They’re phantom places devised by priests to assure the laity’s obedience to the Church.
AQUINAS Those places are known to God. Although God gave man superior intelligence man will never know what God knows.
HOST Let’s get on with death and resurrection.
AQUINAS Upon death the body decays and the soul survives. The soul separates or departs from its dead body prior to the emanation of the body’s rotting stench. The Church then performs visible acts and God performs invisible acts. The Church celebrates the visible act of the Mass for the Dead. God performs the invisible act of judgement.
HOST You said the Church celebrates, celebrates death?
AQUINAS Yes, because God will redeem the faithfully departed soul. The Mass for the Dead is followed by the funeral to a gravesite and prayers for the burial of the dead. Whether the soul eventually rests or not depends on its merit or demerit as judged by God.
HOST Does God hear prayers for the dead?
AQUINAS Prayers rise through the firmament to angelic heaven and then to the Godhead. Sometimes prayers get lost en route to God, so it’s better to pray to saints.
HOST Are you suggesting the living should pray to saints rather than to God?
AQUINAS Saints transmit prayers directly to God.
HOST Are prayers transmitted like radio waves to God the receiver?
AQUINAS Radio waves? I don’t understand.
HOST Think of radio waves as spiritual messages. Engineers can transmit sound, including voice, through the air from one place to another, for example from Rome to Cologne.
AQUINAS That’s truly remarkable, another of God’s wondrous works.
HOST But engineers have improved on prayers because radio waves never get lost. You mentioned praying to saints. What’s your opinion of sainthood?
AQUINAS God grants sainthood to the few predestined by Him to lead holy lives, those whose devotion and sacrifice are rewarded by revelation from or direct communication with Him.
HOST Apparently the saintly hear God’s voice and see visions of Him. I understand that in the ecstasy of those experiences they might even levitate in the throes of a spiritual zero gravity.
AQUINAS Saints might intercede on behalf of the living or dead in two ways, by express prayers or by intercessory acts.
Express prayers – saints petition God for clemency.
Intercessory acts – saints’ merits being known to God, He intercedes on their behalf for the living or dead.
Unfortunately prayers to saints are not always granted for reasons unknown to us.
HOST You described the visible acts of the Church. What are God’s invisible acts?
AQUINAS God’s first act is His First Judgement of the recently departed soul. In the First Judgement God decides whether the soul was baptized. An unbaptized soul is directly conveyed to limbo.
HOST That means all those who died before Jesus was baptized and all the unbaptized since then are in limbo. That includes all the unbelieving righteous and saintly men BC and AD. Are you saying the unbaptized cannot enter heaven because they’re floating around out there in limbo lost in the deep unfathomable space of Catholicism?
AQUINAS Those souls are waiting for God’s Last Judgement.
HOST Might those in limbo be the extraterrestrial aliens some of us assume are out there? If so, why don’t they communicate with us through saint’s intercessory acts?
AQUINAS Intercessory acts apply to Catholics only.
HOST Extraterrestrial aliens are probably atheists. Still why don’t they communicate with us? Where are they if not in limbo?
AQUINAS Those in limbo are waiting for God’s Last Judgement. On that day God shall consider their dispositions.
HOST Well let’s get on with baptized souls.
AQUINAS Upon death God generally judges a baptized soul for its merit or demerit.
HOST You said generally. Does God consider other circumstances?
AQUINAS God’s judgement might be influenced by the individual circumstances of the recently departed soul. In death as in life the Church allows intercessory acts such as dispensations and indulgences.
HOST Why does God permit such acts? I understand the Church performs those acts in return for monetary contributions.
AQUINAS With Christ as its head the Church is forgiving and loving. It gives individual attention to each departed soul.
HOST Do all souls ascend to God the Father?
AQUINAS No, merited souls only.
HOST You were describing God’s judgement of a merited soul.
AQUINAS God redeems a merited soul by retrieving it unto Himself for enlarging His kingdom.
HOST Did God gift man with a soul so that upon death God’s reclamation project is used to enlarge His kingdom?
AQUINAS No, God redeems only souls of the merited faithful to only enlarge God’s Kingdom. Redemption is followed by salvation and resurrection.
HOST I thought in principle salvation and resurrection were the same.
AQUINAS In salvation God’s spiritually saves merited souls through His grace for remission of sin and delivery from eternal damnation.
HOST The all-knowing God created reject man only to retrieve and save his soul with procedural salvation?
AQUINAS On this matter Augustine says "the soul to be happy, must avoid all bodies" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 2, p936). God is the shepherd of the lost lamb. Through His love and mercy He takes away the sins of the world, which is different from resurrection. In resurrection God reunites the saved soul and its body, thereby returning man to his original state of embodied soul but without original sin.
HOST You’ve described how the soul survives but how can a decayed or cremated body be resurrected? On this matter I agree with Aristotle who taught that the body is matter having the potency of soul; when the body dies the soul dies.
AQUINAS I answer that the soul leaves the body for union with God Who then resurrects man’s remains for reunion of body and soul.
HOST How is that possible? In cemeteries all over the world bodies of departed souls are still in the ground. How can a dead body on earth be recombined with its soul in God’s Kingdom?
AQUINAS Man’s remains signify his temporal version. For a merited soul God transmutes the temporal version to its eternal version. Heaven is eternal therefore God resurrects man’s temporal being to its eternal being.
HOST What’s the logic of death if one is going to be resurrected? Death and the separated soul wouldn’t be necessary if God gave man immortality.
AQUINAS Man does not know the divine mind of God. In the heaven of the resurrected, men who led holy lives on earth congregate in the Holy Man Society.
HOST What about the ashes of cremated bodies?
AQUINAS Ashes are the remains of temporal man and are resurrected in like manner.
HOST You can’t have it both ways, temporal and eternal.
AQUINAS You are again thinking materially, not spiritually. The spiritual life exceeds material life in power and scope.
HOST If God recreates dead bodies, does He make clones of corpses?
AQUINAS If you’re alluding to the Greek klon, God resurrects bodies de novo. Christ was the first efficient cause of resurrection, therefore His resurrection is the cause of man’s resurrection.
HOST Why is it that man is expected to use the intellect God gave him except when applied to God? In that consideration man is expected to suspend his intellect. Besides if God intended the soul to survive death and depart the body, why did He bulk the soul with a body?
AQUINAS Recall that in the animal kingdom, God created man and woman with a body infused with a soul. Resurrection defeats death by restoring a being in heaven.
HOST Which heaven, certainly not the Godhead or angelic heaven?
AQUINAS Keep in mind God created many heavens including the heaven of the resurrected.
HOST That makes at least four heavens – supreme, empyrean, starry, aqueous, and resurrected. The problem is there aren’t any astronomical coordinates for any of them. It’s unfortunate that God created only one world, one universe. If I were a Godist I would want to be resurrected just to visit other universes.
AQUINAS In the heaven of the resurrected they shall see God’s face, the Beatific Vision, and live in eternal bliss and glory.
HOST Does that mean God created two versions of man, temporal and eternal?
AQUINAS God created man to live a temporal life on earth. If man lives a merited life God resurrects his temporal version transmuting it its eternal version in heaven.
HOST By the way when the resurrected see the Beatific Vision do they see the countenance of the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost?
AQUINAS They see the Beatific Vision of the oneness of God.
HOST If God is purely divine essence how can He have a countenance or face?
AQUINAS You must think spiritually. The Beatific Vision is the exuberant bliss and boundless glory of being in God’s presence.
HOST But how can spiritual beings in heaven experience bliss, glory, or any other human quality?
AQUINAS You’re again thinking as an agnostic. The faithful think spiritually; they know God’s face and eternal bliss are metaphors for being in His presence. If God revealed to me His divine vocabulary you might not understand His words just as I do not understand some of your modern scientific words. Keep in mind that the Beatific Vision is made possible through God’s grace, mercy, and love.
HOST The main problem with Christianism, and other religions, is that believers think in metaphoric, symbolic, or revelatory terms rather than real terms. There was religion before there was law and then religion became God’s law. Religion fictionalizes life by recreating it with metaphors once applied to ancient mythological deities.
AQUINAS The function of religion is to transcend the real or physical world for that of the soul or spirit.
HOST The soul or spirit as you call it emanates from the physical world of the brain.
AQUINAS The Beatific Vision is denied to living man because it transcends his natural abilities to view it. However it’s written that God granted His vision to Moses and Paul.
HOST We’ve discussed God’s judgement of a merited soul but what is His judgement of a demerited soul?
AQUINAS Before we discuss the disposition of demerited souls there are rewards and dowries given to merited souls.
HOST Doesn’t the idea of rewards and dowries merely confuse the faithful? Aren’t they irrelevant to the average Catholic?
AQUINAS Nothing about God is irrelevant. We try to understand His works to better comprehend His nature. God’s purpose is to encourage living man to obey His commands and teachings. Rewards and dowries are granted to souls who in life passed from the carnal pleasures to the spiritual life of ascetic continence. When resurrected merited souls shall be offered rewards distinguished as fruit, aurea, and aureole.
HOST I’m assuming that those distinctive rewards are also discriminatory.
AQUINAS Continence is a virtue deserving of the reward of fruit given to a spouse, widow, or virgin.
Spouse – a person who keeps conjugal continence is awarded thirtyfold fruits because 10 x 3 are thirty. Now 3 is a number beloved by all because it has a beginning, middle, and end; there are also 3 divine persons in Holy Trinity. Therefore a continent spouse is dutifully awarded 30 fruits.
HOST The phrase conjugal continence is another oxymoron. Doesn’t continence transgress God’s commandment to multiply?
AQUINAS God prefers spirituality to carnality.
Widow and widowers – those who forsake married life for a spiritual life of continence are awarded sixtyfold fruits.
Virgins – are awarded one hundredfold fruits because they eschewed carnal pleasures. Virgins are continent and spiritual without limit.
HOST What about the rewards of aurea and aureole?
AQUINAS An aurea is a golden award given to the blessed. Man’s aurea is his happiness. The more excellent an aurea the more it moves towards an aureole, a crown or circle of glory whose every point is greater than the genus aurea. To the brave belongs the aurea but to the victorious belongs the aureole. It’s written "life of man upon earth is a warfare" (opcit p1050). To the Church militant belongs the aurea but to the Church triumphant belongs the aureole.
HOST Today the aureole is irrelevant and confusing. Of what concern is a crown of glory to the life of man on earth?
AQUINAS Aureoles are not awarded to the living. Aureoles are due to martyrs for their struggles against heresy, to virgins for their struggles against carnal pleasures, and to eunuchs for their dedicated service to God. Man sows the seed of nature through husbandry. The spiritual seed is sown through the Word. The more we withdraw from carnal pleasures the greater the aureole and glory of the Word. You need to separate the corporeal from the spiritual.
HOST There remains the award of the dowry.
AQUINAS In a carnal marriage a bride is dowered with white garments and jewels. Isaiah says "He hath clothed me in the garments of salvation … as a bride adorned with her jewels" (opcit p1043). In a spiritual marriage Christ dowers nuns with spiritual gifts. A spiritual marriage is more deserving therefore God dowers nuns with aurea. God’s dowry to saints is the adornment of the aureole and eternal glory.
HOST Having rewarded merited souls, what about demerited souls?
AQUINAS A demerited soul is guilty of disobedience to God and therefore not rewarded. The demerited soul is conveyed to purgatory where it endures punishment until it expiates its sins. Venial sinners are conveyed to purgatory’s upper level, which is closer to the exit. Repentant mortal sinners go to the hotter lower level far removed from the exit. Prayers by the living profit the soul by reducing its custodial suffering, by offering the Blessed Sacrament received in Mass to the suffering soul, and by petitioning the Church for intercessory acts. Unrepentant mortal sinners are conveyed to hell.
HOST How can a suffering soul in purgatory be helped by donations of prayers and acts of the living?
AQUINAS In the same manner a debtor’s amount due can be reduced by someone else’s donation of money. Spiritual union with God is called charity. Charity by the living profits the soul in purgatory. It’s written "Charity never falleth away" (opcit p903).
HOST Do those acts purify a demerited soul?
AQUINAS When a sinner dies without having confessed his sins intercessory acts forgive his sins, which preclude conveyance to hell, but the soul must still endure the fires and punishments of purgatory until its sins are expiated.
HOST So through intercessory acts the Church can retroactively forgive sins? How is that possible?
AQUINAS Christ as head of the Church grants it the power to do so.
HOST How can the spiritual entity of a departed soul experience torment or fire, which acts on matter only?
AQUINAS A demerited soul is deliberately reunited with its body for sensing corporeal punishment in purgatory.
HOST But you declared the reunion of body and soul takes place in resurrection.
AQUINAS Yes, but only for merited souls. You need to be aware of distinctions in death as well as in life. In purgatory the heat potential in a body acts out in the form of the extreme pain of fire. The soul suffers by seeing its body burned. When purified of its sins God redeems the soul, followed by its salvation and resurrection.
HOST I think resurrection is pure fiction. The body does not consist of two parts, physical and spiritual. There’s no duality in the body. It’s purely physical and when it dies everything in it dies.
AQUINAS There were ancient philosophers who held the same opinion, including Aristotle. It’s written "He that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies" (opcit p940).
HOST About hell, does God send any soul directly to hell?
AQUINAS Unrepentant sinners guilty of mortal sins are sent directly to hell. They include heretics, martyrers, and others guilty of flagrant and deliberate disobedience to God. God sends to hell a body reunited with its soul so that both suffer the pain of hell’s eternal fires. In order to maintain world order God created as many levels in hell as there are spheres in the firmament. The most flagrant sinners are conveyed directly to the lower levels of hell in the bowels of volcanoes. Shrieks from their torments, greater than any pain on earth, are heard in the earthquaking exhausts of volcanic eruptions. Conversely a soul in purgatory never purified of sins is conveyed to an upper level of hell for lesser but nevertheless eternal torment.
HOST Where is God’s mercy and justice when He condemns to hells’ eternal torment those whom he created?
AQUINAS When man eschews good for deliberate evil, he might commit unforgivable mortal sins that must be punished. In the words of our Lord "Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, which was prepared for the devil, etc." (opcit p898). Where purgatory is concerned God is rigid in judgement but flexible in punishment, permitting intercessory acts and prayers to mitigate suffering of the damned. In hell God is rigid in both judgement and punishment. The torments of those in hell cannot be assuaged by acts of the living. They will never be resurrected. They will never see the Beatific Vision.
HOST If all you described is the result of God’s First Judgement, I’m fearful about what happens in His Last Judgement? It’s incredulous that the all-knowing all-everything God requires a second opinion of man, His own creation. It’s more irresponsible than a drug company claiming it didn’t know about the debilitating affects of a drug it created. When and where is the Last Judgement to take place?
AQUINAS Only the Father knows the time and place. It’s written "It’s not for you to know the times or moments which the Father hath put in His own power" (opcit p1003). Most scholars agree it will take place in the valley of Josephat, which foots the Mount Of Olives from where Jesus ascended to heaven. There were prophets who claimed the Last Judgement would be on the day that fingernails of Jews wore down the Mount Of Olives.
HOST Are there linkages between the two comings and two judgements?
AQUINAS At the First Coming the Son was weak and they crucified Him. At the Second Coming He will be strong, appear in shinning white robes, sit on the Throne of glory surrounded by a fiery aura, His Son seated at His right, and the Holy Ghost seated at His left, and He will judge all the living and dead.
HOST Do you mean the recently dead or the dead previously dead and already disposed of in the First judgement?
AQUINAS We cannot presume to know the mind of God’s intentions.
HOST What about pregnant women? Are they to be counted as one or two?
AQUINAS An unborn is considered part of the mother, who will be judged as one living person.
HOST How about women in the process of giving birth, are their newborns sent to limbo?
AQUINAS A newborn will be sent to limbo and also judged as a living person. But God with mercy will rescue it from limbo.
HOST Have you an opinion of the Last Judgement day itself.
AQUINAS On the day of His Last Judgement God shall send the archangel Gabriel with trumpet to herald that day amid all the heavenly signs. Luke says "There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars, etc." (opcit p922). It’s written also "The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold" (opcit p924). On that day God will suspend time and make it stand still.
HOST In our discussion of God you declared He cannot undo past events, so how can He make time stand still?
AQUINAS Nothing is impossible for God. He has the power to undo past events but chooses not to. On the day of the Last Judgement however God shall suspend time and eclipse the sun and the moon. He shall appear in an aura of glory with His supreme judicial powers. He shall glorify the saints, separate the good from the evil, judge the living and raise the dead to be judged anew, and on that day Jews shall believe in Christ.
HOST On that day who shall do the judging the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost?
AQUINAS On that day God the Father shall read from the Book of Life and do the judging.
HOST One book for all the living and dead?
AQUINAS Many books symbolically alluded to as the Book of Life. In that book are the names and numbers of each person living or dead. Numbers are needed because names might change; numbers never change. The dead shall be raised to congregate with the living. God shall command the chief Seraphim to read the names and numbers from the book. It’s written "the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged by those things which were written in the books according to their works" (opcit p998). God shall judge each one according to his good or evil, merits or demerits as written in the Book of Life. Earth’s entire population shall know God’s judgement of each person. Finally God shall make His Last Judgement, accept humanity or reject it.
Accept humanity – God shall reward the good with eternal life in heaven, punish the evil in purgatory or hell, leave the world as is, and ascend once more to the Godhead.
Reject humanity – God’s wrath shall consume the world.
It’s written "The beauty of this world will perish in the burning of the world by flames" (opcit p925). On the day of the Last Judgement the Seraphim will descend to earth and escort to heaven martyrs and saints. The Cherubim will descend to earth and escort to heaven the blessed and faithful. But the damned are cast into the fires of hell. It’s written "the devil who seduced them was cast into the pool of fire and brimstone, where both the beasts and false prophets shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever" (opcit p1081). On that day the devil himself will ascend from the bowels of earth and escort the damned to the eternal fires of hell.
HOST Do you believe the consumed in hell will rise from earth’s ashes?
AQUINAS It’s written "Earth thou art and into earth shalt thou go" and "Dust thou art into dust thou shalt return" (opcit p949). God’s divine essence shall consume earth, water, fire, air, destroy all the world’s corruption, and in the conflagration world order shall turn to chaos. The earth will be formless and in darkness and a mighty wind will sweep over its waters.
HOST I ask you without condescension and in all sincerity, how can any intelligent being believe in a First Judgement, Last Judgement, or any judgement by a discriminating God who’s not merciful or just?
AQUINAS I answer that faith and revelation from God triumph over intelligence. To the faithful God’s grace, love, and mercy are boundless. All the faithful are redeemed unto God’s Kingdom. There they are saved and their bodies resurrected with embodied soul for eternal bliss in heaven. They enjoy the dual happiness of body and soul residing in mansions in the City of God.
HOST Unlike phantom heavens cities have locations. Where’s the City of God?
AQUINAS It’s obviously a metaphor for those chosen by God. It’s written "In my Father’s house are many mansions" (opcit p1039).
HOST Are mansions also metaphors and if so for what?
AQUINAS Mansions relate to the distinctions of the resurrected, whether proximate and remote.
If proximate – the resurrected are distinguished by their charity. They reside in the upper levels of mansions. There they are closer to God for a better view and more clarity of His Beatific Vision.
If remote – the resurrected reside in lower levels of mansions. They are more removed from God with a lesser view of His Beatific Vision.
HOST I’m amazed at God’s discriminatory practices. Today He would be taken to court and made to make amends for His discrimination.
AQUINAS What you call discrimination is based upon merit and reward for obedience to God.
HOST In the second iteration of creation, when God gets a second chance to recreate all there is, will He have learned from His previous mistakes? Will He recreate man perfect in all parts, without natural inclination for evil and without original sin?
AQUINAS I do not know the mind of God or presume to know His intentions. Man had free will for good or evil. Perhaps next time man will choose good over evil.
HOST Do saints in heaven see the suffering of the damned?
AQUINAS Yes but in rendering to God copious thanks for their heavenly bliss it makes their own happiness all the more delightful.
HOST When the chief Seraphim challenged God’s power, God converted him to devil and cast him from heaven to hell’s eternal fire in the never ending cycle of instantaneous combustion. But today when man not only challenges God’s power but even denies God’s existence, nothing happens.
AQUINAS That’s because man is on earth, not in heaven. The faithful will be saved from hell because it’s written "He that eateth my body and drinketh my blood hath eternal life" (opcit p1083).
HOST That’s ghoulish; it’s cannibalism.
AQUINAS It’s symbolic of Christianism as distinguished from Judaism.
HOST It’s more of Christianity that’s only symbolic, not real. The idea that God created man with natural fault to sin just so that the Son, through gratuitous sacrificial crucifixion, could save reject man from himself assaults one’s intelligence. That religious cabal is deceitful, preposterous, and grotesquely absurd.
AQUINAS Your comment is the usual conclusion of unbelievers. It’s written "the god of this world hath blinded the minds of unbelievers" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, p339). Keep in mind that all Christians believe in Christ’s resurrection.
HOST By the way the word resurrection is in the New Testament only because resurrection is the device contrived to deify Jesus.
AQUINAS Resurrection is not contrived; it’s an historical fact witnessed and confirmed by the three Marys and Jesus’ disciples.
HOST We’ll finally get to that next in your Treatise on Trinity.
AQUINAS You moved Trinity from next to God where it belongs to the end of our discussion where it’s misplaced.
HOST I believe Trinity was contrived only after Jesus was deified to Son of God in order to satisfy dissenters like Arius and other nonbelievers in Jesus’ divinity.
HOST We at last encounter your Treatise on Trinity. I moved it from its place after God because I believe Trinity was contrived after Jesus died.
AQUINAS The move is the result of your own choosing.
HOST Yes, free will and all that.
AQUINAS I placed the treatise directly after God because Trinity and God are one and the same.
HOST That’s obviously Church dogma. Before we go any further, I need to make the following assumption. The New Testament describes the life of the man Jesus. His sacrificial crucifixion redeemed man for God’s Kingdom, saved him from the eternal damnation of sin, then resurrected his body for reunion with his merited soul thereby giving man the opportunity for heavenly bliss. On the third day after death Jesus was presumed resurrected and thereafter ascended to heaven seated at the right hand of the Father. Is that assumption more or less correct?
AQUINAS I’ll accept that assumption except that there’s no presumption of Jesus’ resurrection. He was in fact resurrected as witnessed and affirmed in the Gospel and elsewhere in the New Testament.
HOST But your exposition of Trinity doesn’t reveal that it was contrived by early Church fathers to satisfy the deification of Jesus.
AQUINAS I answer that Trinity and God are in the Godhead and that they are one and the same. Trinity is the oneness of God, which consists of three divine persons the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Moreover early Church fathers explained to the laity the mystery of the three persons in God. That mystery is called Mysterium Fidei, Mystery of Faith.
HOST The Church recognized that Trinity required the mystery of faith to render it acceptable. I understand the Church insists that Catholics believe in Mysterium Fidei.
AQUINAS It’s part of Church dogma.
HOST Of course, it’s the bedrock of Catholicism and the device by which the Church explains how the Son came into being. Trinity is not a mystery at all because it’s patently false. You need to explain how the three persons came into being? Let’s begin with the Father.
AQUINAS God is the Father. Our creed begins "We believe in one God the Father Almighty,"... The Father is innascible; He’s unborn. He is that He is; He is God. The plurality of persons in Trinity proceeds from God the Father.
HOST On earth the plurality of persons in one person exists in the chaos called schizophrenia.
AQUINAS There’s no chaos in heaven because of God’s perfection.
HOST Did the Father beget the Son?
AQUINAS There’s no begetting in Trinity. The Son proceeded from the Father, therefore the Son is of the same substance as the Father.
HOST You said substance. Substance is matter. How can divine essence be matter?
AQUINAS Substance meaning hypostasis, the theme or subject of divine essence.
HOST Did the Holy Ghost proceed from the Father?
AQUINAS There’s a difference of opinion on that. Some believe the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father; others believe it proceeded from the Father and Son.
HOST What do you believe?
AQUINAS I answer that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and was aspirated through the Son.
HOST What does that mean?
AQUINAS An action proceeds from a source through an agent to a result. In the matter of the Holy Ghost the preposition ‘through’ is significant because it identifies whether an action is formal, final, or moving, as defined in the following examples:
Formal – a sculptor works through love of art.
Final – a sculptor works through love of gain.
Moving – a sculptor works through the command of another for love of art and gain. The act of going ‘through’ is itself the agent producing the result, as when a sculptor works ‘through’ a mallet the mallet is the cause of the result. In like manner The Father as source works ‘through’ His agent the Son to produce the result, the Holy Ghost. Therefore the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father ‘through’ the Son.
HOST That convoluted logic is required to qualify the Holy Ghost as participant in the Incarnation of the Virgin Mary, and in the subsequent deification of Jesus as Son of God.
AQUINAS Athanasius says "The Holy Ghost is from the
Father and son; not made, not created, nor begotten, but proceeding" (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, p156).HOST If Trinity is the oneness of God, why did you write a separate treatise on Trinity?
AQUINAS Because Trinity is the foundation of Catholicism and deserves it’s own treatise. Furthermore the a priori existence of the Son in Trinity made Him available to be incarnated in the Blessed Virgin Mary.
HOST In order to make Trinity believable early Church fathers required the Incarnation of Jesus to make Him man. After Jesus’ death they required the Resurrection of Jesus to deify Him to Son of God.
AQUINAS Not true, you’re contriving an explanation because you do not believe in God or Trinity. The oneness of God is in Holy Trinity. Eternal Holy Trinity is an undivided unity of God, therefore we have three persons in one God.
HOST Three persons in one is absurd. How can three persons be undivided? Three means more than one.
AQUINAS No, there are three innascible spiritually divine persons in the one undivided unity of God.
HOST Three divine persons identified only after Jesus died to account for the Son born as man. We do not agree on that point so let’s get on with Trinity itself. In your Treatise on God you declared God immutable. In your Treatise on Trinity you declared God to be three divine persons. How do you explain God’s immutability in one treatise and God’s mutability in another.
AQUINAS I never wrote that God was mutable. I wrote that God does not change.
HOST In your Treatise on God you declared God is not subject or vulnerable to external events. If God becomes Trinity He’s vulnerable to external event on earth that required His Son to become the man Jesus. That means the one God changed to satisfy the external event requiring Him to have a Son.
AQUINAS No, God is Trinity and the Most Holy Trinity is God. They are one and the same.
HOST How do you explain the three persons in the one God you say is simple, pure, and immutable?
AQUINAS In procession there’s no outward movement from God to Trinity.
HOST But the Church devised Trinity only after Jesus died to provide the Son who descended to earth to be incarnated in Mary’s womb. That means God is mutable and vulnerable to external events.
AQUINAS Once more I answer that Trinity and God are one in the oneness of God.
HOST The word Trinity is not in the Bible, not in the Old Testament or New Testament. That’s proof enough that early Christians and patristic writers contrived Trinity because they were forced by zealous Jews to deify the Son Jesus Whom they believed was the Messiah. The Church then used Trinity to explain to unbelieving Jews and Moslems that Jesus was the Son of God. Trinity is sheer trumpery.
AQUINAS Trinity is alluded to several times in the New Testament. Mathew says "Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (MT 28,19). During baptism holy men hear the voice of the Father proclaiming "this is my beloved son" (opcit p62) and see the Holy Ghost as a dove hovering over the infant being baptized. Also in 2 Corinthians it’s written "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with you all" (2 Cor 13,13).
HOST It’s clear that Mathew, and Paul in 2 Corinthians, don’t agree on the names of the persons in Trinity. Mathew calls the Father the Father and Son the Son. Paul calls the Son Lord Jesus Christ and the Father he calls God. But neither Mathew nor Paul uses the word Trinity.
AQUINAS Surely it must be clear that both allude to Trinity.
HOST It’s also clear that early Christians were followers of the risen Jesus, not Christ. Moreover it was Jesus who was resurrected, not Christ.
AQUINAS In those days it was common to use metaphors and synonyms to identify the same person.
HOST Those Biblical allusions were made by patristic writers, none of whom knew Jesus. They wrote about Jesus long after He died, about 75 to 100 years later. Even at those late dates the word Trinity was never used, more proof that Trinity was contrived after Jesus died. Prior to Jesus’ death there’s no mention of Trinity. The word itself, Trinity, is not used in the New Testament which means Trinity did not exist until after the New Testament was written. These facts support my contention that the Church devised Trinity solely for the deification of Jesus to Son of God.
AQUINAS John proclaims "there are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost" (opcit p168).
HOST John doesn’t mention Trinity. Besides John calls the Son the Word.
AQUINAS John proclaimed "In the beginning was the Word; the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God" (Jn 1,1-4).
HOST In that quotation John calls the ‘Word’ God. I think John did that solely to equate the God of Christians with the God of Jews.
AQUINAS Do not think of the word ‘Word’ as a vocabulary entry. ‘Word" represents the Father’s love for His Son and the Son’s wisdom.
HOST Why didn’t God create Trinity during the six days of creation?
AQUINAS There was no need to create what already exists. Trinity exists in God; it’s unborn, innascible.
HOST During the six days of creation who did the creating?
AQUINAS God the Father was, is, and remains the creator.
HOST That means the Son and Holy Ghost didn’t create anything.
AQUINAS The Son’s wisdom assisted the Father and the Holy Ghost, giver of life and love, breathed life into man. The Holy Ghost lives in our minds if we would only reach out for Him.
HOST But it was God who breathed life into the man formed of clay.
AQUINAS That’s in the Second Story of Creation, which is concerned chiefly with the fall of man. The Church interprets the creation itself as being in the first story.
HOST If Trinity was revealed to Catholics why wasn’t it revealed to Jews? Jews and Catholics believe in the one God, the God of all there is.
AQUINAS Revelation is not for us to question; it’s a gift from God. How can a mere human determine or probe the divine mind of God and the reasons by which He graces us with His revelations. Moreover Jews had no concept of Trinity.
HOST Trinity was not revealed to Jews because they had no need of it. Trinity was created by the early Church fathers ex post facto, after the death of Jesus. You’re well aware that Jews considered Jesus their Messiah, the anointed one. After Jesus died zealous Jews were determined to deify Him to Son of God. You’re also aware that Greeks interpreted the word Messiah, the anointed one, as Christos. The followers of Jesus appended the name Christ to Jesus, referring to Him as Jesus Christ, and were thereafter called Christians.
AQUINAS You’re repeating that which every Catholic child learns in Catechism class, but please continue even if it’s for your own propaedeutic benefit.
HOST Children in Catechism class are not taught the entire truth.
AQUINAS Truth? How can truth of God come from the mouth of an atheist?
HOST As follows, the man Jesus needed a father and mother. Early Church fathers had to solve the problem of how to make the man Jesus into the declared Son of God? How were they to convert humanity to divinity? They solved their problem by contriving Trinity, the new God of Christians, composed of three persons. Judaism has God 1 and Christianism has God 2.
AQUINAS There’s only one everlasting God.
HOST The God of Jews without Trinity is not the God of Christians with Trinity.
AQUINAS There are simply two versions of the one God.
HOST Please bear with me, as you mentioned this is more for my benefit than yours. Patristic writers were required to contrive a theology whereby Jesus would become the Son of God. Their solution was Trinity, anachronous and illogical.
AQUINAS I answer that in the Godhead are three divine persons of the Most Holy Trinity, which always existed but not revealed until needed.
HOST You replaced God with Godhead.
AQUINAS Godhead means the divine essence of God. In the Godhead, God and Trinity are one.
HOST In your Treatise on God you declared God is not a composite of parts. What about the three parts of Trinity?
AQUINAS Not three composite parts of matter but three divine and loving persons in the oneness of God.
HOST Now I’m really confused. For me understanding Trinity is best understood retrospectively after Jesus’ death, the same was concluded by the Council for the Deification of Jesus.
AQUINAS That council was convened by a heretic sect whose beliefs divorced them from the Church.
HOST That council concluded that the early Church fathers needed to explain how after His death the man Jesus was deified to the Son of God. Jews had a one God. Romans had many gods. Christians had no God but they had the man Jesus the Son of God. The man Jesus needed a mother. In those days it was common practice for deified humans to be born of virgins. Early Church fathers chose a young Jewess, the Virgin Mary. Church fathers then had the problem of how to fertilize Mary. They decided to create the Holy Ghost to come upon her for Immaculate Conception.
AQUINAS No, the Holy Ghost already existed as the third person in Trinity. The Holy Ghost represents the Father’s ardent love for His Son.
HOST The Church through the Holy Ghost’s Immaculate Conception of Mary gave Jesus a mother. That done Jesus needed a father so Church fathers specified God as the Father therefore we have Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – e pluribus unum.
AQUINAS You’re repeating in different words the same story I related to you in the Incarnation. With due respect to you, your conclusions are wrong. All Catholic theologians agree that Trinity existed in God before the Father sent His Son to earth. That belief is so strongly held it’s Church dogma.
HOST In that case why would it be necessary a priori for one God to consist of three persons? What was the purpose of the three-way split in one God? Today we call such a split multiple personality disorder.
AQUINAS We cannot comprehend the mind of God. Surely the all-knowing Father knew in advance that His Son would be sent on a divine mission to earth, there to be transmuted to the man Jesus.
HOST Speaking of God and Jesus whenever I see a representation of God looks like Jesus, a man with a beard. Most of those representations show God sitting on a throne and in His lap the world is topped by a cross.
AQUINAS You might be interested in knowing that during Mass the priest makes the sign of the cross 52 times, each time reciting the names of the three persons of Trinity– the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
HOST I’ve never seen God represented as Trinity with Jesus sitting at His right and the Holy Ghost sitting at His left. Moreover you declared God’s divine essence is supreme simplicity. If so, how did it evolve to Trinity?
AQUINAS God’s simplicity has no likeness in man. In man the will for likeness is called generation. Hilary says "Let not man think to reach the sacrament of generation by his own mind" (opcit 176). Ambrose says "It is impossible to know the secret of generation. The mind fails, the voice is silent" (ibid). In God the will for likeness does not exist. God does not will Himself. He is that He is. God’s will toward a divine person is not called generation but procession. In God procession exists as an internal act. Keep in mind there’s no potency in God as there is in matter. God is pure act without movement. He acts out of will with procession. The Lord Jesus Christ said "From God I proceeded" (opcit p153).
HOST How did procession create Trinity?
AQUINAS I answer that "The divine processions can be derived only from the actions which remain within the agent. In a nature which is intellectual, and in the divine nature these actions are two, to understand and to will. For to sense, which also appears to be an operation within the one sensing, is outside the intellectual nature, nor is it wholly removed from the genus of external actions; for the act of sensation is perfected by the action of the sensible upon the sense. It follows that no other procession is possible in God but the procession of the Word and of Love" (opcit p157).
HOST I’m not sure what that means but surmise that Word is the Son and Love is the Holy Ghost.
AQUINAS From the Father proceeded the Son; from the Father and Son proceeded the Holy Ghost. To the Father belongs power, to the Son wisdom, and to the Holy Ghost life and love.
HOST Today the Holy Ghost is called the Holy Spirit.
AQUINAS I prefer the Holy Ghost because His spirituality is ghostly; He appears that He appears not. Some scholars believe procession is an outward movement. They are wrong. Procession is an internal act of intellectual emanation. For example when an orator speaks his words proceed from his intellect but the meaning of those words remain in his head. In God the procession of Trinity remains in his intellect.
HOST So in God were three processions.
AQUINAS No, only two.
HOST How can only two processions create the three persons of Trinity? Should trinity be duality?
AQUINAS No. Trinity means the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
HOST But you just said there were only two processions.
AQUINAS There was no procession from God to the Father because God is the Father.
HOST In descriptive terms Trinity is not duality as I suggested but quadrity – God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
AQUINAS No. God is the Father, they are one and the same. To speak of paternity and filiation it’s proper to call God the Father.
HOST Your Trinity is very confusing. It’s easier to think of the arithmetic trinity– plus, zero, and minus.
AQUINAS Try to think in terms of spiritual relations.
HOST I find it hard to think in terms of phantoms. Speaking of human relations is there evidence that Trinity is in man?
AQUINAS In man Trinity is represented by number, order, weight, and substance:
HOST What, are we back to quadrity?
AQUINAS I refer to Trinity’s characteristics, for example:
Number – refers to the three divine persons.
Order– refers to the hierarchy of the three divine persons.
Power– refers to the equality of their spiritual power.
Substance – refers to their common divine essence.
HOST How can there be a hierarchy if the three divine persons are co-equal?
AQUINAS You’re thinking again in human terms. I answer that Trinity is three divine persons having five relational properties.
HOST What? You began with three, then four, and now five?
AQUINAS Not five persons, five relational properties –innascibility, procession, sonship, paternity, and aspiration.
Innascibility – God the Father is unbegotten, unborn, He is that He is.
Procession – one God proceeding to three divine persons.
Sonship – the Son proceeded from the Father.
Paternity – from Father to the Son is active paternity and from the Son to Father is passive paternity.
Aspiration – the Holy Ghost proceeded from Father and Son.
From Father and Son to Holy Ghost is active aspiration.
From Holy Ghost to Father and Son is passive aspiration.
HOST Unless I misunderstand what you’re saying, there are two processions delivering three divine persons for four characteristics having five relational properties, two of which have the dual functions of active and passive. It sounds like the subplots of a mythological drama.
AQUINAS Perhaps the mystery of a theological drama.
HOST It appears to me the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are God’s isotopes of nonpolar beings.
AQUINAS What?
HOST Amidst the phantoms a little levity or perhaps reality.
AQUINAS In my day your amusing conclusion could be construed as blasphemy or even heresy.
HOST And in my day the three persons of Trinity in one God are referred to as multiple personality disorder.
AQUINAS You’re still confusing human and divine relationships. Do not confuse the relational properties of Trinity with the human relationships of consanguinity.
HOST Speaking of consanguinity the Bible speaks of begetting, not procession.
AQUINAS Yes, the begetting of humans. In begetting man activates potency in matter to act. But God proceeds directly from act, such as the Word becoming flesh of Jesus. It’s written "This day have I begotten Thee" (opcit p154).
HOST That quote includes the word begotten. You used the word proceeded.
AQUINAS The word begotten is mostly from the Old Testament. Keep in mind that there are different substances in the begetter and the begotten. Boethius holds that "in God the substance contains unity, and relation multiplies the Trinity" (opcit p160). Ambrose says "the Father and Son are in one Godhead. Nor is there any difference in substance between them, nor any diversity" (opcit p172). The substance he speaks of is the first principle called hypostasis. Procession signifies hypostasis, the same substance. I say the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are of the same substance co-equal and co-eternal. The three persons do not imply diversity.
HOST But diversity is exactly what distinguishes the three persons in Trinity. I recall that in the early Church there were those who opposed your conclusion, among them Arius and Sebellius. Moreover Arius denied the divinity of Jesus as the Son of God.
AQUINAS Arius believed that the Father begot the Son, inferring the begetter and the begotten were of different substances. Sebellius believed the Father became the Son in assuming flesh of Jesus. Arius and Sebellius believed the Son was the outward manifestation of God, which is impossible because God does not act from potency of matter as do humans.
HOST To better understand your concept of Trinity I need to separate the three persons. In the beginning God, not the Father, created the heavens and earth. The Father appeared in patristic writings only after the death of Jesus.
AQUINAS God is the Father. God and the Father are one and the same.
HOST The name Father is not appropriate to the God who created all there is. The God of creation must be above paternity.
AQUINAS In the eternity of the Godhead, God is the Father of the Son. In temporal time God is the Father of Jesus.
HOST Is it realistic for the Father to be unbegotten by God?
AQUINAS The first relational property of Trinity is the innascibility of the Father; there’s no before or after. Hilary says "One is from one – that is the Begotten is from the Unbegotten – namely by the property in each one respectively of innascibility and origin" (opcit p183). Augustine says " the father is the principle of the whole Deity (opcit p181).
HOST Does Father imply family as in pater familias?
AQUINAS No, it’s irrational to compare a human relationship to a divine one.
HOST What about the fact there’s a Father before there can be a Son?
AQUINAS You’re again thinking in human terms and of human generation. Remember the innascibility of the Father and that the Son exists within the Godhead, so that the Son exists within the God the Father.
HOST You claimed the Son exists within the Father. How can the Son proceed from Himself? That relationship is impossible and incestuous.
AQUINAS Augustine says "As the son is related to the Father, so also is the Word to Him whose Word He is" (opcit p185). On earth there’s separation between father and son but in heaven there’s no separation between the Father and Son, and no separation in Trinity. John confirms it when he says of the Son "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (opcit p229).
HOST John had flights of fancy. Is the Son therefore as great as the Father?
AQUINAS Yes, they are co-eternal and co-equal in power and greatness.
HOST Was it the Father or God who sent His Son on the mission to earth?
AQUINAS I repeat God and the Father are one and the same.
HOST On the seventh day God rested. Did He disrupt His rest and inertia to send His Son on a mission to earth?
AQUINAS You’re confusing the creation story in the Old Testament with the New Testament. God sent His Son on a mission to earth so that His sacrificial death would forgive man’s sins past, present, and future thereby redeeming his soul. In the flesh the Son Jesus was moderator between God and sinful man.
HOST In your Treatise on God you declared God does not change past events. How is it possible for God to pardon past sins? How is it possible to forgive future sins?
AQUINAS The pardoning of sins is a metaphor for the redemption of man for God’s Kingdom, thereby enabling man’s soul to be saved for eternal bliss in heaven. The pardon is made possible by the sacrifice, the redemptive price, of the Son for man’s soul.
HOST I thought it was sin that was being redeemed?
AQUINAS Why would God redeem sin as an independent agent? God created man’s soul because sin is in the soul.
HOST Speaking of missions, I thought angels went on missions.
AQUINAS God is free to send any heavenly being on a mission. There are two kinds of missions, visible and invisible. When the Father sent His Son to earth it was on the visible mission of Jesus the man. When the Father sends the Holy Ghost to earth it’s normally for invisible missions such as the Incarnation.
HOST The Son was sent on a mission to redeem sinful man for God’s Kingdom and possible ascension to heaven. Other than the sanctification and incarnation of Mary, why was the Holy Ghost sent on missions?
AQUINAS Augustine says "the Holy Ghost proceeds temporarily for creatures’ sanctification" (opcit p231). Through its gift of life and love the Holy Ghost dwells in the hearts of holy men.
HOST Was the Holy Ghost ever sent on a visible mission?
AQUINAS When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist the Father sent the Holy Ghost, transmuted to a hovering white dove, as a sign of love for His Son.
HOST The transmutation of the Holy Ghost to a hovering white dove is certainly a myth.
AQUINAS It’s a ceremonial metaphor accompanying the sacrament of baptism.
HOST While the Son was redeeming man what was the Holy Ghost doing?
AQUINAS The Holy Ghost moves as the wind through the air and over the earth. The Father sends the Holy Ghost to earth on invisible missions to dwell in the hearts of holy men. Its spirit enables Catholics to enter into a personal relationship with God.
HOST A little while ago you said that I shouldn’t compare human relationships with divine ones. How can a human engage in a personal relationship with God a divine being?
AQUINAS But that’s the very purpose of the Holy Ghost, to enable that relationship to occur through His power of life and love. Life and love are the proper attributes of the Holy Ghost. Gregory says "the Holy Ghost Himself is love (opcit p197).
HOST But love is a human attribute, it’s physical.
AQUINAS I reply that the Holy Ghost is the intellectual emanation enabling that relationship to take place, comparable to physical attributes of "to love" or "to speak".
HOST Was the Father ever sent on a divine mission?
AQUINAS Are you implying the Father sends Himself? The Father does not proceed from another and therefore does not send Himself on missions. The Father is God; He does not descend to earth.
HOST When the Father sends the Son and/or Holy Ghost on missions, is Trinity numerically reduced or deprived of divine essence?
AQUINAS No, in heaven Trinity is infinite and eternal; it cannot be altered.
HOST But the sending of the Son or Holy Ghost to earth reduces Trinity to duality.
AQUINAS No, you are thinking arithmetically instead of spiritually, only their temporal versions are sent. Their heavenly divine essence remains intact in Trinity in the Godhead.
HOST That means that on missions to earth the three persons in Trinity remain equal irrespective of departures of the Son and Holy Ghost.
AQUINAS Equality means the absence of more or less. Athanasius says "the three persons are co-eternal and co-equal to one another" (opcit p224).
HOST We’ve discussed Trinity in one God but how about the one God that’s transmutable? Trismegistus wrote about the monad, the one transmutable God. The monad is transmutable to Trinity and is also the quinary God of the five relational properties. He remarked that references to God are always singular and not plural as in Gods of Trinity. I ask the same question.
AQUINAS You’re are again confusing human composition with the pure simplicity of divine essence. God is not a composition of parts, He is purely and wholly divine essence. It’s written "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one God" (opcit p204). Many men comprise an army but in that one army are soldiers. God is to Trinity what an army is to soldiers.
HOST Your scholarly explanations have not convinced me that Trinity exists, that it is real.
AQUINAS That for which no reason can be given, it follows you cannot know Trinity by reason alone. We should not attempt to prove by reason what’s known by revelation through faith. The authority of the Church alone teaches us about Trinity through Mysterium Fidei. Dionysius says "We must not dare to say anything of God but what is taught to us by the Holy Scripture" (opcit p178).
HOST The one God of the Jews proceeded from the ineffable Yahweh to the expressible Elohim and Adonai. The God of Christians proceeded from one God to Trinity. Early Christians who believed in magic and the supernatural were likely to believe in Trinity as well as other Biblical stories. Trinity is a fiction created by zealous Jews, those early church fathers, who were determined to deliver Jesus as the expected Messiah, the Son of God.
AQUINAS Mathew and Luke allude to Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God.
HOST John avoids all mention of it.
AQUINAS But in Mark (14,62) Jesus admits He’s the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One meaning God. Are we not to believe Jesus’ own words?
HOST Those words were written by Mark not Jesus. Mark wasn’t even a contemporary of Jesus. His gospel was written about seven decades after Jesus died. Furthermore patristic writers proselytized for Jesus as their Saviorman. Jesus is not only the Christian Saviorman but also its veritable maintenance man. Today greedy Christian clerics act as TV marketers proselytizing for their Saviorman and money.
AQUINAS Catholics have faith in the Church, faith in Mysterium Fidei.
HOST The early Church concluded that most rational Christians did not believe in Trinity, so it was forced to make faith the highest of virtues. Faith that God crossed over to the animal kingdom to perform the sexual rite leading to the birth of Jesus. Mysterium Fidei became dogma to maintain Church viability and authority.
AQUINAS No, from the beginning Holy Trinity was and is in God. The three persons in Trinity are the oneness in the one God.
HOST A fiction created by churchmen to explain Jesus as the Son of God.
AQUINAS You should be aware that the Holy Ghost is also mediator between God and man.
HOST In addition to angels and Jesus?
AQUINAS Yes, the Holy Ghost gives seven gifts to man – wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge, piety, and fear of God (Is 11,2). These gifts enable man to have faith in God and Trinity.
HOST Yes, and faith in the fiction of Trinity.
AQUINAS The Holy Ghost also gives nine fruits to man – love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, generosity, faith, mildness, and chastity.
HOST Those are all human qualities.
AQUINAS Of course, God grants them to man through the intercession of the Holy Ghost.
HOST Trinitarians believe in three persons in one God. Unitarians believe in one God of one person. Each believes in heaven but who actually gets to heaven?
AQUINAS Heaven is open to all who believe in God.
HOST So if a Christian believes in God but not in Trinity he can go to heaven. If that’s true, why did the Church bother to contrive Trinity?
AQUINAS Holy Trinity was not contrived, it’s in God. Trinity is part of Catholic dogma.
HOST It has to be, it’s the foundation of Catholicism. When the Son and Holy Ghost returned from their missions to earth, they were recombined with God the Father. Today several Catholic apologists claim that upon death the soul’s process of returning and recombining with God the Father was the model for recombinative DNA.
AQUINAS I have no knowledge of your DNA but upon death merited souls rejoice the Father in heaven.
HOST That extends the fiction of rinity. There’s more written about religion than any other topic. I believe the more a thing needs explanation or definition the more it becomes fiction. No purported logic, whether that of a philosopher or theologian, can make real or believable the contrivance of Trinity.
HOST We’ve come to the end of our friendly disputation. However I cannot ignore your unfortunate experience the morning of 6Dec1273. That morning while celebrating Mass for the Feast of Saint Nicholas, it was reported that a great change came over you. Witnesses claimed it appeared you had a shocking and depressing experience. Deacons and congregants close to the altar claim you had a nervous breakdown. You ended the Mass in an agitated state and hurried unto the sacristy. Concerned deacons asked "Thomas what happened, what’s wrong"? He didn’t say and no one knows. Whatever it was so distressed him that it ended his scholastic career, no more preaching, teaching, or writing.
AQUINAS "I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life." (Great Books of the Western World, Thomas Aquinas, Volume1, pvi)
HOST Several months later Pope Gregory 10 (1271-1276) dispatched you to the Second Council of Lyons in an attempt to reconcile the differences between Greek and Latin versions of Christian theology. On your way to Lyons, 12Feb1274, it was reported you suffered a stroke.
AQUINAS Fortunately I was in the vicinity my niece’s palace at Maenza and was taken there. Later I was taken to the Cistercian Monastery at Fossanova (new ditch) in the Lazio region. At first my health improved but then worsened. It became apparent to me I was getting worse. The doctor told me I was approaching my end. That evening in my cell I recited one of the favorite prayers I composed:
"Almighty and Eternal God, behold, I approach the Sacrament of Thine only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. I approach as one who is sick to the physician of life, as one unclean to the fountain of mercy, as one blind to the light of eternal brightness, as one poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Therefore I beseech Thee, of Thine infinite goodness, to heal my sickness, to wash away my filth, to enlighten my blindness, to enrich my poverty, and to clothe my nakedness, that I may receive the Bread of Angels, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords with such reverence and humility, with such contrition and devotion, with such purity and faith, with such purpose and intention, as may conduce to the salvation of my soul.
Grant, I beseech Thee, that I may receive not only the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord, but also the fruit and virtue of this Sacrament. O most indulgent God, grant me so to receive the Body of Thine Only-Begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, which He took of the Virgin Mary, that I may be found worthy to be incorporated with His mystical body and numbered among His members.
O most loving Father, grant that one day I may contemplate forever, face to face, Thy beloved Son, Whom now on my pilgrimage I am about to receive under the sacramental veils; Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen." (Latin-English Booklet Missal p5. This prayer is now called the ‘Prayer of Saint Thomas Aquinas’. It is surely the outpouring of someone living in the abstraction of fantasy.)
HOST You voiced your last confession at Fossanova. It was reported to be the confession of an innocent child. You uttered another prayer made famous since then.
AQUINAS I had a vision of Christ and in His presence spoke directly to Him:
"I am receiving thee, Price of my soul’s redemption; all my labours have been for love of thee. I have taught much and written much of the most sacred body of Jesus Christ; I have taught and written in the faith of Jesus Christ and of the holy roman church, to whose judgement I offer and submit everything". (Butler’s Lives of Saints, p512)
End of Disputation
HOST While celebrating Mass on the fateful morning of 6Dec1273, no one knows what happened to Aquinas because he didn’t reveal it. I was compelled to compose the following poetic account of the incident.
Revelation
1.
In a committed celebratory Mass mood
The saintly Aquinas approaches the altar
Genuflecting makes the sign of the cross and then
Pulls to each side curtains of the tabernacle
Revealing therein the Eucharistic vessel
Takes to himself the shinning gold ciborium
Its cover topped by cross, its front with window to
View adoringly its contents of sacred hosts
Symbolizing bodies of crucified Jesus
Nearby upon a gold platen a sacred host
Body of crucified Jesus lying in state
Nearby a gold chalice in which is poured red wine
The very precious blood of crucified Jesus
A cruet of John’s water from Jesus’ side
Added to blood red wine confirms Jesus’ death
Adoring Jesus’ body and watered blood
Aquinas demeanored with supreme reverence
Consecrates Jesus’ body and watered blood
Sacramentally renews Jesus’ death and
Begs God to accept consecrated offerings.
Deep inside the tabernacle’s dark mystery
Appears the mocking specter of Prince of Darkness
Accoutered in the Dominican black habit
Lightning from his horns illuminates the darkness
Revealing therein the Beatific Vision
He beckons Aquinas to view the production
Of the Devil’s Repertory Theater troupe
In its performance of ‘Travesty of the Mass’
In which paten and chalice are replaced by props
Jupiter’s body, Bacchus’ wine, Neptune’s water
The parody like reveille’s harsh bugle blast
Wakes Aquinas from the mood of Mass reverie
He ponders quiddities of body and blood and
Unnerved as ‘doubting Thomas’ quickly ends the Mass.
Divesting himself of priestly vestments Aquinas
Hurries to his cell niche protected by Christ
Kneels before the walled cross and prays to Christ Savior
"Look down upon your humble and wounded servant
Whose wounds remind him of your 5 most precious wounds
As humble servant I confirm my love of Thee
I beg you purify doubt in my besieged soul"
Agonizing in cell garden Gethsemane
With Petrine denial responds to the devil
Suddenly in a depressive revelation
He’s shocked to realize that his beloved Mass
Was contrived to propagate Jesus Son of God
Overcome by unforeseen apostasy he
Withdraws to his mind’s dark confessional and then
Imposes upon himself the harshest penance
His masterpiece Summa Theologica
He retitles Summa Mythologica.
2.
Depressed exhausted he falls into a deep sleep
The resurrected Jesus in brilliant white gown
Exhibits himself to the three grieving Marys
Sends Mary Magdalene to Galilee to spread
To disciples good news of his resurrection
There they inquire "Where is he, habeas corpus"?
Jesus the King of Jews gathers his followers
They depart Galilee for renowned Rome city
There angels prepare his victory chariot
Drawn by caparisoned Lippizaner white stallions
Led by their patron Saint Francis of Assisi
In the chariot the deified King of Jews
Wears not the honored laurel but a crown of thorns
Blood dripping from his impaled head miraculously
Disappears before maculating his white gown
Escorted by his disciples and followers
Aping Julius Caesar and Constantine the Great
He enters Rome through its Porta Triumphalis
On the palm-strewn road the white stallions’ clacking hooves
Alert Romans of Messiah’s Second Coming
Cheering are his champions Athanasius
Chrysostom, Augustine, Magnus, Bonaventure
And all the souls of the faithfully departed
The king’s triumphal parade passes in review
Past Temples of Jupiter, Minerva, Venus
King of Jews crown of thorns converts to devil horns
Sweating and screaming Aquinas awakes and then
Falling to his knees begs "O Lord come rescue me".
Death 7March1274
On his deathbed Aquinas requested to hear once again the Song of Solomon. In the early morning of 7Mar1274 Aquinas died; he was 49 years old. In Cologne coincident with Aquinas’ death it was revealed that his teacher Albertus Magnus exclaimed,
"Brother Thomas Aquinas, my son in Christ, the light of the Church, is dead. God has revealed it to me" (Butler’s Lives of Saints p512).
Aquinas was interred at the Cistercian Monastery in Fossanova. It was demeaning and shocking that no superior Dominican friar attended the funeral of the greatest medieval Catholic scholar. While contemporary Dominicans profanely snubbed Aquinas’ funeral, succeeding Dominicans fought over his corpse irreligiously manhandled in several macabre exhumations.
1368
Dominicans exhumed his coffin from the Cistercian Monastery at Fossanova and transferred it to the Cathedral of Saint Sernin in Toulouse, site of the first Dominican priory. Aquinas was canonized in 1323. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ remains reposed there in a gold and silver coffin for 600 years.
1974
The coffin was again exhumed and transferred to the Jacobin Church in Toulouse. A symbol of status and renown for Dominicans the macabre exhumations evidenced the struggles for the remains of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The exhumations confirm that no amount of brotherhood can replace the honor and prestige of having the remains of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Aquinas the Man
Born into aristocratic advantages Thomas Aquinas lived a contemplative and holy life given to the mysteries in his vision of God. He was humble and irenic in his devotion to Christ. He was a liturgist, philosopher, scholar, theologian, avid reader, and consummate writer with encyclopedic knowledge of all the aforementioned. He was the greatest Catholic scholar, teacher, and writer of his time (perhaps of all time). He taught students to determine truth by methodically investigating the two R’s, reason and revelation. Although liberal and progressive his teaching methods unfortunately never developed any famous students.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas died at 49. The ungodly Church and irreverent Dominican Order that once ignored his funeral later granted him its highest honor, sainthood. In 1323, 49 years after his death, Pope John 22 in Avignon, France glorified Aquinas’ holiness and scholarship by canonizing him Saint Thomas Aquinas. His contemporary and posthumous brethren declared that his writings, probably the greatest of all Catholic writings, were due less to his genius than to his constant prayers, obsession of Christ, and his almost sacrificial devotion to the Mass. The Church proclaimed him patron saint against thunderstorms and lightning because his younger sister and their nurse were killed during a thunderstorm in which he was unscathed.
The Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas was first celebrated on the date of his death 7March1274. In 1970 Pope Paul 6 ordered the feast date changed to 28January. As in the macabre exhumations the Church for whatever reasons or endeavors does what it wants. Catholicism changes with the popes and times.
Associated with Aquinas’ sainthood are the following instances of his holiness.
During Aquinas’ confinement in castle Monte San Giovanni a prostitute tried to seduce him. That night Thomas dreamed two angels girded his loins with a cord emblematic of chastity. The next morning he prayed God would grant him perpetual chastity. (Lives of Saints p278)
When his sister Marotta heard that God had sent two angels to assure Thomas’ chastity she became a Benedictine nun (satisfying her parents). Thereafter she became abbess of a Capua Cloister. After her death Thomas had a dream in which she begged him to offer Masses for her release from purgatory, where she was being punished for having been promiscuous in her youth. (Butler’s Lives of Saints p510)
Aquinas spent many hours constantly praying. "When consecrating at Mass, he would be overcome by such intensity of devotion as to be dissolved in tears, utterly absorbed in its mysteries and nourished by its fruits". (Lives of Saints p280) To Aquinas humility and obedience came naturally. "Obedience is the perfection of the religious life; for by it a man submits to man for the love of god, even as God made Himself obedient to men for their salvation". (Lives of Saints p284)
Aquinas resolved the theological mystery of the Blessed Sacrament’s transmutation of Jesus’ body and blood to the host (wafer) and wine. His expertise was rewarded when he had a vision in which Jesus said "Thou hast written well of the sacrament of my Body"; and almost immediately afterwards Thomas passed into an ecstasy and remained so long raised from the ground that there was time to summon many of the brethren to behold the spectacle. (Butler’s Lives of Saints p511)
One night after Thomas wrote about Christ’s passion and resurrection, a sacristan saw him in church kneeling next to the altar praying before the large cross affixed with the crucified Jesus. A voice from the cross said aloud "Thou hast written well of me Thomas; what reward wouldst thou have?" To which he answered, "Nothing but thyself, Lord". (ibid)
Apparently schizophrenics and holy men hear voices and have visions. In the throes of REM prayer, imbued with antigravity, holy men might levitate midair like a hovering hummingbird feeding on the nectar of God's omnipotence. It appears that, in its fictional loom of life, religion tries to spin truth. Today pseudo holy men and other imposters produce TV extravaganzas in which they play the guitar, cry real tears, and beg for money from naïve believers. Smitten by the hand of God, for the benefit of their audiences, they even convulse and twitch reminiscent of Saint Vitus dance.
Posthumous Honors
Saint Thomas Aquinas received more posthumous honors than any other Catholic.
1323
Pope John 22 canonized him Saint Thomas Aquinas, the ultimate Catholic
honor.
1344
Pope Clement 6 praised the Dominicans for producing Saint Thomas
Aquinas and proclaimed that no Dominican dare depart from his doctrine.
1368
Pope Urban 5 praised Saint Thomas Aquinas’ excellence as a scripture
scholar and recommended that the masters and doctors of Toulouse
University follow his doctrine.
1451
Pope Nicholas 5 proclaimed that Saint Thomas Aquinas’ teachings
enlightened the Universal Church. In 1496 Pope Alexander 6 proclaimed the
same.
1483-1546
Martin Luther, the great Christian reformer, burned all of Aquinas’
works beginning with his Summa. Books can be burned but their intellectual
accomplishments often survive.
1545-1563
During the Council of Trent popes praised Thomas Aquinas’ writings and
declared they were to be used to counter the Protestant Reformation.
1564, 1567
Pope Pius 5 declared that Saint Thomas Aquinas was the most brilliant
light of the Church. In 1567 the pope elevated Saint Thomas Aquinas to
Angelic Doctor of the Church. Given that honor Aquinas had been granted
the ultimate and penultimate Catholic honors.
1603
Pope Clement 8 proclaimed Saint Thomas Aquinas was the angelic
interpreter of divine will and claimed his doctrine was without error.
1614
Pope Paul 5 proclaimed Saint Thomas Aquinas the defender of the Church
and conqueror of heretics.
1724
Pope Benedict 13 declared Saint Thomas Aquinas the surest rule of
Catholic doctrine.
1756
Pope Benedict 14 declared that any lesson learned from scholarly works
must be ascribed to the Angelic Doctor (Saint Thomas Aquinas).
1777
Pope Pius 6 declared Saint Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine the most consistent
with the Sacred Scripture of Church Fathers.
1870
Pope Pius 9 speaking of Saint Thomas Aquinas observed "that the Church,
in the ecumenical councils held after his death, so used his writings that
many of the decrees propounded found their source in his works; sometimes
even his very words were used to clarify Catholic dogmas or to destroy
rising errors". (New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 14, p23)
1880
Pope Leo 13 proclaimed Saint Thomas Aquinas the Patron Saint of
Catholic schools, colleges, and universities. The pope declared that
Thomism was the means for Catholic scholars to meet their modern
intellectual needs.
1914
Pope Pius 10 ordered that Thomism be taught at all Catholic educational
institutions.
1918
Pope Benedict 15 inserted Saint Thomas Aquinas’ name in the Code of
Canon Law, directing that priests be instructed in the method, principles,
and doctrine of the Angelic Doctor.
Summa Summary
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (Summa) is his masterpiece and the best example of his writing style. He, his assistants, and scribes spent 8-10 years compiling it. In it are more treatises on human behavior than on God because more is known about humans than about God. It was written as a textbook for the Dominican Order of the 1200’s to enable young friars to engage in theological disputations with non-Catholics. At that time the population believed in magic, miracles, and the supernatural. Today most of the Summa is irrelevant because of its lack of evidence for substantiating its conclusions about God.
Aquinas’ schoolman writing style was common to scholars engaged in theological disputations. That style is outlined by philosophical and theological assumptions each followed by a series of questions and detailed answers, sometimes distressingly detailed. Interposed in each expository answer are objections and replies to objections, which complicate the answer to the original question. To further involve the reader in his encyclopedic knowledge there are innumerable internal cross-references. For the answer to an original question in Volume 1, First Part a reader might be referred to another Part of Volume 1 or even to Parts of Volume 2. The relevant answer to an assumption is seldom in one place. The logic behind this discursive and roving style might have been to discourage non-Catholic disputants from asking any follow-up questions.
Anyone attempting to read the Summa should heed Aquinas’ own cautionary comment that it was meant to be studied, not read as narrative. Reading the Summa for a first pass comprehension is like trying to fit the proverbial square peg into a narrower round hole. The Summa reading project would be suitable for scholastic masochists willing to dedicate many years to its understanding. It’s language is representative of ‘speaking in tongues’. Aquinas habitually creates sub verbo labyrinths through which he tour guides a reader past the crypts of Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers, theologians, and saints. Sometimes Aquinas creates a montage of 1200’s minutiae inserting multiple references and quotations from the Bible and patristic writers for supporting the infirm foundation of Catholicism built in quicksand. To believe in the Summa requires the Middle Ages mindset of magic, miracle, and superstition. Finally Aquinas was more a compiler of his encyclopedic knowledge than creative writer. Fortunately the Renaissance rescued the heavily laden schoolman writing style.
Catholic Sainthood
In imitation of Jesus’ sacrifice certain early Catholic holy men gave their lives in martyrdom and were considered saints. To canonize a dearly departed holy person the Church requires a five-year waiting period. The Church requires also two miracles by the departed holy person, the first for beatification and the second for canonization. Ignoring these rules, requirements of Canon Law, the newly installed (May05) Pope Benedict 16 announced his intention for the short-cut canonization of the recently departed (Apr05) Pope John Paul 2. The dictatorial decision by Pope Benedict 16 confirms the conclusion that the Church’s Canon Law can be annulled to satisfy any perceived exigency. In this instance the exigency was artificially created by Pope Benedict 16 to honor the repose of the body of the departed Pope John Paul 2 in a vault under Saint Peter’s basilica.
Decline and Fall of Catholicism
Catholicism will fall of its own contrivances. Most obvious are the 7 dolorous fallacies:
God’s existence
Heaven, purgatory, hell
Incarnation and Resurrection
Jesus deified to Son of God
Trinity
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Polyglot Mass
The abandonment of Latin for polyglot tongues replaced the Mass’ power and mystery to common mundanity, thereby replacing God with the vicissitudes of daily life.
Abbey of Monte Cassino
The prestigious Benedictine Abbey Monte Cassino was symbolic of the power of the papacy versus that of the Holy Roman Empire. Because of its wealth and strategic high location it was fought over for hundreds of years. It was destroyed at least three times – by Teutonic Lombards, by Saracens, and by Allied Forces during World War 2.
In World War 2, because of its strategic high location, the Nazis occupied the abbey fortifying it with heavy artillery and other weaponry. When allied forces tried to take it, they were mowed down as they tried to climb the steep mountain. The American General Mark Clark sent thousands of young American men, some of them boys just out of high school, up that mountain only to be slaughtered. The general ordered three different assaults on the abbey each having the same murderous result. The Canadians and Australians also tried with the same murderous results. Apparently the allies had no tacticians. Finally allied bombers carpet-bombed the renowned abbey destroying it and forcing the Nazis to abandon it. The Allies should have stranded the Nazis on Monte Cassino rather than turning the ancient and famous abbey into rubble. When and if the Nazis tried to come down the mountain, the Allies could have picked them off just as they did our allied youth.
End of Book