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12 Aquinas, Thomas
ing through into a divine state, and thus posing a
threat to the status of the gods.
In Buddhism, the best-known story involving
Mara, the Buddhist Satan, portrays the apsaras as
being Mara’s minions. This story, the tale of his
attempt to prevent the Buddha from achieving
enlightenment, is structurally parallel to classical
Hindu myths about the gods sending apsaras to
tempt ascetics.
The story goes that as Siddhartha Gautama,
the Buddha, was on the brink of Nirvana, Mara
sent beautiful, tempting heavenly women
(Buddhist apsaras) to distract his attention.
Unmoved by passion, Mara changed tack and
tried frightening Gautama with ferocious demons.
Still undisturbed, Mara finally challenged
Buddha’s right to liberation. In response, Gautama
is said to have called the earth as his witness,
whose response was so powerful that it frightened
away Mara and his hordes. That very night, the
Buddha achieved enlightenment.
See also Demons; Hinduism
For Further Reading:
Conze, Edward. Buddhist Thought in India. 1962.
Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1967.
Garg, Ganga Ram, ed. Encyclopaedia of the Hindu
World. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Concept Publishing,
1992.
Ronner, John. Know Your Angels: The Angel Almanac
with Biographies of 100 Prominent Angels in
Legend and Folklore, and Much More.
Murfreesboro, TN: Mamre, 1993.
Stutley, Margaret, and James Stutley. Harper’s
Dictionary of Hinduism: Its Mythology, Folklore,
Philosophy, Literature, and History. New York:
Harper & Row, 1977.
Aquinas, Thomas
Anyone assailed is exercised by fighting against
opposition. It was fitting for this procuring of man’s
welfare to be brought about through the wicked
angels, lest they should cease to be of service in the
natural order after their fall.
Aquinas, Summa Theologica
The Catholic theologian and philosopher St.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) was born in
Roccasecca, Italy. Educated by the Benedictines of
Monte Cassino, he became a Master in Arts at the
University of Naples before entering the Order of
Dominicans in 1244. In 1252 he was sent to the
University of Paris for advanced study in theology
and taught until 1259, when he went back to Italy
to spend about ten years at various Dominican
monasteries, lecturing on theology and philosophy.
After spending four years in Paris, he
returned to Naples where he taught for more than
a year at the university and where he preached a
notable series of sermons. Illness forced him to
interrupt his teaching, and later on to interrupt his
trip to Lyons, where he was supposed to attend a
church council in 1274, the year of his death.
Thomas Aquinas’s eclectic philosophy can be
characterized as a rethinking of Aristotelianism
with the significant addition of Christianity and
of the philosophies of his predecessors. This
philosophy was expressed in his writings, which
he produced during his twenty years as an active
teacher. Besides a variety of recorded disputations
and commentaries (On Being and Essence,
De Anima, On Physics, On Interpretation,
Posterior Analytics, Ethics, Metaphysics, Politics,
and the unfinished expositions of Aristotle’s De
Caelo, De Generatione, and Metheora), his works
primarily consist of theological and philosophical
treatises written in Latin. These include the
short treatise Principles of Nature, in which he
discusses several philosophical subjects, from the
distinction between essence and existence to the
Aristotelian dependence of abstracted universals
on individual material things; the Summa contra
Gentiles, four books in which he argues against
nonbelievers and heretics; Against the Errors of
the Greeks, in which he expresses his opinion
about the doctrinal points disputed by Greek and
Latin Christians; and the unfinished Summa
Theologica, a three-part treatise on sacred
doctrine that contains the principles of
Thomistic theology.
The element that provides the Summa with
conceptual unity is the Dionysian circle, implying
the going forth of all things from God and the
return of all things to God. Part one includes questions
and treatises about creation, the angels, the
human being, and divine government. The two
divisions of the second part are about virtues,
vices, law, and grace, and the questions contained