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Aquinas, Thomas 13
in the third part consider Christ and his sacraments
as indispensable means to salvation.
According to Thomas Aquinas, salvation is
possible through scriptural knowledge, which
contains certain truths that exceed human reason
and can be accepted only on faith. Human beings
cannot directly know God’s essence, which transcends
all species and genera. God’s existence can
be proved in five ways that employ the principle
of causality and, starting from the empirical
knowledge of the physical world, include the
argument from motion, the argument from
nature of efficient cause, the argument from
possibility and necessity, the argument from the
gradations of perfection to be found in things,
and finally the argument from the order of the
world. All these arguments imply the principle
that reason needs a final stopping point in any
chain of explanation, which must be outside of
the series itself and be of a different nature—that
is the nature of God.
Thomas Aquinas maintains that God’s simultaneous
presence occurs in all things as the source
of their being, power, and operation. God’s
essence, defined as an immutable pure act, cannot
be fully understood by the created intellect, unless
God makes himself intelligible to it through his
grace, a foretaste of eternal life in heaven that is
expressed in good works and in the exercise of all
the virtues. Only those who possess the more
divine grace will be able to see God more perfectly,
and they will be the more beatified.
Aquinas asserts that God cannot be seen in his
essence by a mere human being, but the goals of
beatific vision and ultimate happiness, which have
an eternal nature and cannot be lost once attained,
can be achieved only by the separation from mortal
life. The third part of the Summa deals with immortal
life, which humanity reaches through the Savior
by the Resurrection, when the soul is rejoined to the
body. Death is a necessary circumstance in the
process whereby human beings, even the people
alive at the end of the world, become immortal. All
people are directed to one last fixed end, and after
death both intellect and will of all the dead, whether
they are in hell, purgatory, or in heaven, whether
before or after resurrection, become immutable and
they are brought to eternity.
According to Aquinas, the localities of life after
death are: Limbus Patrum, where the good went
who died before Christ; Limbus Infantum, where
are allocated the children who died unbaptized;
Purgatory, the place where all sinners stay until
they are purified or redeemed by the church, or
until the last day; Hell, or Gehenna, where the
wicked are condemned; and finally Heaven, where
the good are admitted. At the day of judgment, all
the souls will reassume their bodies. The intermediate
states will then be destroyed and, when the
last sentence is pronounced, the condemned will
depart for hell and the good will go to heaven
forever, while the souls in purgatory may be
redeemed and transferred to heaven through the
prayers of the living for them, and the transfer of
good works to their account.
Aquinas accepted the tradition that Satan and
his demons were fallen angels. His view of angels
was based on the assumption that humans cannot
be the highest beings in the created order. Angels
were thus a race of superior beings characterized by
capacities far beyond our own. He asserted that
angels are the next step in the order of being beyond
humanity. Aquinas also argued that since intellect is
above sense, there must be some creatures who are
incorporeal and therefore comprehensible by the
intellect alone. He thus assigned to angels an incorporeal
nature, departing from earlier philosophers
who had asserted that angels were constituted from
a subtle material substance. In spite of their incorporeal
nature, angels can sometimes assume bodies,
since the scriptural account of Abraham’s entertaining
angels makes this plain.
At the time, it was generally recognized by the
church that the angels were impeccable. Their
state of perfection is such that they are unable to
sin as men and women do. Aquinas held that
Lucifer, like all the angels, was created in a state of
grace. Nevertheless, he exercised the free will with
which all angels are endowed in a wrong direction.
Otherwise he could not have sinned since, according
to Aquinas, angels achieve everlasting bliss the
instant they do one meritorious act, and thereafter
they are so close to God that it is impossible for
them to turn away from him. Hence, the angels
who did not rebel can never sin.
In some places, Aquinas expressed pity for the