Intensities

Aquinas has mostly been read in the twentieth century in terms of a duality between reason and faith, philosophy and theology. However a careful reading of his texts will not support this position. All knowledge for Aquinas is by participation in the divine mind, analogically mediated, and faith and reason are simply differing degrees of intensity of this mediation. There is for Aquinas no secure ontology outside the orientation to the beatific vision, and his account of esse belongs more to sacra doctrina than to metaphysics. Because esse is equally in substance and accident, general and particular, it opens up to an ontology of event congruent with revelation (though the latter is always mediated by human reason). In accord with this Aquinas stresses, beyond Aristotle, emanation, relation and accidental supplementations as belonging as much to things as their substances. All this provides him with a fundamentally Trinitarian ontology. A mind renewed through the incarnation and the sacraments can once more infer the Trinity from creation. Theology builds up towards the vision of Christ as true theologian and passes beyond theory to sacramental and liturgical enactment.