16 November 2023
I would have thought it wasn't necessary to state that the Radix Fidem path rejects Thomism (the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas). But I believe a bigger problem is that most people have no idea how influential Thomas Aquinas was and still is in Christian religion today. Thomism remains the foundation of most Protestant theology, even as Protestants deny they are taking anything from Catholicism.
Side note: If you need to review Thomism, it won't matter much whether you prefer Wikipedia or Infogalatic (except that the latter has more trouble with their site software). The primary point is in this snippet I borrow from Wikipedia:
Thomas Aquinas held and practiced the principle that truth is to be accepted no matter where it is found. His doctrines drew from Greek, Roman, Islamic and Jewish philosophers. Specifically, he was a realist (i.e. unlike skeptics, he believed that the world can be known as it is). He often affirmed Aristotle's views with independent arguments, and largely followed Aristotelian terminology and metaphysics. He wrote comprehensive commentaries on Aristotle, and respectfully referred to him simply as "the Philosopher".
You still need to ensure you understand the terms "realism" and "metaphysics". For example, realism asserts that man can fully grasp what is real. The Bible denies that. Fallen mankind cannot possibly grasp the fundamental nature of what God has made; we can only pick out for ourselves a functional path within Creation. We should know instinctively that we cannot understand it, that our best hope is knowing God and trying to please Him.
Thus, we also reject the linear/binary logic inherent in Thomism. This is the biggest single source of debate and bitterness in Christian theology. It's false; two contradictory things can be true at the same time. The problem is not with reality, but that we are inherently unable to define reality well enough to know if two different things contradict in some fundamental way. Indeed, we should always harbor some doubts about what we individually, and what mankind as whole, can understand about God's Creation.
Thus, we know that Jesus garnered a hysterical rejection, persecution and execution for His teaching, and then, while still on the Cross, said that He had won. No human would call that victory, unless that human had learned to reject the linear/binary logic of realism. This is why debate with realists is pointless. It's good to know the rules of logic, but it's better to understand how they fail to account for what God does in this world.
I've seen professors try to explain that a move of God's hand is not a violation of reality. Students rarely get it. God is the maker of reality; the rules are whatever He says they are. Sometimes He is quite arbitrary to our eyes, but it's all consistent with His revealed character. You could make sense of it, but you must surrender your definition of "logical consistency" at His feet. The real problem is that Aristotelian reasoning (and thus, Thomism) falls short. It cannot account for what God has done and continues to do. That vast majority of theology students leave untouched by such teaching.
I find it quite insane that Aquinas would embrace a philosophical approach that assumes God does not actually exist. More to the point, it rejects that God exists in terms of what He has revealed, because it rejects those terms.
It is not faith that must satisfy the demands of reason. Rather, it is reason that stands in the dock. It must justify the exclusion of divine revelation. It is madness to assert that Aristotle can be consistent with faith in Christ.
Much of the rest of the discussion about the influence of Thomas Aquinas gets bogged down quickly in the business of semantics and how we use language. In the ancient Hebrew culture, the whole field of semantics was dismissed as a juvenile obsession with control. Defining words and restricting their meaning, and then playing games with those meanings, is just an attempt to avoid having to deal with truly weighty matters of faith and moral responsibility. It's what juveniles do when they are full of themselves and imagine they are equal to wise elders.
I find it shameful that elders who can recognize the offense of juvenile head-games, but cannot address the matter cogently. Instead, they take the offense personally and fail to help the juvenile thinker to grow up. The flaw in eldership is quite common, and explains how the wiser elder rabbis failed to restrain the younger generations who dove into the cesspool of Aristotelian reason.
We make much of how the conquest of Alexander the Great changed Hebrew religion into Judaism, but that is just a convenient historical hook. The whole business of Hebrew philosophical thought had drifted quite some ways between the time of Solomon until Alexander. Every major event offered yet one more excuse to leave behind the deep mysticism of the likes of Moses. How easily we forget that Moses met with God on that mountain; his metaphysics were formed and confirmed in that experience.
Yes, Solomon received the divine gift of moral wisdom, but he abused it and beat on it until it began to break. His abuse of that gift opened to the door to seeking out all the different kinds of human wisdom, making it a goal to survey and mix it into the scholarship that clustered around the palace and Temple. While the priests resisted longer, their prophetic outlook began to dim over the centuries until it was very nearly gone in the Exile. Jeremiah before the Fall of Jerusalem, and Ezekiel in Exile, were anomalies, and that's the truly sad part.
Judaism was a capitulation to the metaphysics of Aristotle. It was a loss of the deep legacy of Hebrew mysticism. Jesus sought to restore that legacy, and was killed for it. The compromise resurfaced in the Judaizer efforts to derail the early Christian Mysticism, by displacing it with a fake mysticism based on Aristotelian logic. So, we are more surprised that it took so long for someone like Thomas Aquinas to come along and elevate the surrender to the Judaizers into formal Church doctrine.
Over and over again: This "reality" is a lie. If you can just absorb that biblical truth, then you stand in a good position to recognize all the lies of church history and back out of them. It's a much harder task for some than for others. I can cover only so much of the path as I have experienced it. We need more of you, dear readers, contributing your own understanding of how this big lie can be taken down.
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