Lecture 16: Scholastic Theology
The key notion behind analogical speech about God is that the creation is
like God. For Aquinas, God is not at all like the creation, but every created
thing is to some degree like God. All things are like God because God always
creates things that are like himself, having goodness, truth, and being.The analogy of being illustrates the underlying metaphysics of this way of
speaking of God. When we say “God has being” and “this tree has being” we
are talking about two different kinds of being. God has being because God
is being. In contrast to God, who is his own being, the tree has being only by
participating in God’s being. This means that God is not one being among
other beings.One of the most important legacies of scholasticism is Aquinas’s doctrine
of created grace. Supernatural grace is created grace, a form in the soul.
Developing Augustine’s concept of the Holy Spirit as the Love of God,
Peter Lombard had proposed that the love of God in our souls is actually the
Holy Spirit. This was a radical doctrine of uncreated grace, for it meant that
the love of God in us is not a created thing but the uncreated God himself.
Aquinas rejects Lombard’s view and
teaches that the supernatural love of God
in our hearts is a created form that gives
shape to the activities of the soul.Aquinas’s doctrine of grace makes use
of Aristotle’s concept of form. Form, in
Aquinas’s Aristotelian philosophy, is what
gives being and de¿ nition to a thing. A
bowl is a bowl, for instance, not because of what it is made of but because of
its form or shape. For an Aristotelian, a virtue is a form in the soul, because
it gives shape and de¿ nition to the soul’s activities. In a rather similar
way, skills are forms in the soul that give shape and de¿ nition to bodily
movements, like the well-formed movements of a pianist’s hands while
playing. The moral virtues are like being skilled at living a good human life.
Created grace is a form in the soul that is the basis of supernatural virtues.
Like virtues and skills in Aristotle, created grace is in Aquinas’s view a habit
and quality of the soul.Like virtues and skills in
Aristotle, created grace is
in Aquinas’s view a habit
and quality of the soul.