Today (03/17), at Mass, one of the hymns contained the following verses: “You (God) are the Artist and the Potter; we are the Canvas and the Clay.” This line draws from Scripture passages such as Isaiah 64:7, Jeremiah 18:2-6, and Romans 9:20-21. And while these passages refer to God shaping and molding those who do or do not keep with Covenant, they acknowledge God as Creator, as one who instills in his creation the means to *know* him and thus enter into a covenant relationship.
Perhaps Aquinas would have appreciated these same verses as another angle to show reason as a God-given, or God-molded, gift, as well as a path to reconcile it with faith. After all, if humankind is in fact God’s creation, our senses are a pathway to knowledge, and we have the unique ability to reason through complex subjects — S.T.E.M. topics, philosophy, and metaphysics, for example — then the means to reason, as Aquinas suggests, “retain in themselves some trace of imitation of God…and are good” (Ch. 7).
But where is the distinct line between faith and reason, or the adjoining point to keeping both in harmony? It starts with how humankind goes about discovering and discerning truth. Truth, according to Aquinas, can be split into two types. Some truths transcend human reason, for they deal with mysteries of faith; that is, immaterial reality causing or influencing material reality: the Holy Trinity, Christ’s Divinity, and how creation itself fully came into being (Aquinas Book 1, Ch. 3; Saint Leo Slide 5).
Other truths, known as preambles of faith, rely on natural reason. By using natural reason — which, in turn, relies on a well-grounded relationship between the senses and the intellect — humans are able to discuss the existence of God, the properties of the soul, morals and ethics, and related topics, all falling under what is called natural law (Aquinas Book 1, Ch.3; Saint Leo Slide 5). Moreover, the preambles of faith are a kind of bridge between faith and reason, for they exist within both natural reason and sacred science (God’s revelation / word); “while the mysteries of faith are exclusive to the latter” (Saint Leo Slide 6).
Compared to say, Augustine, the senses-to-knowledge-to-reason connection appears quite similar to Aquinas’ view. If looked at from a hierarchal perspective — the senses receive information; the senses then feed knowledge; and then knowledge feeds reason — then Augustine, just as with Aquinas, sees the senses as the entry point to reason, and so on so forth. Perhaps one difference is that Augustine distinguishes between the bodily sense and the internal sense (39, 40), with the latter being a gateway between a purely physical understanding of nature, and reason as a pinnacle of understanding greater truths.
Now, when circling back to the relationship between faith and reason, and whether Aquinas’ view on faith clashes with Augustine and Anselm, Aquinas already grants that the human mind may not fully grasp the mysteries of faith. However, as Augustine and Anselm would agree that faith seeking understanding is inherent to human thinking — that faith allows for natural reason to come to know God (Saint Leo Module 4, Slide 8) — so is the case with Aquinas. That said, it may be safe to say that, despite some slight differences in jargon, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas all agree about the preambles of faith.
Works Cited
Saint Leo University. Module 4 Lecture Slides. PHI-502. 2024
Saint Leo University. Module 5 Lecture Slides. PHI-502. 2024
Selections from chapter 3 from Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, book one: God, Translated by Pegis (University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 63-65.
Selections from books 6-8 are from Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, translated by Freddoso, https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/264/scgbk1chap1-9.htm