The Soul Exists

Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274)

Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Catholic philosopher and theologian in the scholastic tradition, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis. He is the most famous classical proponent of natural theology. He gave birth to the Thomistic school of thought (Thomism), which has long been the primary philosophical and theological approach of the Catholic Church.

Saint Thomas Aquinas lived at a critical juncture of western culture when the arrival of the Aristotelian corpus in Latin translation reopened the question of the relation between faith and reason, calling into question the modus vivendi that had obtained for centuries. This crisis flared up just as universities were being founded. Thomas, after early studies at Montecassino, moved on to the University of Naples, where he met members of the new Dominican Order. It was at Naples too that Thomas had his first extended contact with the new learning. When he joined the Dominican Order he went north to study with Albertus Magnus, author of a paraphrase of the Aristotelian corpus. Thomas completed his studies at the University of Paris, which had been formed out of the monastic schools on the Left Bank and the cathedral school at Notre Dame. In two stints as a regent master Thomas defended the mendicant orders and, of greater historical importance, countered both the Averroistic interpretations of Aristotle and the Franciscan tendency to reject Greek philosophy. The result was a new modus vivendi between faith and philosophy which survived until the rise of the new physics. The Catholic Church has over the centuries regularly and consistently reaffirmed the central importance of Thomas’s work, both theological and philosophical, for understanding its teachings concerning the Christian revelation, and his close textual commentaries on Aristotle represent a cultural resource which is now receiving increased recognition.

–Saint Thomas Aquinas [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised May 23, 2014].

Jacques Maritain

If the philosophy of Aristotle, as revived and enriched by Thomas Aquinas and his school, may rightly be called the Christian philosophy, both because the church is never weary of putting it forward as the only true philosophy and because it harmonizes perfectly with the truths of faith, nevertheless it is proposed here for the reader’s acceptance not because it is Christian, but because it is demonstrably true.

–Jacques Maritain [“Elements de Philosophie,” 1920].

Additional St. Thomas Aquinas Quotes

“We ought to cherish the body. Our body’s substance is not from an evil principle, as the Manicheans imagine, but from God. And therefore, we ought to cherish the body by the friendship of love, by which we love God.”

–St. Thomas Aquinas [Summa Theologica (1265–1274) II–II, q. 25, art. 5].

“To love is to will the good of the other.”

–St. Thomas Aquinas [Summa Theologica (1265–1274) II-II, q. 26, art. 6].

Man cannot live without joy. That is why one deprived of spiritual joys goes over to carnal pleasures.

–St. Thomas Aquinas [Summa Theologica (1265–1274) II–II, q. 35, art. 4, ad. 2].