Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher, born to the comital family of Aquino in southern Italy and educated at the University of Naples and then at Paris and Cologne under Albert the Great. He joined the new mendicant order of Dominicans against his family’s strenuous opposition (his brothers reportedly held him captive in the family castle for over a year to dissuade him), and spent his career writing, teaching, and conducting the disputed questions that constitute the medieval university’s principal scholarly form. He died in 1274 on his way to the Council of Lyons; his major work, the Summa Theologiae, was unfinished at his death.

¶Core ideas

• The Aristotelian-Christian synthesis. Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1265-1273) is the canonical synthesis of Aristotelian natural philosophy and ethics with Christian revealed theology. The work treats the relation between reason and faith as one of distinction-without-opposition: natural reason can know much about God and the human good without revelation; revelation extends what reason can reach without contradicting it.

• The virtues and vices. The Summa’s second part (II-II) provides a comprehensive analytical apparatus of the virtues (cardinal: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance; theological: faith, hope, charity) and the vices opposed to them. The framework is not just a moral catalogue but an analysis of the structure of the soul in act — what dispositions enable what kinds of action under what conditions.

• Acedia, spes, studiositas, curiositas. Aquinas’s specific treatments of these affective conditions provide the cybernetic-postliberal framework’s upstream vocabulary for the medieval pastoral apparatus’s calibration of inner life. Acedia (spiritual sloth), spes (theological hope), studiositas (the disciplined love of knowledge), and curiositas (the disordered cognitive appetite) are categories the framework treats as prior forms of what the contemporary apparatus calibrates differently.

• Pastoral theology and the practice of confession. Aquinas’s articulation of the sacrament of penance, the practice of examination of conscience, and the ministerial-confessional apparatus provides the institutional grammar within which medieval Christian subjects were governed in their inner life. The energetic interior of the institution — the seal of confession, the slow pastoral relation, the sustainable timescales — is what the contemporary platformal apparatus operates without.

¶Significance for cybernetic postliberalism

Aquinas is upstream as the major theological-philosophical articulator of the medieval pastoral apparatus the framework treats as the prior form of californication. The framework draws on him principally for the affective categories (acedia and curiositas especially) that name dimensions of contemporary platformal life with a precision contemporary vocabularies have not maintained, and for the model of an institutional pastoral apparatus that sustained an interior the contemporary apparatus has lost.

¶Key texts

• Summa Theologiae (1265-1273, unfinished at death)
• Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265)
• Disputed Questions on Truth (De Veritate, 1256-1259)
• Disputed Questions on Evil (De Malo, 1269-1272)
• Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1271-1272)