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Medieval theology was called ’scholasticism’, because it was developed for teaching purposes by professional instructors in monastic schools (scholae) and universities. It flourished between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was its greatest, most creative and most influential figure. (A pope declared his theology to be eternally valid as recently as 1879!)

Thomas’s theology, though consciously traditional, as was that of the whole era, was not exclusively so. He took as his basis the orthodox theological heritage, particularly as spelt out by Augustine. But he sought to recast it to fit a different philosophical mould — that provided by the recently rediscovered writings of Aristotle. Aristotle’s philosophy prompted Thomas to conceive God not as a static essence, as traditional transcendence-talk might well have led him to do, but as a being whose essence is precisely his constant activity: the dynamism of the one who is the First Cause of everything that is not himself.

Aristotle’s method was to analyse everything in terms of causes. This prompted Thomas to develop ‘natural theology‘ — supposedly real and sure knowledge of God gained by reason alone. His method was to note respects in which, as he thought, this world can be shown to be the effect of a First Cause, and then reflect on what the First Cause must be to have produced such effects.

Thomas’s natural theology starts with proofs of God’s existence. He rejected Anselm’s ‘ontological’ argument (see Can God be proved?), but produced his own famous ‘five ways’, starting from five observed features of the world around us:

• motion;
• cause and effect;
• the existence of things that are generated and sustained from beyond themselves;
• degrees of perfection in things;
• the way each organism strives towards its most perfect state.

Of these famous ‘five ways’, the first four boil down to the argument from a First Cause, or ‘cosmological’ argument. The fifth is a form of the argument from design, that the evident nature and purpose of existing things implies an intelligent Designer.

Thomas also tried to exhibit God’s oneness, goodness, dominion and perfection as truths of natural theology (knowledge of the God of nature). He claimed that the findings of natural theology are the proper basis on which the truths of supernatural revelation (knowledge of the God of grace) should be received.

Thomas differed from Augustine on the question of knowledge. Both saw all knowledge of God as God’s own gift, but they understood this in different ways. Augustine believed that God illumines everyone’s mind, yielding an innate awareness of himself which bad people stifle.

Thomas held that all knowledge of realities comes as our minds work on what we perceive with our senses. God leads us to know him, therefore, by helping us to think straight about what encounters us from outside. In this Augustine followed a modified form of Plato’s thought, Thomas a modified form of Aristotle’s.

Is Thomas’s natural theology logically and psychologically sound? Did he construct it to show Christians that their faith is rational, or to produce a syllabus for evangelistic instruction? Is his distinction between natural and supernatural realms of being and knowledge good or bad theology? These questions are disputed to this day.

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