I’m learning more about Thomas Aquinas, aided by the quarantine and much more by Aquinas 101. Thomas loved creation, including bodily creation, which makes sense as part of the reaction to the Albigensian heresy, which was a large part of the stimulus for the thirteenth-century founding of the Dominican order, of which Thomas was a second or third-generation member. This Thomistic theme comes out, for instance, in Summa Theologiae III.1.2, which names ten ways in which the incarnation of God worked for “the restoration of the human race”:

First, “with respect to our ‘furtherance in good’”:

1. “with regard to faith, which is made more certain by believing God Himself Who speaks,”
2. “with regard to hope, which is thereby greatly strengthened,”
3. “with regard to charity [i.e., love], which is greatly enkindled by this,”
4. “with regard to well-doing, in which He set us an example,” and
5. “with regard to the full participation of the Divinity [we might say ‘participation in Divinity’], which is the true bliss of man and end of human life.”

Then, “for our ‘withdrawal from evil’” (the translations are modified here for the sake of inclusive language):

6. “because we are taught by the incarnation not to prefer the devil to ourselves,”
7. “because we are thereby taught how great is human dignity,”
8. “because, ‘in order to do away with human presumption, the grace of God is commended in Jesus Christ, though no merits of ours went before’” (quoting Augustine),
9. “because ‘human pride, which is the greatest stumbling-block to our clinging to God, can be convinced and cured by humility so great’” (again quoting Augustine), and
10. “in order to free us from the thralldom of [i.e., ‘to’] sin.”

This is the bare bones. Thomas says more in explanation, and I will go into that detail as, through the next week, I post, for your Holy Week and Good Friday meditations and for mine, some thoughts about and celebrations of what God did for us in the incarnation and on the cross. I will add links to those posts to this page.

• The good of Good Friday
  1: introduction
  2: faith and hope
  3: and love
  4: doing and being
  5: bodies
  6: humility
  7: brought low and lifted up
• Love for creation: see “Produce and Proofs” and my various posts on personalism (most recently the distinction of person and image in What Is My Label? 2). And perhaps I should’ve gone that direction in “Antinatalism.” Right now, I’m eating salmon jerky from Big O’ Smokehouse, which is the best-tasting thing you will ever eat, if you are fortunate enough to eat it. So I am loving creation as manifested in the minor trinity of the salmon, the smokehouse, and the tastebuds.
• The Albigensians’ theology was supposedly Manichean. That is, it regarded the body and physical creation as a whole as evil. But they also managed to foster a burst of cultural creativity.
• The standard English translation of Summa Theologiae is available on-line, among other places, here. Summa Theologiae III.1.2 (Part III, Question 1, second article), “Whether it was necessary for the restoration of the human race that the Word of God should become incarnate?”  is here. Thomas White goes through III.1.2 in an Aquinas 101 lecture titled “Aquinas on the Incarnation.” White brings into the discussion Pope John Paul II’s inaugural encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, thus connecting this theme of love for creation to personalism, that is, in John Paul’s case, to opposition to Communism.