Abstract

Lam, Joseph The reception of Augustine's theology and thoughts in Thomas Aquinas's works has never been a point of serious disagreement among scholars. What divides scholars is rather the question of how to assess the weight of Aristotelian influence and Thomas's Augustinian heritage. According to Gilson, the answer is evident in itself. While acknowledging in the works of the Dominican friar a close familiarity with Augustine's theology, the French philosopher nevertheless argued for a distinct Aristotelian colour in Thomas's philosophical approach to the question of natural truths. To the question of how human reasoning arrives at the truth, Gilson wrote: 'What is it to know truth? It is intellectually to grasp the essences of things such as they are and to associate them in our minds, by means of judgements, in the same way they are associated in reality'. Knowledge, therefore, is not the result of a subjective mind, but rather an outcome of a conscious judgement that concords with the objective intellection of the given objects. In this Gilson observed a basic difference between Augustine and Thomas: Both St. Thomas's philosophy and St. Augustine's philosophy are philosophies of the concrete, but their attitude toward the concrete is not the same. St. Augustine always seeks notions comprehensive enough to embrace the concrete in its complexity. Thomas always seeks notions precise enough to define the elements that constitute the concrete. In a word, the former expresses the concrete, the latter analyses it.