The Philosophy of God in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Works. A Characterization of the Main Issues

The topic of God in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas will be treated in three aspects: the question of the existence of God, the essence of God, and the topic of the relations between man and God. In this article, we would like to show the key issues of Thomas’s philosophy of God in order to show how they serve as a starting point for the theology of Aquinas. With regard to the first matter, it was claimed that the only argument of Thomas for the existence of God is the reasoning conducted in De ente et essential, where Aquinas points at the existence of God (the subsistent act of existence – ipsum esse subsistens) as the external efficient cause of the existence of beings composed of two elements, the act of existence and the essence as potentiality. In this perspective, the famous ways of St. Thomas were accepted in numerous philosophical systems (Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, and their compilations) to be an illustration of the possibilities of arriving at the stance that the first cause exists. When it comes to the latter issue, we present a concise approach to God’s attributes in Thomas’s Compendium theologiae and show a strictly existential approach to these attributes in the Thomism of Mieczysław Gogacz. Regarding the relation of man to God, we turned our attention —following St. Thomas — to two orders of these relations: natural, related to justice, and supernatural, which is love (friendship) between man and God. As an example of the application of philosophical solutions in theology, we point to a Thomistic interpretation of the development of the religious life of man. In sum, we observe that the philosophy of God, in its version developed by Aquinas, is characterized by strict intellectualism and a naturalistic starting point for philosophical analyses.