Aquinas And Augustine Similarities

Augustine and Aquinas are both very well known for their philosophical and theological explorations. They are both known for trying to prove that ancient philosophy and Christianity were connected, they both took two different paths. Augustine is known for following a Platonic path and Aquinas an Aristotelian. The two both talked about faith, reason ,and knowledge.

Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 into a noble family, where he lived in southern Italy. His family decided that he would be a church leader so at the age of six they sent him to the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, and at fourteen he was sent to the University of Naples for further studying. When he joined the scholarly dominican order at the age of 20, he wanted to pursue

Aquinas,was more empiricist because he followed the route of Aristotle. As to Augustine who wasn’t empiricist. Aquinas believed senses are how we find the truth, opening your eyes to the bigger picture. Aquinas simply believed that abstraction is a process that takes place in the human mind, and that person, thats seeing multipl objects, such as a basketball, will be able to create this random idea of a basketball in their mind, which would be done by by the ideology of “active intellect” a process in which Aquinas concieved. Aquinas built from the ground up using Aristotle’s ideas of the intellect and how we understand information we come across. Aquinas was conflicted by the fact that or minds can understand something he refers to as internal copies of what we see, feel, smell, or hear. The “passive intellect” is the the intellect that knows material objects, thats what Aquinas believed to be how we know all objects. To know what phantasms actually are, we require a passive intellect to actually know understand what we are seeing. The active intellect is the part of the mind that is able to create from knowledge of the passive, kind of like a memory card. Again Both Aquinas and Augustine agree upon the fact that God is the ultimate knowledge and nothing or nobody can or will ever know as much as God, this is

Aquinas and Augustine's showed their philosophies ,that were derived ancient philosophers, when they spoke of faith and reason, both of them tried to get there point out in there own way. Aquinas and Augustine both had one goal and and that was too prove that Christianity was somehow intertwined with philosophy and Both of them did just that, many people may or may not agree with these philosophies but it just depends on the type of person you are. Many people like to live off fact and know for certain, but like Aquinas and Augustine we all have our own philosophies, we choose what to believe and what not to believe. We are not machines nor are we controlled by one. We are after all humans and have free will, what we want to believe in is ours for the