Compare Aquinas And Hildegard Of Bingen

Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingen Within any body, such as the Catholic Church, there will never be complete concurrence of opinion on any issue, ideology, or even fact. This holds true for even basic tenets of the Catholic tradition, tradition here referring to an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined. Examples of this tradition, and its defining and redefining, would be the evolvement of Scriptural interpretations or the Catholic Church’s positions on matters ranging from climate change to civil rights. This defining and redefining because of tradition is central to the progress and amelioration of the Catholic Church and the faith as a whole because it provides a multitude

Currently, Catholic justice is interpreted as thinking and acting towards the good, the true, and the beautiful in a manner that is both objective and subjective. Justice is the former because it is independent of thought and it is the latter because justice depends on human action. Catholic dimensions of justice also have their roots in Ancient Greek philosophy. Plato’s definition in The Republic encapsulates an idea of justice that is widely accepted, that “justice is virtue and wisdom and injustice vice and ignorance” (pg. 16). Plato basically states that to be just is to have virtue or excellence of the soul and to be wise. It is this definition of justice that is sustained through argument into the times of Saints Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingen

Saint Hildegard of Bingen was quite focused on preservation and the natural world, a virtue surprisingly relevant to today’s social justice. Saint Hildegard of Bingen’s ideas on humans place in the natural world display a strain of justice that other theologians could often overlook. Saint Hildegard’s main two notions of justice are those of cultivation and asceticism. The former can be explained as “The role of humanity is that of a gardener in God’s creation… Humans serve the rest of creation best by growing closer to God in love” (Bauerschmidt pgs. 110-111). Saint Hildegard’s justice of cultivation is that if humans do achieve this cultivation, then they have fulfilled their purpose, meaning that treating the natural world with respect and care is the just way to live. This cultivation is an argument against other ideas of justice because it focuses squarely on the way humans interact with their surroundings in the natural world, not just in their dealings with each other and laws. Additionally, Saint Hildegard vouches for a justice through asceticism, or “freeing ourselves from all those things that we consider necessities in order that we can know where to draw the line” (Bauerschmidt pg. 113). Saint Hildegard’s justice through asceticism is a justice of