Anselm Vs Aquinas

Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, well-established theologians in the history of Christianity, aimed to probe the unexplored and insufficiently answered questions of their faith. In their arguments, presented in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo and Aquinas’ Summa Theologia, each presents a desire to better understand his religion from within its own ideology. Aquinas and Anselm both rely on the premises of Christianity as the foundational support of their arguments, ruling out the possibility that these works were written with the intention of convincing non-believers to convert. Despite this similarity, though, their methods of inquiry differ; while Anselm stays within the bounds of Christian teachings to evidence his arguments, Aquinas relies …show more content…
Out of necessity in Aristotelian philosophy, God is the ultimate cause, the “first mover,” that ends infinite regressions in philosophical debate over what set the physical world into motion (q.2 a.3). Aquinas explicitly references Aristotle’s Metaphysics in his fourth argument for the existence of God, naming God as the ultimate form of attributes of gradation from which all other things derive their level of any particular quality. Moreover, Aquinas utilizes Metaphysics again to demonstrate that while the sacrament is physically two separate components, consisting of “dry” and “wet sustenance,” it is “formally and perfectly one” (q.73 a.2). By separating the physical and formal natures of a substance or object, Aquinas is able to explain the process of transubstantiation; the substance of an object changes while its accidents, or non-essential qualities, remain the …show more content…
Further, he later employs predication to discuss the attributes of creations in relation to God, arguing that descriptors of creations are not univocal to God as “‘healthy’ [is] predicated of medicine” (q.13 a.5). In addition, Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s theory on knowledge, stating that “natural knowledge begins from sense,” which carries on to influence how he analyzes human intellect (q.12 a.12). Lastly, Aquinas adopts the Aristotelian theory of the forms, naming God as a form and declaring that only blessed men can know his essence (q.12 a.1 RObj.2). Through his adoption of Aristotelian philosophy as an avenue to enhance the understanding of his religious arguments, even if out of necessity for his arguments to be considered valid during his time, Aquinas made his proofs intellectually accessible to a larger number of people and, most importantly, used connections from the physical world to delve deeper into