Aquinas And Anthropology

According to G.K. Chesterton, anthropologists’ views differed greatly to those of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas saw “man as a whole” while anthropologists saw man as a beast. To anthropologist’s humans contrast with God. Aquinas’ goals in his study were to understand the connection between man and the divine and studying how men were involved with divine beings. In the Summa Theologica Aquinas wrote about how man could even reconcile with God and that angels help lead men to their divine path to God. Chesterton wrote of anthropologists, “under their limitations, they could not get a complete theory of Man, let alone a complete theory of nature. They began by ruling out something, which they called the Unknowable. The incomprehensibility was almost comprehensible, if we could really understand the Unknowable in the sense of the Ultimate. But it rapidly became apparent that all sorts of things were Unknowable, which were exactly the things that a man has got to know.” Aquinas had an answer to this as well. He believed that when reason could not explain, faith could. This contradicted everything the anthropologists believed, to “follow reason as far as it will go.” Aquinas may have involved anthropology in his studies and reasoning but he did not believe in some of their most fundamental ideas.