We can’t love what we don’t know.
St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the most important thinkers in the history of Christianity. Learning from him can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be.
With Aquinas 101, you’ll dig into Aquinas’s thought on the most pressing questions: What is man? Who is God? What is happiness? Who is Jesus Christ, and how is he present to the world today?
Join our team of Dominican friars, who will walk you through Aquinas’s thought step-by-step. By enrolling, you’ll receive:
One email a week with the latest video
Supplemental readings and podcasts
A 40% discount off some of the works of Aquinas
Our latest videos are covering The Sacraments and Aquinas’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God.
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Recent Videos
St. Thomas Aquinas' Fifth Way & Arguments from Modern Science
In many people’s minds, Science and Faith are fundamentally at odds with one another. If we can explain some phenomenon on scientific principles, then we can remove God from the consideration – or, if God is active, then science must step aside. As we have discussed before, this is not the Catholic view and especially not Aquinas’ view of the relationship between God and Nature.
This is beautifully illustrated in Aquinas’ so-called “fifth way” of arguing for God’s existence from the Summa Theologiae, especially in comparison to some modern arguments for God linked to modern science.
Recent Videos
Why do Christians baptize in the name of the Trinity? Or to put it another way: Does it really matter what you SAY at a baptism? The answer is: yes – in fact, it makes all the difference in the world! Why is that? What is the connection between Baptism and the Trinity?
Recent Videos
Can Catholics believe in astrology? #AskAFriar
Is astrology ever good or noble? If not, why were some saints like St. Albert the Great interested in it in ages past? Big questions like these have been popping up in the comment boxes of our Aquinas 101 videos since the start of our very first season. In this video series with Fr. Ambrose Little, O.P., we will attempt to provide some answers.
Recent Videos
What is God’s Role in Ordering the Physical World?
Universal patterns or “Laws” of nature have become so familiar to us that we often treat them as obvious and self-evident, which makes Aquinas’ claim that the regularity of natural activity demands some intelligent being – expressed in his “Fifth way” and elsewhere – sound antiquated and strange.
Ultimately though, this intuition of Aquinas does not reveal some naivete of his about the order of nature. More properly, it reveals our own blindness to how much we take the natural scientific order for granted.
WELCOME TO AQUINAS 101!
Aquinas 101 is a project of the Thomistic Institute that seeks to promote Catholic truth and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas through short, engaging video lessons. On this website, you’ll find more than 140 videos by Dominican friars and expert scientists covering topics like the existence of God, virtue and vice, the soul, Genesis and evolution, the sacraments, and much, much more. You can find indexes of all the videos in each “season” of Aquinas 101 using the Videos menu at the top of the page.
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Most Popular Videos
St. Thomas Aquinas on Faith & Reason
Because God is the source of reality of everything that exists, he is the ultimate source of the light of reason and also of divine revelation and the light of faith. So since both reason and faith come from God, and since truth is one, we can be confident that faith and reason will never truly contradict each other because truth cannot contradict truth.
Most Popular Videos
Thomas Aquinas' famous work called the Summa Theologiae has three main parts. The entire work is really an extended meditation on the presence of God, but one of the greatest questions of all times is whether God exists, and Thomas takes the question head on with his famous five ways or five proofs for the existence of God.
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Aquinas teaches that God has imprinted in creatures their inclinations to their proper acts and ends in accordance with God's eternal plan. And likewise, that He's imprinted these inclinations in human beings in a higher way, in virtue of our spiritual nature. Aquinas famously claims that the precepts of the natural law follow the order of our natural inclinations.
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Metaphysics is the study of the science of being, of that which exists, in so far as it exists. You might say that metaphysics is a structured way of thinking about the most fundamental explanations of the world that we encounter. When Aquinas defines metaphysics, he says that its object of study is the causes of existence in things.