Matthew Kostelecky

The Summa contra gentiles is perhaps the most peculiar work of St. Thomas Aquinas, due to Thomas's decision to structure the work first according to what humans can say about God without revelation and then what humans can say about God once revelation is explicitly introduced. Such an approach to the human pursuit of the divine is otherwise unheard of in Thomas's own day, and this unusual structure has provided a fertile seedbed for a wide range of interpretations. Matthew Kostelecky's book shows the integral relationship between the conceptions of human nature and God operative throughout the Summa contra gentiles such that the text is always in a twofold movement, at once describing what humans can say about God while also reflecting human nature back on itself by delineating its limits and capabilities with respect to the possible human knowledge of God. As a result, the Summa contra gentiles is presented as a mirror of human nature as that nature is directed to its most noble object.

In this essay, I argue that there are noteworthy textual and thematic links between Thomas’ Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate and the Summa contra gentiles that shed light on the contents and peculiarities of these two works. While it is commonly held through codicological research that these two texts are closely related, I have not found some of the precise thematic links I will be discussing announced, much less explored, in the literature or commentary tradition. I present these connections in order to account more perspicuously for Thomas’ conception of metaphysics over and against that of revealed theology, especially with respect to how those two domains figure into the odd structure of the Summa contra gentiles.

This essay focuses on two technical and difficult notions in the thought of Thomas Aquinas: the object of the intellect and self-knowledge. I argue that the object of the intellect determines the character and content of self-knowledge. Prosecuting this case requires disambiguating our everyday use of object from Thomas’s technical sense of obiectum and unpacking Thomas’s ambiguous use of one term, “object of the intellect,” for multiple notions. For Thomas, self-knowledge occurs in virtue of the cognition of being (ens), and I show how the multiple senses of “object of the intellect” relate to and determine self-knowledge as related to the cognition of being. Recognizing the determining influence of the object of the intellect on self-knowledge also provides an account of why human self-knowledge is a complicated, episodically actualized, and variegated affair.