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Pasquale Porro, Thomas Aquinas. A Historical and Philosophical Profile (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), pp. 47-48:
“In d. 3, q. 1, a. 3, Thomas can, therefore, return to specify that God can be known from creatures to the extent that every creature is nothing more than an imitation of God according to the limits and possibilities its nature. And this justifies the adoption of the three ways mentioned earlier—the way of causality, of remotion, and of eminence—proposed by Pseudo-Dionysius and, according to Thomas, taken up again by Peter Lombard (with the doubling of the way of eminence, as we saw). To what does knowledge mediated by creatures lead us? Certainly not to the Trinity, for the knowledge of God from creatures leads us to be able to affirm—as we said—God’s existence, but it does not lead us to any—or only a minimal (and this in a purely analogical form)—knowledge of God’s essence, and certainly nothing distinct about the Persons of the Trinity. Consequently, “the philosophers knew nothing about this [that is, the Trinity] if not from revelation or from having heard it from others (et ideo philosophi nihil de hoc sciverunt, nisi forte per revelationem vel auditum ab aliis).” If we emphasize this aspect, it is first of all because it allows us, once again, to understand the reason why, according to Thomas, another science besides philosophy is necessary and, second, to note that Thomas, like the majority of his Scholastic colleagues, when he refers to the philosophers, almost always adopts the past tense (sciverunt) and does not do so purely fortuitously. For Thomas, “the philosophers” are the Greeks and the Arabs, and both belong to an experience that is now a thing of the past. There is no such thing as contemporary philosophers, there is no contemporary philosophy. In Thomas’s view (and, as we have said, for the majority of his colleagues, even those of the faculty of arts), philosophy is an horizon that is essentially closed, already concluded, past, not a current option. Of course, philosophers did once exist and from them many useful doctrines can be appropriated, while others can be corrected or refuted, but philosophy as such (as pure philosophy) is something now obsolete, outdated. If we do not attend to this fact, there is a danger of creating confusion about the relationship between theology and philosophy in Thomas. This is why, as we announced at the beginning of this work, Thomas would never have understood himself as a philosopher, and also why in Thomas’s eyes nothing existed that could be called a “Christian philosophy.” Philosophy is an experience that has already passed into the archive, and precisely as such is serviceable in its / complete autonomy, not because all of its conclusions are obsolete, but precisely because some are valid in themselves; they express what natural reason can reach. It is possible, in fact, to arrive at further conclusions (and here the Aristotelian epistemology of the Posterior Analytics remains the fundamental criterion) from new and different premises: those offered by revelation. It will not be a question of advancing philosophical discourse from within, but of making space for a new science that operates from different premises. In the history of humanity’s scientific progress, as we will see, philosophy, without being abolished, is destined to make room for a new knowledge that has a subject that is different, at least in part, and, above all, uses entirely new premises. It cannot be stressed enough that this is the meaning of Thomas’s scientific project (taking into account what scientia meant in the thirteenth century, namely, the model offered in the Posterior Analytics). This is not a matter of creating a synthesis between reason and philosophy, on the one hand, and faith and theology, on the other, as if reason stood wholly on the side of philosophy and faith wholly on the side of theology. The point is, rather, to construct a new scientia that must necessarily establish itself on philosophy, and hinges on it—even though it works rationally, as we have said, from different principles.”