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On Kingship to the King of Cyprus by Thomas Aquinas (Author)
'On Kingship to the King of Cyprus'
By Thomas Aquinas (Author)
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Description:
'As I was turning over in my mind what I might present to Your Majesty as a gift at once worthy of Your Royal Highness and befitting my profession and office, it seemed to me a highly appropriate offering that, for a king, I should write a book on kingship, in which, so far as my ability permits, I should carefully expound, according to the authority of Holy Writ and the teachings of the philosophers as well as the practice of worthy princes, both the origin of kingly government and the things which pertain to the office of a king, relying for the beginning, progress and accomplishment of this work, on the help of Him, Who is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, through Whom kings rule, God the Mighty Lord, King great above all gods.'
(Thomas Aquinas)
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By Thomas Aquinas (Author)
Purchase Book:
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Description:
'As I was turning over in my mind what I might present to Your Majesty as a gift at once worthy of Your Royal Highness and befitting my profession and office, it seemed to me a highly appropriate offering that, for a king, I should write a book on kingship, in which, so far as my ability permits, I should carefully expound, according to the authority of Holy Writ and the teachings of the philosophers as well as the practice of worthy princes, both the origin of kingly government and the things which pertain to the office of a king, relying for the beginning, progress and accomplishment of this work, on the help of Him, Who is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, through Whom kings rule, God the Mighty Lord, King great above all gods.'
(Thomas Aquinas)
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Without doubt the most famous and influential of all medieval European thinkers, St. Thomas Aquinas, entitled the Angelic Doctor, was born in Sicily. He was educated in Paris and became a member of the other great medieval order in Christianity, namely the Dominican Order. He studied with Albertus Magnus who was himself influenced deeply by Islamic philosophy and science and was a defender of Aristotelian thought in the Latin world. St. Thomas taught in Paris for many years where he defended his position on the relationship between faith and reason. He was opposed to both the Latin Averroists, that is, those interpreters of Ibn Rushd in the West who emphasized only the rationalistic aspect of the thought of the great Islamic philosopher, and those Christian thinkers who were totally opposed to rational philosophy. St. Thomas created a vast synthesis based on the Aristotelization of Christian thought, drawing heavily from the writings of Ibn Sina, al- Ghazzali and other Islamic thinkers and creating a summa of theology which has been influential to this day and which is still the most impor- tant source of Catholic theology and philosophy. His two best known works, the Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, are the greatest summations of classical Catholic philosophy and theology and among the most important works of European thought.
After St. Thomas, his school of thought continued strong into the eighth/fourteenth century with such figures as Duns Scotus but it was also criticized by the nominalists and gradually began to wane until in the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries the new wavt+. of Renaissance thought began to replace Scholasticism in most centers of learning in Europe. Scholasticism, especially in the form of Thomism, survived strongly, however, in Italy and Spain into the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries. Moreover, through the influence of Spain it spread into South America where it continued to produce a large number of philosophers of local significance but was not well known within the mainstream of European philosophy which gradually turned away from the synthesis of faith and reason created by the great theolo- gians of the Middle Ages such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure.
(Seyyed Hossein Nasr)
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