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Aquino was born in a world where human beings were part of an enchanted world, magical - a world that has contributed to lower

In his influential book, A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor contrasts the "I porous" of the Middle Ages with the "I stamp 'of modernity. Thomas Aquinas may be seen as a figure that lies between these two worlds.

Taylor said that our medieval ancestors lived in an enchanted world was alive with magical powers. The boundary between the individual human being and the other was the porous nature, and humanity is in a vast cosmos organic beings visible and invisible. This helps us to understand why Thomas Aquinas refers to angels and demons as real beings that invite philosophical reflection as much as any other life form.

modern rationalism completed the spirit of these ideas, the eradication of hidden forces of nature and harness the power of imagination. But it was Thomas Aquinas and his scholastic contemporaries who started this transformation in the range of Western knowledge, when she married philosophy to theology. Thomas Aquinas would have been horrified to know that finally the scaffolding of reason and not based on the foundation of faith, but he played an important role in the erection of scaffolding. Therefore, despite its medieval context, we might recognize as the father of modernity.

Understanding

Aquinas the human soul was very different from our modern conception of the mind. It was perhaps closer to the Freudian idea of ??the soul. Freud was an atheist, but his work in German refers to the soul (Seele), mistranslated into English as "spirit".

The spirit or soul, that psychoanalysis shows us that our unconscious is home to the fantasies, desires and fears of a more self critical, if turbulent boil an otherness within the spirit supposedly rational and autonomous scientific modernity. We need only think of computer-generated creatures realize that angels, demons, gargoyles and monsters retain their ability to fascinate and terrify us. So perhaps the differences between the world of Aquino and ours are not as great, if we expand what we mean by "spirit".

, including human nature is essentially good for Thomas, because life itself is good. He said repeatedly that "grace perfects nature" - our desire for God makes us more or less natural. A more pessimistic view emerged when theologians of reform establishes grace over and against nature, stressing the fact that the goodness of human nature was totally destroyed by original sin. This paved the way for the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, where nature, including human nature, was finally under the control of the rational mind, separated from its biblical and theological heritage.

intellect, will and reason, everyone has a specific meaning, technicians Aquinas.