O comentário de Tomás de Aquino ao Liber de Causis: elementos de uma metafísica negativa

Abstract

This dissertation presents the reception of Neoplatonism in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, both thinkers of Christian patristics and the influx of philosophical translations from Arabs and Jews that were widely diffused in the thirteenth century in the Latin West. Among these works we will highlight the Liber de Causis, the Elements of Theology of Proclus and the Dionysian corpus, works that St. Thomas Aquinas welcomes and approaches in his personal synthesis and it is from this Neoplatonic contribution that St. Thomas constructs his own conception of being, of causality and of a negative knowledge of the Divine Being. For Thomas the being of things is veiled and is not encompassed in concepts, from the material being to the Being itself by subsisting. Causality is not reciprocity, because the first cause remains separate, so there is an ontological abyss between all that is creaturely and the first uncreated cause, therefore, the path that St Thomas constructs in the face of the absolute transcendentality of the cause that governs all things without leaving its separate unity is the path of negativity.