Accommodating Avicenna, Appropriating Augustine: Assessing the Sources for Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Prophecy KU Leuven
In this paper I argue that Aquinas’s doctrine of prophecy develops from the early period (De uer. q. 12, a. 1, prophecy is a habit) to his more mature articulation (ST IIa-IIae q. 171, a. 2, prophecy is not a habit) as a result of his complex handling of the metaphysical thought of Avicenna. Aquinas subtly distances himself from the implication of Avicenna’s emanationist framework for prophecy, namely that prophetic knowledge is acquired through ...