"If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy." Saint Thomas Aquinas
A counterpart to the accusations against Calvin? Do they cancel each other out?
I was posting Aquinas not as authority to be swallowed whole least of all by people who don’t believe in, well, a whole bunch o’ stuff.
So the point is that he addresses the issue. It feels a little ridiculous to have to mention this, but I think Aquinas may have looked in a Bible once or twice.
I think the protasis is important in your problematic text. (Do you know what it’s a quote from?) Aquinas also thinks that prime matter is made of the four elements. And he didn’t think the “conceptus” was human until weeks after conception. (He was still against abortion.)
I do not agree with either of these thoughts of his. But they were excommunicating heretics, and running them out of town and/or killing them long before and long after him. We don’t kill forgers and most malefactors these days either. And nobody had started doing real chemistry, and he didn’t have the knowledge of embryology that we have.
I don’t see the relevance of these things to his usefulness in working out transubstantiation.