De VeritateThomas Aquinas
About De Veritate
("On Truth") is among the earliest of Aquinas's disputed questions, composed during his first Parisian regency in the 1250s. It treats truth not as a single problem but as a cluster: the nature of truth, the relation of created truth to divine truth, and the mechanisms by which human beings come to know anything at all.
Aquinas defines truth as the conformity of intellect and thing (adaequatio intellectus et rei). This formula, inherited from Avicenna and Isaac Israeli, he sharpens in two directions. Truth exists primarily in the intellect, not in things, because it is the intellect that judges whether its apprehension matches reality. But things themselves are "true" insofar as they conform to the divine intellect that creates them. Every creature is intelligible because it is the product of an intelligence.
The questions on the teacher (De Magistro) and on prophecy extend the analysis. Teaching does not pour knowledge into a passive mind; it provides signs and occasions by which the student's own active intellect can move from potency to act. Aquinas thus positions human learning as genuinely active while keeping divine illumination as the ground of all intelligibility. The work laid the conceptual foundations that the would later compress into its treatment of knowledge, truth, and the divine ideas.