"In the panoramic description of philosophy that Aristotle gives at the outset of his Metaphysics he makes us aware of the fact that 'philosophy' is an umbrella term that covers a number of different disciplines or sciences -- logic, mathematics, natural science, ethics, etc. -- yet having an overall telos as well. That is, it is not just a jumble of different inquiries, unrelated to one another, but rather an ordered set of disciplines which aim at a culminating inquiry -- in the divine.

On this basis, we can say that the goal of philosophy is theology. This is an internal goal. The theology based on Sacred Scripture may be thought of as the external goal of philosophy, the mistress to whom philosophy is handmaiden, but there is an intrinsic theology to philosophy and it is the point of the whole enterprise.

Does this mean that we will find among Aristotle's works one devoted exclusively to the divine? Does this mean that theology is a separate discipline like geometry or arithmetic or natural science? Well, why not? Geometry has its subject matter, so does arithmetic, and so does natural philosophy. What is to prevent there being a science whose subject matter is the divine?

What prevents it is the fact that we have no access to the divine of the kind that would be required for it to be the subject of a science. We would have to have a definition of God, for one thing. But all our talk about God is oblique and indirect, dependent on our knowledge and talk of other things, which are more easily accessible by us.

What we find as the wisdom toward which philosophy tends is the unwieldly treatise that later editors dubbed the Metaphysics, fourteen books which have given scholars trouble for two millennia."

-Excerpt from Introduction to Thomas Aquinas study materials, found at catholicthinkers.org