St. Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton

(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1933), 138

I. On Two Friars

  • "It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, 'I have understood every page I ever read.'" (422)
  • "Every saint is a man before he is a saint; and a saint may be made of every sort or kind of man." (423)
  • "The Saint is a medicine, because he is an antidote. Indeed, that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison, because he is an antidote. He will generally be found, restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same elements in every age…Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most." (424)
  • "The twentieth century is already clutching at the Thomistic rational theology because it has neglected reason." (425)
  • "St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth." (428)
  • "Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the sense were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies." (430-431)
  • "St. Thomas was making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian...St. Thomas was taking the lower road when he walked in the steps of Aristotle. So was God, when He worked in the workshop of Joseph." (437)
  • "It is an old story that, while we may need somebody like Dominic to convert the heathen to Christianity, we are an even greater need of somebody like Francis, to convert the Christians to Christianity." (440)

II. The Runaway Abbot

  • "He traveled a great deal; the truth applies to the travel, status mind, as well as his body. History temperature, even the opponents of Christianity, much more carefully and partially most of the fashion." (444)
  • 7th child in large family (452)

III. The Aristotelian Revolution

  • Albert: "You call him a Dumb Ox; I tell you this Dumb Ox shall bellow so loud that his bellowings will fill the world." (458-459)
  • Platonism was the old orthodoxy (the Church began by being Platonist), Aristotelianism was the modern revolution (464). The Faith had become too Platonist to be popular. It needed something like the shrewd and homely touch of Aristotle to turn it again into a religion of common sense." (467)
  • St. Thomas quoting prior doctors: "even when he differs, he also defers." (465)
  • "Aristotle took things as he found them, just as Aquinas accepted things as God created them." (468)
  • "His Aristotelianism simply meant that the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth." (471)
  • Style: "Nobody could feel for a moment that Thomas Aquinas was showing off. The very dullness of diction, of which some complain, was enormously convincing. He could could have given wit as well as wisdom; but he was so prodigiously in earnest, that he gave his wisdom without his wit." (473)
  • "It is a fact that falsehood is never so false as when it is very nearly true." (473)
  • Thomas was adamant against Siger of Brabant who said the Church was right theologically but could be wrong scientifically. "Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts." (475)
  • Phrases to use: "We shall do battle with his errors or bring a cure to his ignorance." (475)
  • Pragmatic argument:
    • "It is no good to prove a man wrong on somebody else's principles. We must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours." (476)
    • "He maintained controversy with an eye on only two qualities; clarity and courtesy. And he maintained these because they were entirely practical qualities; affecting the probabilities of conversion." (509)

IV. A Meditation on the Manichees

  • "No men are more different than saints...While it is possible for a king to wish very much to be a saint, it is not possible for a saint to wish very much to be a king." (478-479)
    • But saints are all the same in the essentials: theology "is hardly an occasion for originality" (507)
  • St. Louis: "Every man should dress well, in the manner of his rank, that his wife may the more easily love him." (480)
  • "Religion is truly a raging fire, and that Authority is often quite as much needed to restrain it as to impose it. Asceticism can be kept in some reasonable control; and it is indulged in much saner proportion under Catholic Authority." (483)
  • Asceticism is rare now and misunderstood as to be hating nature. (482-484)
  • Manichean philosophy is always in one way or another a notion that nature is evil. (484)
  • Calvinism holds that "God had indeed made the world, but in a special sense, made the evil as well as the good: had made an evil will as well as an evil world." (485)
  • Rather, "God looked on all things and saw that they were good." There are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. (485)
  • "The Augustinians derived only from Augustine, and Augustine derived partly from Plato, and Plato was right, but not quite right." (486)
  • "It was the inmost lie of the Manichees that they identified purity with sterility. St. Thomas always connects purity with fruitfulness."(486-487)
  • "St. Thomas stands up simply as the great orthodox theologian." (488)
  • "Catholicism is the only optimist theology. Among consistent cosmic creeds, this is the only one that is entirely on the side of Life." (488)
  • If Thomas had a title like John of the Cross, he would be St. Thomas of the Creator. (494)

V. The Real Life of St. Thomas

  • "His head was of a very real and recognizable type." (496)
  • "I think even his contemplative life was an active life." (498)
  • "About his real life of sanctity he was intensely secretive. Such secrecy has indeed generally gone with sanctity...In life and death, there is a sort of enormous quiet hanging about St. Thomas." (501)
    • "The holy man always conceals his holiness; that is the one invariable rule." (504)
  • "He had from the first that full and final test of truly orthodox Catholicity; the impetuous, impatient, intolerant passion for the poor; and even that readiness to be rather a nuisance to the rich, out of a hunger to feed the hungry." (502)
  • Love of neighbor: "At an early age he did not understand all this. He only did it." (503)
  • The miracle of the crucifix: I will have thyself or Only Thyself (505-506)
    • "Self-sufficiency is the very opposite of sanctity." (505)
    • "He was a person who was enourmously interested in everything. His answer is not so inevitable or simple as some may suppose." (505)
  • Thomas struggled over the mystical change in the Blessed Sacrament, seeking guidance in prolonged prayer, and threw his thesis at the foot of the crucifix: "Thomas, you have written well concerning the Sacrament of My Body." (507)
  • "He could alone restore all philosophy, if it had been burnt by fire." (507)
  • "I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw." (510)
  • While dying, he asked to have the Song of Solomon read through to him from beginning to end. (511)

VI. The Approach to Thomism

  • Thomism is the philosophy of common sense. (513)
  • Chesterton contrasts Thomas' philosophy—"nearer than most philosophies to the mind of the man in the street"—to the modern philosophies which don't correspond to reality (514). Yes, things exist, and eggs are eggs (515).
  • Thomas is not always easy to understand: "There are passages I do not in the least understand myself." (516, cf. 2 Pt-03)
  • Aquinas is almost always on the side of simplicity. (517)
  • I used the discussion on 520-521 about induction vs deduction an fallacies for a great 2024-2025—Aquinas—Alta II Traditional Logic I discussion 2024-12-03-Tue. In summary: Chesterton says that modern science things we can replace deduction (syllogism) with induction, when in fact that is just a starting point that must still ultimately result in a logical (deductive) statement. This is applicable today with ML/AI and the thought that we can just throw enough data at a question to get truth (cf. xkcd Machine Learning)
  • "The Thomist begins by being theoretical, but his theory turns out to be entirely practical." (522)

VII. The Permanent Philosophy

  • Generalism: "It is just possible, for all I know, that this labelling of Aquinas as a specialist was an obscure depreciation of him as a universalist." (527)
  • "Suffice it to say that the mere modern evolutionists, who would ignore the argument, do not do so because they have discovered any flaw in the argument; for they have never discovered the argument itself. They do so because they are too shallow to see the flaw in their own argument; for the weakness of their thesis is covered by fashionable phraseology, as the strength of the old thesis is covered by old-fashioned phraseology." (534)
  • "The simplest truth about St. Thomas the philosopher is that he immediately recognized the real quality in things." (536)
  • "Anyone writing so small a book about so big a man must leave something out." (539)

VIII. The Sequel to St. Thomas

  • Thomism "is the only working philosophy...St. Thomas's work has a constructive quality absent from almost all cosmic systems after him. For he is already building a house, while the newer speculators are still at the state of testing the rungs of a ladder, demonstrating the hopeless softness of the unbaked bricks, chemically analyzing the spirit in the spirit-level, and generally quarreling about whether they can even make the tools that will make the house. Aquinas is whole intellectual aeons ahead of them, over and above the common chronological sense of saying a man is in advance of his age; he is ages in advance of our age. For he has thrown out a bridge across the abyss of the first doubt, and found reality beyond and begun to build on it." (542-543)
  • "The Thomist philosophy and theology is quite obviously a working and even a fighting system; full of common sense and constructive confidence; and therefore normally full of hope and promise." (545)
  • Aquinas vs Augustine:
    • Augustine was a prose poet who wrote with wit. Aquinas didn't have literary magic, but also didn't have literary abuses. (540)
    • "Augustine, a name never mentioned by Aquinas without respect but often mentioned without agreement." (548)
  • The Summa Theologiae is "the great central Synthesis of history, that was to have linked the ancient with the modern world." (551)
  • Thomas' philosophy is the "Everlasting Philosophy." (551)

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Created: 2024-12-06-Fri
Updated: 2024-12-09-Mon