I continue my Chesterton streak with this slim biography of St. Thomas
Aquinas.

St. Thomas was a Dominican priest; and though you may not of heard of him
he was also one of the world’s most influential philosophers; indeed, his
writings still provide the theological foundation for Roman Catholic
doctrine.

A little history. You all remember the Greek philosophers, Plato and
Aristotle. St. Paul, St. Augustine, and many of the other early church
fathers were greatly influenced by what’s called neo-platonism; they
identified Jesus Christ, the Word of God, with the neo-platonic “logos”.
Because of neo-platonism’s emphasis on the ideal, there was a tendency
in the Christian followers of Plato to emphasize the goodness of the
spirit and the wickedness of the flesh, sometimes to the extent of saying
that the flesh and the material world are altogether evil.

Now, this is part of the Manichean heresy, and has never been acceptable
Christian doctrine–after all, God created the world and then said that
it was good. Jesus Christ, so the early church councils decided (and so
we believe today) was fully divine and fully human–and if fully human,
then partially material, ergo, the material world cannot be evil.

As Thomas approached adulthood, the work of Aristotle was becoming known
in Europe once again, mostly through the work of a muslim named Averroes,
and because Averroes had added some decidely problematic ideas of his own,
Aristotle was acquiring a bad name among churchmen. It was Thomas,
reading Aristotle afresh, who “baptized” his work and in so doing slew the
dragon of Manicheanism.

In my Intro to Philosophy class in college we didn’t study either
Aristotle or St. Thomas; we skipped straight from Plato to Descartes, and
then on to David Hume. And looking back on it, I’m
very sorry we did so, for I’m acquiring a taste for Aquinas, mostly
because everybody since has gotten it all wrong. Let’s look at David
Hume to see why.

David Hume was an empiricist. Following Locke and Barclay, he believed
that we can only know what we perceive with our senses–a seemingly
reasonable starting point, but coupled with the notion that Hume wasn’t
sure he could trust his senses it led, in the end, to solipsism–the idea
that we can’t be sure that anything exists but ourselves.

In my view, this is utter nonsense. Reality bites, as they say; I’ve long
thought that any philosophy that doesn’t take the existence of objective
reality as axiomatic is looney-tunes. The difficulty for me, then, is
that the only prominent philosophy I’d been familiar with that takes the
existence of objective reality is axiomatic is materialism, the notion
that natural world alone exists. As a Christian, materialism really isn’t
my cup of tea either.

And then I picked up Chesterton’s book on St. Thomas, and lo and
behold–unlike those who follow him, St. Thomas doesn’t attempt to prove
everything from a miniscule set of first principles. Not for him the foolish game of
pretending to know less than we do. Instead, with common sense
not shown by philosophers as a class, he accepts God’s creation–the
universe we live in–as a given.

Imagine–all this time I’ve been a Thomist, and I didn’t even know it.

Anyway, I liked the book a whole lot. And I’m clearly going to have to
spend some quality time with St. Thomas.