Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.

I first met Chesterton when I was in college, via the Father Brown stories. One of the advisors to our IVCF group suggested the The Man Who Was Thursday, which I read and mostly failed to appreciate; and I recall picking up The Everlasting Man and finding it not at all like Mere Christianity as I had been led to believe. In fact, I found it impenetrable…which given my gross lack of familiarity with the intellectual currents in which Chesterton swam is unsurprising. Despite that unpromising beginning, I found myself picking up the occasional book now and then, as I ran across them–Four Faultless Felons, Orthodoxy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Heretics, and so on–and eventually I put my hand on Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, a figure I knew virtually nothing about. I bought the book mostly because it was by Chesterton, and I was in a book-buying mood.

And I was enchanted. I’m afraid most of the actual facts swept past, borne rushing away on Chesterton’s glorious stream of verbiage, but the fundamental sanity of St. Thomas shone clearly through.

Some background is needed. The “Philosophy 101” class I’d took as an undergrad spent a fair amount of time on Plato, then slid right over Aristotle and Aquinas to Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Kant, and Marx. Hume was the sticking point for me. He insisted that all knowledge comes from sense-experience, and then, as I recall, concluded that alas! we really can’t trust our sense experience either. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying.) In the end, he concluded that, consequently, we can’t really know much of anything for sure. He called this a conclusion; I called it an absurdity.
I was, in fact, completely disgusted. I left college with not much use for philosophy and a definite sense that any system of thought that regarded objective reality as something that needed to be proven wasn’t worth spending my time on. And all of the modern philosophers we studied, from Descartes on, seemed to start with the assumption that such proof was necessary (”cogito ergo sum”). And later philosophers, I found out, mostly started with the assumption that such proof was impossible.

Aquinas, though, and Aristotle before him, they took objective reality as a given! The world doesn’t need to be proven; it amply demonstrates itself. This was a shock and a delight. At last, here were philosophers that it might be worth my time to listen to. Not just then, of course, because I was ”so” frightfully busy, but I resolved, someday, to spend some time with Aquinas and see what he had to say. Not immediately; it sounded like rather a major project. But someday.

Then I noticed that several of the bloggers I was reading, notably Mark Shea and Tom of Disputations, quoted Aquinas (and Chesterton!) from time to time, and not just as an interesting nugget but in the heat of argument. (It was also at about this time that I read Mark’s By What Authority and Peter Kreeft’s Back to Virtue.) It also began to seem to me that they had deeper wells of argument to draw from than many of the other bloggers I was reading, that they were standing on deeper and firmer intellectual foundations. What were those foundations? Where did they come from? And for the first time I really came face-to-face with the intellectual tradition of Roman Catholicism.

Let me digress for a moment. People often want religion to be simple, but as Lewis noted that’s the point: nothing real is simple. Physics isn’t simple; chemistry isn’t simple; things that are real are complicated. If Christianity is true, we ought to expect it to be complicated, with lots of intricate little details and occasional results of elegance, beauty and deceptive simplicity. Now, our knowledge of Physics and Chemistry accumulates. No one expects a budding physicist to work it all out from scratch; instead, there are these neat things called “textbooks” that contain the basics of the field and then build on them. If Christianity is real, we should expect to be able to do the same thing, and with more reason. If God is all-good and unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then a truth once learned can and should be held onto. We might, over time, find that “it’s more complicated than that”, we might need to develop our knowledge further, as Einstein revised Newton (though even Newton gets the job done for many practical purposes).

And in the books and web pages I was reading, I thought, I was beginning to see the outlines of such an accumulated body of knowledge.

Part 5 is here.