With regard to my post On Listening, an activity which, as Lindsay notes with some justifiable asperity, I am not always wont to do, I’ve just run across the following passage in Josef Pieper’s Guide to Thomas Aquinas. It’s from the final paragraph of the book, and really gets at what I mean by listening:

….The other side is an intrepid frankness of affirmation, an enthusiasm for ever new explorations into the wonders of reality. Along with that, of course, there come ever new difficulties in incorporating the new data into our total view of the universe, and hence ever new conflicts, compelling us constantly to rethink our previous positions, to revise all our set ideas, even in theology. This attitude, which neither permits us to cast away insights already won nor allows us to rest on our laurels with a false sense of finality, is not easy to achieve. It is a highly demanding affair. But it is perhaps the best lesson among the many that can be learned in the school of the “universal teacher” of Christendom.

This is why listening—intellectual listening—is so hard. Some people, perhaps, can take in and assimilate new data without worrying about how it fits in with what they (think they) already know. I have a great deal of trouble doing that, at least about matters that are important to me. I need to figure out how the things I know fit together. But rethinking one’s previous positions and revising one’s set ideas to take in new data so that it all forms a coherent whole can be really, really hard. It’s even harder to take in new data probationally, so to speak, to see the new data as a whole and determine whether or not it can be made to fit with those “insights already won.” And when the gap between the new data and those “insights already won” is particularly large, the task is particularly daunting. It’s much easier to say, “Oh, it clearly doesn’t fit, so it’s most likely nonsense,” and forget about it.

St. Thomas chose the more difficult path, the path of listening and understanding. Not agreeing, necessarily, but understanding.