G.K. Chesterton's brilliant sketch of the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas is as relevant today as when it was published in 1933. Then it earned the praise of such distinguished writers as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Martain, and Anton Pegis as the best book ever written on the great thirteenth-century Dominican. Today Chesterton's classic stands poised to reveal Thomas to a new generation.
Chesterton's Aquinas is a man of mystery. Born into a noble Neapolitan family, Thomas chose the life of a mendicant friar. Lumbering and shy -- his classmates dubbed him "the Dumb Ox" -- he led a revolution in Christian thought. Possessed of the rarest brilliance, he found the highest truth in the humblest object. Having spent his life amid the vast intricacies of reason, he asked on his deathbed to have read aloud the Song of Songs, the most passionate book in the Bible.
As Albert the Great, Thomas's teacher, predicted, the Dumb Ox has bellowed down the ages to our own day. Chesterton's book will enlighten those who would consign Thomas to the obscurity of medieval times. It will confound those who would use Thomas to bolster arid schemes of Christian rationalism. Rather, it will introduce the wondrous mystery of the man who, after a life of unparalleled genius, was seized by a vision of the Unknown and said, "I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw."
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So how has he accomplished this feat? By simplifying, as his editor says, without oversimplifying. He turns his own lack of intimate knowledge to his advantage by concentrating on the core elements of Aquinas' thinking: his affirmation of the goodness of creation; his defense of common sense; and "the primacy of the doctrine of being." In this way he grasps--and helps us grasp--the importance of Aquinas for us today. As Raymond Dennehy has written, it's as if Chesterton is saying to us "the truths [Aquinas] was getting at--the basic principles of reality and reason--are in themselves really quite simple. Your basic intuitions were right all along." --Doug Thorpe
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Two or three times Chesterton penned a sentence in this book that literally made me wince in pain; not because I disliked what he wrote, but because the sentence overwhelmed me with the truth it conveyed so powerfully (and perhaps also because I knew I would never in my life write such a magnificent sentence).
A Southern Baptist by upbringing, I had long before college decided that Christianity was useful in keeping the stupid masses in line, but we smart folks had science and didn't need such myths. After two years of reading in the "Great Books" at college, this arrogance had faded, and I began to toy with the idea that Christianity was far more reasonable and even noble than I had thought. But I wasn't sure whether it was in fact true.
Then in this book Chesterton reiterated Aristotle's classic philosophical argument that reason tells us there must be a First Mover which set the world in motion. Chesterton added that it is reasonable to deduce that a First Mover must have willed to make that first move, and a being with a will is a person; so the First Mover is a personal God.
That logical point hit me hard, and changed my life. After a few more years of intense reading (and almost as intense procrastinating), I was received into the Roman Catholic Church--the same Church into which Chesterton's prodigious, joyful intellect impelled him. (He had been raised in the Church of England.
... Read more ›All of the usual caveats about Chesterton's writing apply here: he cannot resist a digression, he cannot resist an alliterative allusion, he cannot resist a pun. He is so full of life that he is constantly threatening to spin out of control. He is not a scholar, he is not writing a sober appraisal, he is probably not sure of most of the biographical details of his subject (in his own autobiography, which has much the same candid dearth of dates and details, he commented that if he had denied such careful treatment to St. Thomas and St. Francis how could he justify it for himself?).
In spite of these defects, the book is a triumph. Toast it with your best wine. Chesterton, for me, is the embodiment of "A Man in Full"; he is the polar opposite of C.S. Lewis' "Men without Chests". He is so full of good sense, penetrating insight, sound moral judgement, and the joy of life that it is all spilling out in every direction. Anyone who has read his book of literary criticism on Dickens will understand what I mean: this is criticism in an old key; it is appreciative criticism; it is an encounter with a writer by an entire man, and not just by a theory. It is wonderfully refreshing. I don't know of anyone writing today in a similar vein.
... Read more ›It's amazing that Chesterton was able to pack so much into so little of a book. This brilliant introduction to Aquinas should be required reading on all college campuses.
Chesterton admits that the book is a biography. His hope is that it will introduce readers to Aquinas' philosophy and therefore lead them into his theology. The theology, Chesterton also admits, is the one thing that he has left out of the book.
Instead, Chesterton spends a great deal of time comparing Aquinas to St. Francis of Assisi - a comparison which at first might seem quite odd. In classic Chesterton style, he demonstrates that the two friars were perhaps more similar than they were different.
Each generation, Chesterton writes, is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. Therefore, argues Chesterton, the 20th century is clutching at Thomism because it has neglected reason.
"...as the eighteenth century thought itself the age of reason, and the nineteenth century thought itself the age of common sense, the twentieth century cannot as yet even manage to think itself anything but the age of uncommon nonsense," writes G.K.
I was particularly intrigued by Chesterton's introduction of Martin Luther late in the book and his argument that the quarrel between the Augustinians and the Dominicans led, in part, to the Protestant Reformation.
The brilliance of this book is both its simplicity and the Chestertonian gems discovered within.
... Read more ›"Saint Thomas Aquinas" is not a biography. Read more
- Woman in White by Wilkie Collins on page 122
- Saint Thomas Aquinas by G. K Chesterton in Front Matter
- The Summa Theologica (Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 19 & 20) by Thomas on page 195
- The Woman in White (Bantam Classics) by Wilkie Collins on page 122
- Defence Of Usury by Jeremy Bentham on page 188
- A History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Medieval Philosophy - From Augustine to Duns Scotus by Frederick Copleston in Back Matter
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