What's being said, not who's saying it

 
I’m reading a book called ‘The Thought of Thomas Aquinas’, an academic monograph that costs £69. It doesn’t sound like a gripping read, does it? Yet, despite some quite difficult philosophical passages, it is actually very interesting.

Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274) was the greatest theologian and philosopher of the Middle Ages, and possibly the greatest theologian of all time. We probably owe far more to him than we realize — in some cases, negatively, through rejection of his ideas!

However, I’m not here concerned with his theology. I just want to share some things that Brian Davies, the author of the book, has to say about Thomas Aquinas as ‘saint and thinker’. I think some people might find these encouraging from the point of view of Christian writing.

Brian Davies says, firstly, that Aquinas was enormously inquisitive. 

He is always asking ‘Why?’ or ‘What?’ One might even say that Aquinas’s whole system rests on a question. This is because the most important element in his thinking is God, and because God, for him, is an answer to puzzlement…, an answer which leaves us with yet more questions. Aquinas is not content simply to say that God is. He wants to explore the divine in as many ways as possible.

And, secondly, he stresses Aquinas’s great concern to communicate ideas, which is clearly shown in his prose style. He is not like some theological authors, e.g. St Augustine, whose writing rises to the heights of literature. Nevertheless:

He writes with impeccable clarity, which says much for his cast of mind. It shows him to be someone wanting us to see what he is talking about rather than wanting us to see him talking about it. It shows him concerned with what is being said rather than who is saying it.

I think that this is an admirable aim for all of us.

A third thing he tells us is that Aquinas was very open-minded:

He was a cautious thinker not given to supposing that any one authority has all the answers. He quotes eminent sources, but he can also see fit to disagree with them on occasion…. Far from thinking that all wisdom resides in a single school of thought, his desire seems to have been to draw, with gratitude for diversity, on as much as was available to him.

Not bad for the thirteenth century!