St. Thomas Aquinas Paperback – November 16, 2011

Gilbert Keith.Someday, you'll win a trivia contest with "What is G.K. Chesterton's full name?" If you are on Jeopardy, be sure to phrase the answer as a question.I reviewed Gilbert Keith's What's Wrong with the World last May. He is difficult to read on Kindle because one wants to underline every other line of his magnificent prose.Some time ago I wrote a little book of this type and shape on St. Francis of Assisi; and some time after (I know not when or how, as the song says, and certainly not why) I promised to write a book of the same size, or the same smallness on St. Thomas Aquinas. The promise was Franciscan only in its rashness ; and the parallel was very far from being Thomistic in its logic. You can make a sketch of St. Francis: you could only make a plan of St. Thomas, like the plan of a labyrinthine city. I'm not a man of envy. Payton Manning's new little bungalow in Cherry Hills is a fine structure; his rival Tom Brady's wife is extremely attractive, blog friend sugarchuck has some cool guitars. I'm fine with that. Mazel tov! But two good friends took some of their Catholic education at the firm hand of the Jesuits: one in high school, one in grad school. And I am green that the entire, substantive, intellectual aspect of Catholicism was never shared with me. Eleven years of parochial school theology got me a succession of deconstructionist, feel good hooey.The Charles Murray book reviewed last April suggested that its young reader cough, cough engage in serious religious thought and study. Randy Barnett's masterful Structure of Liberty [Review Corner] used natural law and St. Thomas Aquinas as a foundation. So, I ponied up $1.99 for a Kindle version of Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas (illustrated and annotated).He opens with a lengthy (well, not too lengthy -- it is a very short book) comparison of St. Francis because, again, he had written a similar book on St. Francis. But as an introduction, it is helpful to compare something new to something known.Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom. Perhaps it may be misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy , saved us from being Platonists. It would be rich of your review corner author to compare himself to any saint, but I was certainly drawn to Aquinas. Chesterton says that he "baptized Aristotle," bringing him into a church completely in the clutches of Platonic spirituality and mysticism. I have blasted the current pontiff, once or twice, for his irrational economics. I hope nobody missed Kevin Williamson's superb essay pushing back against an Honduran Cardinal's anti-Capitalism. Dare I mention Michael Novak?Aquinas stands for reason and in the middle ages says that there is no conflict between religion and science. Both seek the same truth.He practically said that if they could really prove their practical discoveries, the traditional interpretation of Scripture must give way before those discoveries. He could hardly, as the common phrase goes, say fairer than that. If the matter had been left to him, and men like him, there never would have been any quarrel between Science and Religion. Aquinas takes on the Platonists of his own church as well as the encroachment of Islam, and "The Manichees." But his crusades are fought with reason and philosophy.For the Augustinians derived only from Augustine, and Augustine derived partly from Plato, and Plato was right, but not quite right. It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point , it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it. After a thousand years of extension, the miscalculation of Platonism had come very near to Manicheanism. [...] Hence, we may say broadly of the Moslem philosophers, that those who became good philosophers became bad Moslems. It is not altogether unnatural that many bishops and doctors feared that the Thomists might become good philosophers and bad Christians. But there were also many, of the strict school of Plato and Augustine, who stoutly denied that they were even good philosophers. Between those rather incongruous passions, the love of Plato and the fear of Mahomet, there was a moment when the prospects of any Aristotelian culture in Christendom looked very dark indeed. Anathema after anathema was thundered from high places; and under the shadow of the persecution, as so often happens, it seemed for a moment that barely one or two figures stood alone in the storm-swept area. They were both in the black and white of the Dominicans; for Albertus and Aquinas stood firm. Aquinas was high-borne and chose the life of a friar. He was accepted into society, lectured at Colleges but was not subsumed by anything but thought and philosophy. Chesterton says "But he had all the unconscious contempt which the really intelligent have for an intelligentsia."There may be many who do not understand the nature even of this sort of abstraction. But then, unfortunately, there are many who do not understand the nature of any sort of argument. Indeed, I think there are fewer people now alive who understand argument than there were twenty or thirty years ago; and St . Thomas might have preferred the society of the atheists of the early nineteenth century to that of the blank sceptics of the early twentieth. But, to a 13th century friar, "A is A."Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. [...] According to St. Thomas, the mind acts freely of itself, but its freedom exactly consists in finding a way out to liberty and the light of day; to reality and the land of the living. In the subjectivist, the pressure of the world forces the imagination inwards. In the Thomist, the energy of the mind forces the imagination outwards, but because the images it seeks are real things. All their romance and glamour, so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind. The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision. Or, if you will , it is a vision because it is not a dream. And yet, the book ends a little sourly. This long-review-of-a-short-book is the first of three: today GK Chesterton, next week Karl Popper, then George Orwell. I posit that each of these three brilliant sons of liberty made economic and political errors because of the dark times in which they lived. Liberalism was in its death throes to each and each tried to posit a world with liberty in a post-Liberal universe. My man Mises saw the eventual victory of Liberalism, but Chesterton, Popper, and Orwell saw the need to make the best of a crueler world post Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.I can forgive the Middle Ages Friar for not cheering on free market economics. He predated Menger, Bastiat, Adam Smith, and Ludwig von Mises -- and his cable package did not include CNBC, so he never saw Kudlow. But Chesterton, sadly, piles on:He foresaw from the first the peril of that mere reliance on trade and exchange, which was beginning about his time; and which has culminated in a universal commercial collapse in our time. He did not merely assert that Usury is unnatural, though in saying that he only followed Aristotle and obvious common sense, which was never contradicted by anybody until the time of the commercialists, who have involved us in the collapse. The modern world began by Bentham writing the Defence of Usury, and it has ended after a hundred years in even the vulgar newspaper opinion finding Finance indefensible. But St. Thomas struck much deeper than that. He even mentioned the truth, ignored during the long idolatry of trade, that things which men produce only to sell are likely to be worse in quality than the things they produce in order to consume.Something of our difficulty about the fine shades of Latin will be felt when we come to his statement that there is always a certain inhonestas about trade. For inhonestas does not exactly mean dishonesty. It means approximately "something unworthy," or, more nearly perhaps, "something not quite handsome." And he was right; for trade, in the modern sense, does mean selling something for a little more than it is worth, nor would the nineteenth century economists have denied it. Usury -- and "less than handsome" goods for trade. I weep. But at the end of my triumvirate review, I intend to bring Chesterton, Popper, Orwell, and maybe Aquinas to 2014. I will ask them to use their preternatural intellects to update the economic side of their philosophies.Chesterton's book? Five starts, of course!

This is an old book. Chesterton died in 1936. And because it is an old book and the scholarship on Thomas has advanced, there are errors that in all likelihood Chesterton was not aware that they were errors. So as a factual biography, it has a few flaws. Where it soars is in capturing the essence of Thomas without knowing a great deal of his biography. This is all the more impressive when we realize there isn't a great deal known about Thomas' biography and that is the way he wanted it.St. Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher, teacher, theologian and Saint. The amount of his writing is enormous and this is all the more impressive when we realize he didn't live past 50 or so. His Summa was considered by C.S. Lewis to be one of the finest accomplishments of the human mind. He is a heavyweight, literally and figuratively, of all the doctors of the Church and his theology dominates to this day. Yet his humility is what is best known about him. Thomas let his thinking and writing do his talking for him. His personality fades into the background in the presence of his arguments. The teaching is what matters.Chesterton is known as the Apostle of Common Sense, and even a brief reading of anything he wrote indicates he might have been better described as the Apostle of the paradox.Thomas is best known for using the philosophy of Aristotle as part of his theology. Less well known is that at the time Thomas began his work with Aristotle, the orthodox in the Church viewed Aristotle as they would every other pagan. Besides the Arabs translated him, when it would have been more logical for that to be the work of the Latins. The Muslims tried to turn him into some kind of pantheist philosopher less acceptable to Christians than a pagan. No, Aristotle was not fit for Christian thought, according to the CHurch leaders of the 13th century. Chesterton first reminds us that there has never been a true Revolution in history. All that we call "revolution" is really a counter revolution. Aquinas countered the orthodox thinking regarding Aristotle in much the same way as the American Revolution ran counter to British Imperialism - minus the violence. He points out that the earliest Church history shows us the fathers were the true Neo-Platonists. Between them and Thomas the Roman Catholic foundation rests on pagans - or so it seems.Chesterton was rare for his time in that he saw the Middle Ages, not as the Dark ages, a derogatory term dating back to the Enlightenment, the proudest people on earth to that time, used to distinguish themselves from the superstition they erroneously believed dominated thought, but as a time of enormous progress in human thought, perhaps more so than the Renaissance that came after. He would be proven right and today the term "Dark Ages" is simply considered flat out wrong. Using this, for his time, truly enlightened viewpoint, he captures Thomas in a way that few have ever done. A contemporary religious biographer of St. Thomas tells us that his love overcame his humility. Chesterton agrees, and in so doing points out the most massive paradox: that a man could be so lacking in self awareness, could make such a massive impression from his day to the present. Not just Chesterton's present, but ours as well.

Livro muito bom. Chesterton com certeza foi um dos grandes! Mais do que nunca precisamos de um homem como ele em nossa cultura.

I am not a philosopher but this book was a fantastic introduction into a new and wonderful world. I recommend for anyone who wants a birds eye view of St Thomas and his tremedous influence on world thought.

He’s so modest a about this book, but I’ll have to read it many more times to really see it’s riches. Highlights ...the human portrait of Thomas, the history of Aristotle in the Arab world, the argument that catholic philosophy is the only one on the side of life, the critique of agnosticism and the term’s founder Huxley and the quip that Francis Bacon always a 3rd rate philosopher.

J'aime l'approche originale du sujet ,le parallèle intelligent entre les deux saints qui souligne avec humour leurs différences et leur complémentarité . Il est également très agréable de trouver un esprit aussi cultivé pratiquant l'autodérision et le paradoxe avec la jubilation d'un converti dont la foi a bénéficié d'une lente maturation...J'aime cette clarté, cet enthousiasme (au sens original) et cette vigueur dans l'affirmation de ses opinions... Et quelle langue fastueuse, fluide et simple à la fois ! Un régal !

Ensayo sobre Tomás de Aquino en el que se proporcionan unos apuntes biográficos y se hacen reflexiones sobre su filosofía. Escrito de forma inteligente. Chesterton hace uso de paradojas y contrastes con mucha frecuencia, lo que hace atractiva la lectura del libro pero puede confundir a algún lector. Será más apreciado por quien tenga alguna referencia sobre la filosofía tomista.