Today is the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, not every modern person's favourite saint. But note him well; find something to read by or even about him: the Wikipedia article is a decent start. He is HUGE. In every sense: his fellow-students at Cologne called him "the dumb ox" because he was very large (if good-looking) and taciturn. But for the next 30 years or so he got up before Mattins every morning and read, thought, and wrote. And wrote, and wrote. It's not his fault that he became the Church's Official Spokesperson at the Council of Trent and got co-opted by every anti-modernist since. He is beyond brilliant. And his junction of faith and reason should be mandatory reading for everyone worried about how to live faith in a supposedly rational (and "therefore faithless") world today. He is a feast for the mind -- a faculty all too often exiled from our sentimental devotion. (I remember leaving an otherwise admirable Catholic prayer group because they lived as if God had created every bit of them except their mind.) And if you look at current cutting-edge images of the Universe, there is nothing there to contradict Thomas's ideas on the Creator and his Creation. Dumb Ox, indeed. From a castle in Sicily to a tomb in Toulouse, this was one stupendous Doctor Ecclesiæ.
Image: Fra Angelico, Virgin & Child with St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas (detail)
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