Aquinas I

Just finished a book by Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols entitled Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to His Life, Work, and Influence. As far as an introductory book goes, it ain’t. I had the impression that the author expected a prior familiarity with Thomas and his times. He seemed to tread water around Thomas' philosophy, too, kinda supplying a rambling overview and diving here and there into peripheral waters that looked pretty to him. I must admit that my mind would wander quite often, but I will spend the week to re-read it simply because I was drawn in several times.

I liked these two long sentences, at the end of the chapter entitled "Thomas in History":

Moreover, the realism and sobriety of the Thomist metaphysic – that is, the particular way in which the Thomist philosophy exercises those rights – enables the doctrinal theologian to speak to the common man (or at least the common reasonably well-educated man!) with some well-founded expectation of being heard. Its clarity is refreshing in a post-modern world where parodistic allusiveness, randomness and incoherence are frequently erected into pseudo-virtues that make reflective life an intellectual mess.

Hey – the "common reasonably well-educated man" – that’s me!

And the description of the post-modern world is the clearest statement of everything I hate about modern philosophy.

I’ve also been working my was slowly – and I really, really mean s-l-o-w-l-y – through the Summa Theologica. It’s an unbelievably massive work. I have the two volumes from the Great Books series and it's something like just under two thousand pages in length. I think I'm 9 pages in. So it’s obviously something you don’t read during a long holiday weekend. But for the past couple of days I read a few of the "articles" with absolutely no thought of being rushed or even completing it. My only goal is to keep reading it. If I could get through my Hegel anthology in a couple of months, this should be cake.