I wanted to give a little air time to St. Thomas Aquinas on his feast day, as I have a great deal of admiration for him as a person of "equal parts head and heart." All that I've ever read about him makes me think I might have been molded out of some of the same dirt. He caught a lot of guff for "thinking too much," to the point of even occasionally branded as heretical, but at the same time he was prone to his experiences of "holy ecstacies," which sort of remind me of my own, "Oh, WOW!" moments in my own personal spirituality.
As quoted in Lesser Feasts and Fasts, "Thomas asserted that reason and revelation are in basic harmony," and that "Grace is not the denial of nature." He figured out that one way of looking at God was to know what God was not (the via negativa) and he understood the essence of God as a being was right there in black and white in Exodus 3:14, "I am Who I am." He understood God as Being, itself, and the Ultimate Reality--that all we know as "being" is derived from God as "Ultimate Being, defined." If you want to read his proofs for the existence of God, I've linked them here.
So here's to you, St. Thomas Aquinas, your heart bursting with love for God, and your head bursting with thoughts! I really do think you'd have been the first one on the block with a Kindle...
0 comments:
Post a Comment