Our need for St. Thomas Aquinas today

The title may sound anachronistic and can provoke a turning-off reaction, given today's general mentality. But that's part, in fact, a big part of why we have to bring this topic out in the open.

With the world drifting to a repeat of the Enlightenment that is self-generated, we need the mind of St. Thomas, his way of reasoning and looking at the world, to see that we need a light outside of ourselves, that our light is at best something received and can only reflect.

Ours can never be the original and creative light. When we say we have to be original and creative, we have to understand those qualities in a broad sense, never in the strict, literal sense.  We can only be the moon with respect to the sun.

Our originality and creativity are borrowed and shared qualities. They are a given-and-received affair involving us, rational, free and therefore responsible creatures who can rightfully think that what we think, say and do are also ours even if we can only react and reflect exterior or even interior stimuli.

At the moment, we have many thinkers who pride themselves as free-thinkers and who think they can go about understanding the world and the universe by their own selves. The brightest of these free-thinkers cannot go far beyond their own ideas, precisely because they imprison themselves in their own world. They cannot transcend.

They claim they have no biases, no presuppositions at all, and that they are not pre-conditioned, which are already quite an assumption to make. In the end, what they mean is that no one has the right to tell them anything. Everything ought to start and end with them. No authority is above or before them. That already sounds funny to me.

Any mention of faith, religion, Church, God, etc., already turns them off. That's already quite a contradiction for those who claim they are not conditioned by anything at all. They, a priori, already eliminate any possible contribution to their knowledge and wisdom from these sources.

St. Thomas Aquinas was a medieval philosopher who made the great contribution of synthesizing the best of philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks with the role and requirements of faith.

It was he who clearly distinguished between what is reason and what is faith, but he also made it clear that the two while distinct are not incompatible. More than that, he demonstrated that, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “a philosophy elaborated without the knowledge of Christ almost awaited the light of Jesus to be complete.”

In short, it is in the nature of reason to be in need of faith. And it is also in the nature of faith to be in need of reason, since faith which is a supernatural gift needs to impact on us who always have to work through reason.

Reason without the guidance of faith is a force with a limited sense of direction, at best, and has the likelihood to fall in circles, unable to go beyond what it can already perceive as beyond it-the world of the spiritual and the supernatural.

This is the usual problem of many brilliant men who have little or no faith. They tend to allow their reason to be dominated by the impulses of the flesh and the things of the world. In their worst predicament, they keep reason to be fully captivated by the powers of reason alone.

They don't go to limits of reason to discern a deeper, richer reality that is just beyond reason. They feel quite convinced there is no reality outside what reason can take.

The contribution of St. Thomas Aquinas is precisely in demonstrating that reason has the capacity to transcend itself to discern this reality that is pure spirit and above our nature.

In real life, of course, this conviction of St. Thomas can only be appreciated if one has the humility to accept the true character of our reason-that it is something created by someone who is not us, and that it is not self-generated.

Without this humility, one gets blinded by the powers of reason alone and becomes incapable of discerning the world of faith. That's why, St. Thomas, more than a brilliant man, was a very holy, pious and humble man.

Others saints, like St. Edith Stein, who were also big minds got converted to the faith by the example of humility they saw in others and that moved them. This is what we need this days-intellectual humility.

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