St Thomas Aquinas

Chesterton reveals the marvelous clarity of Thomas’s mind and highlights “the intense rightness of his sense of the relation between the mind and the real thing outside the mind.” This book is a splendid introduction to both Thomas the man and the significance of his work for his own time and ours. No less a scholarly light than Etienne Gilson remarked that “I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement.”

“Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book.” —Etienne Gilson.

“He was a Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air, in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of our Lady’s Tumbler.” —Dorothy Sayers

According to Chesterton, “once Christ had Risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again.” The synthesis between Christianity and Aristotle could only strengthen the believer’s affirmation of the reality and goodness of created being; and also a strange kind of interconnectedness where “the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth.”