The Angelic Doctor. Universal Doctor of the Church. St. Thomas. Thomas. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas goes by many names. He is still a part of secular vocabulary. Ask most any modern and odds are they’ve heard his name connected to that of the Catholic Church, the Middle Ages, theology, or philosophy. He is sometimes scorned as a throw back to the “Dark Ages;” in the modern Church he is usually marginalized as a mere pre-Vatican II reference or worse an ossified rationalist whose thought they claim lacks in spirituality.
St. Thomas. The greatest mind, teacher, and intellectual saint in the history of the Church. Not my opinion. That’s the opinion of a centuries old lineage of popes up to and even after the Second Vatican Council.
And I can tell you from personal experience reading St. Thomas, absorbing his wisdom coupled with accounts of his saintly intellectual humility, that what these popes have taught rings true. His teachings give the intellectual soul wings to rise above ignorance, foolishness, and any jouvenile or fragmented sense of morals. Thomistic wisdom is like putting on glasses and seeing the world in all its divine and natural hierarchical organization. To see the proper relation between the material and spiritual, the vegetative, animal, human, and angelic. To see how the Creator orders Creation upward in an organized way as a path to Him. And that metaphysical hierarchy isn’t just a development of Aristotle but likewise Plato. Modern classical Thomists like J.P. Torrell or Ralph McInerny have highlighted this, with the insight that the Thomistic world view is not only a hierarchy of existence but also a cycle of life. All come from God and return to Him, but the return is necessarily vertical.
In other words, to ascend back to God, according to the Angelic Doctor, to find our ultimate self-actualization in the ultimate source of our existence, we must follow the path of Creation as God set it out. With St. Thomas then we can and must discern the wisdom embedded in Creation and by means of it climb upward toward sainthood.
That is one of the most profound messages of St. Thomas for modern man. It runs against our horizontalist mindset, but is liberating as I can attest.
To read St. Thomas, go to his Summa Theologicae all online for free at New Advent.com.