The beautiful St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland
“… Sacred doctrine is food and drink since it feeds and gives drink to the soul. For the other sciences only illumine the intellect, but this illumines the soul.”
(Aquinas, Commentary on Hebrews 5:12)
Philosopher Peter Kreeft notes that “the medievals had a passion for order, because they believed that God had a passion for order when He designed the universe.”[1] Medieval scholars were preoccupied with discovering this order and then synthesizing it with the truths of Scripture. Because of the common grace spoken of in texts such as Romans 1 and Acts 17, all truth was God’s truth to them, even that which comes from pagan philosophers and poets. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas epitomized this “inclusive habit of mind” that sought to bring back into Christendom all that is good, true, and beautiful.[2] In particular, Aquinas excelled at harmonizing human reason and divine faith, displaying a keen intuition as to where they stand apart and where they overlap. Kreeft notes that he “combined faith and reason, without confusing them” by establishing that there “are some truths that are known by faith alone, like the Trinity, and some that are known by reason alone, like natural science, and some that can be known by both faith and reason, like the existence of God and the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul.”[3] Not unlike today, the challenge was defining the boundary line between Divine Scripture and human philosophy, a challenge made all the more difficult by the inevitable fallibility of the ones surveying their borders. In his book A Shorter Summa, Peter Kreeft writes that in a humble style that comes directly to the point, with logic that is refreshingly clear and grounded in common experience, Aquinas “fulfilled more than anyone else the essential medieval program of a marriage of faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, the Biblical and the classical inheritances.”[4] As mentioned, one such synthesis is represented in Aquinas’s resolution to the apparent paradox between the existence of human free-will and the divine sovereignty of the Unmoved Mover. The way in which he was able to resolve the riddle without compromising either shows us that Aquinas’s spiritual sight was truly stereoscopic: he was able to see “two different pictures at once” without sacrificing one for the other.[5] As a result, Thomas Aquinas was able to see more while remaining within orthodoxy’s borders. Through him, our sight is likewise broadened in that he shows us a way forward in resolving our own conflicts between faith and reason.
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