Saint Thomas Aquinas

Today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas: saint, mystic, philosopher, theologian, apologist, professor and doctor of the Church.

From the pen of the inimitable James V. Schall:

"The Feast of Thomas Aquinas is celebrated on January 28 (today, if you’ve lost track), the day his body was transferred to Toulouse in 1369. He was born at Roccaseca, across from the Abbey of Monte Cassino, in 1225. He died at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova on March 7, 1274. Christof Cardinal von Schönborn, in a favorite passage, once said that Aquinas was the “only man ever canonized simply for thinking.”
To read it all, go to: http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1113&Itemid=2

I have been reading Thomas lately, as well as some of his many interpreters and I am coming to respect him more and more as a biblical and orthodox theologian. He was not merely a philosopher who practiced natural theology cut off from faith as if one could prove God's existence and discover the way of salvation by human reason alone. There is currently a revolution taking place in the interpretation of Thomas and at the forefront of an intriguing school of "Biblical Thomism" is Matthew Levering of Ave Maria University.

I have become more and more convinced over the past 3 or 4 years that the tradition of classical, Christian, orthodox thought in which St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas are the high points contains much that is of permanent relevance and much that points the way forward today in the post-Enlightenment era. I look forward to being instructed this year by "The Angelic Doctor."