St Thomas Aquinas By G K Chesterton eBook GK Chesterton
Download As PDF : St Thomas Aquinas By G K Chesterton eBook GK Chesterton 
This book makes no pretence to be anything but a popular sketch of a great historical character who ought to be more popular. Its aim will be achieved, if it leads those who have hardly even heard of St. Thomas Aquinas to read about him in better books. But from this necessary limitation certain consequences follow, which should perhaps be allowed for from the start.
St Thomas Aquinas By G K Chesterton eBook GK Chesterton
Chesterton himself is very modest about writing about a saint and philosopher without going very deeply into either philosophy or theology:"... It is the fate of this sketch to be sketchy about philosophy, scanty or rather empty about theology, and to achieve little more than a decent silence on the subject of sanctity. And yet it must none the less be the recurrent burden of this little book, to which it must return with some monotony, that in this story the philosophy did depend on the theology, and the theology did depend on the sanctity. In other words, it must repeat the first fact, which was emphasised in the first chapter: that this great intellectual creation was a Christian and Catholic creation and cannot be understood as anything else."
Which is why I give it four stars instead of five. GKC, for all his beef with Macaulay, really does write like a Tory, or Catholic Macaulay, namely with brilliance, but sometimes without seriousness:
"... Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. [...]The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God."
... but this sort of fooling is not typical. For the most part, the paradoxes and contrarian views are genuinely thought provoking, and if the book only hints at philosophy, it deals with medieval history, comparative religion and modern conventional wisdom (which hasn't changed all that much since 1933) very well. At any rate, this is a point still worth making:
"... He may not be a Liberal by the extreme demands of the moderns for we seem always to mean by the moderns the men of the last century, rather than this. He was very much of a Liberal compared with the most modern of all moderns for they are nearly all of them turning into [.. not gonna say it...]. But the point is that he obviously preferred the sort of decisions that are reached by deliberation rather than despotic action; and while, like all his contemporaries and coreligionists, he has no doubt that true authority may be authoritative, he is rather averse to the whole savour of its being arbitrary."
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St Thomas Aquinas By G K Chesterton eBook GK Chesterton Reviews
This edition surprised me by being in a large format. I've read Chesterton's "St. Thomas Aquinas The Dumb Ox" several times and never cease to enjoy it. Not only does Chesterton give you a penetrating sketch of Thomas Aquinas but he gives you a sense of the struggle to put neo-Platonism and Aristotelian moderate realism in balance. No less an authority than Etienne Gilson, the foremost Thomistic scholar of the 20th century said of it "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." In a letter he wrote to Father Kevin Scannell, a priest of the diocese of Leeds, he said "G.K. always argues from his intellectual perception of truth, never towards it. In the case of Thomas Aquinas — a mere incident in his colossal production — I always feel him nearer the real Thomas than I am after reading and teaching the Angelic Doctor for sixty years."
It is hard to imagine higher praise from a better source. My own sense of this little book is that it is an indispensable portal to Thomistic studies, a book that at once is easily accessible and illuminates Aquinas like no other.
St. Thomas Aquinas was nicknamed "The Dumb Ox" not because he was stupid, but because he didn't talk very much. According to many, he was the greatest philosopher between Aristotle and Descartes.
An example of his silence was the night he was more or less forced to dine with the French King, the universally-beloved St. Louis. Royal dinners were not his style, and he sat silently while the French nobility did their "witty conversation" thing. There was a pause in the "witty conversation," and St. Thomas suddenly smashed his fist down on the table, exclaiming, "THAT should settle the Manichees!!"
The other guests stared dumbfounded at this horrible breach of etiquette, but the King was smart enough to send two secretaries around to St. Thomas, to make sure he didn't lose that thought.
This volume also contains another Chesterton masterpiece, his life of St. Francis.
I am not a Catholic, not even a Christian, but I found a lot of stuff in these biographies which makes a LOT more sense than what Atheists Inc. have brought to America and Europe. I'd much rather listen to a Te Deum than watch "reality TV," for example. And these two short biographies are worth your time because they are an excellent visit with Dr. Sanity.
Chesterton is such a wonderfully fluid writer who draws one into the story immediately. I loved his work on St. Thomas He states on p. 123, "He was not a person who wanted nothing; and he was a person who was enormously interested in everything. His answer is not so inevitable or simple at some may suppose. As compared with many other saints, and many other philosophers, he was avid in his acceptance of Things; in his hunger and thirst for Things. It was his special spiritual thesis that there are really are things and not only Thing;that the many existed as well as the One." Chesterton's understanding of St. Francis is equally as profound and one that calls us to mediation and contemplation."To read Sacred Scripture is to turn to Christ for advice."
Chesterton himself is very modest about writing about a saint and philosopher without going very deeply into either philosophy or theology
"... It is the fate of this sketch to be sketchy about philosophy, scanty or rather empty about theology, and to achieve little more than a decent silence on the subject of sanctity. And yet it must none the less be the recurrent burden of this little book, to which it must return with some monotony, that in this story the philosophy did depend on the theology, and the theology did depend on the sanctity. In other words, it must repeat the first fact, which was emphasised in the first chapter that this great intellectual creation was a Christian and Catholic creation and cannot be understood as anything else."
Which is why I give it four stars instead of five. GKC, for all his beef with Macaulay, really does write like a Tory, or Catholic Macaulay, namely with brilliance, but sometimes without seriousness
"... Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. [...]The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God."
... but this sort of fooling is not typical. For the most part, the paradoxes and contrarian views are genuinely thought provoking, and if the book only hints at philosophy, it deals with medieval history, comparative religion and modern conventional wisdom (which hasn't changed all that much since 1933) very well. At any rate, this is a point still worth making
"... He may not be a Liberal by the extreme demands of the moderns for we seem always to mean by the moderns the men of the last century, rather than this. He was very much of a Liberal compared with the most modern of all moderns for they are nearly all of them turning into [.. not gonna say it...]. But the point is that he obviously preferred the sort of decisions that are reached by deliberation rather than despotic action; and while, like all his contemporaries and coreligionists, he has no doubt that true authority may be authoritative, he is rather averse to the whole savour of its being arbitrary."
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