the sums of saint thomas aquinas a monument of christian theological thought

I COME BACK ALMOST EVERY SUMMER to review the sums of Saint Thomas and I soak up Aristotle and Christ. Aquinas is the greatest thinker of catholicity where everything fits everything has an explanation. Prius in sensu denique in intelectum or if you will, nothing exists in thought that was not previously in the senses. Saint Thomas was a mute ox, an Italian German almost two meters tall and 130 kilos, a real friar who proves the existence of God through nature and natural law. We have come out of chaos, we were made from clay and to clay we return, but the Spirit blew in our ears, our eyes opened, touch came to our hands and walking to our feet. But we must always distinguish between substance and accident. The result of this creation was a marvelous thing. The body obeyed the powers of the soul. The mute ox discovered hylomorphism. In our vile flesh there is a wonderful soul capable of thinking and acting. No religion had set the bar so high as this good Dominican friar who spoke little, ate a lot and spent half his life thinking and writing in his cell. He did not want to be abbot of Monte Cassino. He was subjected to an ordeal or judgment of God. His relatives locked him in a dark cell in the abbey and at midnight they sent him a naked daifa. The saint pursued the woman with a burning brand and won the bet, thus defeating the demon of lust forever. Bos castus et bos mutus et bos innocens. He loved silence, solitude and was very credulous and naive like the great sages as if they had stripped him of the malice of original sin. He was as candid as he was wise; One night in the convent a lay brother wanted to play a joke on him: "Look out of the window, Brother Thomas, there's a flying bull flying by." In a gesture of humility and obedience he looked out of the window to please the nosy lay brother, although the good Dominican knew well that this is impossible in nature.

He had a mendicant soul and became a Dominican. Domini canes. White monks adopting the colour of the purity of Islam. They are the dogs of God who guarded the estate, barked in the pulpits and on top of the university chairs and preached devotion to the Virgin Mary throughout Europe.

In the personality of this great Italian, Germany merges with Paris. He is a result of the Holy Germanic Empire. His sums are geometric squares in which Gothic art fits: the twinned windows, the celestial arcades and the airy vaults, the ivory spires, all that mental agility of Gothic art that is captured in stone. I read the sums of St. Thomas in Latin. My texts from the BAC appear very worn and punished with notes and asterisks. I understand that life is pure syllogism. Someone makes a proposition and when we are born we enter into living in the contradiction, denying ourselves the least, throughout the years of our life to conclude in the great ergo the great outcome that is death. It is the ergo of all syllogism. That sometimes turns out to be cunning as the scholastics said because sometimes things happen that nobody understands.

Being man something so small, he can turn out to be a great thing. All life deserves to be lived in freedom. Then I think of the triumphant verses of Tantum Ergo and Pange Lingua that he composed in his Italianized Latin. He was a mute ox, yes. His Sorbonne teacher Gregory the Great already said it: "but his bellowing will thunder the earth and will be an earthquake of many consciences." He made Christ a friend of Aristotle and brought Europe closer to the Muslims with whom he came to understand each other through The Stagirite and to try to get closer to Islam. Reading Thomas Aquinas reassures me in these times of tribulation and confusion. His conclusus contra Iudeos et maniqueos is a blessed glory of prophetic guarantees. The enemies of the church, he teaches us, are not in Islam. They are within ourselves for making fun of the main evangelical precept: Love.