Conclusion
Conclusion
Perhaps the greatest legacy of Thomas Aquinas was his inquisitive mind. He dared to make inquiries into matters that most of his contemporaries never dreamed of questioning. Trained in the logic of classical philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas was able to equip these complex inquiries with such bulletproof logic from beginning to end that it was hard for his detractors to tear them apart.
Thomas Aquinas was not just good at asking fundamental questions, but he was also a tremendous force of reason when it came to creating logical arguments. When he first came to the seminary in Cologne, his peers took his silence as stupidity and mocked him as being a “dumb ox.” But as he sat in silence before them, little did they know the tremendous thoughts that were racing through Thomas Aquinas’s mind. Within the recesses of his brain, he was sifting through the stuff of existence itself.
Thomas Aquinas longed for answers and claimed that he had found them. They came to him both in the form of logical reasoning and alleged divine visitation—and sometimes the latter circumvented his own logical treatises. In fact, on December 6, 1273, Aquinas was in the middle of finishing his Summa theologiae —one of his greatest works—when he claimed to have been intercepted by the divine. This supernatural experience caused him to drop his pen and declare, “The end of my labours has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” Like Albert Einstein’s unfinished theory of everything, which sought to place all the laws of the universe into one convenient package, Thomas Aquinas too left his greatest work incomplete.
Although Aquinas passed away several centuries ago, his is a legacy that is still unfolding. The camps still seem divided as to whether he was a great theologian, an ingenious philosopher, or merely some sort of fortunate hack who was riding the coattails of prior thinkers that came before. But whatever people may think of the work of Thomas Aquinas, his life shines as a testament of utter faith and devotion.