Chapter Four
Chapter Four
St. Thomas’s Method
In imitation of the well-known book entitled Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, we might head this chapter “Introduction to the Method of St. Thomas Aquinas.” Here are some of its principal characteristics.
Unlike so many who start a work without first attending to their own formation, as if the two were unconnected, St. Thomas began with himself. Our action is our second act. He wished his work to be fruitful, useful, and edifying, so he began by forming his own character, knowing that it would color not only the spiritual, but also the technical and intellectual, character of his writings. In philosophy, in theology, and in science, his method was to be the method of sanctity.
He was distinguished first and foremost for his power of intellect, which, in him, was not so much a particular trait, as the very essence of his life. It gave a unity to his whole life: it was his profession as Doctor, while in his preaching, he only simplified and elaborated his doctrine and adapted it to the exigences of the pulpit. In his poetry, he sings in concepts; his mysticism is intellectual rather than emotional. Even his prayers are didactic in form, like the articles in the Summa, which are really quite as spiritual, although not so obviously so.
His task was to see and then to show others what he had seen. Therefore, he had first to rectify his outlook. He who would speak wisely must behave wisely.
It is a great mistake to imagine that we think only with our brain. We think with our whole being and, more particularly, with our whole soul, and it is the various inclinations of the soul that lead us toward or away from the truth, that make us prejudiced, or our judgements biased and capricious.
Pasteur wanted somebody to write a book on the influence of the heart in the progress of knowledge. It would certainly account for a great deal: we know what is meant in Scripture by purity of heart. Truth does not change, but the angle from which we view it is governed by our general attitude, and, if that is wrong, then our keenness of sight is only an additional danger.
Again, to see without bias calls for a certain detachment from other things. To be in the right atmosphere for knowledge, one must make heroic sacrifices, and, if knowledge is one’s sole aim, everything else must be laid aside. “Every conquest of learning,” writes Nietzsche, “is the outcome of our own courage and austerity.”
Philosophy, like art, implies of its nature a detachment from concrete reality and a quest of ideal sources, or causes, and it is not surprising that St. Thomas’s power was enhanced by his retiring disposition, and by that detachment from things which resulted from his vows. His loyalty to truth was due as much to his complete disinterestedness as to his right-mindedness. He was able to forget himself, so absorbed was he in his thought; he was ready to identify his fate with that of the truth, as a miser will sacrifice all in his greed for gold.
Rodin made a curious experiment. He found that he could change the word Jesus to sculpture whenever it occurred in the Imitation of Christ, and every passage remained true. This only shows that technical work requires the same conditions as sanctity, and that the holier a man is, the better is his work. St. Thomas’s moral attitude was possibly due to some similar reflection. We might apply to him those words addressed to the Tree of Knowledge in the Ebauche d’un Serpent:
Grand être agité de savoir, Qui toujours, comme pour mieux voir, Grandis à l’appel de ta cime.18
St. Thomas strove to make his holiness keep pace with his learning, that he might have a clearer perception of reality. Just as the Beatific Vision is the reward of virtue, so understanding is the combined product of holiness and natural talent. Holiness is a necessary condition, although not, of course, the only one. Indeed, learning, according to St. Thomas, is simply one of the forms under which holiness acts; it is holiness using natural talents, to witness to the truth, and spending itself to make truth reign supreme.
With these views, it was only natural that he should join an order whose motto is Truth. There, doubtless, he expected to find the intellectual resources he desired. But a religious order is not a school: it has vows that are essential to it, and it was in them that St. Thomas found what his intellect required. By thus giving himself to God, he became detached, unburdened, and settled. He gave up external goods by his vow of poverty and could now forget his gentle birth, having nothing to administer, nothing to answer for, and, above all, nothing to expect. Henceforth, he will handle only intangible truths; he will covet, not the miser’s gold or the vanities of this world, but the light of truth.
His having been girt by angels he regarded as a token of God’s will, and in matters of purity, he ever remained as a “child of five.” Men of the world may be inclined to scoff at his lack of experience of human passions, which his ascetism suggests, but his writings give the lie to this. Even a pagan like Plato knew that “vice can know neither itself nor virtue, but virtue can know both itself and vice.” In the midst of troubles of the flesh, with its ever-changing desires, madness, deceit, and remorse, which sap our mental energy and impede our intellectual pursuits, who can possibly reason clearly?
By the vow of obedience, St. Thomas simplified his life by giving up all responsibility other than his work, and even that he thereby made to depend on God’s providential design, rather than on his own will.
To the vows, he added certain virtues that seem to follow from them. By his humility, he forsook honors and disdained flattery. To borrow a phrase from Pascal, “he sought inspiration through humiliations,” and he was able to say of himself that he never remembered giving way to a temptation to vainglory. Mortification enabled him to neglect the care of his body, to practice strict fasting and abstinence, especially when a difficulty troubled him. He did not, however, practice the extreme penances that were customary in his age, as he judged them to be detrimental to his work. Silence, “the father of preachers,” and solitude particularly become a deep thinker, who must listen when wisdom is speaking. All great achievements are done in a silence “higher than the stars, and deeper than the realms of the dead.” He was detached even in his work, because he concentrated on his proper object, and ignored all extraneous matters. This was a real sacrifice, for he had a natural aptitude for all branches of learning, and he had to pass them by unexplored. “A wise man,” says Goethe, “avoids all distracting knowledge; he specializes in one branch and masters it.” This must not be taken too literally, for every particular study implies a wider knowledge: true perspective needs a broad outlook. But St. Thomas always avoided knowledge that was distracting. At Paris, St. Louis once asked his advice on certain questions that he intended to discuss in court on the morrow. He answered them as well as he could, but with brevity and without really rising to the occasion. For, although “when he applied his mind to affairs of this world, he judged them with a wisdom which to everyone seemed divine” (as an old biographer says), still, he did not consider this a sufficient motive for making a thorough study of them.
With these virtues to help him, St. Thomas became as adept in learning as man, by his own power, can be. There was now no obstacle between the mind and its object. Pride, vanity, and ambition warp the intelligence and make it partial and intellectually callous. He was passive, in the sense that there was nothing arbitrary about his philosophy: it was not the result of a personal fiat, but was imposed by the inexorable necessity of things. He was, as it were, the hub of converging forces.
This made it harder for him, because an ideal reconstruction of the world offers less scope than does the recognition of it as it is. The imaginative use fable; the hard-working use history. As Marcel Proust remarks, “All mental action is easy so long as it is not tied down to reality.” To be tied down to reality implies a detachment from self, and from the thousand and one artifices of fancy and caprice. St. Thomas’s sound judgment is remarkable as much for its justice as for its justness. He respected the rights of things and of other people’s views. He had very little of that curious tendency, common to all of us, to believe the man who is always right, the man who sets himself up as judge of everything and who laughs superciliously at the stupidity around him. His very objectivity demanded that he should retire from this topsy-turvy world of passions and small talk, and from the material world of everyday needs. He asked nothing of the world but to be its servant, and to lead it to the truth.
There is one still more important point about his method. It was useless to detach himself from the world, if he were not thereby to receive something, to be richer, to be able to give. He did not work for a negative result or merely for himself. Truth is living and is never entirely subdued save by love; it is the common heritage of mankind, and nobody has any right to monopolize it. Moreover, there is a sprinkling of truth in the opinions of all men, and we must collect it before we can pass it on. Now, this can be done only by sympathy, which establishes contact with others. As St. Albert the Great says, “Let us be two, but let the cause be one.”
St. Thomas made God the center of his doctrine; he set out to know God, his relation to creatures, and the creatures’ relations to him. That, since, in fact, it includes everything, was his entire object. Spinoza would not have been far wrong in making all things either God or modes of God, had he at the same time recognized God’s transcendence.
This concentration of everything in God did not consist in a simple coordination in logic, as might be made by a clever logician.
No, God was the center in a more vital way; the center of his contemplation and love and, hence, of his experience and intuition; he was not merely a concept. His contemporaries, who were best able to know, affirm that in his exposition of doctrine, all his syllogisms were the outcome of a genius that was to a great extent intuitive and supernatural — in short, of a gift.
There are, he tells us, two ways of approaching God, which usually go hand in hand:
To be able to judge of things divine, by human reasoning, belongs to the intellectual virtue of wisdom . . . But there is another “wisdom descending from above” . . . by which we judge of them, by being, as it were, raised to a state connatural to theirs. This wisdom is the gift of the Holy Ghost, and it perfects a man by making him not only learn, but also experience the things of God.19
He says very much the same thing in his commentary on St. Paul’s words: “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.”20
Reason brings God within our compass, but it is an intermediary; by love, on the other hand, we possess him intimately and share his secrets. And if genius be joined to the love, it will establish a reciprocal relation, similar to the relation between a work and the inspiration that created it, as explained by Goethe. Genius is like the shuttle that draws the woof through the warp and thereby weaves the cloth.
All his biographers agree that St. Thomas sought in prayer and contemplation, and even in ecstasy, the intuitions that he then put into the scholastic form of theorems and scholia, for teaching purposes. He tells us himself that he learned more at the foot of the crucifix than from books. He would put his head against the tabernacle to discover its secrets, like a little child. At Mass and Compline, he often wept, and he asked with tears the answers to his abstract questions. Knowledge for him was a sort of pilfering from heaven: he knew that the vast stream of knowledge must ultimately have its rise in God.
From the very start, his vocation was not to be intellectual only; he was to be espoused to the living Truth. He who possessed being, in abstract form, was to be possessed by Being. His intellectual as well as his practical life was to be governed by this surrender of his own being, and having thus attained intimacy with God, he would find in God whereby to become intimate with everything else.
The same may be said of his attitude toward other philosophers. He was sympathetic enough to make their wisdom his own, by understanding their position and taking what there was of good in them. He thus became a contemporary of all antiquity, a worker in the present, and hence a prophet of the future.
Nor are the vocations of intellect and love really distinct, for God, the source of things, is equally the source of the thought in which things are reflected. “All truth is from the Holy Spirit.” This was a sufficient reason for trying to understand other people’s thought, collaborating with them, and using their discoveries.
When one’s purpose is to give rather than to receive, this method of love makes one ready and eager to spend oneself in the cause, obedient to superiors, the representatives of God, and prompt to comply with requests of any kind. These are signs of God’s will, and by being thus prepared to obey, we satisfy the two precepts of loving God and our neighbor, which, according to St. Thomas, are really one and the same precept.
A truly great man has a certain right to be an egoist. His egoism is for the general good, provided it is prudently controlled. It must, then, be an act of boundless generosity when such a one gives away all, his work and his very being.
St. Thomas did not map out his life and choose his work. His teaching and practically all his writings were done at the command of his superiors, or at the request of his fellow-religious or others. He felt that he would be doing a more useful work by using his knowledge to answer occasional inquiries than if all his work had been carefully arranged for him according to a strictly logical plan. After all, these chance occurrences were just as truly from God as any regular daily round of work.
According to St. Augustine, the highest form of charity is that of teaching, while St. Thomas extols the gift of truth above every other. He agreed with Plato that error is more harmful than homicide and that error due to negligence, or error about things that it is our duty to study, is as bad as murder.
It was reflections of this kind that led him to attempt a task so arduous that he died prematurely, a martyr to truth. He cut out of his life all that was foreign to his purpose: the athlete must run clad as lightly as possible. He simply thought. He would never allow himself even the most harmless distractions or friendships, that might in any way impede his work. He said Mass early each morning, heard another as his thanksgiving, and often served it, and then betook himself to his work, which often went on far into the night.
At table he had to be watched, because he neglected the needs of the body, so engrossed was he in his thoughts. When others tried to get him to recreate or take a walk in the garden, he would go with a smile, but return to his cell at the first opportunity. “The well-used cell becomes sweet,” says the Imitation of Christ. But it was the inner sanctuary of the soul that he guarded with special care, hearing only when appealed to, and speaking only in reply to others.
He worked quickly but without undue haste, perhaps with some forebodings of the fewness of his days. Yet he never worried about the completion of his work, knowing that God would take it up where he dropped it, if only he did God’s will.
He never allowed his studies to interfere with his proper profession of preaching. His sermons, as those which have survived testify, were didactic, but it would be unfair to conclude from these notes and skeleton sermons that he was an uninteresting preacher. After all, the writings of St. Vincent Ferrer or Savonarola make equally dull reading. A magistrate bore witness at his canonization that, at Naples, St. Thomas was interrupted by the tears of the congregation. He never, however, preached for effect: his manner was calm and without gesticulations, with his eyes upcast as if in a sort of ecstasy. He seems to have impressed his hearers rather as Newman did, by his deep sincerity and his penetrating voice.
St. Thomas put these principles into practice in his very method of teaching. His love of God naturally led him to adopt the synthetic method, or the reassembling of scattered truths into a unified whole. Synthesis is a law of all art, but it belongs in a special way to metaphysics, which traces, in abstract language, the fundamental relations of all things. St. Thomas’s design was simply to take everything into account. False systems are false only insofar as they neglect some aspect of reality; they sin by defect. A true system must be complete and must therefore probe every problem and examine every opinion, to find out exactly what these opinions have in common.
Since all things come from God, they must be in reality united, and therefore somehow reconcilable in the opinions of men. Relative truth must ultimately lead to absolute truth, and there is no statement in science that is not relatively true. Pure error cannot be put into words, much less can it gain adherents. “The false,” says St. Thomas, “is true in a certain sense.” The investigation of an error will lead to what gave rise to it, from which it derives its apparent truth and cogency, and that must be a truth of some sort. This basic truth, reached after endless soundings, and the substratum of all thought, can be used to reconcile contrary statements, when they can be reconciled, and to judge and refute them when they are incompatible. This method is positive even where it is critical, and constructive even where it appears to destroy.
Truth, then, is to be found everywhere, and in every age. St. Thomas did not study tradition, as some have done, to pull it to pieces, and form a new system that should do without it. He was not like Kant, who wished to form “an entirely new science, which nobody had ever thought of before”; nor was he like Descartes, who “did not even wish to know whether anybody had lived before him.” Such an impossible attitude points to the complete stagnation of philosophic thought. Truth belongs to every generation, and a lover of truth must be the contemporary of all ages: he must be already venerable, if he wishes to be abreast of the times. One must be disciple before master, and the greatest innovator is he who borrows most from the wisdom of the ages. Because of the peculiar character of his work, St. Thomas felt that he could not afford to pass over any author, just as a good builder will look about everywhere for his materials.
He paid special attention to the great works of genius, because they contained a larger quota of truth, whether original or secondhand. He was quite impartial. He studied principally the Fathers of the Church, and, in the words of Leo XIII, “for having venerated them, he inherited the learning of them all.” But he read a good many others as well, especially the philosophers. He was conversant with the historians, lawyers, doctors, orators, poets, grammarians, and geographers of antiquity. He quotes, among others, Ovid, Horace, Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, Terence, Sallust, Livy, Strabo, Valerius Maximus, Galen, and Hippocratus. He was familiar with works of Arab and Jewish philosophy, while he made a profound study of the old theologians. He undoubtedly knew some of these at secondhand, through Albert the Great, who was widely read.
He studied the past, not to save himself the trouble of thinking, but to prepare the ground; he discovered his own position and true orientation by comparison with what these others had already done. Tradition supplied the stimulus rather than the substance of his thought.
There are numerous well-known passages in which he gives his views about borrowing from other writers. The following are from his commentary on the Metaphysics:
In the investigation of truth, one person is helped by another in two ways, one direct, the other indirect. Directly, one is helped by those who have already discovered the truth, because each earlier writer has found some part of it. When these parts are assembled, later writers are led to a greater knowledge of truth. Indirectly one is helped, insofar as those who have erred in the past have given their followers a chance of vindicating the truth more clearly, by searching criticism.21
Just as nobody can give a fair judgement without hearing the arguments for both sides, so he who studies philosophy judges the better, if he hears all the arguments of those who call it in question.22
So insistent is St. Thomas on this principle that he might be accused of not practicing what he preached, were it not that his sole object was doctrine. He is not always accurate as a historian of philosophy. He is not much interested in whether an author thought this or that. He is in search of the truth, and, if he believes that he has found it in some text, as he understands it, or as he thinks it ought to be understood, he quotes it, without troubling very much to find out whether the meaning that he gives it is exactly what the author intended it to mean. Elsewhere he commentates on what the author meant to say rather than on what he actually says. This is hardly exact criticism, but it is an indication that his sole object was to find out the truth and pass it on to others.
Deep interest in profane writers can hardly be said to have been common in his day. Many theologians considered it useless and dangerous to pursue studies that were not theological — the Bible, the Fathers, and the approved Doctors they considered quite enough, while the study of nature and the humanities that flourished in antiquity were excluded as too worldly.
St. Thomas thought otherwise; he was a humanist in the best sense of the word. He failed to see how the study of God’s handiwork, in itself and as reflected in these writers, could possibly harm our knowledge of God, seeing that this knowledge is, in part, derived from nature and is always illuminated and corroborated by nature. The world is an effect of God, and no true study of it can lead us away from its Author. The world is a commentary on God’s Word and moves as to admire his wisdom and adore his bounty.
While it is true that human learning may lead to pride, it does not follow that to be humble we must be ignorant. Great learning, once safeguarded from hindering sanctity, becomes a powerful aid to it. The greater a man, the greater the need of humility, since only as little children can we enter the kingdom of heaven. But once a man has conquered his pride and is on the right road, his superior learning assists him, rather as powerful headlights assist the motorist.
St. Thomas held that the profane sciences could be studied in a Christian spirit: nature could be made divine; philosophy and the natural sciences could be used in conjunction with theology properly so called. He resolved to treat, not only of God’s relations with everything else, but also of the relations of everything with God. God was to be the center of a universal knowledge, with radiations in every direction; a synthesis comprising God and “all human ideas, synthesized at their base by sound reasoning, and at their summit by sound faith.”
Another effect of this exclusive love of truth was his sense of proportion. He never exaggerates; he is never partial; he never pushes an idea to the detriment of others that happen to be less original or less brilliant. Other systems make a fetish of certain notions, while they neglect or belittle all others, but violence of this sort is incompatible with truth. Truth has no favorites: everything must be weighed on a sensitive balance, and nothing may be sacrificed; all things must be in proportion and judged on their merits.
A true philosopher must give every truth its due, no matter how insignificant it may seem.
St. Thomas would have endorsed the remark of Nietzsche, that “every reality is, of its nature, an object of respect.” There is no room for undue emphasis when the entire truth can be viewed from different angles and when every truth, precisely as such, is regarded as of equal value. Exaggeration implies a failure to grasp the true relations of things and a sacrifice of the whole in favor of some of its parts.
A philosophical thesis can be better explained than by exaggerating it at the expense of other theses. St. Thomas would compare it with the others, concentrate all his knowledge on that point, and thereby find its exact significance. No matter what element of reality he might be treating, he marshals the whole of his philosophy in support. It is often a matter of surprise to find him advancing great fundamental principles in support of an insignificant thesis. Just as a vulture describes great circles before it drops onto a field-mouse, so he sets out from a universe to reach a tiny truth, because he is aware that in the “sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere,” everything is of equal importance. This being his attitude, he has no need to stress certain points; he has simply to incorporate all things in one universal plan.
For this synthesis, he made use of correct classifications and clear-cut definitions, as being the most suitable means of determining the relative values of things and of uniting them in one harmonious whole. “The man who can divide and define,” says Plato, “shall be for me as a God.”
The philosopher’s first duty is to establish order. St. Thomas was the sworn enemy of confused thought. It was because of this ability to classify and order, and to reconstruct what he had patiently analyzed, that Leibnitz attributed to him a special gift of elucidating obscure problems. He avoids subtleties; he simplifies, and this by synthesis, not by mental juggling. His finished synthesis is like an engineer’s plans, from which he or another might reconstruct a complicated piece of machinery.
Moreover, in agreement with the rule of Pascal, he never discussed a truth without taking into consideration the opposite truth. There are two sides to every question, and each may be legitimately weighed, developed, and possibly reconciled with the other. His mind, like that of his master Aristotle, oscillated between the pros and cons of a question, and finally dominated them all. Ideas that seemed to conflict when in shadow he showed to agree when brought into the full light of day.
Finally, what most characterizes his love of truth is his attitude toward his opponents. Indeed, he seems hardly to have opponents, so well does he work with them. St. Paul says, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”23 To do this, we must first be able to recognize the good when we see it, and that implies sympathy. St. Thomas loved the truth that others possessed, because, as he says, “Truth does not change with the diversity of persons, and whoever maintains it is thereby invincible.”24 He dealt with his opponents not out of any vindictive desire to refute them, but rather to judge them fairly and meet them halfway. He accepts what is true in them, and rejects what is false, showing where it goes wrong.
As a small indication of this attitude, we may give the following: when he approves of an opinion, he quotes its author, but when he condemns it, he simply refers to its author as quidam, “a certain one.” It is a way of condoning the error, which, after all, is only a “lack of seeing the whole of a thing,” as Pascal puts it. He defended his own teaching, not by being blind to all objections, but by a free discussion of the whole question. He therefore had no need to hold his opponents up to ridicule; he could praise them for the good they had accomplished and help to rectify their vision.
He was too discriminating to see only headstrongness and insincerity behind error. We are quite ready to claim a like indulgence for ourselves! He gave everyone his due, and, with strict impartiality, he rejected erroneous statements, even when they had the support of eminent men such as Aristotle, Augustine, or his own master, St. Albert. In his single-minded search for truth, he would accept the statement of an enemy and reject that of a friend.
The following fine passage of Kant would have met with his approval:
The honor of human reason is, to some extent, vindicated by reconciling the diverse ideas of its greatest exponents, and by showing that, even when they are contradictory, they all contain some measure of truth.
Between all philosophies there is a latent connection, which it takes a profound thinker to discover. The common earth is below them as surely as the sky is above. Even a penetrating mind might hold false doctrine, but only because of the truth that it contains. Great antagonists are really much closer to each other than they imagine. They oppose and refute each other’s arguments by invoking principles common to them both, and their antagonism has the effect of making them go more deeply into the matter, as in mining and countermining.
The true philosopher, and a fortiori the saint, must take his stand beside his adversaries, not opposite them. He must collaborate; he must use their true statements, and even their errors, to elucidate the truth. In a sense, he must be above truth and falsehood, and draw from both. Then will he experience the pleasures of discovery rather than the annoyance of controversy, since impartiality spells peace; it is only the temper that gets ruffled.
He felt acutely how mysterious everything was, and the more fundamental the question, the more diffident he became. The most fundamental question in philosophy is surely the validity of the principle of contradiction. Yet, in his opusculum De Æternitate Mundi, arguing with men who contested its validity, by granting God the power of acting against it, he simply answers with respectful reserve that that was not according to his way of thinking. It is well known that the human mind hesitates before such questions, and the deeper the question, the greater the hesitation. Great geniuses, trying to cope with these profundities, are like children groping in the dark.
When writing on points of doctrine, he usually expresses himself with more decision, but even here the careful reader will find that he makes use of all opinions, even those most opposed to his own. His synthesis was comprehensive enough to include them all; indeed, it had to include them all, for they each contained some aspect of truth not to be found elsewhere.
He seems in his element when dealing with ideas contrary to his own; he calmly steps over their pitfalls, and he derives more from a genius whose views are false than from a mediocre writer who is perfectly orthodox.
Again, he found that this study stimulated him and made him strengthen his position on those very points where so many fail. It is always profitable to converse with those whose errors are on vital points. Contradiction enriches our ideas, uncovers hidden pitfalls, and sharpens our wits. Goethe says, “What is like us, we may leave alone; it is what is opposed to us that stimulates us.” When we go back to St. Thomas, after reading the maze of opinions put forward and discussed by his commentators, we realize that his brief expressions are as so many bridges over an abyss. The least change of word alters the sense, or obscures it. It was only by constant study of the errors that surrounded each doctrine that he was able to make a safe passage through. “Error is due to resemblance,” says Plato. We must make a profound study of error to make sure that our truths do not resemble it, and do not thus deserve to be dubbed false.
So little did he fear opposition, that he set himself up as his own opponent and mustered the most formidable objections possible to his thesis. He was so confident that truth would triumph that he felt no uneasiness at attempts to undermine it. He puts forward the objections and the thesis with the same calmness, however sacred the subject, and appears to bestow the same care on each. It is extraordinary to see the calm way this saint sets snares for God, siding with atheists, agnostics, heretics, and pagans, more strongly than the most rabid of unbelievers. He is absolutely without fear, for he knows that the truth must escape every snare. He makes the Devil help him build a temple to God.
St. Thomas was able to relinquish his own opinions as readily as he absorbed those of others. He was ready to retract or amplify what he had said. He never, it is true, wrote a book of Retractations, as did St. Augustine, and the opusculum De Concordantiis found among his works is spurious, but he would retract on occasion, and that quite simply, without explanation or self-justification.
In short, St. Thomas is like the patriarch who “walks before God.” In his thought, in his word, in his writings, his soul is untrammeled by personal motives and centered on truth. He is the interpreter of his poem of ideas; the hero of his book; the saint of the holiness he describes. His method was to unite wisdom and love in his studies and in his stewardship of the truth entrusted to him.