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Saint Thomas Aquinas

Book by G.K. Chesterton · 14 quotes · Catholic, Catholicism, St Thomas Aquinas

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Saint Thomas Aquinas Quotes

“For instance, in the matter of the inspiration of Scripture, he fixed first on the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident; and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation. Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion. (chapter 3)”

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“I read in a "high-class" review of Miss Rebecca West's book on St. Augustine, the astounding statement that the Catholic Church regards sex as having the nature of sin. How marriage can be a sacrament if sex is a sin, or why it is the Catholics who are in favour of birth and their foes in favour of birth-control, I will leave to the critic to worry out for himself. (chapter 4)”

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“I have pointed out that mere modern free-thought has left everything in a fog, including itself. The assertion that thought is free led first to the denial that will is free; but even about that there was no real determination among the Determinists. In practice, they told men that they must treat their will as free as though it was not free. In other words, Man must live a double life; which is exactly the old heresy of Tiger of Brabant about the Double Mind. In other words, the nineteenth century left everything in chaos; and the importance of Thomas to the twentieth century is that it may give us back a cosmos. We can give here only the rudest sketch of how Aquinas, like Agnostics, beginning in the cosmic cellars, yet climbed to the cosmic towers.”

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