Twelve Aquinas Aphorisms
Simple observations from the medieval poster boy will give you new perspectives
The famous historian Will Durant ranked Thomas Aquinas as the fourth greatest thinker of all time.
When I saw that, I was shocked. Aquinas is the Catholic thinker extraordinaire. He is a canonized saint. His nickname is “The Angelic Doctor.”
Durant wasn’t impressed by such things, to say the least.
An Aside: Will Durant
A quick detour about Will Durant might be helpful to explain why it’s significant that he respected Aquinas so much.
Durant is best known for his monumental 11-volume The Story of Civilization, but he first made his name with the publication of The Story of Philosophy, which became an unlikely bestseller, selling 2,000,000 copies in the 1920s.
The book doesn’t have much Aquinas, and that’s an understatement. Its chapters jump from Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) to Francis Bacon (d. 1626 CE). The 2,000 years in-between receive only nine pages (out of 540). Thinkers like Epictetus, Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas are mentioned only once or not at all.
It’s not surprising. Most of those missed years are conventionally known as the “Middle Ages” and they were in thorough…
