Fr. Gregory Pine

So a lot of times you're like, there's something out there and I'm gonna say a lot of words and hope that it lands kind of in the vicinity.

It's kind of a horseshoes and hand grenades type approach to the truth.

Whereas for St.

Thomas, it's, no, we've got the best philosophical resources, the best theological resources, and also the best thinker, arguably, of all time.

And he does so with a kind of consciousness that this should be explained in as coherent a fashion as possible.

Because a lot of the texts that he inherited were kind of like, catch as catch can.

And so he says about the sentences of Peter Lombard, he's talking about a lot of cool things, but he's repeating himself.

He's not necessarily doing it in the order wherein we can best onboard all of these insights.

And yes, I think we can do that.

So that's like the introduction to the Summa Theologiae.

And then he just gets after it at the height of his career with a whole team, like a whole squad of people in his service.

And the results are magical.

Nope, wrong word, mystical.

so to the first um they didn't want to become a dominican because the dominicans had been recently founded maybe like 30 years prior a little less than 30 years prior and so they were still kind of ragtag as it were um i guess something comparable would be like

how someone might have looked at the missionaries of charity when it wasn't yet clear that St.

Teresa of Calcutta was a saint.

So St.

Dominic had been canonized at that point, but nevertheless, it was like, they were not especially prestigious, whereas other religious orders at the time had that reputation for being prestigious.

So why did he want to be a Dominican in the first place?

I would tend to think, so the Dominican ideal is at the time revolutionary, not in the way that a lot of people say revolutionary, but in the sense that it represented a departure from the norm and it was risky.