Fr. Gregory Pine

Thomas has always been someone to whom we can return because he's passionate about getting to the heart of the matter.

St.

Thomas doesn't necessarily address a lot of these nitty-gritty details in his works, but he furnishes you with principles so that you can rehearse arguments, so that you can be in fruitful dialogue with your environment, your contemporaries, with whomever.

And I think that like, yeah, part of the reason for which St.

Thomas has so much purchase now is because you read St.

Thomas and you find that you can engage with life in a way that's more free, in a way that's more kind of abandoned as it were, maybe that's the wrong word to choose.

But the basic idea is that,

you attend to what is most important and you find that that kind of unriddles the complexities.

And while life still might be hard, you know, it's like hard to persevere in the practice of the faith, it needn't be overly complex, you know?

And so like St.

Thomas, you know, even though people talk about him as overly complex, it ends up that he, yeah, he facilitates an encounter with life which proves more simple.

I think often this line from Chesterton, he says, the most practical of persons is the mystic.

In the sense that the mystic has clearly between his navigational beacons, the port of call, the mystic is headed for heaven.

And in light of heaven, he's able to make judgments as to things here on the surface of the earth and do so with clarity and conviction.

And I think that's the power of St.

Thomas Aquinas in that he's not a slave to our practical considerations, but he furnishes us with, again, speculative principles or maybe to make it more approachable for folks.

He furnishes us with genuine wisdom.

that we find we can apply to practically every situation.

So there's some real input energy.

I think about those like charts in my ninth grade biology textbook, like you have to have like a catalyst, maybe it's whatever, shut up, no one cares.