Faith and reason are not enemies
Aquinas' Summa Theologica begins
Thomas Aquinas begins writing the Summa Theologica around 1265 AD as a teaching tool for Dominican students. It is not intended as his greatest work — he has already written more formal academic treatises. It is meant to be accessible, organized, systematic.
The Summa is arranged around questions. Each article asks a question — Does God exist? Can God be known by natural reason? What is the nature of angels? — and proceeds through a set method: first the objections to the proposed answer, then the response, then replies to each objection.
This method is Abelard's Sic et Non applied with Thomistic rigor: take the objections seriously, give them their full force, then answer them. The objections to the existence of God in the Summa are some of the strongest arguments against theism in medieval literature. Aquinas does not soften them. He answers them.
The synthesis he builds — drawing on Aristotle and Augustine, on scripture and the Greek philosophers, on the tradition and natural reason — becomes the foundation of Catholic theology for the next seven centuries. The Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century will still call Aquinas the Common Doctor — the shared teacher of the church.
He never finishes it. On December 6, 1273, during Mass, something happens to him — a mystical experience of such intensity that he stops writing entirely. When his secretary urges him to continue, he says: I cannot. All I have written seems to me like straw compared to what I have seen.
“All I have written seems to me like straw compared to what I have seen.”
— Thomas Aquinas, December 6, 1273 AD
“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known.”
The greatest theologian in Western history looked at everything he had written — millions of words, decades of work, the most comprehensive synthesis of faith and reason ever produced — and called it straw.
Not because it was wrong. Because he had seen something that made all words inadequate.
All our theology is straw. All our doctrinal precision is approximation. All our careful arguments are fingers pointing at a moon that cannot be captured in the pointing.
This is not an invitation to stop thinking carefully. It is a reminder of what the thinking is for: not to capture God in a system but to prepare the mind to receive what no system can contain.
What would it mean to hold your most carefully constructed theological positions with the humility of someone who knows they are seeing in a mirror dimly?