Pints With Aquinas - 50.5: Peter Kreeft shares 12 stories about St. Thomas Aquinas

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Pints with Aquinas, episode 50.5. I'm Matt Fradd. If you could sit down with St. Thomas Aquinas over a pint of beer and ask him any one question, what would... Oh, hang on. Who's this? One second, Thomas. Shush, shush, shush, shush. Guess who just walked in, guys. Guess who just walked in. It's Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft just walked into the bar. Peter, take a seat, mate. Here's a pint of beer. Thomas, you just be quiet for one second. In today's episode, we're going to ask Peter Kreeft to tell us 12 quick stories about St. Thomas Aquinas. Welcome back to Pints with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Great to have you with us. Why am I doing 50.5? What's with this episode in the middle of our regular Tuesday episodes? Well, the reason I'm doing this episode is to thank y'all. And here's why. Pints with Aquinas, as of today, has been in existence for one year. Can you believe that? I've been putting out podcasts every week for the last year. I am so appreciative to all of you who are listening. You know, I just started this as a little school experiment to try and make more credit for my master's degree, and it accidentally exploded. And I think that's because so many

Starting point is 00:01:36 Christians, you know, realize, you know, that our faith isn't about leaving our brain at the door, right? And we want to be challenged intellectually and who better to do that than St. Thomas Aquinas. We're getting right now about 85,000 downloads a month. And as of now, we almost have half a million downloads of this podcast in literally over a hundred countries since the show began. So, hey, thank you, thank you, thank you. Before we get to Peter Kreeft, I want to share with you a little bit about how you can support the show. I want to tell you about some of the thank you gifts I have in store for those of you who want to donate. I'll be honest, it's a little embarrassing asking for money, but I kind of need it for this show to continue because it

Starting point is 00:02:30 takes time out of my free time and money to help have the show keep going and that sort of thing. So if you can give $2 a month to Pints with Aquinas, I will give you access to an ever-growing library of exclusive in-depth pints with Aquinas interviews with philosophers, converts, and apologists. And all of those interviews are available just to my Patreon supporters. If you can give five bucks a month, you will get access to an audio book that you've probably never heard before. It's Aquinas' Meditations on Lent. Now, you can listen to them at any time of the year. It doesn't have to be Lent, but I've literally sat down and recorded the entire book, so you can listen to that. You get a couple of free eBooks from me if you give five bucks a month. You get a monthly video

Starting point is 00:03:14 of me. Again, all of this stuff is just available to the Patreon supporters. Now, if you can give 10 bucks a month, you'll get a personal phone call from me, unless that freaks you out, in which case I'll thank you by not giving you a phone call. You will get a free Pints with Aquinas sticker delivered to your door. You'll get your name and social media links on the credits of the show, plus all previous rewards. Now, if you can give 20 bucks a month, wow, thank you. I will interview you on Pints with Aquinas. I'll send you a copy of my book, Pints with Aquinas, 50 plus thoughts from the angelic doctor and all previous rewards. Now, here's the final one. And I'll be honest, I did not expect anybody to give this much,

Starting point is 00:03:57 but someone has. If you give 50 bucks a month, here's what I'll do. I'll give you all the things I just talked about. And here's what else. I'll give you, I'll send to you a new book on apologetics handpicked by me and I'll post it to your door every quarter. Okay. And I'll also give you a signed copy of my book and all the previous rewards. So just tremendous thanks to all of you who think that this show is not only worth listening to, but worth financially supporting. If you're listening today and maybe you feel a little guilty, you're like, huh, maybe I'd love to support the show, but I can't afford it. Don't worry. I'm so honored that you would even listen to this show. So I love you all, whether you can support the show or not.

Starting point is 00:04:37 And I'm just tremendously humbled, humbled by your support. Again, if you can support the show, humbled? Humbled by your support. Again, if you can support the show, please go to pintswithaquinas.com, click the Patreon banner, and you can support the show today. All right. Let's now hear 12 quick stories from Peter Kreeft about Pints with Aquinas. I recently spoke with Peter Kreeft. I was at what's called the Legatus Conference in Florida. And I had to speak after Peter Kreeft. Nobody wants to speak after Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft is brilliant and entertaining and amazing. And then I had to get up. But that's okay. It was beautiful. It was so nice to meet him. So if some of our listeners, I know that we have Protestant listeners, some atheist listeners, great to have you too. Maybe you have heard of Peter, maybe you haven't, but he's written dozens and dozens and dozens of books. He's a philosopher at Boston College and loves St. Thomas Aquinas. All right, guys, God bless you. Enjoy the show, and I will speak to you on Tuesday.

Starting point is 00:05:45 share with you now just 12 little anecdotes from his life that reveal the kind of person he was. The first is his fearlessness. Once Aquinas underwent surgery without shedding a single tear, he seemed not even to notice it. Remember, there were no anesthetics then. But he feared one thing all his life, thunder. What more innocent fear can you imagine? Even his fears were simple and childlike. Here's a second story. At the age of five, he asked his teacher a stunningly simple question. What is God? His teacher was stumped and couldn't answer. So Thomas became a theologian to find out. He loved simple questions with non-simple answers. As we'll see later, Aquinas' answer to that question is that it's literally unanswerable, like a Zen koan. He says we cannot know what God is, only what God is not.

Starting point is 00:06:41 That sounds like agnosticism, and it is agnosticism about God's essence. We can't define that, but not about his existence. He thinks we can know that and even prove it. Here's a third story. Once he reached the age of adulthood, he decided to join the Dominicans, one of the two new monastic orders that had been founded a century before by Saint Dominic, the other being Francis of Assisi's Franciscans. Both were orders of wandering beggars, not the socially acceptable, comfortable, and politically powerful regular clergy or secular clergy who had parishes. These orders were like the religious hippies of his day. Chesterton says somewhere that it was like an English gentleman running off and marrying a gypsy. This upset his family, who had made different plans

Starting point is 00:07:31 for his future. He could have become the abbot of Monte Cassino, the most prestigious monastery in the world, and eventually a leading candidate for pope. So his brothers kidnapped him, imprisoned him in a castle room, and sent a prostitute into the room to test his vocation. Thomas grabbed a log from the fireplace and put the fiery brand between himself and the temptation, who lost no time finding the door, on which Thomas then burned a large cross. He knew very clearly what he wanted and what he didn't want. Here's a fourth story. When he was sent to study under Albert, the most famous teacher in the Christian world, Aquinas was shy and silent and placid. And he was also very large and very fat, though not for lack of fasting. His fellow students called him the dumb ox. And when Albert heard this, he told them, you may call him

Starting point is 00:08:26 a dumb ox, but I say his bellowing will be heard around the world. A prophecy which came true. But all his writings manifest a kind of ox-like demeanor. Slow, calm, careful, patient, contemplative. He never raises his voice, so to speak. He tells you nothing about himself. His whole passion was to be a transparent window to let the light of objective truth shine through. He was a contemplative. Even when he speaks, you can hear the silence surrounding his words. Another story. Teachers traveled a lot in the 13th century, especially Dominicans, so Aquinas was often on the road. But unlike all the other monks, he always walked instead of riding donkeys. He probably weighed about 300 pounds, and he put the donkey's comfort above

Starting point is 00:09:16 his own. The Dominicans used donkeys instead of horses because they lived in poverty. Contrary to our modern stereotype of contemplative monks as otherworldly, Thomas was a keen observer of the natural world, especially animals. Another story shows how self-forgetful and absent-minded he was. Like many intellectuals, he probably had a severe case of ADD. An example of this is a banquet at the court of King Louis of France, at which he was an honored guest. Instead of sharing the small talk at the table, he was pondering a philosophical problem in his mind

Starting point is 00:09:51 and suddenly found the answer to it. It was a conclusive argument to refute the old heresy of Manichaeism. So he banged his big fist on the table and said, that will settle the Manichaeans. King Louis had enough philosophical sense not to be insulted at the interruption. In fact, he quickly commanded his scribe to bring pen and paper and take down Thomas's latest thought. Another story shows the same priority of philosophy over material things in his mind. He was traveling over a high mountain pass with his companions, and the sun suddenly came out and illuminated a vast landscape below, of rich towns and cities with golden domes. One of his fellow monks remarked,

Starting point is 00:10:33 Wouldn't it be grand to be the owner of everything you can see? Thomas replied, Well, I suppose so, but I'd rather be the owner of that missing page in that Aristotle manuscript. For Aquinas, one page of truth trumped thousands of miles of buildings. A pure philosopher. Another story is about how he wrote. He would sit surrounded by four scribes, and he would dictate one sentence to one, the next sentence to the second, and so forth. He spoke four times as fast as they wrote, so by the time he finished the fourth sentence, he'd dictate the fifth one to the first scribe. Aquinas's mind was as fast

Starting point is 00:11:13 as his body was slow. If he had had computers, he probably would have written about a hundred thousand pages. As it is, in twenty-five years he wrote 50 folio volumes. That's about 50,000 pages, the equivalent of 500 short modern books, and all with a quill pen. Also, he hardly ever revised anything. First drafts came out perfect. Remember that if you browse through the Summa Theologiae, which is a masterpiece of condensation written, he said,

Starting point is 00:11:53 for beginners. It's about 4,000 pages long. To say what he said in one page would take a typical modern theologian about 20. Thomas had an incredibly clear photographic memory and mind, like the chess master who plays 20 games simultaneously in his mind, blindfolded. There are such people. I played one once. I lost very quickly. Another story. Shortly before he died, he stopped writing the Summa. It's unfinished. Asked why he stopped, he replied, compared to what I have seen, everything I have ever written looks to me like straw. Imagine that. The Summa, by far the greatest work of theology ever written,

Starting point is 00:12:30 and its author refused to finish it because he called it straw. Medievals used straw to contain dung. So this word of Thomas's is like the word St. Paul used for all his worldly achievements in Philippians 3 when he compared them to knowing Christ. I count them but dung. The Greek word is skubala. Yes, it's the S word. Now, why did Aquinas call the greatest theological work in history straw? What had he seen? In a word, God. He had a mystical experience, a foretaste of heaven, and it so radically transcended words that he just couldn't go back to them. I think no one ever sculpted words

Starting point is 00:13:13 as clearly and accurately as Aquinas, but they were not his God. I think he would have smiled knowingly to hear this famous Zen Buddhist wisdom about words, a finger is useful for pointing at the moon, but woe to the fool who mistakes the finger for the moon. And I think he would have had a good laugh at the story of the theologian who died and was given the choice between going to heaven or going to a lecture on heaven, and of course he chose the lecture.

Starting point is 00:13:39 Another little vignette, as a teacher at the University of Paris, he loved the public debates called disputed questions, in which a teacher publicly fielded any and all objections from other faculty and students. These were held in public, usually outdoors, for crowds, and most teachers avoided the rough and tumble of unpredictable questions with their risk of embarrassment, but Thomas loved it. I think he loved debate and dialogue and dialectic more than anyone else who ever lived, except maybe Socrates. A Summa article is really a short systematic summary of a debate. Another story, when he knew he was terminally ill, he made a general confession of all the sins of his life. His friend and

Starting point is 00:14:26 confessor, Brother Reginald, came out of the confessional booth weeping, the sins of a child of five, the sins of a child of five. And I don't think that could have been a cover-up. Aquinas was constitutionally incapable of dishonesty or even exaggeration. No word better fits him than innocent. Nothing is more inappropriate in reading him than the so-called hermeneutic of suspicion. There are no hidden dark corners. What you see is what you get. Here's the last and most telling story of all, because it tells you his absolute center. Brother Reginald, his confessor, swore that in the middle of the night he saw Thomas alone lying flat on his stomach on the

Starting point is 00:15:12 floor of the chapel conversing with Christ. A voice came from the crucifix over the altar. It asked Thomas the greatest question in the world, and Thomas gave the greatest answer. It said, Thomas, my son, you have written well of me. What will you have as your reward? And Thomas answered with characteristic brevity, only yourself, Lord. I think those are the three most eloquent words Aquinas ever wrote. He wrote about 10 million words. Nobody ever put the meaning of life in fewer words than that. They were the most perfect summary of his theology that he ever spoke. And I think even an atheist can admire the perfect style of that answer. Thanks so much for tuning in and thanks for making Pints with

Starting point is 00:15:57 Aquinas possible. One year. Terrific. God bless you guys. Send me some messages over Twitter and stuff. And also join our Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group called Pines with Aquinas. You can join and if you want to start some discussion, some philosophical theological discussion, that's the place to do it. God bless you. And as I say, I'll chat with you in a couple of days. Thanks. Who's gonna survive? Who's gonna survive?

Pints With Aquinas - 50.5: Peter Kreeft shares 12 stories about St. Thomas Aquinas

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