Happy Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas

Today, January 28, is the Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He is, of course, a great Doctor of the Church and perhaps her greatest theologian, certainly one her most influential thinkers. He is rightly commended for integrating natural reason (especially as exemplified in the thought of Aristotle) with the Christian faith, and so contemporary Catholics (and other Christians more generally) look to Saint Thomas as paradigmatically harmonizing science and religion. He was also a philosopher of noted ability and his insights into natural philosophy (physics), metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, ethics and politics are still vigorously debated and defended even among secular academics. Not surprisingly, most of the attention paid to the Angelic Doctor focuses on the light he brings to the issues of our own day. However, the impact he had on his medieval contemporaries and their own rather…