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welcome a weeks ago I was in Toulouse
France filming for our 10-part
catholicism series and I admit that I
was there for a very personal reason
because st. Thomas Aquinas is buried at
the dominican church of the jackal bang
in Toulouse and Thomas is my personal
hero really when I was 14 years old I
went to Fenwick High School Dominican
High School near Chicago and one of the
young priests taught us the arguments
for God's existence from Thomas Aquinas
and I'm still not sure exactly why this
happened but it was like a bell went off
in me there was a sense I got of the
reality of God which I've never lost and
hearing those proofs many years ago set
me on a path I've never really gotten
off of so when I was praying before the
tomb of Aquinas it was very much of a
personal prayer of gratitude to him for
the way he set a path for my life it
occurred to me that I'm a priest because
of the grace of God but that grace
really for me came through Thomas
Aquinas so it was a privilege to to
thank him there in Toulouse it also
occurred to me that Thomas is such an
important figure for our own time
wondering I wait with this 13th century
theological master be so important for
the 21st century three things came to my
mind there are many others but three
especially the first one is Thomas
Aquinas saw with utter clarity that
truth is one since all truth finally
comes from the one God who is truth
itself therefore there can never be a
conflict between the truths of science
and the truths of faith during his own
time in the 13th century in Paris where
he taught there was a group that
advocated the double truth theory which
said well there are two sets of truths
there are religious truths and there are
philosophical or scientific truths and
they might be at odds with each other
they might be in contradiction but you
have to sequester one is philosophical
the other is religious and they can
exist even contradict
truth side-by-side well time as Aquinas
thought that was so much nonsense and
said so and made a very public case of
it I think this is very important for
our time when we see in the minds of way
too many people this conflict between
faith and reason between religion and
science again Thomas would say if there
is an apparent conflict between a
clearly known scientific truth and a
religious truth either we're dealing
with bad science or bad religion we need
to think more deeply more creatively
about what's at stake he followed a
Gustin in saying this if an
interpretation of the Bible is opposed
to what is clearly known through our
scientific investigations we should
interpret the Bible in a more symbolic
or a metaphorical way in other words he
resisted the tendency to sequester these
two truths into opposite categories and
I think that very Catholic understanding
of Bible in relation to philosophy and
science is very important for our own
time we as biblical people following
Thomas's intuition reach out to the
sciences we reverence the sciences we
take with great seriousness what the
sciences teach and we don't see a
conflict finally between religion and
science we also allow science to be
disciplined by what we know to be the
case from revelation these really deep
truths that emerge out of Revelation
cannot be of contradicted by the
sciences so I think that sense of the
unity of truth is a great gift of Thomas
for our time here's a second one I know
I've talked about it many times before
I'm these YouTube forums but Thomas
Aquinas was very impressed by the fact
that contingent things that's to say
things that don't contain within
themselves the reason for their own
existence exist and that's a puzzle
that's a mystery contingent things like
you and me if we eat and drink if we had
parents and we breathe air we're
contingent we don't explain our own
existence
plants trees animals human beings the
cosmos itself are contingent therefore
the fact that they exist needs to be
explained Aquinas intuitive furthermore
an infinite appeal to other conditioned
things other contingent things will
never be adequate it simply postpones
the explanation we must come therefore -
saw to some reality which exists through
the power of its own essence that's what
Catholics call God that's what he called
God and that's how he argued for God's
existence on rational grounds he was
very moved by the coherence between that
view of God and the self revelation in
Exodus 3:14 when Moses asked God for his
name and God said I am Who I am I'm not
a particularly
I'm not one contingent thing among many
I'm the sheer act of existence itself
Thomas saw that and it was the rational
ground for confirming God's existence
how important that is in this time now
where the so-called New Atheists have
emerged with all this claptrap about how
the sciences obviate belief in God they
do no such thing the scientists talk
about the relations that obtain among
conditioned things that's a very
legitimate task but it says nothing
about the non-contingent ground of all
existence the scientists don't address
the question of why there's something
rather than nothing
Thomas saw that was the question God is
not a superstitious holdover from an
ancient time God is the answer to that
eternally relevant question that's
important for our time third thing
Thomas Aquinas was a radical humanist
because he was a Christian Christians
hold that God became human that humans
might become God that's the old
patristic adage it means God became one
of us that we might become sharers in
the divine life that means there is no
humanism higher than Christian humanism
there's no claim made about the human
being from ancient times to modern times
that is more extravagant
and more extraordinary than the
Christian claim that we are meant for a
share in the divine life now the
implication is each human person is
irreducibly dignified each human person
is the subject of an enormous god-given
set of rights abortion euthanasia
stem-cell research all those things that
would reduce human beings to a means to
an end our repugnant to this fundamental
Christian claim about the dignity of the
human being
Thomas Aquinas knew that as all the
great Christian theologians know and
that makes him I think extraordinarily
relevant to our own time and so going
back to that tomb of Aquinas I think of
his bones are in that that casket in
Toulouse but thank God his spirit and
his mind live on provocatively in the
life of the church now
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