Josef Pieper

One of the great philosophers of the 20th Century, Josef Pieper, gives a penetrating introduction and guide to the life and works of perhaps the greatest philosopher ever, St. Thomas Aquinas. Pieper provides a biography of Aquinas, an overview of the 13th century he lived in, and a wonderful synthesis of his vast writings. Pieper shows how Aquinas reconciled the pragmatic thought of Aristotle with the Church, proving that realistic knowledge need not preclude belief in the spiritual realities of religion. According to Pieper, the marriage of faith and reason proposed by Aquinas in his great synthesis of a "theologically founded worldliness" was not merely one solution among many, but the great principle expressing the essence of the Christian West. Pieper reveals his extraordinary command of original sources and excellent secondary materials as he illuminates the thought of the great intellectual Doctor of the Church.

Guide to Thomas Aquinas

This makes me think about the nature of how the Church teaches and must teach. Not authoritarian, but via valid opinions which conflict but meet ultimate resolutions through the Church’s apostolic authority.

Zeke Taylor

That is the nature of teaching as Thomas understood it. In this procedure, therefore, the hearer has an absolute right to "speak up," even if he does not actually take the floor. The teacher must give him the floor within the framework of his own lecture. Here, then, is the old So- cratic-Platonic conception at work: that truth develops only in dialogue, in conversation. This, precisely, was what Dominic had striven for when, shocked by the violent methods being used against the Albigensians and con- vinced of the utter futility of a merely authoritative, merely judicial mode of establishing truth-the very opposite of "teaching"-he replaced interrogation by dialogue be- tween equals in the famous disputation at Montréal.

Guide to Thomas Aquinas quotes

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