Growing up as a Roman Catholic, I was introduced to Thomas Aquinas very early in life. I was not even a boy but a child. But all these years growing up, I still did not get to grips with the essence of what Thomas Aquinas’ central idea was.
Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic theologian and a priest who lived from 1225 to 1274 in Italy. He was an ideas man and used reason more than the Bible as a Catholic priest. In this regard he is regarded as a philosopher more than a Catholic priest. He belonged to the sect or faction of the Roman Catholic Church called the Dominicans. The Dominicans followed along the footsteps of St Dominic, a Priest who advocated for the education of the masses.
As a child, and later on in life, all I can get to know about Thomas Aquinas was that he had an insatiable desire to unify all humanity, in one commonwealth, a universal community of people, a global village. And this universal community of people was not to be based on the church teachings nor the Bible, but by common sense. That was all I knew about Thomas Aquinas, and I was sort of content with that little knowledge.
It was Eugen Weber that opened my eyes about the central idea of Thomas Aquinas. Eugen Weber was a great historian and was the professor of History for three decades at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). I found his teaching on Thomas Aquinas very masterful.
Passing through his books and lectures, from then on, my eyes were opened and I got to see the whole picture and its several parts. I can now see the great contributions that Thomas Aquinas has made to modern life, the modern person and modern governments. And above all the universal community of people, this global village we live in above church dogma or the Bible.
What I have done here to get to share what I have learned on Thomas Aquinas from Eugen Weber is to I relay some portion where Eugen Weber talked about Thomas Aquinas in only three minutes. This is an audio, so you get to here from the horse’s mouth. This is very profound. In the book the Western Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Atomic Age, Eugen Weber went into great details in expounding on Thomas Aquinas. So if you want indepth study get the book.
However this three minute audio will serve you well. It will give clarity and perspectives. You will begin to understand the importance of History, and role it plays in today’s society.
Today, people are so robbed of life that they are even told that the study of history should be relegated to the background. No wonder we have rootless people with no grounding, and this is the very source of all mental illnesses we see. Today there is such lack of sound mental health that news about mental health and mental breakdowns dominates.
And as we know, Aquinas’ student Dante Alighieri, went on to contribute to us the Divine Comedy in the year 1321 and the prior to that the New Life in 1295.
Thomas Aquinas quite simply, without any doubt, was the harbinger of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. He sparked that age that has defined our age, the 21st century.
Get this three minutes audio here.
