The Apostle of Common Sense by Dale Ahlquist

Author:Dale Ahlquist [Ahlquist, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681490427
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He understood the theory of thanks and knew that

Its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing.29

9

St. Thomas Aquinas

To this question “Is there anything?” St. Thomas begins by answering “Yes”; if he began by answering “No”, it would not be the beginning, but the end. That is what some of us call common sense.

—St. Thomas Aquinas.

When G. K. Chesterton was commissioned to write a book about St. Thomas Aquinas, even his strongest supporters and greatest admirers were a little worried. But they would have been a lot more worried if they had known how he actually wrote the book.

Chesterton had already written acclaimed studies of Robert Browning, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chaucer, and St. Francis of Assisi. Nonetheless, there was a great deal of anxiety even among Chesterton’s admirers when in 1933 he agreed to take on the Angelic Doctor of the Church, the author of the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Without consulting any texts whatsoever, Chesterton rapidly dictated about half the book to his secretary, Dorothy Collins. Then he suddenly said to her, “I want you to go to London and get me some books.”

“What books?” asked Dorothy.

“I don’t know”, said G. K.

So Dorothy did some research and brought back a stack of books on St. Thomas. G.K. flipped through a couple of books in the stack, took a walk in his garden, and then, without ever referring to the books again, proceeded to dictate the rest of his book to Dorothy.

Many years later, when Evelyn Waugh heard this story, he quipped that Chesterton never even read the Summa Theologica, but merely ran his fingers across the binding and absorbed everything in it. But, of course, Chesterton had read at least parts of the Summa. What is amazing is that he read it long before he became a Catholic and thirty years before writing his book on St. Thomas Aquinas.

And what kind of book did he write? Étienne Gilson, probably the most highly respected scholar of St. Thomas in the twentieth century, a man who devoted his whole life to studying St. Thomas, had this to say about Chesterton’s book:

I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a “clever” book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called “wit” of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate, and he has said everything that they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being

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