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Principal Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas

Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas

From a lifetime of studying the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, popular author Peter Kreeft says that his amazement has continually increased not only at Aquinas' theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity, but also at his personal, practical wisdom, his "existential bite." Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other. Kreeft wrote this book to help bring that sun out from its eclipse. He provides easily digestible samples of the religious wisdom of Aquinas.

Here are 359 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas's masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae , which Kreeft says "are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain 'the one thing needful,' or 'the greatest good' ", the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life. Three of its names are "being a saint," "beatitude" ("supreme happiness") and "union with God." That was the principle for Kreeft in choosing which passages to use: do they help you to attain your ultimate end - sanctity, happiness, union with God? St. Thomas would have agreed with writer Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end "there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint".



Among the many topics Aquinas and Kreeft cover here include:

  • The problem of evil
  • Interpreting the Bible
  • Love vs. knowledge
  • Reconciling justice and mercy
  • Human freedom and divine grace
  • Angels and demons
  • The need for theology
  • Predestination and free will
  • Three kinds of goods


Categories: Religion
Année: 2014
Edition: 1st
Editeur: Ignatius Press
Langue: english
Pages: 400
ISBN 10: 1586179683
ISBN 13: 9781586179687
File: EPUB, 901 KB
Téléchargement (epub, 901 KB)

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358 Ways Your Mind Can Help You to Become a Saint

from the Summa Theologiae


Quotes from the Summa Theologica, first complete American edition

© 1947 by Benziger Brothers, New York

In most cases the Scripture quotations in this book have been taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, Second Catholic Edition, © 2006. The Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible: the Old Testament, © 1952, 2006; the Apocrypha, © 1957, 2006; the New Testament, © 1946, 2006; the Catholic Edition of the Old Testament, incorporating the Apocrypha, © 1966, 2006; the Catholic Edition of the New Testament, © 1965, 2006 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Some of the Scripture quotations, especially from the Psalms and the Wisdom books, are taken from the Douay-Rheims Version of the Bible. The notation differs from that of modern versions like the RSV.

Cover art: St. Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1476

National Gallery, London

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Cover design by Enrique Javier Aguilar Pinto

© 2014 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-58617-968-7

Library of Congress Control Number 2014943996

Printed in the United States of America



1. Religion

2. The need for theology

3. Saints compared with theologians

4. How to interpret the Bible

5. The (a) reality and (b) inadequacy of our innate knowledge of God

6. The “problem of evil”

7. God’s necessity: “His essence is existence”

8. All perfections are in God

9. All that is, is good

10. Only three kinds of goods

11. Seeing God everywhere: the presence of God in all things

12. “Seeing” God in Heaven

13. Reason’s power to know God

14. Knowing God by analogy

15. We, not God, are the analogy

16. God’s knowing is creative

17. Human science = the knowledge of God’s art

18. Is God alive?

19. Predestination and free will

20. Does God love mosquitoes?

21. Why God loves all the different things in the universe and why we should too

22. Inequality is good

23. Do men or angels rank higher in God’s love?

24. Reconciling justice and mercy

25. How we can aid predestination

26. Personalism

27. Pain or sin: Which is worse?

28. God and evil

29. Why good must be stronger than evil

30. Do angels know the future?

31. How is the human heart known by God, men, angels, and demons?

32. The ultimate reason for patience

33. The greatest sin

34. Do creatures withdraw us from God?

35. Why is it important that we have only one soul, not many?

36. The innocence of the body

37. Why practicing the presence of God is the key to sanctity

38. Love vs. knowledge

39. Proof that we have free will

40. Free will is based on reason

41. Human freedom and divine grace

42. Do we know objective truth?

43. Human equality and inequality

44. The goodness of human authority

45. Chance

46. The connection between monotheism and peace

47. How our free choices share in God’s sovereign government

48. God’s action and presence in all things

49. How God is in His creatures

50. Angels can teach us

51. Guardian angels are real

52. Why evil spirits assault us

53. How “everything has a purpose” changes the meaning of life

54. Why life must have some single ultimate purpose or end

55. How even trivia are related to our union with God

56. Why wealth can’t make you happy

57. Why human honors can’t make you happy

58. Why being famous can’t make you happy

59. Why power can’t make you happy

60. Why a perfect body in perfect health can’t make you happy

61. Why pleasure can’t make you happy

62. Why even moral virtue alone can’t make you happy

63. Why nothing but God can possibly ever make you completely happy

64. What role our bodily senses play in our happiness

65. Happiness is the “Beatific Vision”

66. How we can get there from here

67. God alone suffices

68. Don’t expect perfect happiness in this life

69. Eternal security?

70. Happiness is unattainable by human power

71. The importance of knowledge

72. Why God can’t force us to will the good

73. Is there such a thing as partial freedom and responsibility?

74. Is sin due to ignorance?

75. Will vs. passions

76. Does God move my will or do I?

77. Man vs. animal

78. Reason and freedom

79. Being as such is good; all being is good

80. A map of good and evil

81. How much of life does ethics cover?

82. Listening to reason is listening to God

83. The sacredness of conscience

84. Holy subjective intentions or holy objective deeds?

85. Holiness in the passions

86. “My love is my gravity” (Augustine)

87. Love is cosmic

88. Loving God more than knowing God

89. Love’s end is union

90. Ecstasy

91. Zeal

92. St. Thomas the “soft-hearted”

93. Hatred

94. Self-hatred?

95. Hating the truth

96. The danger of unnatural desires

97. A recipe for happiness

98. Love and pleasure

99. Is pleasure helpful or harmful?

100. The pleasures of contemplation

101. Accentuate the positive

102. Three evils: sorrow (misery) is worse than pain, and sin is worse than sorrow (misery)

103. The worst thing about physical pain

104. The importance of well-disposed emotions

105. The importance of reason in morality

106. The proper role of feelings in a good man’s life

107. Why there are four cardinal virtues

108. The need for supernatural virtues

109. Is man innately good?

110. How to become virtuous

111. Moderation and extremism

112. “The greatest of these is love”

113. The reason there must be a “natural law” morality

114. The three dimensions of ethics

115. Spiritual vs. carnal sins

116. Evil and ignorance one more time

117. Passion and responsibility

118. Why God doesn’t give us enough grace to overcome sin

119. “The Devil made me do it”?

120. Why there is always hope for conversion even of the worst sinner

121. Evidence in our experience for Original Sin

122. The purpose of law, and why not to obey bad laws

123. The sacredness of the natural moral law

124. What the natural law is and how obvious it is

125. Why you must go beyond legal goodness to be good

126. Our obligation to secular human laws is not just secular but sacred

127. When may we and when should we disobey unjust laws?

128. The spirit vs. the letter of the law

129. The ultimate purpose of morality

130. The different levels of moral instruction

131. Why we need “organized religion”

132. Kindness to animals

133. The heart of the gospel is not its creeds or codes

134. “Progress”: Will there be a “third testament”?

135. The difficulty in being a Christian

136. Spirit and letter, internal and external

137. Going beyond the commandments

138. God’s presence in ordinary knowledge

139. Grace

140. Nature and natural virtue

141. Can we know that we are in the state of grace?

142. Grace and free will

143. How salvation “works” and why faith alone is not enough

144. The greatest, most dramatic event of all time

145. The main qualification for religion teachers

146. Faith and certainty

147. Faith is a gift of God

148. Faith and fear

149. How unbelief is a sin

150. The good done by unbelievers; and “implicit faith”

151. Why lust is harmful

152. The fear of God

153. Love and fear

154. Presumption

155. Is love in us from God or from our own active choice?

156. The infinity of charity

157. Charity and sin

158. Loving your body

159. Loving sinners, hating sins

160. Self-love

161. How to love enemies

162. Love’s two dimensions, objective and subjective

163. Love of parents compared with love of children

164. Love of spouse compared with love of self

165. Order and hierarchy of loves in Heaven

166. Loving enemies vs. loving friends

167. The secret of joy

168. The fullness of joy

169. Peace

170. Virtue and peace

171. Motive and deed

172. Alms

173. Guidelines for giving

174. “Fraternal correction”

175. When it’s right to correct your clergyman

176. Denouncing public sins

177. Hating God

178. Hating sins without hating sinners

179. “Hate crimes” vs. adultery: which is worse?

180. Sloth

181. When sloth becomes a mortal sin

182. Sloth as the origin of lust

183. Why the military is an honorable occupation

184. Sinning a little sin to avoid a big scandal?

185. Actual vs. habitual charity

186. Anger

187. Why God does not give you grace to overcome lust

188. Pride

189. Women’s punishment for the Fall

190. Cruelty vs. savagery

191. Why we are tempted

192. Curiosity

193. Games and jokes

194. How play and jokes go bad

195. Modesty in dress

196. “The adornment of women”

197. The truths in false prophets

198. The importance of words

199. Apparent miracles

200. The contemplative life

201. Beauty, lust, and contemplation

202. How nature aids contemplation

203. Contemplation and joy

204. Active vs. contemplative lives

205. Comparing the merit (worth) in the two lives, contemplative vs. active

206. Are the active and contemplative lives opposed?

207. The limits of perfection in this life

208. Perfection = charity beyond measure

209. How the Incarnation completes the purpose of the creation

210. The necessity of the Incarnation

211. A good but unanswerable question

212. Christ on other planets?

213. Adoration of an image of Christ

214. Mary-worship?

215. Relics

216. The Immaculate Conception

217. Mary’s humility

218. Mary’s sinlessness

219. The name of “Jesus”

220. John the Baptist

221. The meaning of Christ’s Baptism

222. Why Christ was tempted

223. Demonic strategy

224. Why Christ offended people

225. Why Socrates was the greatest philosopher

226. The reason for miracles

227. What Christ’s miracles taught

228. Why Christ had to suffer

229. Why Christ had to die on the Cross

230. Christ suffered everything

231. Christ’s pain

232. Why Christ died young

233. Why Christ died in Jerusalem

234. Why Christ died between two thieves

235. How God could have suffered and died

236. How Christ’s death was martyrdom, not suicide

237. Christ’s death as obedience

238. How Christ’s death opened Heaven

239. Why Christ had to rise

240. Why Christ rose the third day

241. Why Christ’s Resurrection body had scars

242. Christ’s presence before and after His Ascension

243. What the Eucharist signifies

244. Why sacraments are visible

245. The place of sacraments in our historical story

246. Sacraments and grace

247. How the sacraments get their power

248. How sacraments make us Christlike

249. Why there are seven sacraments

250. The greatest sacrament

251. Water

252. Baptists vs. Catholics on immersion

253. The finality of Baptism

254. How God’s grace is not confined to His physical sacraments

255. Who should be baptized

256. Infant Baptism

257. The need for the parents’ will in infant Baptism

258. Why the Eucharist is greater than Baptism

259. The Eucharist as the end and purpose of Baptism

260. Three meanings of the Eucharist

261. Real Presence

262. Transubstantiation

263. Real Presence: “Body and Blood, soul and divinity”

264. Bread without wine = the whole Christ

265. How Christ is “here” in the Eucharist

266. When Christ’s Presence departs from the sacrament

267. Why Christ’s Presence is invisible

268. Eucharistic appearances of bread and wine without their realities

269. How complete is Christ’s disguise in the Eucharist?

270. We hear Christ’s words, not the priest’s

271. The greatest sentence ever spoken

272. Drinking Christ’s own Blood from His own wounds

273. The Eucharist and our future Heavenly glory

274. The Eucharist and forgiveness

275. The Eucharist and Purgatory

276. How the Eucharist keeps us from sin

277. How the Eucharist helps your friends

278. Venial sins vs. the Eucharist

279. Can forgotten or unconscious sins impede the Eucharist?

280. Denying Communion to public sinners

281. Eucharist for the mentally disabled?

282. Daily Communion

283. Bread alone vs. bread and wine

284. The content of the Mass

285. How the Church deals with problems during the Mass

286. Absolution

287. Frequent Confession

288. Repentance is not essentially a feeling

289. Penance and fear

290. What penance does to sin

291. Why forgiveness requires repentance

292. How to distinguish true repentance from its counterfeit

293. We don’t get off scot-free

294. How can we repay an infinite debt to God?

295. Exchange: bearing one another’s burdens

296. Why God punishes

297. Excommunication

298. Group guilt?

299. Indulgences

300. Matrimony: natural or supernatural?

301. Why sex is not sinful

302. The essence of Matrimony

303. Married sex as sacramental

304. Heaven as a real place

305. Immediate judgment after death

306. How souls in Heaven can be present on earth

307. Heaven is pure good but Hell is not pure evil

308. The experience of the soul separated from the body

309. The extent of the power of the communion of saints

310. How we can help the dead

311. Who are funerals for?

312. Whether suffrages offered for several are of as much value to each one as if they had been offered for each in particular?

313. Are we being watched as we pray?

314. Why it is good to pray to saints

315. The time of Christ’s Second Coming and the end of the world

316. A new universe

317. The resurrection of the body

318. The personal identity of the resurrection body

319. The organs in the resurrection body

320. Hair and nails in Heaven

321. Youth and age in Heaven

322. Gender in Heaven

323. Animal activities—eating and copulating—in Heaven?

324. The agility of the resurrection body

325. Wounds in the resurrection body

326. The concreteness of the resurrection body

327. The clarity, or light, of the resurrection body

328. The “impassibility” of the resurrection body

329. Remembering sins in Heaven

330. The need for two judgments

331. The time of the end of the world

332. Three categories of persons at the judgment

333. The new world

334. The “Beatific Vision”

335. The role of the bodily eye in seeing God

336. The communion of saints in Heaven

337. What the resurrection body adds to Heavenly happiness

338. Degrees in Heaven

339. The blessed’s attitude toward the damned

340. Can Hell make Heaven happy?

341. Damnation

342. Hellfire

343. Is Hell “down”?

344. Repentance in Hell?

345. What the damned want; and why suicide can never work

346. Sins in Hell

347. Memory in Hell

348. Hell’s eternity

349. How can God refuse the prayers of the saints for mercy to the damned?

350. The harrowing of Hell?

351. More on the eternity of Hell

352. Limbo: reasons for its existence

353. What they experience in Limbo

354. Purgatory’s pains

355. Purgatory’s freedom

356. The amount of time you spend in Purgatory

357. The existence of Purgatory

358. Purgatory and Hell compared

Postcript: What St. Thomas didn’t say


St. Thomas wrote a very short preface to his very long (4,000-page) Summa Theologiae. In it he says he wrote his Summa “for beginners”! I too will give you a fairly short preface (though not as short as his) to tell you why I wrote this fairly long book (though not as long as his), and why “beginners” should read it.

In a lifetime of browsing through Aquinas, my amazement has continually increased not only at his theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity but equally at his personal, practical wisdom, his “existential bite”. Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other. I wrote this book to help bring that sun out from its eclipse. Since I already wrote an annotated anthology of St. Thomas’ purely rational, philosophical wisdom, Summa of the Summa, extracting it from its larger theological context of faith and divine revelation. I here try to redress the balance with an easily digestible sample of his much larger distinctively religious wisdom.

Here are 358 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas’ masterpiece the Summa, which are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain “the one thing needful”, the summum bonum or “greatest good”, the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life, which has many names but which is the same reality. Three of its names are “being a saint”, “beatitude” (supreme happiness) and “union with God”. That was my principle for choosing which passages to use: do they help you to attain your ultimate end, i.e., sanctity, happiness, union with God?

St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint.

This is the same thing as attaining true happiness. St. Thomas, like Aristotle, meant by “happiness” not merely “subjective contentment” but “real perfection”, attaining the end or “final cause” or purpose of your very existence.

This is the same thing as union with God, the source of all holiness and all happiness. St. Thomas knew that union with God begins not after death but now. If this real union does not begin now, as a seed—if you are not “born again of the Spirit”—then that life cannot and will not grow, as a flower, in eternity.

This book is a selection of St. Thomas’ fertilizers to make that seed grow.

There are four kinds of fertilizer. They are the four dimensions of every religion. The word “religion” (from religare) means “a binding-back relationship”, a “tying-to”; and there are four ways every religion ties us to God, or something like God. (These four ways are also the four parts of The Catechism of the Catholic Church.) They are (1) theology, (2) morality, (3) public liturgy, and (4) private prayer. Condensing the last two into one, they are (1) creed, (2) code, and (3) cult; or (1) words, (2) works, and (3) worship; or (1) the spiritually true, (2) the spiritually good, and (3) the spiritually beautiful. They are the three ways to become a saint, the three highways to Heaven, and they all begin in the heart, for “in the heart are the highways to Zion (Heaven)” (Ps 84:5). St. Thomas was a master of all three.

The ultimate reason we must become holy is that that is the only way to become real. For becoming holy is becoming what reality ultimately is, i.e., what God, the ultimate reality and the touchstone for all reality, is: true, good, and beautiful; real, loving, and joyful. “You must be holy because I the Lord your God am holy” was His ultimate explanation of His law to His chosen people, who were His collective prophet to the world.

Attaining this end depends on the will—the will to attain it, the will’s choice to believe God, to hope in God, and above all, to love God and that which God is (truth, goodness, beauty).

But the will depends on the mind. Each truth about God known by the mind is a new motive for loving Him with the will. It also works the other way around: the more you love any person (human or divine), the more you want to know him (or Him) better, and the more you do. And this always causes deep joy.

But we simply can’t jump-start our will by a simple command: “Go to now, love God more!” When we give this command to ourselves, we immediately find, like St. Augustine in the Confessions, that the very same self that commands sanctity also disobeys its own commandment! We have divided selves. The self that wants above all things to be forever bound to God and His will in eternity also wants to be free from Him at the present moment to do its own will. Our wills are divided. We love our Father in Heaven, yet we are rebellious kids. We are stubborn, silly, stupid, selfish, and sinful. That is the “bad news”. Without it the “good news” makes no sense. A free heart transplant is not good news unless your old heart is in bad shape. “Sin” means our hearts are in bad shape-“Sin” means “separation”—from God and from our neighbors and even from our deepest selves.

We need the mind to educate and enlighten the will, as a traveler needs a map.

No one in history has ever supplied that map more brilliantly and profoundly than St. Thomas.

Therefore, reading St. Thomas is a powerful aid to happiness, to sanctity.

It has been that to me. I have found more personal spiritual nourishment, more motivation to be holy, in the dry, abstract pages of the Summa than in most other “spiritual” writers.

But reading the Summa all by yourself is difficult, unless someone makes it easy. It’s not likely that you will read all 4,000 pages of the Summa, so I give you here a kind of Reader’s Digest version. By chopping up the meat into small, bite-sized pieces, as Mommy does for Baby—or, to change the image to something less insulting, I do the preliminary work of going down into the 4,000-page tunnels of this labyrinth, as into a deep mine, extract a few choice gold nuggets from this rich lode, bring them to the surface, and give them to you to wear as jewelry.

I tried to type the next sentence “The Summa is a gold mine”, and it came out “The Summa is a gold mind.” I think this was my guardian angel playing a providential joke on me. The typo is the truth.

Here are 358 gold nuggets that have helped me enormously in the struggle of real life, the struggle to live in the real world, to be sane, or in the words of the classic Anglican prayer, “to know Thee more clearly, to love Thee more dearly, and to follow Thee more nearly”. They will help you too.

This is St. Thomas’ book, not mine. I am only one hungry, homeless bum calling to my friends: “Look! Free steak dinners over there!” He supplies the steak, I supply only the sauces. Thus his words are in boldface type, mine are not. My comments that follow each quotation do not mean to add to what St. Thomas says but only (1) explain it, (2) apply it, and (3) festoon it, like a Christmas tree. Or, better, they unwrap the Christmas presents St. Thomas gives us. They are not scholarly theological commentaries but more like what the Jews call midrash: spiritual commentaries: practical, personal, existential, “livable” thoughts. I have formatted these readings as answers to questions that real people actually ask their spiritual directors.

I used the old, literal, faithful Dominican Blackfriars translation. The style is old-fashioned, like the King James Bible, i.e., arresting and formal and proper. It gets your attention. It is memorable. It is “different”, because the subject matter is different. It is about the most important thing in the world, not about advertisements or news reports or gossip; so since it is more important, it deserves a style that sounds more important.

The style of the translation is also literal. It tells you exactly what Aquinas actually wrote, word for word, rather than what some translator thinks he would have written if he had to write in twenty-first century American vernacular. Yet it is totally clear: you don’t have to be a scholar to understand it. Whenever there is a technical term that means something different in Aquinas than it does in contemporary English, I added the contemporary translation or explanation in parentheses.

The numerical references after each quotation tell you three things: first, the “part” of the Summa (I, I-II, II-II, III, or S [supplement]), then the number of the “Question”, then the number of the “Article”. For an account of how the Summa as a whole is organized (it’s a mirror image of how all reality is organized!) and how each part of each “Article” functions (it’s the five most basic and necessary steps in a complete logical analysis), see the Introduction to my Summa of the Summa.

I follow the order of the Summa. Often, I treat and repeat the same point two or three times, in a somewhat different way, or a different context, because that is what St. Thomas did; and the justification for both of us doing that is the intrinsic importance of these issues.


Isn’t organized religion a crutch? Why do we need the Bible and the Church? Can’t we know God by our own reason and common sense and experience instead of “divine revelation”?

It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God besides philosophical science (wisdom) built up by human reason . . . because man is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason: “The eye has not seen, O God . . . what things Thou hast prepared for them that wait for Thee” (Is 66:4). But the end must first be known by men who are to direct their . . . actions to the end. Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths about God which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation (I,1,1).

Life is a road. The most important thing about a road is its end, where it goes. If the road of life has no real end and goal, it is meaningless. It is a circle or a swamp or a wilderness, not a road.

What is our end? Not ourselves. Our end is to know God—not just to know about Him but to know Him. “This is eternal life: to know Thee, the one true God” (Jn 17:3).

But even if we had not fallen into sin and error, our knowledge of God would have been less adequate than a worm’s knowledge of us. For the distance between the finitude of the worm and the finitude of man is only finite, while the distance between finite man and infinite God is infinite.

Only God can bridge that gap, by acting “down” with His power; we cannot bridge it by moving “up” with our power. A worm cannot climb Mount Everest. This was so from the beginning, even before we fell. How much more do we need divinely revealed truth now that we are fallen and foolish.

We need it not just to satisfy our natural curiosity but to actually get us to God, for man’s salvation. We are half-blind and lost in a haunted forest. Without a road map, we will not get Home. The purpose of divinely revealed theology is not just theoretical but utterly practical.

That is why you should read St. Thomas. The ultimate reason for studying theology is the same as the ultimate reason for your existence. It is “Salvation”, that is, it is Heaven, Happiness, Holiness (three words for the very same thing).

Yes, we can know much about God by the proper use of our natural human reason: e.g., that He exists, that He is one, that He is perfect. But since we are fallen fools, most of our philosophy is not “the proper use of human reason” but the improper use of human reason. Just look at the history of modern philosophy if you doubt that! That is why Aquinas adds:

Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover would only be known by a few (how many Aristotles were there in ancient Greece?), and that after a long time (how many die before they get even that far?), and with the admixture of many errors (how many mistakes do philosophers make?). Whereas man’s whole salvation, which is in God, depends upon the knowledge of this truth. Therefore, in order that the salvation of men might be brought about more fitly and more surely, it was necessary that they should be taught divine truths by divine revelation (I,1,1).

Yes, organized religion is a crutch. You mean you didn’t know that you are a cripple? If you don’t know that, then you are a very serious cripple indeed, mentally and spiritually. Go back to Socrates: “Know thyself.” For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. Which are you? You can tell which class you it into by whether or not you accept the “crutch”, the road map. Maybe the Jews were lost forty years in the wilderness because Moses was too proud to stop and ask for directions. (It’s a guy thing.)


Is theology really the most important thing I need to know?

Since this science (theology) is partly speculative (truth for the sake of truth) and partly practical (truth for the sake of practice), it transcends all others (both) speculative and practical. Now one speculative science is said to be nobler (higher, more valuable) than another either by reason of its greater certitude or by reason of the higher worth of its subject-matter. In both these respects this science surpasses other speculative sciences: in point of greater certitude, because other sciences derive their certitude from the natural light of human reason, which can err, whereas this derives its certitude from the light of the divine knowledge, which cannot be misled; in point of the higher worth of its subject-matter because this science treats chiefly of those things which by their sublimity transcend human reason, while other sciences consider only those things which are within reason’s grasp.

Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is not ordained to a further purpose, as political science is nobler than military science, for the good of the army is directed to the good of the State. But the purpose of this science (theology), in so far as it is practical, is eternal bliss, to which as to an ultimate end the purposes of every practical science are directed.

Hence it is clear that from every standpoint it is nobler than other sciences (I,1,5).

Good theology is not the knowledge of theology but the knowledge of God. Bad theology is the theology of the theologian who died and went to Heaven and at the gates of Heaven God offered him the choice between Heaven and a theology lecture on Heaven, and he chose the lecture.

Theology has two ends, which Thomas calls “speculative” (or contemplative) and practical (or active). It seeks truth as an end in itself and also as a means to a life of acts that both lead to and stem from salvation.

“Theology” means “the science (logos) of God (theos)”—“science” in the old, broad, pre-modern sense of “knowledge of the truth ordered by logos (reason and language)”.

There are two factors that make one truth (and therefore one science) higher or more valuable than another: certainty and importance. Theology is #1 in both. For if there is “revealed theology”; if there is a wisdom not just about God but from God; if there is not just man’s thoughts about God but also God’s thoughts about man; then this is the most certain knowledge we have, because God, unlike man, can never deceive or be deceived. And it is also the most important knowledge we have; because if God exists, then knowing God is the most important knowledge there is, because God is the most important reality there is. He is the most important because He is our ultimate End. (That should be obvious!)

Why then is there more controversy in theology than in other sciences, if it is the most certain? It certainly seems less certain than, say, physics. Isn’t it dependent on personal opinion or faith, while other sciences are objective and certain?

St. Thomas answers this objection too, and explains why the most certain seems least certain:

It may well happen that what is in itself the more certain may seem to us the less certain on account of the weakness of our intelligence, “which is dazzled by the clearest objects in nature, as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun” (Aristotle). Hence the fact that some happen to doubt about articles of faith is not due to the uncertain nature of the truths, but to the weakness of human intelligence. Yet the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things (I,1,5).

We must choose between (1) more perfect (clear, adequate, certain-to-us) knowledge of imperfect things (the things of this world) and (2) less perfect knowledge of more perfect things (the things of God). Which is more important to you: a tiny, imperfect little insight into the heart of the person you love the most, or a mathematically complete and certain formula for a better paper clip?


Isn’t the knowledge of God that a simple saint has, by experience and love and intimate personal relationship, a much higher kind of knowledge than the knowledge that the world’s most brilliant theologian has only by reason and study and thinking?

Yes it is; and St. Thomas explicitly says that:

Since judgment pertains to wisdom, the twofold manner of judging produces a twofold wisdom. A man may judge in one way by (personal) inclination, as whoever has the habit of a (particular) virtue judges rightly of what concerns that virtue, by his very inclination towards it. . . . In another way, by knowledge (scientia, science), just as a man learned (educated) in moral science might be able to judge rightly about virtuous acts even though he had not the virtue. The first manner of judging divine things belongs to that wisdom which is set down among the gifts of the Holy Ghost: “The spiritual man judgeth all things” (1 Cor 2:15). . . .The second manner of judging belongs to this doctrine, which is acquired by study, though its principles are obtained by revelation (I,1,6).

St. Thomas himself had both kinds of knowledge. When God gave him an intimate mystical experience of Himself, shortly before he died, he stopped writing. (The Summa, his masterpiece, is unfinished—like life itself.) He said, “I can write no more, for compared with what I have seen, everything I have ever written is only straw.”

Even before this experience, he showed that he had the higher knowledge. One of his fellow monks saw him alone on the floor of the chapel, and heard the voice of Christ speaking to him from the crucifix: “You have written well of Me, Thomas; what will you have as your reward?” And his answer was the very definition of a saint, and of the whole meaning of life: “Only Yourself, Lord.” In those three words he said more than he said in the 4,000 pages of the greatest work of theology ever written.

But the lower kind of knowledge can be a significant help to the higher. Even a book like this one can take you some small but significant steps toward St. Thomas’ wisdom and holiness, since it is based on St. Thomas’ own masterpiece, which in turn is based on God’s own Book of revelation, the Bible. A book is not a person, but it can help us to understand a person better—especially if the primary author of the Book is the very Person we seek to understand, and if when we read His books (He wrote two, nature and Scripture) we read with the person-loving heart as well as the truth-loving head.


If the Bible is our primary source of theology, which is the knowledge of God, how should we interpret it? Literally or symbolically?

St. Thomas’ answer to that question, like his answer to many others, is: “Both.” Here’s why:

The author of Holy Writ is God, in Whose power it is to signify His meaning not by words only (as man also can do) but also by things themselves. So whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.

Therefore that first signification, whereby words signify things, belongs to the first sense, the historical and literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it (I,1,10).

Words are signs—signs of real things or events. Words point beyond themselves.

Real things and events can also be words, that point to God, since divine providence orders all things and events as writers order their words. This is why we often learn more about God from real events and people and history than we do from words in books. It is because these things are words too. God wrote two books, not just one: the Bible and nature, which includes people and history and events. The actual events are “words” (meaningful signs) in the book of divine providence. They point beyond themselves; they are signs of other things—above all, of God Himself, the Author of both books.

That is the justification for a symbolic interpretation of the things, events, and persons in the Bible. It is not an alternative to a literal interpretation, but a rich addition, another layer of meaning, looking-along these signs instead of just looking-at them. We have largely lost this art of sign reading, since it is not “scientific” in the modern sense. But it is a rich mine with many gold nuggets in it.

Take, for instance, the story of the Exodus. A real Moses really led real Jews from real oppression in real Egypt under real Pharaoh, really crossing the real Red Sea and really wandering through a real wilderness, past real Mount Sinai, really receiving a real Law, and really entering a real Promised Land. Yet all these real things and events were deliberately designed by God as symbols, signs pointing beyond themselves to deeper, more spiritual things. The Exodus also = salvation; Egypt = sin; Pharoah = Satan; Moses = Christ; the Jews = the Church; the Red Sea = death; the wilderness = Purgatory; the Old Law = the New Law; the gospel; the old Mount (Sinai) = the new mount from which Jesus preached His “sermon on the mount” (Mt 5-7); and the Promised Land = Heaven. The “=” is not mathematical but symbolic.

St. Thomas distinguishes three kinds of symbolic interpretation:

Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division.

(1) For as the Apostle says (Heb 10:1), the Old Law (Old Testament) is a figure (symbol, image) of the New Law (New Testament, Gospel);

(2) And . . . the New Law itself is a figure of future glory (Heaven).

(3) Again, in the New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type (symbol, image, model) of what we ought to do (I,1,10).

So many passages in the Bible invite a fourfold interpretation:

(1) the literal, historical sense, on which all the others are based;

(2) the allegorical sense (the example of the Exodus, above);

(3) the moral sense (“the imitation of Christ”);

(4) the eschatological sense: thus Jesus’ physical miracles of healing are signs of spiritual healing from spiritual deafness, blindness, paralysis, etc. in Heaven.


Even if we need divine revelation to know more about God, and to know Him better, as St. Thomas explained in point #1, don’t we already know there is a God by innate common sense? Isn’t it part of human nature to believe in some God or other? All cultures in history have religion. Isn’t the gospel like a seed planted in a soil (human nature) that is already fertilized from within?


(a) To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in human nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude (ultimate good, perfection and happiness). For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known by him.

(b) This, however, is not to know absolutely (explicitly, clearly) that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching even though it is Peter who is approaching. For there are many who imagine that man’s perfect good, which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else (I,2,1).

Everyone has some God, some ultimate end, some summum bonum (“greatest good”). In this sense there are no simply non-religious human beings. An atheist too has a god: it is usually himself or his own pleasures, comforts, or joys.

If this were not so—if we did not innately seek beatitude—then the gospel, the revelation of the true God as our true beatitude, would not even be understandable or desirable; just as the offer of real, nourishing food would not be either understandable or desirable to an entity like a robot without hunger and without a digestive system.

Therefore, when talking with “non-religious” people, do not accept their false belief that there are two kinds of people: “religious people” and “non-religious people”. Don’t talk to the false mask they wear; talk to the real hunger within. It is always there.

As St. Augustine famously said, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and [therefore] our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” There are no exceptions to that.

Once someone recognizes and admits this vague yet sharp hunger in themselves, this “lover’s quarrel with the world”, this desire for a truer, deeper, more real happiness than we have in this world, for this “something more” that we cannot define yet cannot avoid yearning for because it is suggested in all the deepest joys in this world (human love, sex, music, sunsets, babies, storms, mountains, waves, poetry)—once this is admitted, the most direct and effective road for evangelism opens up: the evangelism of the heart. St. Thomas is the all-time master of the head, but he begins and ends in the heart. He enables your philosophy and your prayer to be one.


Why does God allow evil? This is the strongest argument for atheism.

St. Thomas formulates the argument. He says, If one of two contraries (opposites) be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable. But there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist (I,2,3).

If God is infinitely good, He does not will any evil. And if He is infinitely powerful, He gets all that He wills and only what He wills. So why is there evil? Does God lack goodness or power?

Here is St. Thomas’ answer:

As Augustine says, “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist and out of it produce good (1,2,3).

The clearest example of this is the crucifixion of Christ, the most evil deed ever done, the murder of God. And out of this greatest evil came the greatest good, our salvation. If God can pull off that trick there, He can do that anywhere. Every tragedy can be a “Good Friday”.

So when you see something evil, whether a physical evil (like death) or a moral evil (like the oppression of the innocent), know that God in His infinite wisdom knows infinitely more than you do about it and does not prevent it even though He could, because He is bringing some greater good out of it, usually a good that we cannot yet see, except by the eyes of faith and trust.

St. Thomas’ answer to the problem of evil is not just good philosophy; it is good spiritual direction, it is powerfully practical. Because it enables us to say to God “Even though I do not understand why You allowed this, I trust you”, not just when we see little evils like hemorrhoids but even when we see horrible evils like Holocausts. Job said, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15). We cannot prove it, and we cannot fully understand it, but we are always free to make the choice to trust Him. The atheist tries to take that freedom from us. St. Thomas defends us against that assault.

Neither St. Thomas nor any other human being can give the atheist what he demands: a reason why God allows this or that particular evil (e.g., the death of a child, or the power of a Hitler). But he can give the atheist a reason why it is irrational and unfair for him to demand to know such reasons. For if there is a God, Whose wisdom is infinitely greater than ours, then we would not be able to understand the reasons why He allows many things to happen, any more than a dog or an infant can understand why adults do what they do. For the difference between our finite minds and God’s infinite mind is at least as great as the difference between a dog’s or an infant’s finite mind and our own. We are not God. Why is it so hard for us to remember that?

In a vision, God summarized all of divine revelation to St. Catherine in two two-word sentences: “I’m God. You’re not.” Why is it so easy for us to forget that second thing?

There is therefore infinite room to trust Him even—especially—when we are shocked, surprised, and scandalized by some evil whose good result we simply do not see. We do not have divine eyes. But there is One Who does. Those are the two most salient facts of our existence.

If we did understand the reasons why God allowed every evil He allows, if we understood “the big picture”, we would be as wise as God; and in that case there would be no God above ourselves, and this would not disprove atheism, this would prove atheism.


Who made God? No one, of course, but how is that possible? Why is it so natural for us to ask that question?

We ask that question because we do not understand that God is not just one of many beings, a being, the first and greatest being, but a different kind of being than everything else. He exists from within His own essence (His essential nature); everything else needs an external cause to exist.

That is why God alone is to be adored absolutely, in Himself and from Himself and for Himself: because He alone exists absolutely, in Himself and from Himself and for Himself.

If the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its own essential principles (sources). Now it is impossible for a thing’s existence to be caused (efficient cause, agent, origin) by its own essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing whose existence differs from its essence must have its existence caused by another.

But this cannot be true of God, because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence. . . .

. . . [J]ust as that which has fire but is not itself fire (by its essence) is on fire by participation (in fire), so that which has existence but is not existence is a being by participation (in existence). . . . If therefore He is not His own existence, He will be not essential being but participated being. He would not then be the first being—which is absurd. Therefore God is His own existence (I,3,4).

This very abstract language about essence and existence is really quite easy to understand. The “essence” of a thing is its nature, what it is; its existence is whether it is. Unicorns have an essence but no existence; horses have both; square circles have neither.

Everything in the universe, everything except God, exists because it is caused, brought into existence by something else. Parents cause children, factories cause cars, the sun causes light, tectonic plate movements cause earthquakes. God alone has no cause, needs no cause; God alone exists from within rather than from without, by His essence rather than from a cause. Thus only God is necessary; everything else is a contingent might-not-have-been. And only God is eternal; everything else has a beginning.

What does this theological point have to do with the practical problem of becoming a saint? Everything. It most sharply distinguishes God the Creator from all creatures, no matter how great. (Even the greatest angel exists only because it is brought into existence by God.) And it is thus the reason for the first and greatest commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”, or, in Jesus’ formulation of the same commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Why is this the first commandment? Because it is the first truth, the first reality; and the commandments define what it is to live in reality rather than in fantasy, in truth rather than error or lies.

Sanctity is sanity. Being a saint is living in reality. Worshipping a creature, having a false God, is a lie. Not worshipping God, treating God as a creature, as a means to your own ends, as a finite thing, is a lie. Why? Because “only God is God.” This is the true heart of Islam. It is the Shahadah that every Muslim recites many times a day to remember the unforgettable wisdom that we so easily forget.

St. Thomas gives us the philosophical principles, the essence and existence language, that explains why God alone is the fullness of being. His essence is existence, and therefore He does not receive any being, any perfection, any essence, or any existence, from any other being, any creature. We are all dependent and interdependent; God alone is absolutely independent. To accept these two facts in our daily lives, to live as if this were true (since it is!), is the beginning of both sanity and sanctity.


Why do we sin? Most sins—perhaps all—are idolatries, preferring something else to God, some creature to the Creator. But creatures are temptingly good. We can’t help loving good wherever we find it. How can we avoid idolizing creatures, placing our love and hope and happiness in them instead of God?

By realizing that every good thing we seek is in God more perfectly than it is in any creatures. “Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it”, says Augustine. St. Thomas says:

All created perfections are in God. Hence He is spoken of as universally perfect (“all-perfect”), because He lacks not any excellence which may be found in creatures.

This may be seen from two considerations.

First, because whatever perfection exists in an effect must also be found in the effective cause . . . Since therefore God is the first effective cause of things, the perfection of all things must pre-exist in God in a more eminent way . . .

Second, from what has already been proved, God is existence (being) itself. Consequently, He must contain within Himself the whole perfection of being . . . Since therefore God is subsisting being itself, nothing of the perfection of being can be wanting to Him. Now all created perfections are included in the perfection of being, for things are perfect only insofar as they have being after some fashion. It follows therefore that the perfection of no being is wanting to God (I,4,2).

Whatever is desirable, in whatsoever beatitude (happiness, joy), whether true (beatitude) or (even) false (i.e., merely apparent beatitude), pre-exists wholly and in a more eminent degree in the divine beatitude.

As to contemplative happiness, God possesses a continual and most certain contemplation of Himself and of all things else.

And as to that which is active, He has the governance of the whole universe.

As to earthly happiness, which consists in delight, riches, power, dignity, and fame, according to Boethius (The Consolation of Philosophy III,10), He possesses joy in Himself and all things else for His delight:

Instead of riches, He has that complete self-sufficiency which is promised by riches; In place of power, He has omnipotence; For dignities, the government of all things;

And in place of fame, He possesses the admiration of all creatures (I,26,4, “Whether All Beatitude is Included in the Beatitude of God?”).

To paraphrase Augustine, when the john knocks on the door of the whorehouse he is looking for a cathedral. Every sin is a desire for some forbidden fruit, some invitingly fat, wiggly worm that the devil puts on his hook. If the fruit, or the worm, had no goodness, we would not desire it. Even stupid fish don’t bite bare hooks.

But everything, every good without exception, that we seek in forbidden fruit, or in worms on hooks, is to be found in God, in pure, perfect form. “Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it”, says Augustine. “You seek Life in the place of death.”

All sin, therefore, comes from a lack of faith—faith in this very fact, that God contains all perfections, not just some. God is not an option for “religious people”, whoever they are. God is the only game in town.

God, out of sheer love and generosity, has put all sorts of delightful “perfections” (desirable qualities, “good stuff”) into His creation—seas, stars, sunsets, babies, music, food, sex—and especially into His creation of persons, who are made in His image. And the Creator has even shared with us His creativity, so that we can create many more beauties of art, discoveries of science, powers of technology, and delights of society and culture. We naturally and rightly fall in love with them. The gifts of culture are God’s gifts too, indirectly, just as much as the gifts of nature are His gifts directly. But it is hard to avoid idolizing them, overdoing them and underdoing God.




“The form (nature) of the Desired is in the desire.” St. Thomas means by that saying that there is no such thing as desire simply, desire with no specific object, desire for nothing, or for everything in general, for an abstraction. There is only desire for food, drink, sleep, truth, goodness, beauty, sex, love, friendship, etc. The form of the object of each desire is in the desire itself, and gives it its nature: desire for sex is sexual desire, desire for knowledge is curiosity, desire for friendship is loneliness.

And thus since the form of its object is in the desire itself, and since what we most deeply desire is God, the infinite source of all finite perfections, therefore the infinite nature of God is “in” this infinite desire for God, like a negative photograph, or like a silhouette. When your mother dies, your grief is a mother-shaped grief; when you lack God it is a God-shaped lack, a God-shaped (and God-sized) vacuum. The desire for God has no limit because its object (God) has no limit.

St. Thomas here simply explains, in philosophical language, St. Augustine’s beloved and famous saying that summarizes the whole meaning of life: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and [that is why] our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee” (Confessions I,1).

How this frees us from worry! Jesus tells foolish, fussing Martha the startling good news that “There is only one thing needful!” (Lk 10:38-42). It’s Him. Mary knew that, and Martha didn’t, even though both loved Him. No thought more liberating, more simplifying, more unifying than that thought has ever entered into a human mind. Your life can be one. You can be one. You do not need to be torn apart, harried and hassled, bothered and bewildered. You can become one great person by having one great love.

For you are what you love. Your love is your destiny. Augustine says your love is your gravity (amor meus, pondus meum).

In speaking to Martha, Christ speaks to all of us. He sees us in her, and he wants to liberate us out of her confusions, her illusions, and her worries, and into Mary’s “one thing needful”. He is the One we need to seek, and find, and meet, and love, and serve in all things. Because everything we seek, every good, every happiness, every joy, every perfection, is There.

(You see now why I took two pages instead of one for this simplest of all lessons. It is really all we need to know to become saints, if we only live it.)


If God made all things, did He make bad things too?

Every being that is not God, is God’s creature. Now every creature of God is good (1 Tim 4:4), and God is the greatest good, therefore every being is good. . . . No being can be spoken of as evil . . . as being, but only insofar as it lacks being. Thus a man is said to be evil because he lacks some virtue, and an eye is said to be evil because it lacks the power to see well (I,5,3).

St. Thomas was once invited to a dinner with King Louis and his court. The absent-minded professor did not join the conversation at the meal but was thinking through some theological problem. Suddenly he banged his fist on the table and muttered, “That will settle the Manichees!” The court held their breaths at this absent-minded breach of etiquette in front of the king, but the wise king called for his secretary to write down St. Thomas’ argument before he forgot it. What was the argument? It was probably the very quotation above. Manicheeism claimed that since there were good things and bad things, there were two gods: the good one made good things and the bad one made bad things, which the Manichees identified with material things.

St. Augustine was held back from Christianity, and suckered into Manicheeism, for years by the problem of evil. He wondered: If God is the maker of all things, mustn’t He be the maker of ill things? Why did the good God make evil? Why did God create mosquitoes and volcanoes and hemorrhoids? Then one day he realized that he did not need another, evil God to make these things, as the Manichees said, but that these things are not evil.

Augustine said, “I sought for the cause of evil, but I sought in an evil way.” He was looking everywhere else but in the mirror. Evil is in our sins, which come from us, not in our being, which comes from God. We love to blame matter, or our bodies, or others, or “society”, or our parents, or chance, or evolution, or genetics, or our ancestors, or the Devil, or even God, for the evil in our lives. But God is all-good, so we can’t blame God; and all that God made is good, so we can’t blame any of that. God made even the Devil good in the beginning; the Devil corrupted himself by his own rebellion. The devil can only tempt us, not force us. So we are left with nothing to blame but ourselves.

There have always been heresies that blamed evil on matter: Manicheeism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism in ancient times, various “spiritualities” or spiritualisms in ours. These isms are not only an insult to God and His creation, but also a convenient but dishonest excuse for our own sins. “My hormones made me do it” is no better an excuse than “the Devil made me do it.”

When St. Thomas says that “no being can be spoken of as evil . . . as being, but only insofar as it lacks being”, he does not mean that evil is unreal, illusory, or fantasy. Blindness is a real physical evil, but it is not a thing, an entity, a being; it is a defect or lack or privation in a thing: the privation (deprivation) of sight in the thing we call an eye. The eye is good, the blindness is not. The soul is good, the sin is not. God made the eye and its sight but not the sightlessness, the privation of sight; God made the soul and its virtues, and its love (for “God is love”), but not the sins, the vices, the lack of virtue, the lovelessness.

All the being, all the positive “stuff”, is good, for it all came from God before we turned it against Him. God made the metal in the earth that we made into the nails that we hammered into His Son’s hands and feet, and He made the flies that buzzed around His bleeding head on the Cross. And God made our strength of mind and will that we used to command the hands and hammers.

He said, after each day’s work of creation, “It’s good!” Let us dare to agree with Him. Let us love everything He loved into being. All that is, is good; all being is good; being as such is good, ens est bonum. It is better to be than not to be; that’s why God said, “Let there be!” He’s just got this thing about being. We should too!


How can I simplify my life? It’s not lacking in good things, it’s too full of them. How can I find space, and time, and simplicity?

The answer is: By realizing that the only things you need are good things, and that there are not as many good things as you think, because there are only three kinds of goods:

Goodness is rightly divided into (1) the virtuous, (2) the useful, and (3) the pleasant. . . . Goodness is not divided into these three as something univocal to be predicated equally of them all, but as something analogical to be predicated of them according to priority and posteriority. Hence it is predicated chiefly of the virtuous, then of the pleasant, and lastly of the useful (I,5,6).

What is “virtuous” is good in itself. The reason to be virtuous, to do right and not wrong, is simply because it’s right and not wrong. What is “pleasant” is simply what makes you happy. And what is “useful” is whatever is a means to either what is virtuous or what is pleasant.

These are three different kinds of goods. They are good analogically, good in different ways, different senses. They are not the same in rank. They are in a hierarchy. (1) The virtuous good is the “goodest” because it is good absolutely, in itself. (2) The pleasant is next because it is also an end in itself (we seek pleasure for no other reason than pleasure), but it is not absolute but relative (“different strokes for different folks”). Also, not all pleasures are virtuous, though all virtues are pleasant. And the deepest pleasure is an effect of virtue, not vice versa. (3) Finally, the useful is good only as a means to either virtue or pleasure.

Hedonists are fools who seek only pleasure. But these people are never really deeply happy, deeply pleased. Pleasure comes only as a by-product. Pleasure-addicts are like hypochondriacs. They destroy the very thing they seek by idolizing it.

Pragmatists and utilitarians are fools who seek only utility. But as Chesterton says, “man’s most pragmatic need is to be more than a pragmatist”, to have some end to justify all these means, some absolute that all these things are relative to, something all these useful things are useful for.

Most of us are semi-hedonists and semi-utilitarians because we fill up our lives and our thoughts with useful goods first of all, then pleasant goods, then virtue last of all, as a kind of last-minute check. We invert the hierarchy. Especially in modern America, where we idolize our feelings (pleasures) and treat everything else (even unborn babies) as utilitarian, disposable consumer goods.

How can we find more room and time in our lives and our thoughts for the higher goods? By simplifying and minimizing the lower goods, and above all by eliminating everything else that is not really good at all. St. Thomas’ classification gives us a road map for a wonderful simplification of our lives. Everyone needs that today. Everyone complains that their lives are too complex, that there is not enough time, not enough leisure—even though (or perhaps because) we have all these technological time-saving devices, our hundreds of mechanical slaves. We are slaves to our slaves. St. Thomas’ simple common sense can free us from this slavery.

For there are only three kinds of good. So if a thing is not virtuous, useful, or pleasant, it’s not really good. So fagetaboutit! Simplify your life by throwing out all the things you have that you don’t need, all that’s not virtuous, useful, or pleasant. Don’t do anything for any other reason, e.g., because “everybody’s doing it” or “everybody has one” or just because it’s “expected”, or because you feel a spontaneous desire for it once you see a commercial for it. Do you really need to buy that expensive sneaker or super cell phone, or to read that book that’s on the best-seller list, or go to that dull meeting? Is it your moral duty? Does it give you happiness, or even pleasure? If the answer to all three questions is no, then dump it! A house without a garbage can becomes cluttered and smelly. The same is true of a life.

Our lives need a “Thoreau” simplification.


Where can I find God?

The answer is literally everywhere.

God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately, and touch it by its power; hence . . . the thing moved and the mover must be joined together.

Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect, as to ignite is the proper effect of fire.

Now God causes this effect (being, existence) in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being, as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things . . . Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.

Objection 1. It seems that God is not in all things, for what is above all things is not in all things, but God is above all things.

Reply to Objection 1. God is above all things by the excellence of His nature. . . (but) He is in all things as the cause of the being of all things. . . .

Objection 2. Further, what is in anything is thereby contained. Now God is not contained by things, but rather does He contain them. . . .

Reply to Objection 2. Although corporeal things are said to be in another as in that which contains them, nevertheless spiritual things contain those things in which they are, as the soul contains the body. (The soul contains the body, not vice versa, as the spiritual meaning of a play contains its physical setting, not vice versa.) Hence also God is in things as containing them.

Objection 4. Further, the demons are beings. But God is not in the demons, for there is no fellowship between light and darkness. . .

Reply to Objection 4. In the demons there is their nature, which is from God, and also the deformity of sin, which is not from Him; therefore it is not to be absolutely conceded that God is in the demons except with the addition inasmuch as they are beings. But in beings not deformed in their nature, we must say absolutely that God is (I,8,1).

This point is so important that it will take two pages to explore it. It is important because it can directly help you to become a saint. The easiest and most effective way to become a saint is to “practice the presence of God,” which is to get just a little bit closer to the Beatific Vision which we will have in Heaven, the Vision which will make it impossible for us to sin because we will be in the presence of the One Who is so supremely beautiful and good and lovable that sin will no longer be attractive, and because “we will see Him as He is.” Then we will know by direct sight and experience rather than by faith that nothing can ever be more attractive than Him. We can get only a little bit closer to that Vision in this life, but even the tiniest bit of progress on that road is worth infinitely more than spectacular success on any other road.

St. Thomas here gives us the philosophical basis for practicing the presence of God everywhere. He explains how God is everywhere, in all things. If we see this “big picture”, the whole world will light up like a stained glass window when the rising sun (the rising Son!) suddenly shines on it, all the colors bursting into life with one and the same light.

This is not pantheism, but it is not deism either. Pantheism sees God as a sea and us as waves: He’s only all of us. Deism sees God as a deadbeat dad Who left His kids after fathering them. He’s gone. For St. Thomas, God is in all things, present rather than absent; but He also transcends all things. In fact, He is in all things only because He transcends them all—like light: only because it transcends all colors, can it be present to all colors. Or like mind: only because it transcends matter can it be present to all matter by knowing it all. So with God: because He is infinite existence itself, transcending all finite, limited essences or natures, He can be present to all of them in giving them existence.

The essence of a rock, a dog, or a man, does not include God. But their existence is caused by God, not just in the past, by creation, but also in the present, by preservation. God preserves them in being, He continues to give them the act of existence.

Everything gives what it has, and God is the fullness of being itself, so God gives being, i.e., He creates being and preserves in being. To say that God is the fullness of being is to say that God does not have existence, from any outside source or cause; He is existence by His own essence, therefore He can give it; and this is what creation of being and preservation in being means.

Pantheism grasps half the truth: that God is not one being among others, but the fullness of being. But pantheism forgets His transcendence. Deism grasps the other half of the truth: that God is the transcendent Creator; that He is not any creature, nor the sum total of all creatures, but transcends creatures. But deism forgets His immanence, His presence.

St. Thomas explains that presence by the nature of causality. For A to cause B, A must touch B, A must meet B. Since God causes creatures, He must touch them. Men do not impregnate women without touching them, and women do not give birth to children without touching them, and baseball bats do not move baseballs through the air without touching them. And minds do not solve problems without touching them mentally, i.e., thinking about them. The “touch” may be physical or mental, but all causality involves some touch, i.e., some presence of the cause to the effect.

But creatures touch other creatures only externally, from without. God touches creatures internally, at their ultimate center: their act of existing. He “turns them all on” from within. Hot things give heat, and dogs give dogginess, and God, Infinite Being, gives being. And therefore we can find Him in every being, in every grain of sand.

Gilson calls this “the great syllogism”:

(1) Being is innermost in each thing.

(2) God is very being, by His own essence.

(3) Therefore God is in all things, and innermostly.

Think of a thing as a series of concentric circles. From the outer to the inner, they are: (1) external relations to other things, (2) accidental actions, (3) accidental qualities or properties, (4) essential properties, and (5) the essence itself.

For instance, there is (1) your superiority to your cat (relation), (2) your eating steak (action), (3) your being hungry (accidental quality), (4) your ability to speak (essential property), and (5) your being human, being a rational animal (your essence).

Or for Bambi there is (1) being in the forest (relation), (2) running (action), (3) being skinny (accidental property), (4) having senses (essential property), and (5) being a deer (essence).

What makes all five of these aspects actual is existence, the point at the center of all five circles. A unicorn has these other five aspects too, but none of them is actual, or real, because unicorns don’t exist, even though they have perfectly good essences and the other four dimensions. When God gives existence to a deer but not to a unicorn, He “turns on” the whole of the deer, and is therefore present to the whole concrete substance, all of the deer, at once.

And because He is not in time, He is not past or future but present, present now, creating us now, not just in the past. God has no dead past and no unborn future; He is “the living God”, not the dead or unborn God; He is everything that He is, and does everything that He does, in the present. He is always now. He is right now saying: “fiat”, “let it be” to you. That is why you exist. And your cat too.

Meet Him there. For “all real living is meeting” (Rabbi Martin Buber in I and Thou).


How can our ultimate end be “the Beatific Vision” of God Himself? Isn’t that too high and holy and distant for us to hope for? We are like worms and God is like Mount Everest. Doesn’t it make more sense to say, in the words of the famous Vermont farmer joke, that “you can’t get there from here”?

Whether any created intellect can see the essence of God?

It is written: We shall see Him as He is (1 Jn 2:2).

God is in Himself supremely knowable. But what is in itself supremely knowable may not be knowable to a particular intellect on account of the excess of the intelligible object above the intellect, as, for example, the sun, which is supremely visible, cannot be seen by the bat by reason of its excess of light. Therefore some who considered this held that no created intellect can see the essence of God.

This opinion, however, is not tenable. For as the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of the intellect (mind, understanding), if we suppose the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else besides God; which is opposed to faith. . . . Further, the same opinion is also against reason. For there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause (reason, explanation) of any effect which he sees, and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.

Hence it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God (I,12,1).

How can we see God? How can we get there from here? The question is legitimate, and stems from a profoundly true understanding of the ininity of the gap between us and God. Only someone who vastly overestimates humanity, or vastly underestimates divinity, or both, can be insensitive to this question, or unworried about it.

(“Seeing” Him, of course, means not just “perceiving” Him with the eyes, or even with the abstract reason, but above all with the heart; “knowing” Him personally, not just impersonally; as Father, not just Explanation. The I AM is not just AM (being) but also I (person).)

But the question is answerable, for God has planted the desire to see Him in our very nature, which remains in all of us, even the most sinful. We find in our very nature the desire to know the ultimate explanation for everything, which is in the Mind that designed everything, the Author of the story we are all in. For we desire to know all that can be known about all that is. (We also desire to attain and enjoy all the good that is and all the beauty that is, but we first have to know it in order to appreciate and enjoy it.) This is not a religious dogma that requires faith to believe; it is a fact anyone can find simply by introspection. Whether or not there is a God, our hearts are in fact restless until they rest in God. It takes only honesty, not faith, to discover that.

So whether God exists or not, we have a natural desire for God. But “nature makes nothing in vain.” All natural desires correspond to real beings that can satisfy them: hunger, thirst, eros, tiredness, loneliness, boredom, ugliness, injustice, and pain point to food, drink, sex, rest, friends, interest, beauty, justice, and pleasure. Unless this one desire—the greatest one of all—is the one and only exception.

But if that is the case, if this is the one exception to the law that runs through everything else, then the correspondence between desires and satisfactions in everything else is not caused by a good God, nor by random chance (it is far too coincidental for that) but by a bad God, or the Devil, who lures us with a thousand appetizers and then starves us of the main course.

Perhaps that cannot be proved to be false, as St. Thomas thinks it can; but why would anyone choose to believe that rather than believe, hope and trust the alternative explanation, that God (and therefore the nature He gave us) is good and trustable? Why bet on what you can’t win even if you win?


If we can know God by reason, why do we need faith and revelation? If we can’t know God by reason, how can faith be intelligent and intelligible? What is the role of reason in our faith life?

Whether God can be known in this life by natural reason?

It is written (Rom 1:19), That which is known of God . . . is manifest in them . . .

Our natural knowledge begins from sense. Hence our natural knowledge can go as far as it can be led by sensible things. But our mind cannot be led by sense so far as to know the essence of God because the sensible effects of God do not equal the power of God as their cause. Hence from sensible things the whole power of God cannot be known, nor . . . can His essence be seen.

But because they are His effects and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God whether He exists and to know of Him what must necessarily belong to Him as the first cause of all things, exceeding all things created by Him. Hence we know His relationship with creatures so far as to be the cause of them all; also that . . . He superexceeds them all (I,12,12).

We can know by faith as well as reason that we can know God by reason as well as faith. The Bible (Rom 1-2) and the Church (Vatican Council I) clearly tell us that everyone, even unbelievers, can know that there is a God by nature (“sensible things”) and by conscience. If there is design, there is a Designer; and if there is a moral law, there is a moral Lawgiver. Reason can lead us that far—to a Mind behind nature and a Will behind the moral law—though it cannot tell us the essence of this Being.

So our own reason, if honestly and commonsensically followed, will do two things: it will begin our journey to God by assuring us that there is indeed a God at the end; and it will confess its inadequacy to finish the journey, and will send us looking for the higher vehicle that can finish it: for divine revelation, which gives us the road map, and for divine grace, which gives us the fuel.

At the end of the journey is total truth (the understanding of the ultimate reason for all things), total goodness (perfect holiness, and the model for all holiness), and total beatitude (infinite, unending, ecstatic, incomprehensible joy). If we honestly admit our need and desire for these three things at the beginning of the journey, we will eventually arrive at the end; that is a solemn promise from God himself: “All who seek [Me] will find (Me)” (Mt 7:7-11). Only those who are not honest with their own nature, and do not seek, will fail to come to know the divine nature; only those who refuse their own humanity will fail to reach the divinity; only those who suppress these three clues God has put into their deepest heart will find misery rather than happiness in their heart at the end.

How much can reason tell us about God? Enough to begin but not enough to end. St. Thomas lists three things about God that we can know by reason alone: (1) that He exists, (2) that He is the first cause and ultimate explanation of all things, of their existence as well as of their design and intelligibility; and (3) that He is mysterious to us not because He is less real, true, good, or beautiful than all His creatures, but more. He is to our mind as the sun is to the eyes of a bat or an owl.

Thus St. Thomas avoids the two opposite extremes of theological skepticism and rationalism, intellectual despair and intellectual pride. Like Aristotle, his habit is always to seek out and avoid two extremes on nearly every issue. For there is usually one angle for standing upright and two angles for falling, to the right or to the left.


In Norse mythology there is a “rainbow bridge” from earth to Heaven (Asgard). What is the real “rainbow bridge” from man to God? In objective reality it’s Christ, of course; but what is it in subjective reality, in our souls, in our minds? It’s faith, of course; but mustn’t there must be a bridge from reason too, for those who don’t yet have faith?—a bridge from reason to faith as well as from reason to God? But there’s a problem with any bridge from reason: our words and our concepts are finite, and made for finite things: dogs, atoms, galaxies. How can we label God? If we can’t label Him, how can we identify Him? When the mystics get close to Him, they all say that words utterly fail. How far can words (and the concepts they express) go? Can they help at all? How can our language about God be meaningful?

No name belongs to God in the same sense as it belongs to creatures; for instance, wisdom in creatures is a quality (an “accident”, or property, of the creature’s essence), but not in God (where nothing is accident but all is substance, essential nature). . . (and therefore) what is said of God and creatures is not univocally (with one and the same meaning) predicated of them. . .

God (Who is infinite) is more distant from creatures than any (finite) creatures are from each other; but the distance of some creatures (from each other) makes univocal predication of (even) them impossible . . . therefore much less can anything be predicated univocally of God and creatures. . . .

The term wise, applied to man, in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is applied to God. . . . Hence it is evident that the term wise is not applied in the same way to God and to man. The same rule applies to other terms. Hence no name is predicated univocally of God and creatures.

Neither, on the other hand, are names applied to God and creatures in a purely equivocal sense, as some have said. Because if that were so, it follows that from creatures nothing could be known or demonstrated about God at all, for the reasoning would always be exposed to the fallacy of equivocation. Such a view is against . . . what the Apostle said: The invisible things of God are clearly seen through the things that are made (Rom 1:20).

Therefore it must be said that these names are said of God and creatures in an analogous sense. . . . For in analogies the idea is not one and the same, as it is in univocals, yet it is not totally diverse, as it is in equivocals; but a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to one thing; thus healthy applied to urine signifies the sign of animal health, and applied to medicine signifies the cause of the same health (I,13,5).

St. Thomas, as usual, rejects two opposite errors here: rationalism and skepticism. Rationalism is far too optimistic about the power of our words to tell Who God is; for only God’s Word (Christ), and not our words, can fully express God. But skepticism is far too pessimistic; for since God designed man with a rational soul, with a mind that is dependent on and dimly reflecting the divine mind, words can help—a little. He has not left Himself without witness in our minds.

Rationalism thinks human reason can do more than it really can, in insisting that our words about God must apply to God as our words for creatures apply to creatures: univocally, with one and the same meaning. Skepticism thinks human reason can do less than it can, in insisting that our words about the infinite God can refer to nothing real in God, since our words are taken from our experience of finite creatures. Skepticism says our words about God are equivocal, that they have a wholly different meaning when applied to God than they do when applied to creatures. Thus there is no “rainbow bridge” for reason to get to God.

St. Thomas steers clear of both extremes. Our positive words for God (“good”, “wise”, etc.) are neither univocal—wholly the same—nor equivocal—wholly different—but analogical—partly the same and partly different.

And these two “parts” cannot be separated, like two quantities, into a univocal part and an equivocal part. God’s goodness (and His wisdom, His power, and all His other perfections) is not the same as man’s goodness; nor is it totally unlike man’s goodness; but it is a little bit like man’s goodness. Or rather, man’s goodness is a little bit like God’s. A good man is more like God than a good dog is, and a good man is more like God than a bad man is. Thus we can begin to move forward in the right direction on the rainbow bridge, to a significant and helpful extent.

But our words and concepts cannot take us all the way to the other side of the river. We cannot know God’s essence; we cannot know what He is. But we can know, by analogy, what He is like (or rather, what is like Him: for a person is not like his picture, a picture is like a person). Thus created things (all created things!) do give us clues and signs to their (and our) Creator.

We can also know what He is not, and here our words can be univocal, and perfectly clear. God is not an angel, or a man, or a dragon, or a lion, or a galaxy (though all these things resemble Him in some at least metaphorical way). By this clear, univocal negative knowledge we can avoid idolatry.

This is not just a theoretical, philosophical point. It affects our lives. Analogy means that we can know God by means of all things, in all things, but imperfectly. Our reason, like our faith, sees “through a glass, darkly”. The whole world consists of divine footprints, fingerprints, clues, pointing fingers. Look along them, not just at them, and you will be looking toward God. And looking toward Him is both a cause and an effect of longing toward Him and living toward Him and loving toward Him, i.e., being a saint.


The name “Michael” means “Who is like God?” The implied answer to this rhetorical question is, of course, “No one.” But doesn’t that mean St. Thomas is wrong when he says we can think and speak of God by analogies with earthly things? God is not like anything else at all.

The answer to this question depends on whether analogy means that God is like creatures or vice versa. St. Thomas says it is vice versa. God is indeed not like anything else; but everything else is like Him. He is the standard, the touchstone, the “prime analogate”, and we creatures are the analogies. That is what St. Thomas means by saying that the positive names for God, all of which are analogical, are predicated (said) not primarily of creatures but of God.

It seems that names are predicated primarily of creatures rather than of God. . . .

On the contrary, it is written: I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Whom all paternity in heaven and on earth is named (Eph 3:14-15); and the same applies to other names applied to (both) God and creatures. . . .

In names predicated of many in an analogical sense, all are predicated because they have reference to one same thing . . . such a name must be applied primarily to that which is (first) . . . and secondarily to those others as they approach more or less to that first. Thus, for instance, healthy (is first) applied to animals (and then secondly it also) comes into the definition of healthy applied to medicine, which is called healthy as being the cause of health in the animal, and also into the definition of healthy which is applied to urine, which is called healthy in so far as it is the sign and effect of the animal’s health. . . .

The words God is good, or wise, signify . . . that these (properties) exist in Him in a more excellent way. . . . These names are applied primarily to God rather than to creatures because these perfections flow from God to creatures. . . .

The same rule does not apply to metaphorical . . . names . . . all names applied metaphorically to God are applied to creatures primarily rather than to God . . . so the name lion applied to God means only that God manifests strength in His works, as a lion in his (I,13,6).

Scripture uses many earthly analogies for God. But the analogies work only one way: everything is in some way a little bit like God (that is why they can lead us to God: the “rainbow bridge”), but God is not like them. He made us in His image, not vice versa. He is not called “our Father” because His fatherhood is named after ours, but because ours is named after His. (That’s the point of the passage from Ephesians that St. Thomas quotes above.) When Christ said to His disciples, “I have food to eat of which you do not know”, they interpreted it literally; and He corrected them: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn 4: 31-34). They did not understand that this “soul food” is real food, and that body food is only an image or analogy of that. That which nourishes spiritual life—namely, doing the will of the Father, loving and trusting surrender to His will—is not an image of the bread that nourishes physical life; bread is an instructive image of it. Everything is. God’s world is a cathedral full of icons.

Some of these icons are metaphors: God can be called a lion not because He really is a lion. Other icons are not mere metaphors: God is called good, and Father, and love because He really is good, and Father, and love. The analogical use of the word is applied to creatures and the literal use is applied to God. We are the analogy, not Him. In metaphors, the analogical use is applied to God and the literal use to creatures.

What makes a lion a lion is its finite form, its lion-ness, and this is the shape of those particular limits on being, truth, goodness, and beauty that God designed the lion to have. For instance, to be a lion is not to be as big as an elephant or as gentle as a pussycat. These limits are not in God, so God is not a lion. But all the perfections these limits limit—all the being, truth, goodness, and beauty that are in a lion—are in God without limit. All the perfections of a pussycat are in God too. Thus God is simultaneously maximally strong and maximally gentle. He is the standard for the “gentle-man”.

The philosophical principle in St. Thomas that explains and justifies this one-way analogy (a principle we will see later) is that essence limits existence (being), and that God is infinite, unlimited existence, Being itself rather than a being. If you don’t understand that, don’t worry. Just remember that being, for St. Thomas, is not an abstraction. If it’s only an abstraction to you, leave it alone; it will do you no good and much harm to think of God as an abstraction. That’s like thinking of a volcano as an abstraction.


In one of Christ’s parables, God says to the damned, “Depart from Me, I never knew you” (Mt 7:23). How can God not know anything? Mustn’t He know everything real?

Augustine says, Not because they are, does God know all creatures spiritual and temporal, but because He knows them, therefore they are. The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art. . . (I,14,8).

In one sense the damned are real (and in that sense God knows them) but in another sense they are not real because He does not know them. He knows of them (“wissen”) but He does not personally know them (“kennen”). He says to them: “I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers” (Mt 7:23).

He created the world by thinking it into being, by knowing it into existence. He is a creative artist, we are scientists; He thought up and designed and created what we discover. The world is our science but God’s art. (See #17.) He knows it into being, as Tolkien knew hobbits into being.

God’s knowing and willing are one: He wills us into being by knowing us into being. In us, knowing and willing are two, and we have to know something (real or imagined) before we will it.

We have earthly existence, earthly life (bios), because He knew us into being as bios when He said “Let there be this person.” And we have eternal existence because He knew us into eternal existence, eternal life (zoe), in Christ, in Whom He knew us (kennen) and prepared His Kingdom for us to inherit “from the foundation of the world” (Mt 25:34).

But to the damned He will say “I never knew you; depart from me” (Mt 7:23). Thus Psalm 1 describes the difference between eternal happiness and unhappiness this way: “The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish” (Ps 1:6).

A consequence of this principle about divine knowing is the vanity of earthly glory:

Man’s happiness cannot consist in human fame or glory. For glory consists in being well known and praised . . . Now the thing known is related to human knowledge otherwise than to God’s knowledge: for human knowledge is caused by the things known, whereas God’s knowledge is the cause of the things known. Wherefore the perfection of human good, which is called happiness, cannot be caused by human knowledge, but rather human knowledge of another’s happiness proceeds from and in a fashion is caused by human happiness itself, imperfect or perfect. And therefore man’s happiness depends, as on its cause, on the glory which man has with God (I-II,2,3).

A significant part of our joy in Heaven will be to know that God knows us and is pleased by us, as a father knows, and pays attention to, and is pleased by, his tiny infant’s first clumsy walking steps, or first attempt to draw Daddy a picture birthday card. What a joy to be recognized by Daddy! That is why we will have, and now rightly desire, rewards in Heaven: not because our Heavenly Father is a cosmic Santa, a means to the rewards He gives, but because the rewards are Himself, His “well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your master” (Mt 25:21). What is that joy? It is that very recognition and approval.

It does not enter into us, we enter into it. It is not in us, we are in it, because we are in Him. We are real, and good, and joy-filled, because God says so. He makes it so by knowing it.

He spoke the universe into being, and He does the same to us, first in our creation and then in our redemption, and He does all three creative acts by His creative Word: (1) His Word “let there be” created the universe. (2) He only “made” our bodies out of some “stuff,” but He created our souls out of nothing, as He had created the “stuff” out of nothing by His Word. (3) And that same Word died to redeem us and remake us, to “create” new hearts (Ps 51:10). Making saints out of sinners was even greater than making something out of nothing. For nothingness put up no resistance to Him, as we did.

How much resistance? Look at a crucifix to see what He had to do to conquer that resistance.


Is science an honorable and holy occupation, or is it only a means for satisfying human curiosity and for the creature comforts and conveniences of technology? Is our serious study of creatures a kind of idolatry or infidelity, or is it pleasing to the Creator? Is it somehow ultimately about Him?

Natural things are midway between the knowledge of God and our knowledge; for we receive knowledge from natural things, of which God is the cause by His knowledge. Hence, as the natural objects of knowledge are prior to our knowledge, and are its measure, so the knowledge of God (the knowledge God has of things) is prior to natural things and is the measure of them; as, for instance, a house is midway between the knowledge of the builder who made it and the knowledge of the one who gathers his knowledge of the house from the house already built (I,14,8).

Truth in science is discovered; truth in art is created. God is an artist, not a scientist; He designed and created the world, which is first of all the product of His art and then becomes the object of our science. Therefore all human science—in all senses of “science”, ancient (broad) and modern (narrow)—is really an appreciation of the divine art. And since all art reveals something about its artist, the knowledge of creatures, by its very nature, leads us in the direction of the knowledge of the Creator, if we are only fair and honest and open-minded toward it.

This is why many great scientists have in fact been led closer to God by the discoveries of their science. There is no such thing as “the conflict between science and religion”. It is as mythical as a zombie. Insofar as it does exist, that conflict is as unnatural as “the war between the sexes”: an unnatural, fallen, abnormal situation that is mistakenly taken as the norm. Or it is like the Marxists’ “class conflict”, the supposedly necessary power struggle between the haves and the have-nots: it is an ideological contrivance, a piece of propaganda. It is either unnatural or unreal. The very idea of it comes into history not from a good mind but from a bad will. The ultimate origin or first cause of this lie is envy or pride or greed or arrogance, not honest love and truth-seeking. (That does not mean, of course, that individuals cannot be honestly conned and confused by its propaganda.)

Science is an honorable and even a holy occupation. It is a kind of remote and indirect mental telepathy with God, the reading of some of God’s thoughts after Him, however dimly. The greatest of scientists (e.g., Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein) were all quite clear about that.

But you don’t have to be a professional scientist to appreciate science. Science is for everyone. Science is not elitist. Science is only methodologically refined common sense. Take science courses. Read science books. (Just be aware of the difference between science and ideology.) Learn more about the divine creativity. Everything you learn about Him is a new reason to adore and love Him. He is amazing and wonderful, and therefore so is His creation.


Is God alive, or is He just an idea, an ideal, an essence, a nature, a Platonic Form, a principle, a formula, something abstract? Is He more like the Idea of an alligator or more like an alligator? Is God something that would act on you and interrupt you and interfere with you and creep up on you and surprise you, like a live alligator? Can you meet Him? Can you say “Look out! It’s alive!”?

Life in the highest degree belongs to God. In proof of which it must be considered that since a thing is said to live in so far as it operates of itself and not as moved by another, the more perfectly this power is found in anything, the more perfect is the life of that thing . . . But although our intellect (too) moves itself to some things, yet others (things) are supplied (to it) by nature, (through sensation and by) first principles (like the law of non-contradiction) which it cannot doubt, and (by) the last end, which it cannot but will. Hence, although with respect to some things it (our intellect) moves itself, yet with regard to other things it must be moved by another. (But) that Being whose act of understanding is Its very nature, and which . . . is not determined by another, must have life in the most perfect degree. Such is God; and hence in Him principally is life (I,18,3).

We tend to reduce “life” to “biological life” or at least “human life”. But what is essential to life, and common to all life, is not necessarily molecules, or mortality, but self-movement, movement from within rather than merely from without. Even plants grow from within, unlike rocks.

There are various levels of life: plants, animals, men, angels, God. All are active from their own nature, all do something. When we say to a rock “Don’t just stand there, do something”, it does not obey. But even a plant does: it grows. And an animal moves around and desires things. And a human being makes free choices. And an angel contemplates God. God too, in the supreme sense, acts, does things. He is more like an alligator than a rock, or an idea. Ideas can’t act; only real things can act.

C. S. Lewis says that speaking about “man’s search for God” is like speaking about the mouse’s search for the cat. We don’t creep up on the Hound of Heaven; He follows us. (But He has gentle feet, withdrawn claws, and merciful eyes.) Here is Lewis’ unforgettable description:
