Why did Thomas suddenly cut short his career? One famous author has a guess.
G.K. Chesterton | posted 1/01/2002 12:00AM
[Thomas] had returned victorious from his last combat with [radical Aristotelian] Siger of Brabant; returned and retired. This particular quarrel was the one point, as we may say, in which his outer and his inner life had crossed and coincided; he realized how he had longed from childhood to call up all allies in the battle for Christ; how he had only long afterwards called up Aristotle as an ally; and now in that last nightmare of sophistry, he had for the first time truly realized that some might really wish Christ to go down before Aristotle.
He never recovered from the shock. He won his battle, because he was the best brain of his time, but he could not forget such an inversion of the whole idea and purpose of his life.
He was the sort of man who hates hating people. He had not been used to hating even their hateful ideas, beyond a certain point. But in the abyss of anarchy opened by Siger's sophistry … he had seen the possibility of the perishing of all idea of religion, and even of ...
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