i swerve into thomas aquinas...

     My only friends, of late I've been drawn back into the complex world of intricate implication that is the thought of one Tomasso d'Aquino (would he have been called Tomasso in the thirteenth century?). It has been a while since I spent any time with the Angelic Doctor. I have even sought to distance myself from that way of construing history which places him at a kairos wherein he weaves his grand synthesis, only to have epigones and enemies tear it to pieces in the succeeding centuries. This genealogical method obscures much of the difficulty of relating a man like Thomas to the rapid and sometimes overwhelming changes of his time, and thus renders a caricature of the relationship between intellectual history on the one hand, and political and social history on the other. 

     Still, once you have shaken off the genealogical jitters, Thomas's works, especially the great Summa Theologiae, stand in all their beauty and danger. So, it seems time to take up the arduous effort of reading him once again. I don't promise by any means that I'll read only works by Tomasso. In fact, I will continue to read Julian of Norwich, all manner of poets and novelists, and pretty much anything I please come to think of it. Just know that accompanying it all will be the constant recourse to the Dumb Ox and his best readers. (Right now, that includes Denys Turner, Fran O'Rourke, Jean-Pierre Torrell, Gilles Emery, Thomas Gilby, and of course the venerable Etienne Gilson.) Anyway, this is happening, and only good can come from it.