Tag: Saint Thomas Aquinas

Two Kinds of People

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…

Choices Make Habits

St. Thomas, as usual, is the apostle of common sense. Virtue, like reason and language, is in us by nature potentially—we are designed for it—but since the actualization of this potentiality depends on our free…

Never Out-of-Date

Cicero lived some five hundred years before Augustine. He himself sent his own son to Greece to study philosophy. Cicero wrote to his son a famous letter, the famous On Duties, which attempted to explain…

Today’s One-Liner (#297)

I take it for granted that we read what are rightly called “great books”—Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, St. Augustine, some Church fathers, St. Thomas, Shakespeare, and into the…

Today’s One-Liner (#292)

The four cardinal natural virtues are fertilizer for the spiritual soil in which the three theological virtues are to grow.  –Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas, 113

Readiness Is All

Every time I re-read a book of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, I shake my head and wonder why I had not seen that before. The answer is most likely that I was not ready…

Virtue’s Greatness

Fortitude appears to excel among the virtues. Virtue is concerned with things difficult and good. But fortitude is concerned with difficulty; hence it is the greatest of the virtues. To this we must reply: the…

Today’s One-Liner (#277)

We are to keep our eyes on Him (and on our neighbors’ needs) rather than on ourselves.  –Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas

Gradual

A lost-looking pedestrian with a violin case asked a New York City policeman: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” the answer was: “Practice, man, practice.” There’s no easier way. You learn to do it…