Every time that he wished to study, to undertake a disputation, to teach, to write, or dictate, [Thomas] first withdrew into prayer on his own and prayed pouring out tears, in order to obtain understanding of the divine mysteries.

The desire for adultery is for him like the child’s desire for six ice creams in a row. Perhaps the child can think of nothing better; but it takes little subtlety to know that she does not really want all six of them in the sense that had she taken thought for what eating them all would be like she would continue to want all six.

It is, to be sure, no overstatement to say that for Thomas theology is but an extended meditation on the meaning of bread and wine, a reflection on what they really are. […] [Thomas is] a materialist whose respect for matter, being theologically motivated, is such as to reveal in the material world far more power of significance than is allowed by the dull, flat, and unprofitable materialism of today’s atheistic fashion. Thomas’s matter speaks, it overflows with meaning.

For Thomas, if the normatively human is to become once again visible to us, it is not by means of some image of ‘natural man’ recovered by a theoretical reconstruction of what the good person looks like from within the debris of our fallen condition. As Aristotle thought, the only option is by looking to how the 'good person’ actually lives, if you can find one—which of course, Aristotle cannot. But Thomas can. […] For in Christ alone is the visibility of the normatively human restored. In what Christ preached, in what Christ did, in the friends that Christ made, in how Christ ate and prayed and cried with them, in what Christ suffered, in how Christ died, is seen what it is truly to be human, no longer as a thin and abstract moral outline, but in polychrome and densely coloured portrait, and, more than that, as an actual life narrated.

Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, which is why natural reason ministers to faith and the natural inclination of the will ministers to charity.

In the end, we can see that neither our ‘Catholic’ nor our 'Protestant’ gets it quite right. Just as 'either/or’ gets no grip on the relation of God to creatures, neither does 'both/and,’ for there is no list—as Thomas puts it, no 'genus'—to which God and creatures belong in common. […] One can only say, 'neither “both/and” nor “either/or”'—or, as the Pseudo-Denys had put it more succinctly, God is 'beyond both similarity and difference'…

Whereas Jesuits are establishment figures, Dominicans are the intellectual mavericks of the church. In our own time they have been Jungians, Marxists, hippies, pacifists and radical Wittgensteinians. As writers, talkers, teachers, preachers and public intellectuals their special form of holiness is exercised through the word.

In the Middle Ages, angels were tremendously useful. For Aristotelians like Thomas Aquinas […], angels functioned as a sort of theological science fiction. They provided a heuristic rubric, much as aliens now do, under which to isolate the essentially human by considering hypothetical cases. Rational creatures made of matter were human. If they were not made of matter, such rational creatures were angels. […]

Theologically the most important consequence was this: if angels had no matter, they had no concupiscence; and if they had no concupiscence, they could be neither tempted nor regretful. They could choose, but only all at once, once and for all. In choosing they either confirmed themselves in original righteousness, or fell without hope of repentance. Thus the angels envied the newly baptized their repentance. […] Angelology teaches us why it is crucial for all Christians to recognize the importance — the salvific importance — of their bodily desires.