Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master

By Robert Barron

Book Overview

Thomas Aquinas is widely considered the greatest and most influential of Catholic theologians. Yet too often his insights into the nature of God and the meaning of life are seen as somehow cold, impersonal, and divorced from spirituality. In this award-winning book, Bishop Robert Barron shows how Aquinas' profound understanding of the Christian mystical life animates and helps explain his writings on Jesus Christ, creation, God's "strange" nature, and the human call to ecstasy. "When one interprets Thomas merely as a rationalist philosopher or theologian, one misses the burning heart of everything he wrote. Aquinas was a saint deeply in love with Jesus Christ, and the image of Christ pervades the entire edifice that is his philosophical, theological, and scriptural work. Above all, Thomas Aquinas was a consummate spiritual master, holding up the icon of the Word made flesh and inviting others into its transformative power."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1943243794
• ISBN13: 9781943243792
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: Word on Fire Academic
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Connects Faith and Reason

The great achievement of Robert Barron's little book on the Angelic Doctor is that he points the reader to the spiritual quest that lies at the heart of Aquinas' seemingly arid intellectual inquiry.For too long, the scholastics in general and Aquinas in particular have been accused of overintellectualizing about the mysteries of faith. An overemphasis on reason is presented as squelching our embrace of the mysteries of faith. On the contrary, as Barron argues, the scholastic effort to find theological precision was an effort to clear away the stumbling blocks to faith that our false notions of God can present. Whether we mean to or not, we do have concrete ideas about the mystery of God. To the extent that our ideas are mistaken, our faith can never lead us to the heart of the True Mystery we seek. Aquinas' project was to clear away the dead-ends our unexamined reason produces for us, so that we can find our way to the abyss of God.Barron has the great gift of making Aquinas' theology come alive for the lay reader. For anyone seeking the great adventure of coming to know God better both through reason and faith, I recommend this book most highly.