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,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824524969
• ISBN13: 9780824524968
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Crossroad Publishing Company
• Length: 187 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.2"

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.