Aquinas. Reason in the House of Faith

1225. The castle of Roccasecca, in southern Italy, between Rome and Naples. A boy is born into the family of the count of Aquino. He is sent from early childhood as an oblate (i.e. for training and preparation for vows) to the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino – the very monastery St. Benedict founded seven centuries earlier, the heart of Latin monasticism. This is the absolute peak of an ecclesiastical career in Western Europe. He is being groomed to become abbot of that monastery – a man who walks the corridors a step behind the Pope.

The boy refuses.

At nineteen, returning to Naples, he meets the Dominicans. A new, still-scandalous order. A mendicant order. Brothers who walk the roads barefoot, own nothing, and preach to educated townspeople. Thomas decides: I am joining them.

His family is in shock. A Benedictine abbot is social capital. A Dominican brother is social catastrophe. In modern terms it is as if the son of a billionaire said: "I am leaving Wharton, I want to walk the roads and beg." So his mother, Theodora, sent his brothers as a raiding party to seize him by force out of the Dominican house itself and haul him home. They held him under house arrest at the family castle of Roccasecca for about a year.

The family tried to break him. At one point they sent a prostitute into his room. Thomas – this slow, gentle giant – snatched a burning brand from the hearth, drove her out, and scored the sign of the cross into the door with the charred stick. Then, the sources say, he sat back down to his books. His mother was the first to relent, and in the end the family let him go. (Chesterton loved the later legend of sisters lowering him from a tower in a basket; Turner, the sober modern biographer, finds no tower and no basket – only a family that ran out of will.)

Remember the firebrand. Thomas Aquinas, the most systematic intellect of Western Christianity, defended his vocation as a young man with a stick of fire. This is not a dry academic history. This is a young man fighting his own family for the right to live the way he believes.

He arrives in Cologne and enrolls under Albert the Great – the leading scholar of his age, a Dominican, a man reading Aristotle in translations from Arabic and teaching others to read.

Thomas Aquinas was a big man. Big literally – taller than those around him, of powerful build, slow in movement. He spoke little. In lectures he sat silent, eyes down. His classmates immediately decided he was thick. They gave him a nickname: the Dumb Ox of Sicily.

One day – the story is in Chesterton, I'll compress it – a kind student took pity on the big silent boy and offered to help him with logic. He began with the alphabet of the subject. Thomas listened, thanked him. The student went on. Until he came to a passage where he himself was wrong. Subtly wrong. And suddenly Thomas, blushing with embarrassment, gently pointed out the error – an error so fine the kindly student would never have noticed it on his own.

The student was struck dumb.

The rumor spread through the school. Albert the Great sent Thomas into a disputation. Thomas performed. Albert listened, then stood up and said what went into history:

"You call him a Dumb Ox. I tell you the bellowing of this Dumb Ox will fill the world."

This is said in the 1240s. Thomas is about twenty. By the end of his life – thirty years later – he will write: the Summa Theologiae (three volumes, about four thousand pages), the Summa contra Gentiles (one volume, a thousand pages), commentaries on nearly every work of Aristotle, commentaries on Holy Scripture, commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences, dozens of treatises. You can compute it: he dictated on average to four scribes at once, on different subjects, holding them all in mind in parallel. Not as showmanship – because otherwise he could not keep up.

One irony worth keeping. When Thomas came up to teach at Paris, the university that would one day boast of him refused him. It would not admit him to the faculty and forbade attendance at his inaugural lecture. This was not personal – it was the Mendicant Controversy, the salaried secular masters fighting off the barefoot friars who were taking their chairs. The Pope had to intervene before Paris would seat its future glory.

To understand why Thomas matters so much, you have to understand the intellectual crisis he was sent into.

In the thirteenth century Europe receives – through the Arabic translations from Spain – the complete works of Aristotle. After two thousand years of intellectual famine, a truck unloads into Latin Europe with the full logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics of Aristotle. It is a shock. A giant, thought-through, perfectly clear, perfectly pagan philosophical apparatus.

For Western theologians the problem is this. Western theology for the previous 800 years had stood on Augustine. Augustine is Plato, baptized. The soul ascends to God. This world is only a passage. The body is a temporary prison of the soul. What matters is inside, in contemplation.

But the West had not slept through those eight hundred years. Before the Aristotle truck arrived, Latin thought was already learning to test faith by reason. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109) gave the motto: "one does not understand in order to believe, but on the contrary, one believes in order to understand." And he set a balance that already foreshadows Thomas: "Not to put faith first is presumption; not to appeal to reason next is negligence." Gilson judges plainly: Anselm did "with the philosophical technique then at hand, what Saint Thomas was to do over again in the thirteenth century after the discovery of the entire works of Aristotle." A generation later Peter Abelard (1079–1142), in his Sic et Non ("Yes and No"), set the conflicting voices of the Fathers in one column so that reason would have to reconcile them – the seed of the very machine of objections the Summa would later shine with. Gilson's verdict on Abelard: he "imposed an intellectual standard which no one thenceforth cared to lower." And over the schools of Chartres already hung the image by which the Middle Ages measured itself – Bernard of Chartres's words: "We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants; we see more things, and more far-off ones, than they did, not because our sight is better, but because they raise us up by their gigantic loftiness."

Aristotle breaks this picture. Aristotle says: soul and body are one substance. A human being is a soul-in-a-body, a single thing. Knowledge begins in external things: you see, you hear, you touch – and out of that the mind draws form. This earth is not a corridor; it is a home, in which the mind does its work.

Thomas took this further than almost anyone dared. Denys Turner puts it bluntly: for Thomas we are wholly animal, animal from top to toe. We are not, as the Platonizers thought, animals only up to the neck, with a spiritual pilot lodged above. One single form makes Thomas's human being alive and makes him think, and it informs the whole body down to the feet. "There is a lot more to matter itself," Turner writes, "than meets the eye of today's average materialist." This is a believer whose God is met in bread and a shared meal, in the lowest and most bodily things. Hold on to how daring this was – within three years of his death it would get him condemned.

This is a threat to official Christianity. If Aristotle is right, then much of what Augustine said has to be revised. Some Christian teachers therefore ban Aristotle. This reflex was old. Already in the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux, whose philosophy was "to know Jesus, and Jesus crucified," had thundered against Abelard for indulging reason too far in theology. Now, in the thirteenth, the fear took official form: in 1210 a provincial council at Paris forbids the teaching of Aristotle's natural philosophy, and in 1215 the statutes of the papal legate Robert de Courçon repeat the ban. The intellectual future of Europe is at stake.

At the same moment, the same fight is happening in the Islamic world. The intellectual giants of Islam – Avicenna, Averroes – are trying to synthesize Aristotle with the Quran. Averroes goes far enough that, in conflicts, he seems to put Aristotle above the Quran. This unsettles Islam from inside. Islam after the twelfth century broadly pulls back from this challenge – and gradually retreats from philosophical rationality. This is one of the reasons the Islamic "golden age" ends. Islam made a choice – and the choice was for pure faith.

And the battle was not off in the distance – it blazed in Paris itself. Siger of Brabant, a master of the faculty of arts, taught that Aristotle's conclusions were "necessary rational conclusions" even where they clashed with faith: the eternity of the world, one shared Intellect for all mankind (and so no personal immortality). Pressed, the defense ran: it is the Philosopher who says so; I only repeat his words. The theologians called this the doctrine of the double truth, and Thomas broke it from the pulpit of the University of Paris: one and the same proposition cannot be "true for faith and false for philosophy" – not even God could achieve that. In 1277 Tempier would expressly ban the excuse itself. (Siger himself, in fairness, always said that in a conflict the truth lay on the side of faith; whether that was prudence or sincerity is hard to tell.)

The Latin West stood at the same fork. Thomas Aquinas made a different decision.

Thomas formulates it in a simple phrase that becomes the motto of an entire medieval civilization:

Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.

"Grace does not abolish nature – it perfects it."

In the Summa this is no free-floating slogan. It sits inside a single sentence about why sacred doctrine may use pagan philosophy at all. In Fairweather's translation: "Since grace does not supplant nature, but perfects it, reason ought to be the servant of faith in the same way as the natural inclination of the will serves charity" (Ia q.1 a.8 ad 2). The axiom about grace and the claim that reason serves faith are one and the same move. Thomas performs it right on the page: to make a point, he quotes the pagan poet Aratus – "for we are also his offspring" – exactly as St. Paul had, taking a Greek verse as a "supporting and probable" authority.

What does it mean? It means: what human reason reaches on its own is not in error. Aristotle, who never heard of Christ, is not a fool. What he demonstrated logically about matter, form, causes, soul, virtue – that is true. It is natural truth. The human mind reaches it through observation and deduction.

Above it there is supernatural truth. That God became man. That He rose. That the Eucharist is His body. Reason does not derive this on its own. It must be received through revelation.

But – and this is the key – natural and supernatural truths do not contradict each other. Because God is the source of both. What reason gives and what revelation gives are from one God. If they appear to conflict – it means we have understood something wrongly. Either in the philosophy, or in the theology. We have to think harder.

It sounds simple. It is revolutionary. Because by it Thomas does two things.

First, he vindicates natural reason. Philosophy is the servant of theology, and in Thomas's mouth that word names a task rather than a rank: reason supplies the tools with which a human being can think about God. To forbid Aristotle is to insult God, not to defend Him.

Second, he vindicates nature. This world is not here by accident. It is a creation. Every frog, every stone, every geometric theorem carries a trace of God. Therefore scientific investigation of nature is a form of theology. Six centuries later, Newton, Kepler, Mendel – all will be Christians. This is not coincidence. It is Thomas who gave this worldview its shape.

Thomas sits down to write his main book – the Summa Theologiae – in 1265. He plans it as a textbook for beginners. For beginners. Four thousand pages. A wealth he is in no rush with.

The structure of the Summa is its own beauty. Thomas does not simply write pages. He builds an architecture. Each section opens with a question (quaestio). Each question is broken into articles (articulus). Each article runs in a four-part form:

1. Objection – "It seems that no, because…" Here Thomas himself writes the strongest possible objections to his own position. He cites Aristotle, Augustine, Avicenna, Averroes, the Fathers, the Bible – anything that might contradict what he wants to prove. Often three or four objections, each strong. 2. Sed contra – "But on the contrary…" One counter-citation from an authoritative source, tipping the scales. 3. Respondeo – "I reply…" Here Thomas writes his own position. 4. Ad objectiones – "To the objections…" Here he returns to each of the three or four objections and shows how his position explains why the objection is wrongly framed but contains a grain of truth.

Take the article the whole book is remembered for, "Whether God exists" (Ia q.2 a.3). Watch the machine run. First Thomas argues against God, and he argues it well. Objection one is the problem of evil: "If one of two contraries were infinite, the other would be wholly excluded. But the name 'God' means infinite good. If God existed there would be no evil. There is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist." Objection two is Ockham's razor before Ockham: everything in the world can be accounted for by nature and by human reason, so "there is no need to suppose that God exists." Only then the sed contra, a single verse: "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14). Then the responsio – the Five Ways, the next stop on our walk. And finally the replies, where the objection from evil is turned inside out: God, "being supremely good, would not allow any evil in his works were he not able to bring good out of evil." The strongest voice against God in the article is Thomas's own.

Notice the form. Thomas first lays out the objections to himself. He does this not out of politeness. He does this because an intellectual's duty is first to show that you have understood your opponent better than your opponent has understood himself. If you cannot formulate the strongest possible objection to your own position, you have no right to defend your position.

You may have heard this called the Rapoport rule, after the twentieth-century game theorist who framed it: before you criticize an opponent, re-state his position so well that he says "thank you, I could not have put it better." But Rapoport rediscovered it; he did not invent it. In Thomas's world it was already a formal rule of the medieval disputatio legitima. Josef Pieper quotes it: "No one was permitted to answer an objection directly; he had first to repeat the opposing argument in his own words." The pedigree runs deeper still – back to Socrates in the Phaedo, restating Cebes' objection "again and again, on purpose, that nothing may escape us," and to Aristotle's Topics, "the joint labor of disputation." Paul Valéry compressed the whole ethic into one line: "The first thing a person who wishes to refute an opinion must do is to make it his own better than the person who best defends it."

And Thomas gave the rule its heart. You do not listen to your opponent in order to catch him at a weak spot; you listen because – in Thomas's own words – "we must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it."

This is intellectual grace. It is a form of love – love of truth stronger than love of victory. If you walk away from the Summa with nothing else, walk away with this: first understand your opponent as he has not understood himself. Then speak.

One last thing about how Thomas writes. Pieper says of him that "Thomas spoke a language; he did not employ a terminology." He mistrusted jargon; his Latin aims at clarity and nothing else, even at the cost of music. Plain words, for him, are a form of reverence for the thing being named. Sobriety is what a mind looks like when it is completely at the service of what is real.

Thomas, at the very beginning of the Summa, in question 2, article 3, gives what the world will later call the Five Ways to God. Five separate arguments, each claiming to be a natural (i.e. unaided by revelation) demonstration that God exists.

I will not rehearse them in detail here. This is not a lecture on natural theology. But notice one thing. Thomas is not trying to prove the Christian God. He does not prove the Trinity. He does not prove the Incarnation. He does not prove the Resurrection. All of those are matters of revelation.

Thomas proves only one thesis: that behind a world of motion and dependence there must stand a first mover, a first cause, a necessary being, a source of all perfection, an intelligence that aims things at their ends. Five roads, five arrivals. And Fairweather's translation lets you hear that Thomas did not close them with one tidy formula. The first way, from motion, ends: "and all men understand that this is God." The second and third, from cause and from necessity: "and all men call this God." The fourth and fifth, from the degrees of perfection and from the arrow that needs an archer: "This we call God." The wording shifts each time, as if he will not let the proof harden into a slogan.

He is reaching the same one Aristotle reached with his Unmoved Mover. And notice what he does and does not claim. He does not say "this proves the God of the Bible." He says: this is where reason arrives on its own. Who this God actually is – is revealed in the Gospels, not deduced in the schools.

This is philosophical honesty of a high order. Thomas does not deliver more than he can demonstrate. He does not try to squeeze the Gospels out of brains. He says: reason reaches the door on its own. What is behind the door – you have to go through and look. To go through is faith.

This is more honest than 90% of modern arguments about religion. The twenty-first-century atheist often argues with a fundamentalist who claims a literal reading of the Bible can be proved by reason. The atheist easily takes that position apart. Thomas would have taken neither side. Thomas would say: reason can reach a philosophical God. The specific God of the Bible is a separate question, and the answer is different.

"Philosophy is the handmaid of theology." Philosophy does not replace theology. It prepares for it.

On 6 December 1273 Thomas Aquinas celebrates Mass in Naples. He is 48. For six years he has been writing the third volume of the Summa. This is the most important hour of his working day – every morning he begins with Mass, then sits to dictate to four scribes, until late evening, with small breaks for prayer and food.

That morning something happened.

Witnesses report: Thomas left Mass, but did not sit down to work. He went to his room and did not come out. His friends, worried, tried to question him. He refused to write. He refused to dictate. His secretary and friend Reginald of Piperno begged him to finish the Summa. There was so little left. He had almost completed it.

Thomas replied with one of the most enigmatic lines in medieval history:

"Reginalde, non possum. Omnia quae scripsi videntur mihi paleae."

"Reginald, I cannot. All that I have written seems to me as straw."

Straw. Paleae. What you feed cattle.

What happened? Honesty first: we do not know. Denys Turner, not a man to duck a hard fact, writes that "we do not know what actually happened that day in any detail," and even allows that "perhaps the story is apocryphal as to fact. It hardly matters." A stroke and a vision are not rivals here – there is no good reason it could not have been both at once, a body breaking under an output of two or three books a month and a soul seeing past its own work.

But there is a deeper reading, and it belongs to Josef Pieper. The "straw" was not a collapse of Thomas's project; it was the last sentence of it. From the very first questions of the Summa Thomas had written that "of God we cannot know what He is, but only what He is not," and that the summit of our knowledge of God is "to know that we do not know Him." A theology that begins by confessing it cannot say what God is has already called all its own pages straw – gloriously, deliberately. The unfinished book is part of what the book is saying. Death did not snatch the pen from Thomas's hand; he set it down and abided by the decision. The fragment is the statement. Gilson says the same in one line: "the range of intelligibility is incomparably wider than that of reason." The straw is the overflow of the real past everything that can be proved about it.

"All that I have written seems to me as straw."

Three months later, travelling to the Council of Lyon, he dies at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova – the friar who had run from a Benedictine future ending, by a last irony, in a monk's guest cell. He is 49. The Summa breaks off in the middle of the treatise on the sacraments, seven-eighths written. His students will complete it from his earlier lecture notes – what we read today as the Supplementum.

Think about this scene. The greatest intellectual synthesis the Western world had seen in two thousand years – and its author, before his death, walks away from it. Not because he thinks it is wrong. Thomas does not say "I was wrong." He says "all of it is straw." Like something you feed to cattle, because the cattle have nothing better.

He does not say the truth is straw. He says his pages are straw. Because the reality they describe turned out to be incomparably greater.

This is not an admission of defeat. It is a final gesture of humility. The greatest philosopher of the West says: "I have seen what all of this was pointing toward. I will not be able to put it on paper. And the attempt to put it on paper is less than the reality."

This is what we call holy. Not the one who has reached everything. But the one who, having reached more than anyone, sees how small even his largest reaching is.

Five centuries after Thomas's death, Immanuel Kant will begin to philosophize, believing very little of what Thomas believed. And yet Kant's intellectual form is a Thomist form. Because Thomas taught the West that reason has its own dignity, that logic has rules, that definitions matter, that you can ask questions honestly, listing every objection to your own position before you defend it.

But the shield was hung on the wall only after a disgrace we usually skip over. Within three years of Thomas's death his boldest thesis – the one-soul doctrine, the human being "animal from top to toe" – was formally condemned. On 7 March 1277, the third anniversary of his death, Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, swept propositions Thomas held into a blacklist of 219 errors; eleven days later the Dominican Robert Kilwardby condemned the same teaching at Oxford. His own colleagues heard in his materialism "a plainly unspiritual view of the human person," and they were on to something. And here is the bitter shape of the drama: Thomas fought on two fronts at once. "The objections to Thomism came from opposite quarters. Thomas was no Averroist, so he was criticized by Siger; but he owed Averroes a certain part of his own interpretation of Aristotle, so he was criticized by the Augustinians, to whom he appeared as yielding to Aristotle more ground than he should." The man who fought the radicals looked, to the uninitiated eye, like a "fellow traveler" himself – and was condemned alongside them. For nearly fifty years the Summa carried a shadow of heresy. The word of that stigma is worth a pause: the Greek hairesis, from which "heresy" descends, meant simply a choice, a chosen direction (the Sadducees were one such hairesis). Only later did it become the name for the crime of thinking for yourself rather than accepting what the community held.

But the condemnation of 1277 was more than a personal shadow on one Dominican. Étienne Gilson reads it as a curtain drawn over a whole age. "Instead of carrying on its effort to conquer philosophy by renovating it, scholasticism acted on the defensive. At that very moment, its golden age came to an end." Before 1277 the great theologians "had exploited the resources of science and of philosophical learning in a spirit of eager confidence"; after it, suspicion of the "philosophers" took the place of that confidence. And the cost was concrete. What everyone from William of Auvergne down to Thomas himself had held to be demonstrable by reason – the immortality of the soul, for one – Duns Scotus, Ockham, and even the "Thomist" Cajetan would begin to file away under faith alone. Reason and revelation, which Thomas had woven into one cloth, drift apart again. This is why Thomas would later have to be reconquered rather than simply inherited: 1277 began the long divorce his synthesis had briefly healed. (It is worth knowing the limit of this reading: Gilson is the twentieth century's great Thomist, and he deliberately measures all fourteen centuries from the summit of the Thomist synthesis. He admits it himself: the perspective, he says, is "true enough, an incomplete one." So the "decline" after 1277 in his telling is a decline measured by Thomas; other historians would describe Scotus and Ockham on their own terms.)

The turn came in 1323, when John XXII canonized him – the first man ever made a saint simply for being a theologian and teacher. Denys Turner says it reads "more like the canonization of a library than of a man"; what went up on the altar was the words. And the Church had, in truth, been singing his words for sixty years already. Back in 1264 Pope Urban IV had asked Thomas to compose the office for the new feast of Corpus Christi, and the man of the icy quaestio answered as a poet: Pange lingua, Adoro te devote, O sacrum convivium are his, hymns still sung eight centuries on. The mind that held four dictations at once could also make a single line stand still: "Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore." His loftiest mystery lived in the lowest, most bodily thing – bread on a tongue. First condemned, then canonized, his own hymns already sung at the altar – only after that long road does Leo XIII become possible.

Seven centuries after Thomas's death, Pope Leo XIII will declare him the official philosopher of the Catholic Church and order every Catholic seminarian to read the Summa. This is 1879. The age of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche – the time when Christianity is staring at its own death.

Why does the Pope, at this moment, bring Thomas back? Because Thomas is a shield. Thomas shows how one can simultaneously be a Christian and work with the most aggressive rational argument of one's time. Thomas does not fear Aristotle. Thomas does not fear science. Thomas does not fear reason. Because Thomas knows that truth is one, that it comes from one Source, and that conflict is possible only when either philosophy or theology has made a mistake.

Eight hundred years after Thomas's death, Joseph Ratzinger – future Pope Benedict XVI – in his famous Regensburg Lecture of 2006 says: "A West that no longer believes in the power of reason has ceased to be the West." This is the Thomist thesis in pure form. The West is the synthesis of reason and faith. If one of the two drops out, the West stops being itself. If faith drops out – what remains is technocratic barbarism that can build rockets but does not know why they should not be launched. If reason drops out – what remains is fundamentalist rage that can burn books but does not know why other books exist.

Western civilization is a rare, fragile, hard-won thing. Its heart is the conviction that faith and reason are not enemies, because both come from God. Universities stand on this conviction. Hospitals stand on this conviction. Human rights stand on this conviction. Science as we know it stands on this conviction.

To destroy the West is to destroy precisely this conviction. To reduce reason to power (as modern cynicism does). Or to reduce faith to tribe (as modern fundamentalism does). Thomas Aquinas, in the silence of his cell in Naples in 1273, made sure the West would know that these are two different choices of betrayal, and both equally fatal.

If you are reading this lecture in a time when the West is again under attack – remember that this is not accidental. Your civilization is not here by accident. It is built out of joinings put in place by men like Thomas. It holds for as long as you hold.

Leave this lecture with one thing.

If you are an atheist, no quarrel from me. Thomas would have had none either. But remember: your position – the ability to refuse faith, to say publicly "I do not believe" and not be killed for it – was bought by a millennium of work by people who believed. Freedom of unbelief is a consequence of a civilization that honored freedom. And that civilization formed around convictions Thomas codified.

And the continuity here runs deeper than it looks. Gilson spent his life fighting the saying that Descartes stands "immediately after the Greeks as though there had been nothing else in between." There was a whole thousand years. "The point of departure of modern philosophy coincides with the point of arrival of mediaeval theology," he writes; Descartes's God, the free creator of heaven and earth, is the God of Anselm, Bonaventure, Thomas, and Scotus, only "confirmed by a new method." "There is no excuse for those who describe the middle ages as a long period of philosophical stagnation." The very modern mind you doubt with grew from the same trunk.

If you are a Christian, reread Thomas. Not because Thomas is a saint (though he is canonized). Because Thomas is the intellectual conscience of your tradition. Without Thomas your faith risks turning into a tribal reflex. With Thomas it is what it ought to be: a reasoned commitment of intellect and heart together, unafraid of the hardest question.

If you are Ukrainian (and statistically you are), hold on to one thing that is better grounded than any slogan. The West built something the Christian East never did: the university – a self-governing corporation of masters holding authority over their own doctrine, answerable to argument and standing a little outside the Church hierarchy. Pieper notes that this free corporation "was something new in the West… the Christian East knows no such phenomenon." A scholar could walk from Oxford to Bologna to Paris to Naples inside one Latin conversation. That conversation is what Thomas lives inside, and it is what made the university and the open disputation possible.

And Pieper leaves a hard observation on his way out. The Eastern form of Christianity is emphatically unworldly – "and yet the most thoroughgoing principled secularism in history has arisen precisely within its sphere of influence." The militant atheism that would later rule from Moscow did not fall from the sky; it grew in soil that had never grown a free university. So when Russian tanks shell your cities, they are shelling more than bodies and homes. They are shelling the civilization that went through 1273 in Naples – your right to argue and to doubt, to sit as believer and unbeliever in one room and still respect each other.

By defending Ukraine, you are defending Thomas. You may not have known this. Now you do.

"All that I have written seems to me as straw" – said the man who, having written thousands of pages, saw that they were less than what they were pointing at.

If every civilization had known a mind so humble, so radical, so great – we would not have had to fight again and again.

But sometimes we have to.