Christian Agnosticism: Learned
Ignorance
The word ‘God’ is a label for something we do not know.
Herbert McCabeThomas Aquinas was known as the ‘Dumb Ox’ at school, prob-
ably on account of his substantial frame. He is second only to
Augustine among heavyweight theologians, and was the lynch-
pin in the thirteenth-century embrace of Aristotle. His great
achievement was the harmonisation of the writings of the
ancient Greek – whose authority was such that he was referred
to simply as ‘The Philosopher’ – with Christian thought. Aquinas
has been called a ‘genius’ in leading philosophy journals; ‘one
of the dozen greatest philosophers of the western world’, by
Anthony Kenny, one of his keenest contemporary readers; he
was canonised by the Roman Catholic Church in 1323.
However, just three months before his death, something
remarkable happened to this man of words. On 6 December
1273, he was celebrating the mass of the day, for St Nicholas, in
the priory of San Domenico, Naples – where he was responsible
for studies. The mass ended. But instead of continuing with his
usual habit of calling for his secretary to continue writing, he
stopped. From that moment on, he neither wrote nor dictated a
single word again. The man whose intellect had grappled with
the philosophy of nature, logic, metaphysics, morality, mind
and theology was now silent.
It was not as if 6 December 1273 was a particularly good
date upon which to put down his pen. His magnum opus,
the Summa Theologiae, was far from complete in its Third Part.
Modern biographers have put the abrupt halt down to a stroke
or a breakdown caused by exhaustion. Others have said he had