Youtube knows me as well as it knows you, and perhaps better. Along with Russian movies, guitologists, tech history, and that all-female Slovenian polka band, it is now offering me Dominicans (the order, not the nationality). The reason is that I’ve been working through Aquinas 101 from the Thomistic Institute. It’s very enjoyable for a certain class of people, one of whom I apparently am. They have a way of enrolling, but it doesn’t look like that has any advantages for anyone, such as me, who doesn’t need the academic credit, the certificate on the wall, or the line in the résumé.

     Thomas Aquinas has been bugging me since my second year of college. I still have, typed on Eaton’s Corrasable Bond, the class paper I wrote for History of Philosophy in which I reacted to Aquinas as taught there and made myself a budding Barthian before I’d heard of a thing called a Barth. I have long since learned to trust Aquinas as taught there less and Aquinas himself more. So I am among friends I don’t know and pleasant instructors when the friars teach about St. Thomas. If you want some good learning either on Thomas or on how to think theologically, which are for many people one and the same thing, check out Aquinas 101.

     The second lesson in the 101 course (of forty-six, with more to come) includes four paragraphs from Thomas J. White’s “Thomism for the New Evangelization” (probably from one of a couple of his books), from which I quote here a couple bits because they agree with what I’ve already written in The One Story, which is a book I’ve recently finished writing. That makes me feel good because I prefer to agree with smart people to feeling stupid when I’ve spouted off something that they’ve already easily figured out is stupid. That happens too sometimes. Here’s brother White:

Perhaps you have had some exposure to the New Atheism. (It’s crude. We need a better class of atheists.) But if you get into the New Atheism, and look at the blogosphere, what you see is the nineteenth-century presupposition from Auguste Comte, namely that modern science gradually displaces religion. The children of antiquity believe in religion, the adolescents of the middle ages study philosophy, and the grown-ups of modernity believe in biology and physics. This view of human thought is literally incredible. Philosophical and religious questions are part of the basic structure of human experience in every age, and are never out of date. If they were, then being human itself would somehow become out of date.

In chapter one of The One Story I talk about something similar to “the basic structure of human experience in every age,” but I’m referring to how we use stories to structure our understandings of life, like it or not. But that’s not so far from “philosophical and religious questions,” n’est-ce pas? Thomas White again:

What does God give to creation? He gives it existence and being, so that anything we discover in the world scientifically is something that exists. If it’s real, if we’ve discovered it to be real, it has being. And if it has being, it has a giver of being. God’s giving things being doesn’t entail making then merely passive; rather, part of the dignity of creatures is that they are created in such a way as to be themselves true causes. This is the case both in the physical order and in the spiritual order. There is not an opposition between God causing something natural to exist, and that created reality having its own history and development as a true, physical cause. And there is not an opposition between God causing something personal to exist, and that reality having its own history and development as a free spiritual cause. God has caused human beings to be and has given us a nature that is rational and free. So we’re free because God actively causes us to be creatures who are free.

That God has made what I call “wills other than himself” is nothing less than amazing. I might say that God placed us here because he likes noise, perhaps even confusion, but I’m not sure Aquinas would appreciate the idea of a disorder-loving God.

• I’ll say more about The One Story when I figure out what I’m going to do with it.