Guide to Thomas Aquinas

Josef Pieper, one of the greatest Thomistic philosophers of the twentieth century, gives a penetrating introduction to the life and works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Pieper provides a wonderful synthesis of his vast writings as well as a biography of Aquinas and an overview of the thirteenth century, when Aquinas lived and worked. Pieper shows how Aquinas reconciled the pragmatic thought of Aristotle with the Church, proving that realistic knowledge need not preclude belief in the spiritual realities of religion. According to Pieper, the marriage of faith and reason proposed by Aquinas in his great synthesis of a “theologically founded worldliness” was not merely one solution among many, but the great principle expressing the essence of the Christian West. Pieper reveals his extraordinary command of original sources and excellent secondary materials as he illuminates the thought of the great intellectual Doctor of the Church.