MR. CHESTERTON proceeds to his treatment of Thomas Aquinas in the genial manner of a man who once wrote a history of England without a date. His book is not a biography, for the scant modern knowledge of Aquinas' life could not be expanded even into Mr. Chesterton's format. Nor is it a mental history of Aquinas; Mr. Chesterton cheerfully admits that he knows little of the metaphysics or theology which were the great framework of that history. It is an attempt to form a channel from Thomism to the mind of the modern man, and an attempt to prove, after the channel is made, that Aquinas never needed one.
There is no large period in the history of the world about which more non sense is talked than the middle ages; and since our critics and teachers will not stop talking about mediaeval thought, someone must make them talk intelligently. It may be that Mr. Max Eastman is right when he says that scholasticism can not give a true view of the central problems of the modern world; but Mr. Max Eastman is in any case right for the wrong reason. He calls it a philosophy of wish fulfillment, but that is because he does not know anything about William of Occam, or Thomas Aquinas, or any of the mediaeval rebels whose scholasticism led them into the friar movement, and knows too much abut Siger of Brabant and Buridan. Professors DeWulf and Gilson have been so busy defending scholastic philosophy that they have never had time to use it; the time to condemn the scholastic view on Russia is after a competent scholastic philosopher has formed it, not after it has been conjectured by people who are not only unsympathetic towards, but even ignorant of scholasticism.
Mr. Chesterton feels that the system of thought which Thomas Aquinas brought to its highest level has a good deal to say to the modern man. He has not been bullied out of his position by scornful a priori; he realizes that the only defense of Thomas Aquinas is in explanation of his ideas, and of the simple principles upon which those ideas were founded. He shows that the Thomist philosophy was a great balance between the exaggerations of realism and idealism which preceded it, and that the exaggerations of realism and idealism which are the dominant philosophical schools of the modern world, might find, for the second time, that Thomism alone can balance them, and form an unshackled instrument for the exploration of the universe. Mr. Maritain has said many times the things which Mr. Chesterton says in this book; but Mr. Chesterton's great verbal skill, and his cheerful confession of propaganda, are good reasons for saying them again.
