I have spent 17 years as a part-time chaplain to a Catholic secondary school, but on the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, I celebrate a moving leaving Mass. The feast of the Doctor Communis, or universal teacher, seems a fitting day on which to finish. The Dominican order, of which Thomas was an early luminary, has as its simple motto Veritas.

Today the claim to know the truth, still more to teach some things as true, seems an affront to many, a monstrous piece of arrogance. How dare you claim a monopoly on the truth? it demands, usually when speaking about some moral judgement. And yet when the late Stephen Hawking wrote that quantum physics was close to unlocking the secrets of the universe and producing a Theory of Everything, allowing Man to know the mind of God, no one seem at all perturbed.

St Thomas is actually extremely cautious by comparison. His epistemology might best be summed up by paraphrasing the old Automobile Association marketing slogan: I dont know much about the reality of things, but I know Someone who does. In Thomass thought, for us to know the mind of God would not be the process of second-guessing with my intellect what God was like or what he was thinking. It would be my intellect participating in the knowledge God has of Himself and has chosen to share with me. I can know truth because it exists, rather than truth exists to the extent I know it. Indeed, St Thomas would go further and say that I am known by the Truth, loved by the Truth and this is why I can have confidence not in the limitless capacity of human reason to discover the truth, but the limitless depths of the truth which is discoverable when the intellect is opened to the divine light of wisdom.

This capacity for knowing truth in man is not a Promethean bid for freedom and autonomy. It is the very opposite. It is how God allows man a share in his own providence.

St Thomas says that the rational creature partakes of a share of providence. Far from being slave to the gods, God desires man to have a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it [the rational creature] has a natural inclination to its proper act and end, and can therefore not merely speculate about truth as an exercise in intellectual improvement, but live by the truth and so become human, and more, like gods, knowing good from evil.

This faculty of reason is, of course, elevated and perfected by grace. When we use such phrases, it is easy to caricature grace as some kind of intellectual bolt-on adding extra capacity to reason. But again we are speaking about Gods own life overflowing into us. Grace does not make me more intellectually acute in terms of the power to compute; it makes me more able to understand truth, because God, in whom all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28), is sharing his life with me. It allows me in some proportional way to see things as He sees them. It is a participation in the Truth.

St Thomas, of course, was foremost a commentator on Scripture. His philosophy was essential to him because it gave a reasonable grounding to faith, without which man would not be able to know God freely, and he would be familiar with the idea of participation in the Truth from the Gospel which used to conclude every Mass. The Logos, the meaning or truth of all things, pitched his tent among us. To all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God (John 1:12). If man cannot know truth then he cannot know love.

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Aquinas, Stephen Hawking and the mind of God - Catholic Herald Online