St. Thomas
I love St. Anthony and St. Therese of Lisieux and Our Lady. I respect and admire and feel connected to St. Pio and St. Patrick. But the saint I may be most flat-out fascinated by is St. Thomas Aquinas. Here's a true blue intellectual, with all the attendant temptation to pride and spiritual dessication and doubt, who apparently didn't fall to prey to those faults but was gentle and humble and not at all abrasive in a St. Jerome sense (with due apologies to St. Jerome of course, who gives hope to many blog parishioners).
Part of what interests me about Aquinas is the sheer imbalance of his life. No wife, children, novels, hikes in the woods. He didn't join the "Inklings" and drink at the local pub as Tolkein and Lewis used to do. His productivity showed an amazing single-mindedness despite lacking (it seemed) a corresponding dose of "beauty", which many need as an antidote to too much logical thinking. But I think the fact that on his deathbed he asked that the Song of Songs be read said it all. There was his beauty and his respite: God alone.
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