Gimme That Old Time Biography
I love a good "ah-ha!" moment. And I find them increasingly rare in modern biographies, which require a devotion to the subject that borders on fanatical: why should I care what LBJ had for dinner on Aug 12, 1967?
It's a mark of how much I've changed, whether for good or ill, that a decade ago I could purchase, and assume I'd actually read, Strouse's thick biography of J.P. Morgan. But such is the savor of youth, that wistful period when time seems endless.
I had a fine "ah-ha" moment last night while finishing GK Chesterton's slim treatise on St. Thomas Aquinas. Chesterton told us not what Aquinas had for lunch, but in a sweeping salvo gives a thrilling overview of the past 800 years. He sees all of Christian theology through an Augustine vs. Aquinas lens, something I've only recently been awakened to and something that is of keen interest to me. Aquinas is the logician, and the optimistic in the sense of being the fruitition of the statement "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". Augustine tends towards pessimism and poetry. I can think of two bloggers who are the Platonic ideals of their respective teachers! I don't need to mention their names, but one is a Lutheran and one Catholic and they fit so well into Chesterton's scheme that I'm led to wonder: did the student pick the teacher or did the teacher mold the student? To some extent I'm sure the student felt an affinity for the teacher since their personalities are presumably naturally inclined toward logic or poetry, at the risk of oversimplifying.
I'll quote some of Chesterton's book in the next few posts. He was pretty rough on ol' Martin Luther as well as the later Scholastics. I would like to read more of his take on Augustine but the next Chesterton on deck is the St. Francis of Assisi bio.
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