Love & Passion Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas is doing something quietly radical: defending wonder as an intellectual method, not a childish phase to outgrow. In a medieval world where theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy is expected to behave, he makes room for the unruly beginning of thought: awe. The line flatters neither the cold logician nor the pious rule-follower. It suggests that the first engine of inquiry is a kind of astonishment that logic can discipline but never replace.

The subtext is a defense of imagination inside a tradition often caricatured as hostile to it. When Aquinas links philosophers to “myths and poetic fables,” he’s not endorsing superstition; he’s acknowledging how humans actually encounter metaphysical questions. Myths and poems stage the big problems - origin, purpose, evil, the infinite - in narrative form before they’re rendered as syllogisms. They are pre-philosophical instruments: not proofs, but provocations.

Calling both poets and philosophers “big with wonder” is strategic phrasing. “Big with” carries a sense of pregnancy: wonder is not a decorative mood, it’s a gestation. Something is being formed, and it will demand articulation. Aquinas also collapses a cultural hierarchy. The poet isn’t merely an entertainer; the philosopher isn’t merely a technician. Both translate the shock of existence into language that can be shared, argued with, and refined. In an era negotiating Aristotle’s newly rediscovered rigor, Aquinas insists the doorway to reason is still a kind of reverent astonishment.