Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas is drawing a sharp boundary line: faith may begin in revelation, but it doesn’t have to stay there. This sentence is doing intellectual triage, separating what the human mind can grasp on its own from what it can only receive. “Not a priori” is the key restraint. Aquinas is rejecting the idea that you can start with a definition of God and reason your way straight to existence, as if God were a theorem. That’s a quiet rebuke to overly confident rationalism and, in his era, a real methodological choice about how Christian theology should behave in a newly Aristotelian university culture.

The subtext is almost pastoral: don’t pretend to have a God’s-eye view. For Aquinas, we know effects before causes; we meet the world first, then infer what must be behind it. So the “work of His” isn’t decorative piety. It’s epistemology. The created order - motion, contingency, gradation, purpose - becomes evidence precisely because it is “more surely known to us” than God’s essence. He’s relocating certainty from metaphysical speculation to experience and observation, but without collapsing into skepticism. Reason can climb, just not by skipping rungs.

Context matters: 13th-century scholasticism is trying to reconcile Christian doctrine with Aristotle’s insistence that knowledge starts in the senses. Aquinas’s move protects both sides. God remains transcendent (not directly accessible “a priori”), while theology earns a public-facing credibility (arguments “a posteriori”). It’s also strategic: by anchoring proof in shared experience, he offers a common language for debate in an increasingly argumentative, multi-tradition intellectual marketplace.