Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas sounds almost mischievously un-mystical here, smuggling bodily common sense into a worldview people often caricature as pure stained glass and metaphysics. The line’s power is its refusal to glamorize suffering. Sorrow, in this framing, isn’t automatically ennobling or spiritually “productive.” It’s also a condition with physical components: exhaustion, dysregulation, the grinding depletion of being a creature with nerves and skin. His prescription is so domestic it borders on comic - sleep, a bath, wine - and that’s the point. It punctures any pious impulse to treat grief as a problem solved only by higher thoughts.

The subtext is classic Aquinas: the soul and body aren’t rivals; they’re integrated. If you take that seriously, then spiritual care that ignores the body becomes not only unkind but intellectually incoherent. This is medieval theology with a surprisingly modern emphasis on baseline maintenance: rest, cleanliness, small comforts, the return of equilibrium. Aquinas isn’t reducing sorrow to chemistry; he’s insisting that grace doesn’t arrive to a person who has been abstracted out of their own biology.

Context matters. In a world of harder living conditions and fewer medical interventions, “alleviation” often meant the simplest humane triage. Also, wine in Aquinas’s register isn’t an escape hatch; it’s a measured good, a created thing that can restore conviviality and calm when used rightly. The line quietly argues that holiness isn’t only forged in heroic endurance. Sometimes it looks like taking a nap, washing up, and letting the world soften at the edges.