Wit & Attitude Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas refuses to let artistry hide behind good intentions. In a medieval culture that prized right order and right purpose, he draws a bright line between the moral drama of the maker and the measurable reality of the made. The “test” isn’t the fervor of the will, the purity of motivation, or the suffering poured into the process; it’s the excellence of the finished work. That’s a bracing claim from a theologian often caricatured as suspicious of aesthetics. Aquinas is doing something subtler: protecting art from becoming mere self-expression and protecting audiences from being guilted into admiration.

The subtext is almost anti-romantic, centuries before Romanticism. He’s saying craft has its own standards, and those standards are not automatically upgraded by sincerity. “Excellence” here isn’t a vibe. It implies objective qualities: proportion, clarity, integrity, the internal rightness of a thing. Aquinas’s broader framework helps explain why: for him, a work’s goodness is tied to what it is, not just why it was attempted. Intention belongs to ethics; excellence belongs to art.

Context matters, too. Scholastic thinkers were busy sorting categories: the act of making (ars) versus the act of choosing (morality). Aquinas isn’t excusing corrupt artists; he’s compartmentalizing evaluation. We can judge the person by the will and the painting by the paint. That division still stings today, in a culture that often confuses authenticity with quality and treats effort as entitlement. Aquinas’s standard is colder, and maybe fairer: show the work.