What has been called St. Thomas’s “system” took shape in this work of assembling, sifting, ordering. The body of knowledge of his time became ordered in his mind. He wrote no “philosophical system,” nor has the system behind his works been written so far.

Yet anyone who studies his works will find clear, definite answers, perhaps to more questions than he himself could ask. And what is more, the organon that the Master bore within himself and that enabled him to settle a host of issues with a firm, serene respondeo dicendum, leaves its mark on his “disciple” and gives him the ability to answer questions in Thomas’s spirit that Thomas never asked and possibly at that time could not have been asked at all.

This may well also be the reason why folks today are going back to his writings. Ours is a time that is no longer content with methodical deliberations. People have nothing to hold on to and are looking for purchase. They want a truth to cling to, a meaning for their lives; they want a “philosophy for life.” And this they find in Thomas.

Of course there is a difference between Thomas’s philosophy and what passes for “philosophy for life” today. In his philosophy we will look in vain for flights of emotion; all we will find is truth, soberly grasped in abstract concepts. On the surface much of it looks like theoretical “hairsplitting” that we cannot “do” anything with. And even after serious study it is not easy to put our finger on practical returns.

But a person who has lived for some time with the mind of St. Thomas – lucid, keen, calm, cautious – and dwelt in his world, will come to feel more and more that he is making right choices with ease and confidence on difficult theoretical issues or in practical situations where before he would have been helpless. And if later he thinks back – even surprising himself – on how he managed it, he will realize that a bit of Thomas’s “hairsplitting” laid the groundwork. At the time that Thomas was working on this or that problem, he naturally had no idea what it could someday be “good for,” nor was he concerned about it. He was but following otu the law of truth; truth bears fruit of itself.

St. Edith Stein. Knowledge and Faith. tr. Walter Redmond. ICS Publications. 2000. pp.26-28