Acclaimed as the best book ever written on St. Thomas, this outstanding profile introduces one of Christianity's most important and influential thinkers. G. K. Chesterton chronicles the saint's life, focusing on the man and the events that shaped him, rather than on theology. In a concise, witty, and eminently readable narrative, he illustrates the relevance of St. Thomas' achievements to modern readers.
Born into an aristocratic family, Thomas rejected a life of privilege to join a new order of preaching and teaching monks, the Dominicans. Chesterton compares Thomas' views to those of...

I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather...

Alone at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.