An Unintended Consequence of Reading Aquinas with High School Students

I assigned my Medieval History students Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God from his Summa Theologiae. It was not my intention to convert students to Catholicism or even really to raise the question of faith. I wanted them to understand and appreciate the mind of Aquinas as representative of the late Middle Ages and to understand his style of dialectical argument.

My students didn’t let me off the hook. “I don’t believe in God,” Erica (name changed) volunteered. “So why do I have to read this?” I explained my purpose. She agreed to read it.

The next day, she still didn’t believe in God. Neither did Josh (name also changed). “There’s no old white man with a white beard in the sky who cares about what I do,” he said. Others murmured agreement.

“Is that what you read in Aquinas?” I asked. “You’ve let your conventional notions of God interfere with your reading.” We talked it through—prime mover, first cause, and so on. Not a white man, not even a mention of a human form. “You have to enlarge your conception of what you mean by ‘God’ if you’re going to read Aquinas,” I told them.

After we finished our discussion, I asked the class, “So, what do you think? Is this how you discuss the existence (or nonexistence) of God when you’re sitting around your room with your friends late at night?” Clearly not. Formal dialectical arguments, rigorous logic based on assumptions that modern people no longer make, imagining the objections of your opponents and then addressing them, one by one. There is a crystalline beauty to Aquinas’ thought—a cathedral of the mind—that we may learn to appreciate, even if it no longer really speaks to us.

I didn’t ask them if they (now) believed in God—it wasn’t my purpose, and, anyway, I didn’t imagine Aquinas’ arguments would address modern concerns.

We left it there and moved on to the 14^thcentury—plague, the Great Schism, the 100 Years’ War. Lots to take our minds off Aquinas’ precision and rigor.

Weeks later, I ran into Erica’s mom in town. “Erica believes in God now,” she told me, “and somehow it’s because of your history class. Her devout grandmother’s very happy.” I explained what we had done. “Oh,” mom said. “That’s why she keeps telling us we have to enlarge our conception of God. But she still refuses to go church.”