This evening, I have the privilege of talking to you a little bit about St. Thomas Aquinas on love, body, and soul.

As Father said, St. Thomas is one of our great geniuses in the Catholic Church, in the Western Church, and in the Dominican order.

His thought parallels, is paralleled by none, and certainly in the Dominican opinion. You probably are most familiar with his work, the Summa Deologier, which in the English edition is about four volumes. In that work, he asks over 3,100 questions, and he answers all 3,118. I think it's 3,118 questions.

He answers them.

There are often questions no one thought to ask in the 13th century.

And then he answers any objections that you might have to his answer.

So this is how his mind worked.

It said that at the end of his life, he was writing four or five things at one time,

without word processors, without a printing press, often with multiple scribes, which he would

just go down the row, dictating a paragraph to this scribe.

Maybe it's the commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. Maybe it's the next part of the Sumet Daily OGA, maybe it's a commentary on Aristotle's

Nicomachean ethics, and by the time he got back to the first one, he'd know exactly where that

paragraph left off and he would dictate the next paragraph. So his mind was working on

multiple tracks at all times.

The only parallel, the modern parallel that I can think of is someone like the genius Bobby Fisher.

If you know who the chess master of Bobby Fisher is, they say that he could play multiple chess games at one time.

This is how St. Thomas did theology, right, the way Bobby Fisher did chess.

This evening, just to give you a little outline of where we're going, we're going,

we're going to talk about basically four things on the body, the soul, and love.

We're going to first talk about avoiding dualism.

I want to focus on the human composite, what St. Thomas calls the human composite,

which is that we are body and soul.

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