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Hello, we will be discussing St Thomas Aquinas.

He was the most important medieval thinker in Western culture on both philosophy and faith.

He was a radical and he turned the prevailing theology of the church upside down.

He sought to bring revelation and reason together, taking the work of Aristotle and developing

it within a Christian framework. All human beings by nature desire to know, he championed man's ability to understand the world

through the senses and by the application of reason to such experience. However, he acknowledged that certain elements of the

divine such as the Trinity remained beyond the reach of reason. In his extraordinary prolific

career he formulated proofs of the existence of God, posited ideas about

individual morality and outlined a system of ethics including the conditions

for a just war. After his death he was condemned, then canonized.

His work lives on at the heart of theology of the Catholic Church today

and continues to inform philosophical debates and subjects such as natural law and human agency.

Joining me to discuss Thomas Aquinas is John Hordane,

Professor of Philosophy at St Andrews University,

Annabel Bread, Senior Lecture in History at the University of Cambridge,

and Martin Palmer, Director of the International

Consultancy on Religion and Culture. Martin Palmer, can you tell us something

about his youth and adolescence, his background? Well the background is quite extraordinary because the period of Aquinas, he's born in 1225,

is probably the wealthiest, most industrial, most urbanized period in Europe since the fall of the Roman

Empire. Tremendous wealth, growth of cities, trade is growing. It's a very confident culture. It's also a culture that's in touch for the first time

...