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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 wrote.

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.

His extraordinary prolific career, he formulated proofs of the existence of God, positive 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 on subjects such as natural law and human agency.

Joining me to discuss St Thomas Aquinas is John Hordein, professor of philosophy at St Andrews University,

Annemblebred, senior lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge,

and Martin Palmer, director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education 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 with an enormous wave of the rest of the world.

You have Muslim and Jewish philosophers in Spain and their materials flowing into Europe.

...