The Aristotelian Society of Marquette University each year invites a scholar to speak on the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 1951, Etienne Gilson gave the following lecture about Aquinas. Here are two key questions with summary points from his lecture.
#1: Do you love wisdom?
Philosophy, as the ancient Greeks show us, is not just something to be taught and learnt, but a way of life, a life wholly dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. Since we only seek things that we love, the real question to begin philosophical inquiry is: Are you in love with wisdom? If we are in love with wisdom, this will engage our will and direct our entire intellectual life towards this supreme end.
“A true philosopher is but a man who loves wisdom for its own sake, because to love it for the sake of something else is to be a lover, not of wisdom, but of something else. Thomas has been a lover of wisdom under all its form, at all its degrees, for the sake of the absolute wisdom which according to St. Paul is Christ” (26).
#2: Do you have a virtuous intellect?
When an intellect knows, it does the work of an intellect, and if, owing to some speculative virtue, this intellect does good work, it is a virtuous intellect. A true disciple of Aquinas is one who, knowing this, absorbs it into the very fibre of his own being, that is, actually trains his mind to “understand” and to acquire “science” in the light of the first principles whose knowledge is “wisdom.”
Man is a rational bring whose ultimate end it is to achieve the perfection of his rational nature through the contemplation of absolute truth. In this sense, the speculative virtues which enable us to exercise intellectual acts are by definition the highest of all human virtues, because through them we are brought nearer to our ultimate end (9).
A virtuous intellect has an uncompromising respect and love for truth. Aquinas’s definition of the question for wisdom: “A humble inquiry after truth” (Contra Gentiles, I, 5, qtd in 37).
“Intellectual life, then, is ‘intellectual’ because it is knowledge, but it is ‘life’ because it is love. Unless we be among those few who wish to undergo such a life-long labor for the mere love of knowledge, we may well be brilliant students, great professors or even scholars thoroughly versed in the knowledge of Thomism; but we will not even have begun to become true disciples of Thomas Aquinas” (39).
Prodigal Catholic 
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