Monday Musings - Advent Insights of St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P. - 1st Week of Advent

Every Monday during Advent, I will posting 12-15 quotations excerpted from St. Thomas Aquinas – Meditations for Every Day, translated and illustrated by Rev. E.C. McEniry, O.P. These pearls of wisdom are worth pondering during the course of the week:

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

              The cause of all good things is the Lord and Divine love.

            Good comes to us because God loves us. The love of God is also the cause of the good in nature.

            God’s love is the greatest because of the condition of the person loved, for it is man who is the object of God’s love, the worldly man living in sin.

            It would seem most fitting that by visible things the invisible things of God should be known.

            St Augustine tells us that: “God was made man, that man might be made Godlike.”

            God has proven to us how high a place human nature holds amongt us, in as much as He appeared to men as true man – St. Augustine

            Just as virtue prepares man for heaven, so sin debars him therefrom.

            God alone is able not only to move man’s will to good, so as to bring him back to the right order, but also to forgive the offense committed against Him; since an offense is not forgiven except by the person offended.

            God became man, so that He might give Himself to man to be imitated, to be known and to be loved.

            John the Baptist was a light, that is, he was illuminated by grace and by the light of God’s Word.

            Rectitude or uprightness of will consists in the regulation of love which is the will’s chief affection.

            If we are to place spiritual things ahead of things material our love must be so regulated that we love God above all things as our highest good and secondly that we refer whatever we love – to God – as our final end; so that a proper order might be observed by us in other things.

            Nothing inspires more to love than to know that we are being loved.

            God willed to become man so that even little children, so like God, might be able to know and love God; and thus, by this means can all understand God and gradually arrive at perfection.