In this episode of Pints With Aquinas we look a letter Aquinas allegedly wrote to a fellow Friar about how to better acquire knowledge.
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The Letter:
“My Very Dear Brother,
Since you have asked me how you ought to study in order to amass the treasures of knowledge, listen to the advice which I am going to give you.
1. Advance up the streams, and do not all at once plunge into the deep: such is my caution, and your lesson. I bid you to
2. Be chary of speech,
3. Slower still in frequenting places of talk:
4. Embrace purity of conscience,
5. Pray unceasingly,
6. Love to keep to your cell if you wish to be admitted into the mystic wine-cellar.
7. Show yourself genial to all:
8. Pay no heed to other folk’s affairs:
9. Be not over-familiar with any person, because over-much familiarity breeds contempt, and gives occasion to distraction from study.
10. On no account mix yourself up with the sayings and the doings of persons in the outside world.
11. Most of all, avoid all useless visits, but try rather to walk constantly in the footsteps of good and holy men.
12. Never mind from whom the lesson drops, but
13. Commit to memory whatever useful advice may be uttered.
14. Give an account to yourself of your every word and action:
15. See that you understand what you hear, and never leave a doubt unsolved:
16. Lay up all you can in the storehouse of memory, as he does who wants to fill a vase. ‘Seek not the things which are beyond thee’.
If you follow these things, you will attain to whatever you desire. Farewell.
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