Humility

His contemporaries most frequently commented on Thomas's humility, a virtue little prized in our times, since we seem unable to distinguish between the humble person's self-evaluation from what we call low self-esteem. In consequence, self-assertion takes on the appearance of a virtue, merely by way of contrast with that mistaken conception of humility. Humility, in sense of that his contemporaries observed its presence in Thomas, had more to do with that peculiarly difficult form of vulnerability, which consists in being entirely open to the discovery of the truth, especially to the truth about oneself. One might say, likewise, that what humility is to the moral life, lucidity is to the intellectual ˗ an openness to contestation, the refusal to hide behind the opacity of the obscure, a vulnerability to refutation to which one is open simply as a result of being clear enough to be seen, if wrong, to be wrong.

We might say, then, that Thomas was fearlessly clear, unafraid to be shown to be wrong, and correspondingly angered by those among his colleagues, especially in the University of Paris, who in his view refused to play the game on a field levelled by lucidity and openness equal in degree of honesty to the requirements of the intellectual life. And yet, even in Thomas’s anger there is nothing personal. His is the anger of a true teacher observing students to have been betrayed by colleagues. It has no more to do with self-assertion than his humility has to do with lack of self-worth. 

From Thomas Aquinas: a portrait, by Denys Turner, pages 39-40

Intellectual Christianity

There is a danger of thinking that we are obeying this first commandment if we live and work in the domain of Christian intellectual endeavour.  It is easy to understand how this comes about.  Anti-intellectualism still inhabits a wide swath of evangelicalism, and sometimes serious thought is mocked and dismissed by those who prefer sentiment and emotion. Both tendencies have called forth biting denunciations, and these certainly have their place. They have also called forth prophetic appeals to young Christians to devote themselves, for God’s sake and for God’s glory, to the life of the mind.

But we should not ignore a converse danger, the danger of intellectual arrogance. Biblical scholars, theologians, and other Christian academics are easily tempted to think that they are obeying this first command simply because they working the intellectual arena and happen to be Christians. After all, studying distinctively Christian themes can be all-absorbing, in precisely the way that studying almost anything can be all-absorbing, provided you have the right sort of temperament and education.  I know first-rate scholars who are absorbed in the study of the metal alloys in the blades of jet propulsion engines and others who devote themselves to the properties of recently discovered quarks with unbelievably short half-lives or to the finer points of Sahidic Coptic. The only difference between these scholars and theologians is that the latter may delude themselves into thinking that the effort they put into their disciplines demonstrates that they are fulfilling these words of Jesus, while those who study the sex life of sea turtles are unlikely to be similarly deluded.  We cannot ignore the brute fact that this first command of Jesus is not a command to think but a command to love, even if that command to love includes the modifiers, “with all your heart...with all your mind.”

D A Carson, discussing Mark 12:28-34 in his book, Love in Hard Places, pg 22.