To recover a comprehensive view of faith, there is no need to invent anything: it is enough to return to Saint Thomas Aquinas and his way of working. Contemporary culture suffers from two fractures. The past is treated as a repository of facts, and it is forgotten that, for a Christian, human history is the history of salvation. And as the idea of ​​a human nature oriented toward an end becomes blurred, life breaks down into isolated episodes, without a thread to connect them.

For Aquinas, wisdom lies not in knowing many things, but in ordering them. He borrows Aristotle’s maxim *sapientis est ordinare* and applies it to theology: sacred doctrine is wisdom because it considers the highest cause, which is God (*Summa Theologiae*, I, q. 1, a. 6). Therefore, it does not compete with physics or philosophy; it looks from a higher perspective and places each field of knowledge in its proper context. Without this order, pastoral care becomes sociology with well-intentioned sentiments, and dogmatics, a mere catalog of formulas.

The Summa also offers a plan. Scholars like Chenu interpreted it as a movement of departure and return: everything proceeds from God out of love and is destined to return to Him. Aquinas announces that he will discuss God, the movement of the rational creature toward God, and Christ, who, “as man, is for us the way to reach God” (I, q. 2, prooem.). Man ceases to be a drifting atom and becomes a viator, someone on a journey. Morality no longer resembles a list of prohibitions but describes what the pilgrim needs: the virtues, the law, and grace.

This order does not revolve around a system, but around a Person. With Christ as the way, what we believe and what we live cease to be separate realms. Reason and faith need not be at odds, because “grace does not abolish nature, but perfects it” (I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2), and pastoral care needs to spring from contemplation, faithful to the Thomistic formula contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere: to contemplate and to transmit to others what has been contemplated (II-II, q. 188, a. 6).

To “reorder” is not to entrench oneself in syllogisms, but to connect the dots of reality so that the picture becomes clear. There is a form of intellectual mercy in this: to those who live their lives as a succession of meaningless flashes, one can say that there is a path, and that someone has also devised it for them.

Manuel Ortuño Arregui . Gaudium Truth Institute . Catholic University of Valencia