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It always irritates me when people use the word 鈥渕edieval鈥� as a kind of insult. The medieval world gave us the magnificent cathedrals of Chartres and Ely. It gave us spectacles and clocks and windmills. From the Lindisfarne Gospels to the stunning Ghent altarpiece, from Gregorian chant to the development of polyphony, from Beowulf to Dante, this was a period of astonishing cultural flourishing all across Europe and beyond. But arguably the greatest achievements of the medieval world were in the field of theology, and not least those of that master of the art, St Thomas Aquinas, whose feast day it is today.

Aquinas was a theological radical long before the word radical had any meaning. God, he said, was not a kind of thing. So, for instance, if you set about some mad project of counting all the things that exist in the universe, you would come up with a list 鈥�.. of shoes, and tables, of stars and oceans, and eggs and lego 鈥�. and God would not be on that list. Which is to say that God is not one thing amongst others. Because God is not a thing. And to this extent, Aquinas would agree with many atheists: God does not exist.

But what would have frustrated Aquinas about many of our debates regarding the existence of God is that so many of them presume that the argument over God is an argument over whether a certain sort of thing 鈥� namely God 鈥� exists in the universe. And Aquinas would have thought this crazy. Of course there鈥檚 no such thing. Because, once again, God is not a thing, not a being - but the ground of being, being itself 鈥� or to use Aquinas鈥� favorite Latin phrase: ipsum esse subsistens.

The American Bishop and Catholic communicator Robert Barron compares this difference as being a bit like the difference between a book and its author. The author is not there in the book, in the actual narrative of the book the author doesn鈥檛 exist 鈥� but nevertheless the author is responsible for every comma, ever character, every plotline. In the book, the author is both everywhere and nowhere.

This kind of meta-physical reflection is not one we are generally familiar with these days, even people of faith. But the medieval imagination was shot through with precisely this rich kind of thinking. God is in all and with all. And this provided the intellectual and cultural background for all those great stonemasons and scientists and musicians of the medieval period. A God who is Ispum Esse Subsistens is not locked up in a church or in a prayer hall. Not just one thing amongst others. There are no half measures here. God is either absolutely everything 鈥� or nothing at all.

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