Today's Signboard

A lovely, snowy Sunday and I am sitting here at Starbucks, as per usual.
Just a word today, nothing near as deep as the snow outside, about something I saw on a signboard on the way here.
There is a bookstore (I’ve mentioned this place before) that I always pass by and they will put a sort of a quote-of-the-week out front on a chalk-written signboard.

Well, as I passed by about an hour ago, I read:
Beware the man of one book. – Thomas Aquinas –
As I walked on, I mused upon the possiblities of what is meant by that brief quotation.
I know very little about Aquinas.
Really, I know next to nothing, other than that he was a Catholic Italian saint and theologian who lived between the years 1225 and 1274. And here is a picture of him, taken with an actual Canon EOS 5D, just before he started eating only at Subway©!
Perhaps the bookstore put that quote out there as a sort of subliminal suggestion, so that everyone reading it as they entered in would be inexplicably drawn to buying WAY MORE than just one book?
Maybe.
As I thought about it, my first impression was that Thomas is simply making a statement about deliberate ignorance. But if this is so, why didn’t he say, “Beware the man of no books at all.” [??]
Beware the man who does not know how to read, or has absolutely no interest in reading.
No, I do not think this is what is meant.
Rather, beware the man of ONE book.
This changes everything.
I right away move from my thoughts of a person who simply has no use for literature in general, to thoughts of someone who venerates one book to the exclusion of all others.
Never mind the superiority of one book above all others (which is also dangerous) but here we are considering the exclusion of all other books.
Only this one book, is a book.
And I was immediately struck with the sense that yes, this would be a far worse (in the sense of dangerous) state of affairs than if a person could not even read at all.
Of course, I then thought of fundamentalism in general, and fundamentalists of all stripes. Religious fundamentalism, I mean. Anyone who claims, and really believes, that only this one book is the one that God wrote.
And then I realized that I thoroughly agree with Thomas, if this is what he is saying.
By all means, beware that man. He is a man of one book. Sift everything he says to you through the seive of knowing that this one phrase is the most important thing that could be said of him.

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