| | | Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but strip away the labels and you’ll find her core ideas align remarkably well with Christian theology, especially the legacy of Thomas Aquinas.
Both Rand and Aquinas saw reason as sacred. Aquinas believed reason was a gift from God to apprehend truth; Rand called reason man’s only means of survival and knowledge. They met, unexpectedly, at the crossroads of logic and moral realism.
Rand's ethics of rational self-interest wasn't a license for selfishness, it was a call for human flourishing. Like Aquinas, who emphasized eudaimonia (human fulfillment) as life’s goal through virtue, Rand championed the pursuit of one's highest potential as a moral imperative. Both rejected nihilism, relativism, and despair. Both insisted that morality is objective and knowable through human nature.
Even Rand’s fierce defense of free will and individual dignity echoes the Christian belief that each soul is created with purpose and moral responsibility. Her heroes, much like saints in Aquinas’s moral universe, are guided by conviction, integrity, and truth.
She rejected the supernatural, yes, but ironically, her devotion to truth, reason, and virtue walks in lockstep with the moral order Aquinas upheld. As strange as it may sound, Ayn Rand built a secular cathedral using many of the same stones Aquinas used for his theological one.
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