What’s so funny about ‘helpmeet’?

‘What’s so funny?’ asked my husband, accusingly, as I made an amused noise while relaxing with a copy of the Summa Theologiae. There aren’t all that many jokes in Thomas Aquinas’s survey for beginners in the field of theology. As it’s such a large field, his summary runs to 1,800,000 words. (Incidentally, just as Dan Brown went wrong in his book title by referring to Leonardo as ‘Da Vinci’, so it would be against preferred usage to call the theologian ‘Aquinas’ rather than Thomas.)

Anyway, it always makes me smile to think of Thomas’s exasperation with a 13th-century university teacher, David of Dinant, who stultissime posuit Deum esse materiam primam, ‘most stupidly made out God to be prime matter’. If that doesn’t sound side-splittingly funny to us, it might be because of a confusion in English over the meaning of potential.