Thomas Aquinas was a theologian, working purely within the circular Christian scholastic system to talk, essentially, about nothing. Where he did talk about concrete things (ethics, politics, even economics) he simply argued based on his religious dogmas. Meh, not very interesting.

> To some extent, it invented academics.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Keep in mind Christians were responsible for the destroying huge amounts of books, temples, and cultural artifacts after they took power in the Roman Empire. The amount of knowledge lost to the murderous hands of Christian monks is incalculable. It was only really after the 10th century that Christian monks began to preserve and translate the classics to Latin (the common picture we have of the monk painstakingly hand-copying the classics to preserve them).