An intellectual (and spiritual) apprenticeship

     "Much of the work of post-Cartesian, modern philosophers in epistemology was driven by worries about skeptical objections that we do not know much, or most, or even all of what we think we know. . . .  some of these philosophers formulated a foundationalist theory of justification which could, they hoped, overcome skeptical worries by admitting as foundational only beliefs which were indubitable, or at least sufficiently obvious and secure, so they could withstand skeptical objections, and other beliefs could be justified on the basis of these.  A characteristic of these sorts of views was the stipulation that the foundational beliefs be evident to the autonomous investigation of the rational subject, for any reliance on authority or other mediating presuppositions, they believed, would be open to skeptical challenge, and assent to them would not be fully rational.
". . . some have interpreted . . . Aquinas’s foundationalism along the lines of this modern tradition.  But although Aquinas recognizes that certain truths may be per se nota ('known of themselves,' i.e. self-evident) to us, the goal of inquiry is that we may come to grasp what is per se notum in itself, and reason to conclusions from these truths.  We can only do this, however, by undertaking a period of training and discipline under the guidance of those more accomplished with the field, so that we may acquire the intellectual habits to apprehend what is per se notum as such.  The concern here is not with skeptical worries and the focus is not on autonomous, individualistic investigation; it is rather with the sort of intellectual formation required so that what is most intelligible in itself becomes most intelligible to us.
     "Central to our interpretation of Aquinas is [therefore] the notion of apprenticeship. . . ."

     John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49.  I have not read this book, but rather stumbled on this passage while spot-checking the claim that "what is the most intelligible in itself is also what is the least [intelligible] for us" (Philippe-Marie Margelidon, "Questions de Christologie en théologie Thomiste au XXIe siècle," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 119, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2018), 103n30 (91-124)), which didn't seem quite right taken in isolation.