Did Aquinas create the Golden Rod to Measure God?

Certain scholars (and others) have lately claimed that rationalism began in the Scholastic era, with Aquinas. Here is an article on "The Senses" of the Middle Ages.

According to Aristotle, sensus communis, or common sense, is the one function of the ψυχή that gains perceptions of all objects, a common central organ of perception in which the separate communications received by the proper senses are combined into a unity. Common sense can also display synthetic power by grasping the common properties in he qualities of the common sensibles. In fact, the common sensibles (movement, figure, etc.) are the proper objects of the common sense. In addition, common sense has the power to separate and distinguish among the various sensations, and yet it must preserve the unity of sense perception. In short, it is the common ground, "the fontal principle of all external senses", as Thomas Aquinas puts it in his commentary on Aristotle's De anima, and as Dante himself calls it in the same chapter of Convivio (3.9.9