Fifty years ago today, to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of Saint Thomas Aquinas, some of us celebrated that occasion with the late Professor Paul Sigmund and a bottle of Chilean wine at dinner in the Princeton University Graduate College’s Proctor Hall.
Much earlier (long before I was a grad student), most of my elementary school teachers had been Blauvelt Dominican Sisters. From them, I learned bits and pieces about the Dominican Order’s history and distinctive liturgy. (We even recited the Rosary in the distinctively Dominican manner.) Above all, however, we learned a lot about the Dominicans’ favorite son among the saints and Doctors of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was especially relevant to us as the author of the two hymns (O salutaris and Tantum ergo), which we sang so frequently at Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. At school, we also learned the familiar story of how young Thomas met the Dominicans at the new University of Naples, how his family opposed his professing a mendicant vocation, how they kidnapped him in 1244, and how he persevered in his vocation in spite of all family pressure. (During his captivity at the family’s castles at Montesangiovanni and Roccasecca, the young Thomas supposedly read through the entire bible and also studied Peter Lombard’s Sentences.)
At some point, I encountered G.K. Chesterton’s short 1933 classic account of Thomas’s life, The Dumb Ox, which took its title from a famous story about the young Thomas and his classmates as students of Saint Albert the Great. (Patron saint of scientists, Albert studied Aristotle and wrote a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, during the very time Thomas was studying with him in Cologne.)
Maybe more memorable for me than Chesterton’s The Dumb Ox, however, was my reading in high school of Louis de Wohl’s 1950 historical novel about Aquinas, The Quiet Light, which situated Thomas’s religious vocation and theological achievement against the tumultuous background of 13th-century medieval Christendom in total turmoil. It was only later, in graduate school, the I engaged directly with the Angelic Doctor, primarily with his political and legal philosophy, some of which seems surprisingly topical today. (For example, at the end of chapter 6 of part 1 of De Regime Principum, Thomas warns about political actors who, not caring about the glory classically achieved by virtuous action, desire only to dominate and will openly commit crimes to obtain what they want.)
Formed in the Aristotelian-Averroist atmosphere of the new University of Naples (founded by Frederick II, « Stupor Mundi, » as an imperial rather than ecclesiastical institution), the young Thomas arrived at an early appreciation of Aristotle’s philosophy – at a time when that was an increasingly controversial position. For Thomas, all truth – whether divinely revealed truth accessible through faith or naturally knowable truth accessible to anyone through philosophy – is truth. There are thus two kinds of truth but only one truth, which admits no contradiction. If Christian doctrine is true, then it must not be contradicted by the wisdom accessible to ordinary human beings, which is based on what we can understand from the world, within which we human beings are rooted. Theology is faith seeking understanding, relating what is incomprehensible to what is naturally knowable. Thomism was Christian history’s most systematic answer to the perennial problematic (still very much with us today) of how to connect what is believed by divine revelation with what is naturally knowable both by believers and non-believers – addressing contemporary realities in a timely manner making use of both old and new wisdom.
In the theologically and polarized environment of the early medieval universities, Thomas’s profession required him to participate in public disputations. But he treated these primarily as a common effort to arrive at truth rather than as a competition. How unlike the modern university, which one of my professors once described as « a holding company for individual entrepreneurs. »
In the 16th century, Thomas was the first « modern » saint to be recognized officially as a Doctor of the Church, joining the ancient Doctors – Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. He is known as Doctor communis, the common or universal teacher. But he is also called Doctor angelicus, the Angelic Doctor, which reminds us how Thomas was always so much more than a university professor.
First and foremost, however, Thomas was a Dominican friar, who had successfully resisted the strenuous efforts of his powerful family in order to live the life of a mendicant, a vocation in some ways as controversial in the 13th-century Church as being as Aristotelian was. As an Order of Preachers, the Dominicans were especially devoted to study and cultivated an intellectual vocation, but that was always understood as serving the spiritual benefit of others (as the General Chapter of 1220 had explicitly prescribed). Thomas certainly saw himself as a contemplative, but he accorded the highest religious status to a kind of contemplative life that produced benefits for others in the form of preaching and teaching. Thus, he wrote his Summa ad eruditionem incipientium, for the instruction of beginners. And the same Saint Thomas who excelled as an author and professor, writing and teaching in Latin, also employed his talents as a public preacher in Italian churches. I am reminded of Louis Bouyer’s observation in his Memoirs that, unless pursued within the context of Church ministry, theology « loses contact with what gives it meaning, » and « can either vanish into fruitless abstractions or degenerate into an almost empty verbal pastime. »
When faced with a challenge, Thomas prepared by prayer. He was, above all, a priest, a person of prayer, which he considered the most important contemplative activity and which he also recognized as God’s gift. He went to confession daily, said Mass, and then served or attended another Mass in thanksgiving. His devotion to the Eucharist was recognized when Pope Urban IV commissioned him to compose the Office and Mass for the new feast of Corpus Christi (from which were derived those familiar Benediction hymns). Before receiving Communion shortly before his death, Thomas prayed: « I receive you, price of my soul’s redemption; I receive you, Viaticum for my pilgrimage, for whose love I have studied, kept watch, labored, preached, and taught. »
One may only hope that the same scholarly spirit that contributed so much to the renewal of the Church amid the political and intellectual turbulence of the 13th century may illuminate and inspire the ongoing renewal of religious life and the Church amid today’s terrible tumults!
Photo: Image of Saint Thomas Aquinas, formerly on display at the Paulist Fathers’ Seminary in Washington, DC, now at the Paulist Fathers’ Motherhouse in New York City.
