Today January 28

Today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274), great doctor of the Church. Here is what I wrote last year concerning him:

Well, come next Jan. 28th, and for all the January 28ths we will ever live to see, there will be more than enough material to discuss today's wonderful saint, St. Thomas Aquinas. This quiet, deliberate genius of a man is the theologian par excellence.

He was above all a man of honor, choosing carefully and completely not only the course of his life (in the mendicant Dominican service) but also each topic and argument in his many, many works: commentaries on Aristotle (whose works he insisted be translated from the original Greek, after having read and appreciated them translated from Arabic), commentaries on Scripture, philosophical treatises, and two, not one, two complete systematic treatises on theology! He is the prescription against Lutheranism (among other things); I remember exclaiming when I first read the writings of Martin Luther, "All this guy needs is a good dose of Thomas Aquinas."

The drama in his life came early: he was kidnapped by his brothers and imprisoned in their castle. One even sent a prostitute in to tempt him. You know the story; he cast her out, slammed the door, and burned on it the figure of a cross using a blazing poker. He said he saw a vision of an angel handing him a rope belt, which he put on and ever after never suffered the torment of lust.
"Aquinas’ treatises on chastity indicate how clearly he saw the harm that unchastity posed for the moral and intellectual life. He lists the 8 daughters of unchastity (or lust) as blindness of mind, rashness, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, inordinate self-love, hatred of God, excessive love of this world, and abhorrence or despair of a future world. [Summa Theologiae, II-II, 153, 5] He explains that they wreak havoc with the four acts of reason and the twofold orientation of the will. Blindness hinders one’s ability to apprehend an object rightly. Rashness interferes with counsel. Thoughtlessness opposes judgment about what is to be done. And inconstancy conflicts with reason’s command about what is to be done. Inordinate self-love is contrary to the will’s proper end, which is God, while hatred of God flows from his forbidding acts of lust. Love of this world is inimical to the means man should will in relation to his end, while despair of a future world results from the distaste of spiritual pleasures brought on by over-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh."

St. Thomas is the antidote to our society's ills. He is a voice for the laity, and his well-known words "communicating one's contemplations to others is a greater thing than merely contemplating" (ST 2-2, 188.6) could be spoken directly to us. "Contemplation comes first, and it will flow naturally into activity. There is no sign in St. Thomas of that tension between the religious and the intellectual life which is given expression in the Imitation of Christ, and which so many modern Catholics seem to feel." (Angelus Book of Saints) St. Thomas is able to navigate easily through the pagan and scientific worlds in his very orthodox boat and is a model for us all.

His honor is evident in his painfully fair and crystal-clear writings. "[We] come to see the characteristics of Thomas's mind its strongly empirical bent, its refusal to speculate where evidence is lacking, its refusal to play down the natural in favor of the supernatural."

We know the story of how when he was saying Mass in Paris at the end of 1273 he had so poignant a mystical experience that he couldn't write anymore "since all that have written seems to me like so much straw compared with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me" (Processus informativus, Naples 1317, # 79). Nevertheless, he knew, also mystically, that he had "written well of Me" saith the Lord, and when asked what he wanted in return, answered, "Only Thyself, Lord." And on March 7th, 1274, he got it.

That's what I wrote before. To that there's not much to add, other than re-emphasizing his placid and single-minded courage in defending Aristotelianism against its many detractors, including the Platonists who thought it entirely too materialistic and the over-cautious who felt it offered nothing helpful to Catholic theology. There were many who zeroed in on the differences between Aristotle and Christian revelation; Thomas showed you needn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need a man like him today! He also had to correct the Averroists who felt that reason proved that the earth always existed, that God has no knowledge of individual persons and that our souls are not immortal!

He upheld the "deeply reasonable order of man's return to the creator, in whose image we are made, harmoni[zIng] the manifold variety of human action into a single moral pattern." He was a very moral man, dedicated to truth, and endowed with great personal charm.

He was the subject of much envy, but while he may have suffered their jealousy, he didn't let it ruffle him. We have to remember he was more than just a genius university professor: he was a man bent deeply on contemplation of God. And he felt the importance of sharing what he learned there. As we have already seen, "Communicating one's contemplations to others is a greater thing than merely contemplating." (Summa Theologica, 2-2. 188.6). There was no tension between the contemplative and active life that modern Catholics seem to feel. There was not the downgrading of active life that some pious types used to express, nor the downgrading of the contemplative life that many moderns expressed later. I felt it myself when our Religious Education teacher in 8th grade posed the problem, "So if your elderly neighbor needed a meal and his lawn raked, would you go over and help him or would you just pray?" And I said, "I would do both." (Which wasn't the response he was looking for.) On the other hand, "[Thomas Aquinas'] sanctity was achieved in and through the main work of his life, his intellectual activity." - Angelus Book of Saints. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.