Reflecting and Responding
Thomas Aquinas
Learning to Love and Know God Fully
To know that God exists in us in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature.
SUMMA THEOLOGICA
THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274) WAS captivated by the work of Augustine and Aristotle. In effect, much of his Summa Theologica is an integration of the two men’s thoughts blended with his own dramatic insights. Aristotle gave to Aquinas the basic rubric within which he structured his entire system. And Augustine connected him to orthodox Christianity.
According to Aquinas, everything in life is a potential state that is moving toward its actual state. That is to say, we all have a purpose and a destiny that we are moving toward. Only one path will lead us to our actual end state, and it is critically important that we find the right path. But how do we discover that this is our destiny, and what resources will guide us along the way?
The Ultimate Goal
Aquinas’s system provides an answer. For him, our ultimate destiny is a state of happiness found in eternal contemplation of God. To gain this state, every potential part of our nature must reach its actual end. With precision and detail he outlines the necessary steps that lead to our ultimate destiny. Because the natural leads to the supernatural, the temporal leads to the eternal and nature is completed by grace, Aquinas begins with what we know and desire on a natural plane. What do our natural desires and ambitions teach us about our eternal life with God?
In effect, Aquinas’s system reflects an architect’s master plan, which coordinates the construction of the entire complex of buildings. A master plan identifies the site and function of every necessary structure. Then, careful thought and attention determine the design of each building so that it contributes to the architect’s overall purposes.
Since we are born incomplete, we realize that our mind and spirit must undergo formation. But to undergo this formation we must understand our ultimate goal in life and then determine how we will reach this goal. Early twentieth-century philosophers referred to this as “intentionality of consciousness,” which develops according to how we spend our life energies—our thinking, our feeling, our desiring. These choices determine how we as humans grow and develop. And this is the way Aquinas says we can achieve the end for which we were created.
The Results of the Fall
Before the Fall, Aquinas asserts, Adam and Eve lived in perfect communion with God. There was nothing that impeded their love and communication with him. But afterward, they lost the divine connection that had produced their automatic happiness. In its place grew an overwhelming longing, but no clear understanding, of how to satisfy it or look for its fulfillment in God.
As a result, our incessant longing for happiness is the indirect beginning of our life with God. Since every part of our spiritual knowledge arises from our natural knowledge, everything we desire naturally has an ultimate spiritual end. This helps us recognize how natural reason is not contrary to faith but is completed by it.
“To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature,” Aquinas begins. He says that it is reason working with our will that creates the drive to discover God and grow in our knowledge of him. Unfortunately, sin distorts our reason, but we retain a sense of God through our longing for happiness. It is then our will desiring to find happiness and our reason sorting through all of our options for happiness that lead us toward God. Often this journey includes several missteps when our passions overrun our reason, distorting our judgment.
This problem has plagued us since the Fall. When Adam and Eve allowed their passions to overrun their reason, they set in motion a chain of events that has never stopped. Our original relationship to God was based on the submission of our will to God’s will. When Adam and Eve disrupted this order, they sabotaged our natural human destiny. And this disordering of our natural destiny caused us to lose our sense of God. As a result, we no longer seek him.
Despite this disordering, we retain the innate human capacities that distinguish us from the rest of creation, especially our reason. With our reason guiding us, we begin to seek the best life we can live, believing that our rational discoveries will lead to true happiness. In the process we discover that our will naturally desires to help us find what is true. Since the will is the motivating power that drives all of our desires and actions, it is essential that the will direct us to the truth and to the discovery of our contemplative life with God. The unfolding of this life with God in turn provides the happiness and stability we seek.
Natural Knowledge and Spiritual Knowledge
With our will motivating us to know happiness and our reason leading us to truth, we discover the building blocks of our life with God. Ultimately this leads us from knowledge of earthly things to things eternal. Since our knowledge always begins with experiential understanding gained through our senses, Aquinas insists that we come to a vague knowledge of God by seeing his effects on our world. It is this recognition that helps us see that to love our neighbor is the starting point of learning to love God.
Natural knowledge alone is not enough, though. Eventually, all that we can know by reason must be completed by the knowledge of God we obtain by faith. Thus the journey toward God begins when our will is aligned by reason to pursue him as the only enduring source of stability and peace. Once our natural knowledge of God obtained by reason is completed by our revealed knowledge of God obtained by faith, we possess complete knowledge that leads to happiness. This means that nature does not destroy grace but is completed by it.
With this recognition in mind, we can move from the potential knowledge that lies within us to the actualized knowledge only some obtain. It is a long and arduous process filled with pitfalls and mistakes. But for those who make the effort and recover the knowledge of God lost in the Fall, the reward is supreme.
We are strengthened in this process by cultivating the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance) and the theological virtues (faith, hope and love). We gain the ability to exercise each virtue at the right time, for the right reason, in the right way and with the right outcome. Together, the cardinal and theological virtues order every part of our natural and supernatural life, producing the right type of satisfaction of all our natural and lawful desires.
Primary Acts and Secondary Effects
Spiritual formation is critical to our development, and for Aquinas, this process begins with justice. The virtue of justice produces the capacity to receive exactly what we are entitled to receive, and, under the virtue of justice, reason and will work most deliberately. Under justice Aquinas assigns the secondary virtue of religion. In Aquinas’s system, religion is the highest moral virtue, holding a middle place between the cardinal and theological virtues. Religion and the practices that give rise to it form a bridge that interconnects all aspects of our human personality. It is here where the interior and exterior acts of religion meet, providing the connecting points between our natural and spiritual life.
The interior acts of religion are devotion and prayer. These acts develop the right motivations so that when we participate in the exterior acts of religion, they stimulate the right effects. Devotion pertains to the orientation and intentionality of our will. Prayer deals with the right and proper use of our reason as it governs the will. In considering devotion, Aquinas begins with five questions:
In answering these questions, he demonstrates that devotion is an act of the will in which we are prompted to worship and serve God. Aquinas emphasizes that devotion, as the first and principal act of religion, must be present in all acts of religion. If it is not, the act is not a true act of religion at all but an empty shell and useless expression.
In Aquinas’s system, there are external and internal causes of devotion. The extrinsic cause is God himself. The intrinsic cause is contemplation, which results from our desire to find God and our discipline in seeking him. The effects of devotion are manifold, but they are principally expressed as a spirit of boundless contentment and joy.
Contemplation, like every other part of the Summa, is addressed through the format of provocative questions and structured responses. In question number 153, Aquinas raises eight queries on the nature of the contemplative life:
In responding to each question, Aquinas helps us see the reasonableness of our convictions. Our contemplative life needs to include both our intellect and our affections. The moral virtues not only pertain to the contemplative life but lay the very foundation that makes the contemplative life possible. The contemplative life helps us coordinate our pursuit of God. After providing specific directives on how this can occur, Aquinas discusses the way every truth pertains to contemplation, the way God works to complete our human reason in order to bring about a higher state of divine awareness, and the importance of Dionysius (see chap. 7) in helping us understand the pleasure and duration of contemplation itself.
Ultimately, Thomas defines our highest good as eternal contemplation of God resulting in perfect love. Our capacity for contemplation is the most dramatic way we differ from every other part of the created order. In order to contemplate, we must have a sound body, ordered passions achieved through moral virtues and prudence, and freedom from external disorders such as crumbling governments and decaying civilizations. If these physical realities that contribute to our stability are not present, then the desire and opportunity to contemplate God will not be present either.
Contemplation produces in each one of us the conviction that we should give ourselves to God in worship. The result is our realization of the goodness of God. Contemplation also helps us see how we are inadequate and thus awakens a keen sense of our need for God. Contemplation helps us appreciate the person and work of Jesus Christ. Through his example, we are inspired to imitate his life.
Finally, contemplation produces both a positive and a negative effect. Its principle positive effect is heartfelt joy. Its principle negative effect is spiritual sadness or regret when we are reminded of all the ways we have acted against our known awareness of God. Aquinas concludes by emphasizing that we are given varied levels of divine understanding. We are responsible to be faithful to the level of understanding we acquire and to work without ceasing to recover the knowledge of God lost in the Fall.
While devotion turns our will to God, prayer completes the commitment of our whole being to love and serve him. Prayer is an act of reason, so it comes under the influence of the will because the will moves all other human faculties. It is the will that moves us to pray, just as it is the will that moves our intellect to worship God.
Aquinas’s treatment of prayer is the longest question in the entire Summa, stretching to seventeen sections. Because prayer is a part of the virtue of justice, and justice is concerned with getting things in the right order and giving people their proper due, prayer helps direct our reason to the development of laws that ensure justice. To balance his thought, Aquinas emphasizes that we give our bodies to God through worship, our minds to God through prayer and our wills to God through devotion.
Mistakes That Defeat the Work of Prayer
Thomas discusses three common mistakes people make when they pray. The first is to believe that the world operates independently of God. This belief causes us to become indifferent to God and, in extreme forms, to deny his providence.
The second error is to believe that everything is fixed. This belief causes us to wonder if we should even pray, since everything is predetermined. This mistake cuts the nerve of actively seeking God’s will and inhibits us from developing the full knowledge of our convictions.
The third mistake is to believe that God changes his mind. This belief arises out of our temptation to interpret certain passages inadequately, or from our egocentric hope that God will soften the consequences we bring into our life by our own actions. Aquinas teaches that we must accept that God’s will has an ultimate purpose. Once we settle this matter, we recognize that prayer is a secondary cause in which God invites us to join with him in accomplishing his purposes.
Through prayer we work to sort out what role we will play as secondary agents in God’s primary purposes. Prayer is not telling God what we think, or simply thanking him for his provision of food and drink. Rather it is our active, intentional effort to understand what God is doing and how we can join him. Thus through prayer we become coparticipants with God. God’s will sets everything in motion. Our will, directed by devotion and prayer, allows us to participate in his purposes. Together, prayer and devotion form our inner being. These two interior acts of religion are the way our will and intellect are given to God.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
For someone who early in life received the nickname “dumb ox,” Thomas Aquinas certainly produced a substantial body of literature in theology, philosophy, law and ethics. Some forty books, in fact. He developed perhaps the most thorough synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and biblical theology. His most famous work, the Summa Theologica, is a systematic compendium on all the theological, philosophical and ethical topics debated in the medieval universities of his day, including what have become classic statements on natural law, virtue ethics and arguments for the existence of God.
But now I must give full disclosure: my understanding of the Summa is fragmentary at best. I am a layman in Aquinas studies, having never taken a single course on his writings. In my early years I made several attempts to grasp the Summa on my own—all pretty much in vain. But even then I was impressed by the fact that Aquinas devoted 175 pages to the role of “habit” in the moral life. I had never read anyone who gave such sustained attention to habit: what it is and why it is important and how it develops and functions. This was of keen interest to me, for habits play a key role in the development of virtue. Indeed, we can think of virtue as deeply ingrained habits we can rely on to make our lives function well. (Conversely, vice involves bad habits we can rely on to make our lives dysfunctional.)
This is, of course, a huge subject that can be followed with genuine profit, and it was Aquinas and his Summa that started my work along these lines. So even though I did not fully understand the Summa, I was helped by it. Since those early days, Gayle Beebe’s lectures and writings have tutored me on Aquinas, and I am grateful . . . though I am sure there is still much I do not grasp.
We can always be grateful for the large place Aquinas gives to right reason in the spiritual life. By separating will and intellect—sin diverts will, not intellect, from its proper end—he could see human reason remaining operative despite the Fall. And here is the key: Aquinas never pitted faith in opposition to reason as is so common today. No, reason and faith work hand in hand, two ways of knowing, both valid and both necessary. Faith completes reason as reason gives the grounds for faith. Reason helps us sort through all the options for a good life, and faith enables us to commit ourselves to this life.
Another thing: Are you as taken as I am by the importance Aquinas places on prayer? Here we witness a massive intellect totally in the service of devotion. On a pastoral and practical level, I appreciate his dealing with a major mistake about prayer so many people make, a mistake that simply defeats the work of prayer. I refer to this notion that everything is fixed, that we live in a closed universe. When you go to a teacher or employer about some matter, and they invite you to sit down and share your concern, appearing interested and attentive, and later you learn that the decision was made before you even entered the room—you know how that makes you feel. Well, a lot of people have a similar feeling about prayer. If everything is set, then why pray? It is a good question.
But I say to you that ours is an open universe, not a closed universe. God has sovereignly chosen to invite us into this process of bringing about his will on the earth. Theologian John Goldingay has written, “It is a characteristic expression of the instinctive self-humbling of God to share with us the making of decisions in the world; and we do this by intercession.” Think of it. We are, as the apostle Paul puts it, colaborers with God, working together to determine the outcome of events.
And prayer was where Aquinas ended. On December 6, 1273, during the Feast of Saint Nicholas, he had a profound mystical experience of heaven and the surpassing glory of God, after which he declared, “All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.” He died three months later. We know, of course, that the Summa is far more than straw, but it is instructive for our growth in grace to see that after all Aquinas’s carefully framed argumentation about the validity and importance of reason, he has a mystical experience so overwhelming that it trumps reason.
Thomas Aquinas said on his deathbed, “I receive Thee, the price of my redemption, for Whose love I have watched, studied and labored. Thee have I preached; Thee have I taught. Never have I said anything against Thee: if anything was not well said, that is to be attributed to my ignorance.”
Dear Lord, we’re so glad Thomas Aquinas is part of the Christian team! He was indeed the “angelic doctor.” We certainly cannot match his intellectual power, but we can be grateful for it. Thank you, Lord, that all of Aquinas’s thinking and all of his reasoning and all of his argumentation was in your service. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.