Postscript: What St. Thomas didn’t say
POSTSCRIPT
WHAT ST. THOMAS DIDN’T SAY
Here is what he did say about what he didn’t say:
(1) that the most eloquent knowledge of God is to know that He transcends all knowledge;
(2) and therefore, a fortiori, that He transcends all words. All the mystics of all the world’s religions agree in that, at least. St. Thomas, the greatest of wordsmiths, sculpted 4,000 pages of profoundly condensed words for his little Summa (for “beginners”!), massed together like a neutron star, but he did this for the same reason an artist painting a single star on a dark night would surround one tiny, bright point of light with massive darkness: he wrote all these words ultimately only to frame and to set off by contrast the God Who infinitely transcends all words, since He is The Word, in the singular (“Hear, O Israel: the Lord, the Lord your God is one!”);
(3) that Socrates, the world’s greatest philosopher, is right in assuming that we know very little, and much less than we think we know, and that on many questions we must be satisfied with possibility or probability or “arguments from fittingness”;
(4) that the argument from merely human authority, though weighty, is not conclusive; in fact it is “the weakest of all arguments”;
(5) that compared with what we will see in Heaven, and compared with what St. Thomas was graciously given the opportunity to see on earth by the mystical vision God gave him shortly before his death, he has to make the shocking judgment about the greatest work in the history of theology that it’s only “straw”. (To modernize the shock, imagine he said, “It’s all bullshit.” Straw was often used in the Middle Ages for covering animal dung.) If he had not made this shocking judgment about it and had not left it unfinished, it would really have been unfinished. “Perfect” literally means “completely made,” per-factum. The most perfect and finished possible work on earth is to know that all work on earth is imperfect and unfinished. The Summa’s capstone is its lack of a capstone.
(6) That the most appropriate commentary on St. Thomas is therefore one that is also unfinished;
(7) and that the demand which this book, like the Summa itself, makes on its reader is not merely comprehension, scholarship, or study, but life. Truth in thought is the necessary foundation for truth in life, truth in action—a building without a foundation will not stand—but the foundation is for the sake of the building, not the building for the sake of the foundation. The ultimate purpose of this book, and of the Summa, and of all theology, is not just knowing the truth but being the truth and doing the truth.
So do it, already: be a saint. God will not let you go until you are. That is why there is Purgatory, and that is why you will love it.