4. The Greatness of the Human Person Consists in This: That We Are Capable of the Universe.
4. The greatness of the human person consists in this: that we are capable of the universe.4
The proof that Aquinas is a premodern thinker who has much in common with indigenous wisdom is that he celebrates, first and foremost, our relationship to the cosmos, which, as we have seen, elicits ecstasy and drunkenness. Indeed, that cosmos is more excellent than human beings. “God has produced a work in which the likeness of God is clearly reflected—that is, the world itself” (158). Our greatness as a species he declares, is that we are “capax universi, capable of the universe.”
What an eye-opener and game-changer this is! Aquinas is urging humans to get beyond our own hurts and wounds and petty agendas and look at the big picture. He recognized that the universe is our mother and, therefore, ought not be neglected in the way we look at the world.
Our bigness of mind, our vastness of intellect and imagination, all urge us to look out into a world so much larger than ourselves. It is not enough to live in the worlds we make. We must consider the world that makes us. He invites us to welcome cosmology and those who study it! And to grow our souls. With the growing of our souls there comes more courage (grand coeur, or “big heart” in French), more creativity, more joy.
Aquinas marvels that we are capable of such a reach at all. “Other beings take only a limited part in being. But the spiritual being is capable of grasping the whole of being” and “embracing the whole of being.” He speaks of our vast capacity to know and understand this way: “There is nothing that the human mind cannot understand potentially. It is capable of knowing all things.”
In terms of our creativity he says: “Instead of the knowledge and power in regard to fixed and particular things, human beings have by nature their reason and their hands.” What we can accomplish with our hands and our reason is vast for “by these means human beings can make for themselves instruments of an infinite variety and for any number of purposes.” Isn’t it true that no two musicians have composed the same song? Or two painters painted the same painting? Or any two poets composed the same poems? Does this not imply that our creativity is infinite?
He elaborates on our immense intellectual capacities when he says that we have “a power extending to the infinite.” And our “intellectual natures have a closer relationship to a whole than do other natures.” We “may comprehend the entirety of being through our intellect” and “our intellect never understands so many things that it could not understand more.” Aquinas is talking about what we today call consciousness: “There is something that relates to the totality of existing things. The soul is such a being that, as is said in [Aristotle’s’] The Soul, ‘in some way is all things’” (142).
A mistake about creation
results in
a mistake about God.