12. Every Truth Without Exception—and Whoever May Utter It—is from the Holy Spirit.
12. Every truth without exception—and whoever may utter it—is from the Holy Spirit.12
These words from Aquinas were written late in life. No doubt he was looking back on his many battles over his eagerness to interact with ideas of non-Christians—including but not limited to Aristotle, Moses Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Plato, and Boethius.
It is difficult to imagine a more ecumenical statement than “Every truth without exception—and whoever may utter it—is from the Holy Spirit.” He is saying that truths from all the religious traditions of the world are “from the Holy Spirit” and therefore are to be taken in and listened to and meditated on. They can all lead us to the divine, and this is why study is so important a spiritual practice to him (as it is in the Jewish tradition).
Aquinas is also saying that all truth arrived at by science “comes from the Holy Spirit.” Thus it is so important not only to pursue science and link it with love of wisdom but also to listen and learn from scientists who help to reveal the insights and revelation that creation contains.
Aquinas also reminds us that all music that speaks truth—all art, all architecture, all mathematics, all novels, all poetry, all dance, all rituals, all films, all documentaries, all political punditry that arrives at truth—is to be taken in and contemplated deeply. Art too, is content worthy of the lectio divina.
Aquinas honors the dignity of work. He insists that the politician must know more about the human soul than the physician knows about the body. He honors the vocation of the politician, but he also warns that politicians can bring about great harm. Consider in the last century how successful Adolf Hitler was and how very knowledgeable about the German soul to which he appealed so successfully by appealing to the resentment that was harbored there. Aquinas would give him good grades for knowing the soul, but of course flunk him for failing to appeal to what is best in the soul (rather than the evil that is latent there).
Aquinas celebrates work as integral to the Via Creativa, and he insists that the Holy Spirit is always alive and active, inspiring us in all our work and creativity and bringing forth truths from all of our professions and pursuits.
He is speaking of our relationship with other species because they, too, speak truth to us. They, too, are logos, the word of God, just as all beings are another Christ, a Cosmic Christ (see chapter 3).
We are surrounded by truth, truth seekers, and truth tellers. Truth reveals itself to us on a daily basis. And it all comes from the Holy Spirit who clearly, in Aquinas’s estimation, did not retire after Pentecost but still unleashes revelations today.
Aquinas is in love with truth and truth-seeking. He is a hunter-gatherer after truth, a model and saint and doctor of the church who fulfills that very important archetype of the hunter-gatherer that I wrote about in my book The Hidden Spiritualty of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine. Aquinas is a walking archetype and story of our pursuit for truth. All his life he sought truth, whether by way of science or philosophy, observation or contemplation, the scriptures or the theologians commenting upon them.
The motto of the Dominican Order to which Aquinas belonged for thirty years is Veritas. Truth. We remember some Dominicans for their honest commitment to that pursuit: Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Sienna and Fra Angelico, Giordano Bruno, Bartholomé de las Casas. And in the twentieth century there is Fr. Marie-Joseph Lagrange, founder of the École Biblique, the oldest biblical and archaeological school in the Holy Land, as well as the scholars there, including Roland de Vaux and Pierre Benoit. And there are theologians who played prominent roles in the Second Vatican Council, such as M.-D. Chenu and his students Yves Congar and Edward Schillebeeckx.
Of course there have also been shadow-filled Dominicans in history, such as Torquemada, chief inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition; the coauthors of the manual for torturing and burning witches, the Malleus Malleficarum; Johann Tetzel, whose mania for selling indulgences in Germany lit the fire to Martin Luther’s revolution; and countless other inquisitors more bent on persecuting truth-seekers than honoring and seeking the truth themselves. The history is mixed. The mission, however, is quite clear: veritas. Living up to it has proven to be a challenge. Where courage is in short supply, clearly there is rarely a pursuit of truth, but rather a shouldering up with pleasing powers that be. Truth requires courage. Pusillanimity and the failure to speak truth to power honors neither truth nor the Holy Spirit.
In the sentence that heads this chapter, Aquinas gives a green light to every scientist, artist, prophet, and activist to carry on the work of the Spirit, which is always a work of truth. He walked his talk—and he paid a price for it, not only by the controversies he stoked in his lifetime but by way of the condemnations that arose immediately upon his death.
Here we may also mention the “year of silence” he underwent during the last year of his life, when he put down his pen and was rendered mute right up to the end. Call it a nervous breakdown, call it a stroke, call it a mystical experience—or call it all three—the lesson he leaves behind is clear. “Everything I have written is straw,” he exclaimed. These words are an ultimate act of letting go, signified by his inability to finish his Summa Theologiae. Compared to the truth he studied, even his genius seemed to offer nothing but straw.
Revelation
has been made to many pagans. …
The old pagan virtues
were from God.