Introduction The Boldness of the Man Is Amazing
Introduction
The Boldness of the Man is Amazing
Alice Walker tells us that “hard times require furious dancing.” I couldn’t agree more. Hard times also require furious and fierce wisdom, and this is why the courage and truth-seeking of the real Thomas Aquinas deserve an audience today. Bold ancestor that he is, we must grasp the deep message he offers to bolster our spirits, sharpen our minds, and expand our hearts for compassionate action.
Recently I was invited to speak at a gathering sponsored by the Sierra Club in the Bay Area along with two scientists about the challenges spiritual, scientific, and technological that climate change and species extinction are posing to us all. It was, as one would expect, quite a sobering occasion. After the three of us had spoken, in strode Joanna Macy, who had just celebrated her ninetieth birthday. As she was handed the microphone, she exclaimed: “Isn’t it a marvelous time to be alive? What a tremendous gift it is to be invited today to address this crisis from the depths of our humanity and our spiritual lineages?” Her words electrified the audience. Instead of wallowing in despair or sinking into denial or running from our responsibilities, she was inviting us to seize the occasion that history has laid upon us.
I could not agree more. We must call forth the best of our lineages and bring them all to the table, along with scientists and inventors and moral imagination at its fullest. Wendell Berry—farmer, poet, essayist, and prophet of my generation—says that we must “fight the worst with the best.”
Clearly what we are facing today is “the worst.” The climate emergency that is calling us to change our ways, as well as the freefall of democracy that we see happening all around us, is as bad as it gets. Years ago, Carl Jung predicted that in the Age of Aquarius (in which we are now) evil will no longer be under the table but on top. And he posed the question: Will we have the will to deal with it?
Our times call for boldness. They call for the young to arise to the great task of saving the earth as we know it from collapse—and for the elders to share the stories of wisdom that we carry from our traditions or lineages. Of course, we look many places for the bold wisdom necessary to render us wise and successful. One place to look for wisdom is our ancestors. And Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) is certainly one of those. In response to Wendell Berry’s call to “fight the worst with the best,” young and future generations deserve to hear the depth and wisdom of Aquinas who brings the “best” into the battle.
Thomas Aquinas, saint and doctor of the church, is one of the greatest geniuses and talented minds to whom the West has ever given birth. Yet, sad to tell, he is not always understood for the bold thinker (and ecumenical champion and creation-centered mystic and lover of creation and justice-oriented prophet) that he was.
Sad to say, movements like “Thomism” have often attracted people who possess far smaller souls than Aquinas, with the result that instead of honoring his breadth and courage and depth of truth-seeking, they often make him over into their pusillanimous image that distort his memory and his sense of intellectual adventure. In the process they have essentially forgotten his amazing contributions to our lives and view of the world, contributions that could help build our strength today as we face unparallel threats to the survival of the earth as we know it and, indeed, to all our relationships.
It is time to rescue Aquinas from Thomism—just as it is time to rescue Jesus from Christianity, Jung from Jungism, and Saint Francis from the birdbath. We humans—and the earth we inhabit—require all the help we can muster, and the brilliant and magnanimous mind and heart of Thomas Aquinas, the wisdom he shares, fill a deep need of our species.
Postmodern times require premodern wisdom. Just as we can benefit profoundly from the wisdom of indigenous peoples today—a wisdom that was trampled on by modern adventurers and philosophers and theologians alike who espoused a philosophy of empire and human narcissism and preoccupation with anthropocentric fears of hell, damnation, and original sin—so, too, can we benefit from the premodern wisdom of Thomas Aquinas. This wisdom begins, as indigenous people do, with a consciousness of the whole—that is, with cosmology. This is how postmodern thinking also begins, as physicist David Bohm confessed: “I am proposing a post-modern physics which begins with the whole.” Premodern thinker Aquinas agrees when he reminds us that “The most excellent thing in the universe is not the human; it is the universe itself.”
It is rare to encounter a human being of the depth and breadth, love and passion, curiosity and intellectual vigor that Aquinas shared. I recall that when I was writing my major tome on Aquinas, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, several years ago I gave a talk at Adrian College in Michigan, a college run by Adrian Dominican sisters. Aquinas had been a Dominican, and I was still one at the time. (Indeed, I realized just this year that I was a Dominican for longer than Aquinas himself—having died young, he was a Dominican for thirty years, whereas I was a Dominican in good standing for thirty-four.)
I shared with the audience some of my findings in researching my new book, which was a first of its kind since I translated many of his works that had never been translated before whether in English, German, Italian, or French. Among these valuable gifts from Aquinas were his first and most mystical book, a commentary on Denys the Areopagite that he wrote at twenty-eight years of age, and his commentaries on the Psalms, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Lamentations, and the Gospels of Matthew and John. It is especially in his biblical commentaries that he reveals his most poetic, mystical, and free-ranging imagination, and it is there that he softens the scholastic framework that formats many of his other works but renders him difficult to grasp by postmodern minds.
After my presentation at Adrian College, an old Dominican sister came up to me with tears running down her cheeks, and she said: “I was instructed in Aquinas and Thomism beginning over fifty years ago. I am so angry—and so sad—that I had to wait over fifty years to hear ideas from Thomas Aquinas that truly move me and inform me for the first time of what made him so great a saint. Why did I have to wait my whole life long to hear these things?”
Why indeed. Because rather than be listened to and studied for the entirety of his life’s work, petty minds landed on a few old philosophical debates or just a few of his writings (always the Summa Theologiae) to carry on their diatribes against the modern world in the guise of a rigid orthodox blanket called “Thomism.” Père M.-D. Chenu, a great historian and scholar of Aquinas with whom it was my privilege to study during his last year of teaching (spring of 1968 in Paris), said that sixteenth-century Thomists “lost the eminent spiritual equilibrium of their master which would have enabled them to understand, assess and assimilate the rational values of this second Renaissance” (meaning the sixteenth-century reformations). Chenu loved to expound on the “first renaissance” in Europe, the twelfth-century renaissance, which birthed the university, the Gothic revolution in architecture, and Aquinas himself. Chenu continues: “their theology had lost the spirit of daring as well as its original freshness and had forgotten the need of continual rediscovery.”1
This spirit of “daring and freshness and need for continual rediscovery” are alive and well in the real Thomas Aquinas. Consider the thirty-one chapter titles of this book: Each one is a sentence from Thomas Aquinas. And each one can wake people up. Each title is a meditation in itself, and indeed that is my intention in this book: to let Aquinas speak to us today, especially to the young who are growing up in a postmodern (and not modern) world and who, therefore, whether they know it or not, are hungry for premodern wisdom. Aquinas is a champion, along with indigenous traditions everywhere, of this premodern wisdom. His wisdom is bold and daring.
I have taken a citation from his commentary on John’s gospel about Mary Magdalene as the title for this introduction both because Mary Magdalene represents the Divine Feminine, but also because Aquinas praises her boldness and her role as prophet. “The boldness of the woman was amazing.”2 Aquinas, mystic that he was, was also a bold prophet like Mary Magdalene. But something similar could be said of Thomas Aquinas: “the boldness of the man is amazing.” He invites us to follow.
Just as Aquinas praises Mary Magdalene for her courage, so I do the same for Aquinas. He was bold; he was daring. He was willing to break radically with the past and to adopt a radical pedagogy—scholasticism—that derived from Islam. In preferring Aristotle to Plato he was turning his back on much of the entire patristic period of theology because so many of the “Fathers of the Church” from the fourth and fifth centuries were Platonists or Neo-Platonists. In many respects, he stood alone against a dualistic establishment centuries in the making. In his non-dualism he was a proto-feminist (see chapter eleven below). What boldness! He was a pioneer who dared to bring science into the heart of the Christian faith by way of a “pagan,” and in doing so he angered the fundamentalists of his day. He insisted on the value of science to people of faith and all people: “All truth—whoever utters it—comes from the Holy Spirit.” Nature, as well as the Bible, is a source of revelation. And always nature is sacred.
The boldness of Aquinas was well known in his time. He was so controversial that riots sometimes occurred at the convent where he was living due to parish priests arousing parishioners to confront him. He was condemned three times after his death. The “evangelical poverty” movement that the upstart Dominicans and Franciscans represented was a challenge to the monastic system that had married itself to the feudal system for centuries and was—surprise!—not eager to relinquish its power and privileges, whether in the fields of education, religion, or even architecture. I describe these realities (and much more) in the fifty-five page introduction to Sheer Joy, and I urge the reader to study that introduction to learn more of the times that shaped Aquinas and his amazing life story (one that truly deserves to be made into a movie for its drama and its importance). I also treat the “clay feet” of Aquinas, as I refuse to put our heroes on pedestals and insist on considering their shadows alongside their greatness.
One admiring student of Aquinas—a major poet of the beat generation, Bill Everson, known for sixteen years in the Dominican Order as Brother Antoninus, described the introduction to Sheer Joy: “Seizing Aquinas by scapular and capuche, Fox hands him point by point through the fundamental issues of our day. The introduction is the finest thing on Aquinas I have ever read. It picks him up where Pieper and Chenu left him in mid-century and lifts him boldly through the paradigm shift into the new millennium.”
The Dalai Lama has remarked that the number one obstacle to interfaith relations is a bad relationship with one’s own faith tradition. I would propose that Christians who do not know the deep, brilliant, passionate, and justice-oriented theology of Thomas Aquinas very likely do not know their own faith tradition. More and more I recognize that my job as an elder is to share that wisdom with the younger generation. I hope this short book opens up minds and hearts to the deeper meaning of the Christian lineage, that of the creation-spirituality tradition so fully incarnated by Thomas Aquinas.
When I was studying the history of Christian spirituality with the historian Louis Cognet at the Institut Catholique de Paris I recall a lecture in which he asked the following question: “Why is there not one question in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae about spirituality? His answer was: “Because for Aquinas, everything is spiritual, spirituality is everywhere.” And so it is.
Let us consider a brief summary of his life. Again, for much more, check out the introduction in Sheer Joy.
Thomas was born in 1225 in a castle named Roccasecca near Naples, Italy, of a family of lower nobility (his father, Landulf, was the count of Aquino) who knew early he was an exceptional child. They proceeded to place him in a Benedictine monastery at the age of five with high expectations that he might raise the family fortune by becoming abbot at Monte Cassino some day. But the sixteen-year-old Aquinas had other ideas. Having availed himself of a solid education for about ten years, he exited the Benedictine monastery and wandered to Naples where a new university (an invention of the late twelfth-century renaissance) had opened its doors in 1224.
There Aquinas encountered two exciting events that changed his life forever. First, he heard lectures by an Irish professor on Aristotle and science. The second was a new movement called the Dominican Order. Aquinas fell in love with both Aristotle and the Dominicans and joined the Order at nineteen years of age in Naples. But this was anathema to his family as the upstart Dominicans were considered far too avant-garde. As G. K. Chesterton put it, joining the Dominicans was tantamount to running away and marrying a gypsy.
What followed next was a drama worthy of a Hollywood story. His mother, now a widow, ordered his brothers to kidnap Thomas. They took him back to their castle where he was held in the dungeon for about a year. Eventually his sister liberated him, and he fled the area to join the Dominicans up north where he studied with the scientist-philosopher Albert the Great, first in Paris and then in Cologne. After ordination in Cologne he moved on to the University of Paris in 1252. A lecturer on scripture and on the Sentences, he was promoted to master of theology by a special papal dispensation because he was four years underage. Teaching theology in Paris from 1257 to 1259, he left for Italy and the papal court in Anagni, Orvieto, Rome, and Viterbo. In 1272 he returned to Paris to teach for three years, then continued on to teach in Naples. Throughout these years he wrote prolifically.
In December 1273, however, he underwent an experience that rendered him mute; he went silent and never wrote another word. The best guess is that he had a stroke that, like that of Fr. Bede Griffiths, doubled as a mystical breakthrough. He did manage to say that “such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” On March 7, 1274, he died in the Cistercian monastery of Fossanuova while journeying to Lyons for a church council. He was forty-nine years old.
Three years following his death, some of his teachings were condemned by the bishops of Paris and Canterbury. In 1323 he was canonized a saint. Current editions of his work fill twenty-five volumes averaging 650 encyclopedic-size pages with double columns. One scholar estimated that a compete edition of his works would fill forty to fifty volumes. No doubt he had a photographic memory. We are told that he kept four secretaries with him at a time to whom he dictated his thoughts. His books were written all within a twenty-one-year period (1252–73). I list them in Sheer Joy, but among them are commentaries on twelve of Aristotle’s major works; many scriptural commentaries; the Summa contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae, both major multivolume works; commentaries on Boethius and on Denys; and much more. A hint of the breadth and depth of his thinking can, I hope, be tasted in this current and brief volume.
I hope this book will prove to be a useful handbook for spiritual activists and people looking for wisdom from our western lineage.
I have deliberately kept notes to a minimum because I do not want to clutter the text with notes. The references are all available in the mother tome to this book, Sheer Joy: Conversation with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, which appeared first with HarperSanFrancisco, then with Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, and—as of May 2020—from Dover Publications. I have devised a method of minimizing references by offering a single footnote to the Sheer Joy text on the first page of each chapter. Any subsequent references that are found within three pages of the original citation and appear within that chapter remain unmarked—the reader can simply go to the original text in Sheer Joy. At times within a paragraph I have also left notes unmarked that can be found in whatever page number is included within the paragraph.
The one exception to this method is chapter 27 (on angels) where the bulk of the references are to the book I coauthored with British scientist Rupert Sheldrake (who also wrote a foreword to Sheer Joy), The Physics of Angels. In that book Rupert and I dialogue with the teachings of Thomas Aquinas on angels (along with those of Denys the Areopagite and Hildegard of Bingen), and the footnotes found there refer to Aquinas’s discussions on angels.
I have tried here, as I did in Sheer Joy, to let Aquinas do the talking as much as possible. Sheer Joy provides a substantive and unique guide to Aquinas’s thought as drawn from a uniquely broad spectrum of his writings. I divide our conversations in that book by way of the Four Paths of Via Positiva (Awe, Joy), Via Negativa (Silence, Grief, Letting Go), Via Creativa (Creativity) and Via Transformativa (Justice and Compassion), all of which are foundational to the tradition of creation spirituality. The book confirms without a doubt that this naming of the spiritual journey is deeply rooted in Aquinas’s consciousness. Indeed, it was from his younger brother Meister Eckhart that I derived the Four Paths and first wrote about them.3
In an amazing passage in his Commentary on the Psalms Aquinas himself tells us that “the soul is elevated toward God in four ways.” And he spells them out. First, “for the purpose of admiring the height of God’s power, as Isaiah puts it: “Lift your eyes on high and see who creates these things” (Isa 40:36). Psalm 104 says: “How wonderful are your works, O Lord.” Thus admiration and wonder—the Via Positiva—first sets our mind toward the divine.
Second, “the mind is raised for the purpose of embracing the excellence of eternal beauty. Job 2 says: ‘You can lift your face without stain, you will be able and you will not fear. You will also forget misery and a kind of noontime brightness will rise from you.’ And this is the elevation of hope. The Via Negativa demands hope because both “misery” and “fear”’ are experienced there. But a “noontime brightness” can sometimes break through the shadow, and contemplation assists that process.
Third, “the mind is raised to cling to divine good and sanctity, as Isaiah puts it: ‘Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem’ (51:17). And this is the elevation of charity.” The Via Creativa is often a movement of waking up and rising up and being connected to the Holy Spirit, who creates goodness and charity.
Fourth, “the mind is raised to work for the imitation of divine justice. Lamentations 5 says: ‘We will lift up our hearts with our hands to God in the heaven.’ And this is the elevation of justice. The fourth way is also indicated when he says, ‘To the holy and on high,’ since the two last ways of elevation pertain to his saying, ‘to the holy’; the first two ways pertain to when he says ‘to you on high.’” (420) Clearly the Via Transformativa is being named here, for it is all about justice and compassion.
One reason for looking freshly at Aquinas today is to ground the young who seek a deep spirituality leading to action. Aquinas offers such a substantive spiritual foundation. Another reason is to rediscover the profound influence Aquinas has had on numerous spiritual giants who drew directly from him: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Dante (Dante’s primary teacher had been a student of Aquinas), Fr. Bede Griffith, Rupert Sheldrake, M.-D. Chenu, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Teilhard de Chardin, to name a few. He was also a direct influence on his Dominican brother Meister Eckhart (who was seventeen years old when Aquinas died).
Intellectual history is very much a communal process—and since Aquinas profoundly influenced his younger Dominican brother, one would have to say that all subsequent thinkers who learned from Eckhart owe Aquinas a great debt. Anyone Eckhart influenced owes a serious debt of gratitude to Aquinas, for his influence is indirect by way of Eckhart. There would have been no Eckhart sans Aquinas.
Among those influenced by Eckhart directly—and hence by Aquinas indirectly—are: Carl Jung, Karl Marx, Thomas Merton, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Howard Thurman, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, George Fox, the radical Protestants Hans Hutt, Sebastian Frank, and Hans Denk, Dorothee Soelle, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, the author of the Theologia Germanica, Martin Luther, Ignatius of Loyola, Peter Canisius, Paul of the Cross, John Tauler, Richard Hooker, Angelus Silesius, Jakob Boehme, Walter Hilton, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., Nicolas of Cusa, David Bohm, D. T. Suzuki, Ananda Coomeraswami, Rufus Jones, George Fox, G. W. F. Hegel, Rudolf Otto, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Annie Dillard, Alan Watts, Ira Progoff, Erich Fromm, and more.
It is quite a list, isn’t it? You can see what a giant Aquinas was along with his famous pupil Meister Eckhart. Anyone grateful for any of these people above might necessarily be grateful to Aquinas—and likely curious and eager to know him firsthand.
Modern science itself may have been delayed in arriving if Aquinas had lacked the courage and intellectual imagination to (1) include the best science of his day (Aristotle as translated into Latin by Muslim scholars in Baghdad and Andalusia) and (2) employ the new “scholastic” pedagogy that arrived from Islam. Scholasticism in Aquinas’s day represented a radical departure from patristic theology, since it was a method for asking and answering questions rather than simply citing long-dead authorities. In this way it helped open the door to modern science.
What has often been missed in Aquinas’s work is how biblically based it is, how he began his teaching commenting on the scriptures, and how he wrote numerous commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. In addition, his Catena Aurea is a major work (now in four volumes in English) that brings forth and arranges commentaries and sermons on the gospels by over eighty church fathers and provides a valuable resource for students of the Bible still today. His thought, while expansive scientifically and ecumenically, is profoundly grounded in the scriptures.
One might ask: What are you doing foisting medieval thinking onto twenty-first century problems? My answer is blunt: The modern era has specialized in knowledge, but no one can possibly argue that it has advanced in wisdom. In fact, as patriarchal and empire-oriented as it has been, it has banished the feminine, wisdom, and mysticism. So one goes to the missing and neglected parts of Western consciousness to attempt to balance our consciousness and redirect our civilization. And why settle for just minor or bit players? Why not invite the greatest minds and hearts into the dialog? Surely Aquinas is just such a person of substance.
Since this book draws on the primary sources that I share in Sheer Joy, I see this book as a kind of hors-d’oeuvre to that previous book, an appetizer or introduction to the deep questioning and seeking of truth that one finds everywhere in Aquinas. I have limited myself to thirty-one topics, as I think these represent pressing issues from our time upon which Aquinas sheds considerable wisdom. The reader is therefore encouraged to consult Sheer Joy for fuller development and a main course.
I have chosen my title, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas to underscore the wisdom for which he constantly strove, as wisdom is a favorite topic that Aquinas frequently invoked. It also hints at a convergence of east and west that is sorely needed today, as we strive to balance action with contemplation, and mysticism with the prophetic on a global scale. Consider this teaching from the Tao Te Ching:
The Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own
He dwells in reality
And lets all illusions go.4
I see Aquinas in this passage with its emphasis on substance and on a mind free of illusions, and I recognize his teachings in numerous other teachings from the Tao Te Ching.
The link with the Tao is also a hint that east and west can cooperate today—as long as they operate out of the depths of their traditions and not at a superficial level.
My prayer is that all who read (and pray) this book will find themselves supported to participate generously in the bold, daring, fresh, discovery-filled, joy-and-justice-making adventure that Thomas Aquinas undertook and in which he delighted. Nothing less than a New Humanity and a New Earth are calling us.
The experience of God
must not be restricted
to the few
or to the old.