Conclusion
THE HUMAN BEING:
MADE FOR ECSTASY
It is often remarked that the Renaissance represented a rebirth of humanism after the long medieval emphasis on asceticism and other-worldliness. With the great sculptors, painters, and scholars of the sixteenth century, the argument goes, the human being, in all of his Godlike splendor, moves center stage. Just think for a moment of the beautiful and adept figures that populate Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, or of the magnificent humanity that is celebrated in Leonardo’s Last Supper. These classic works signify, it is said, a clear departure from the pessimism, dualism, and spiritualism of the Middle Ages and express a renewed appreciation for the integral human being—body and soul, flesh and spirit.
I have always found this point of view puzzling. The strongest and most influential philosophical voice of the Renaissance was undoubtedly that of Plato. Young Michelangelo, for instance, picked up his Platonism at the court of his patron, Lorenzo de Medici, and his mature work, including the Sistine ceiling, is redolent of the Platonic spirit. But Plato was, of course, the greatest dualist of the tradition, the philosopher who put perhaps strongest emphasis on the struggle against the flesh and who most dramatically stated that the human being is essentially spirit trapped in matter.1 This philosophical principle can be seen, in strikingly beautiful form, in the so-called Captives that Michelangelo sculpted for the tomb of Pope Julius II. These figures twist and writhe in their battle to be free of the encumbrance of the flesh; they represent the drive of the spirit away from matter toward union with God.
But the most influential philosopher of the supposedly anti-humanist Middle Ages—and the one who was of decisive importance for Thomas Aquinas—was Aristotle. And it was Aristotle who pointedly disagreed with the dualism of Plato, affirming again and again the fundamental unity of the human being, the coming together of body and soul in an inseparable harmony. In fact, when this radical doctrine made its way into the Christian world in the thirteenth century, it was immediately condemned as irreconcilable with belief in the immortality of the soul. But it was this pro-body, this-worldly doctrine of Aristotle that young Thomas embraced with enthusiasm and never stopped defending even in the face of violent opposition. Thomas will say throughout his writings that the human being—precisely as a unity of spirit and matter—is a beautiful reflection of the divine and a creature destined for deification. So close is the rapport between flesh and spirit that even in the rapture of the beatific vision the human soul will be unsatisfied until it is reunited with the body.
There were undoubtedly dualist and anti-humanist doctrines in the Middle Ages—witness for example some of the works of St. Bernard of Clairvaux—but the teachings of the greatest medieval doctor, who is the subject of this book, are anything but dualist. In fact—and this is the great irony—they are far more humanist than much of the art of the Renaissance. Thomas’ thought is a celebration of the human, a consistent and thorough reiteration of St. Irenaeus’ adage that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”2
In this chapter, we shall consider Thomas’ view of the human person. A union of spirit and matter, the human being is made in the image of God and destined for the glorious transforming vision of the divine power. From the beginning of his life and to the roots of his being the human is touched by a divine energy that lures him to self-transcendence. Thomas’ anthropology is anything but static; on the contrary, it is centered upon the assumption that we are dynamically constituted, that we are, if you will, built for ecstasy, for the movement outward toward God. The human spirit, for Thomas, is “wired” for a spiritual journey upward toward the divine source. We are hunger and thirst for God; we are a longing, a striving for completeness; we are a passion for vision. As we have seen throughout this book, human beings are designed for union with the creative source of all that is. We are made for bliss and for light and for the ecstatic realization of our nothingness before God.
And of course in all of this we can see the centrality of the icon of Jesus Christ. Thomas understands God, the world, creation, nature, and the human being in light of that overwhelming experience we have spoken of so often in this book: the shock of the Incarnation. Aquinas reads the human off of the paradigmatic humanity of Jesus himself. And Jesus in his concrete humanity is, as we have seen, nothing but a sheer openness to transcendence.
It is extremely difficult for us to appreciate the importance and novelty of Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the unity of the human. The biblical notion of the intimate connection between body and spirit had largely been forgotten as Christianity moved into the world of Hellenistic philosophy. In the thought of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Anselm, and so many other of the most influential Christian theologians, the dominant philosophical pattern was that of Plato and his followers. In Christianized form, this Platonism appeared in an emphasis upon the sharp distinction between soul and body.
For many of the great Christian spiritual masters prior to Aquinas, there is, to some degree, a suspicion of the body, a tendency to view the flesh as an obstacle to the ascent of the spirit. In his wonderful book Civilisation, Lord Kenneth Clark shows us an illuminated manuscript from the tenth century that includes a portrait of a man. So little stress was placed on the accurate depiction of the body of this figure that the illuminator felt obliged to write over it imago hominis, an image of a man.3 This sort of “bracketing” of the body as spiritually irrelevant was typical of a hyper-Platonized Christianity. A belief in the immortality of the soul seemed to many of these thinkers to require a clear demarcation between the purely immaterial mind and the body destined for death and dissolution. It was one of the principle innovations of Aquinas to show that this dualism is itself a major source of mischief and a block to authentic spiritual development. It is only when we human beings fully acknowledge that we are good precisely as God made us that we can relate properly to the Creator.
In many of his writings, Thomas insists that the soul is not a thing separate from the body but is rather the “form” of the body. It is most important to understand what he means by this. In saying that the soul informs the body, Aquinas implies that the spirit is the unifying and organizing energy by which a particular conglomeration of bone, flesh, and nerve becomes properly human. As such, the spirit is not a self-contained and self-sufficient ghostly substance that mysteriously and temporarily unites itself to a body. On the contrary, it is intimately tied to and oriented toward the body that it contains and animates.
As it belongs to the notion of this particular man to be composed of this soul, of this flesh, and of these bones; so it belongs to the notion of man to be composed of soul, flesh and bones.4
So tight is the interrelationship between spirit and flesh that, when we define the human being, the two cannot be separated out. It is decidedly not the case that the human being is essentially or basically a soul that has an incidental relation to a body or that, in Plato’s language, merely “uses” a body. For Thomas, “the whole human soul is in the whole body, and again, in every part, as God is in regard to the whole world.”5
This is a wonderful comparison. Just as God is no closer to the angel than to the rock, just as God immediately and creatively fills every corner of the universe, so the soul is intimately and fully present to all expressions of bodiliness, to all sensation, to all feeling. There is nothing in the body that is unworthy of the soul or beneath its dignity; rather, the soul enters into all bodily functions and expressions, energizing and enlivening them.
Accordingly, we ought not to consider the body as an obstacle to the soul, a weight holding it down, preventing it from making its spiritual ascent to God:
Now the nature of our body was created, not by an evil principle, as the Manicheans pretend, but by God. . . . Consequently, out of the love of charity with which we love God, we ought to love our bodies also.6
Several times in his writings Thomas shows his impatience with Origen’s view that the soul was united to a body as a sort of punishment for sin.7 This theory, he thinks, flies in the face not only of the biblical witness that God made all things good but also of the philosophical intuition, so deeply felt by Aquinas, that soul and body belong together. Were bodiliness a penalty for sin, the soul would continually chafe against the flesh (as in Michelangelo’s sculptures), longing to be rid of it. But for Aquinas just the opposite is the case: the soul is most itself and most at home in a body, or better, “with” a body. Against Origen, Thomas Aquinas says that we ought to celebrate the wonderful communion of body and soul.
The implications of this radical view for the spiritual life are profound. First, we must make peace with our bodies. The theoretical dualism of our tradition has had some devastating practical consequences, forcing people to be suspicious of pleasure, of the instinctual life, of the sensations associated with sexuality. Especially in those cultures marked by puritanical forms of Protestantism or Jansenist Catholicism, there is a tendency to demonize the body and its passions as necessarily “fallen,” as inimical to the purposes of God. That the body and its pleasures might be intertwined with the “things of the spirit” is unthinkable to the dualist.
But to Thomas Aquinas, such intermingling is undeniable and, in fact, worthy of celebration. Let us listen to the Dominican master as he speaks, in a decidedly nondualist way, of the sexual impulse:
Natural inclinations are implanted in things by God, who moves all things. Therefore, the natural inclination of a species cannot be to that which is evil in itself. Now, in all perfect animals there is a natural inclination toward carnal intercourse. Therefore, carnal intercourse cannot possibly be evil in itself.8
He even states that the sensible delight that comes from sexual intercourse was greater in paradise than it is now.9 Fresh from the hand of God, the human being was, if anything, sexier than she is at present, sin having diminished some of the “sensibility of the body.” It is absolutely not the case for Thomas Aquinas that pleasure and carnality in themselves are signs of, or inducements toward, sin—quite the contrary. Sin has only rendered the bodily passions disordered and hence less intense, less deeply satisfying. The human ideal is hardly a disembodied spirituality, but rather an enspirited bodiliness, a sensuality in union with the proper impulse toward love and nurturance.
The inseparable unity of body and soul also has implications for how we know and relate to God. In so many philosophies and spiritualities, the intensity of one’s knowledge of God depends upon the completeness of one’s separation from the flesh. One of the greatest pagan influences on Christian spirituality was the Platonic philosopher Plotinus, who was described by his biographer as someone who “seemed ashamed of being in the body.”10
For Plotinus, the heart of the spiritual life is an ascent away from this world, away from particularity and multiplicity, away, above all, from the encumbrance of matter toward a union with the One who is the source of all existence. “A flight of the alone to the Alone” in a purely intellectual rapture is for this Platonist the summit of human experience.11 Once again, Thomas could not be in more dramatic disagreement with this sort of spiritualism.
First, for Aquinas, the knowledge of God comes through the senses, through the mediation of the body. As we saw in chapter 1, the great and unsurpassable disclosure of God’s love takes place in the Incarnation, in the enfleshment of the Son of God. Thomas would make his own the words of the first letter of John: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). God’s being and intention are revealed in the bodily event of the Incarnation and are literally seen and heard with the lowly senses. For Aquinas, one does not flee from matter to arrive at God; rather, one immerses oneself in the matter that God has sanctified and through which God deigns to disclose himself. Furthermore, our indirect philosophical knowledge of God comes, similarly, through bodily contact with the world. As we saw, it is through reflection on motion, causality, order, and beauty that we arrive at a vague understanding of God as the ground and Creator of all. For Thomas, the divine is appreciated precisely in and through the world that has been made by the divine power. In some of his least known but most provocative writings, Thomas reminds us in no uncertain terms that the highest activities of the human mind, its most soaring abstractions, even its rising to the height of contemplating God, are rooted in, and conditioned by, the body, the senses, and the imagination. The spirit does not leave matter behind in its “ascent” to the One; rather, it carries matter with it even to the throne of God.
This consistently incarnational spirituality is, to be sure, deeply Catholic. For Aquinas, we “know” the divine not through mystical elevation, not through infused wisdom, but through pictures, stories, colors, shapes, events, persons, and natural phenomena. There is, throughout his writings, what I would call a sacramental sensibility, a keen awareness of the embodiment of God in the world. There is in Thomas an interesting mix of what C.G. Jung would call the intuitional and the sensate.12 On the one hand, Aquinas’ writings are desperately abstract, soaringly philosophical in their attempt to see the whole, but this intuitive style is always balanced by and grounded in an appeal to direct and ordinary experience. There is something stubbornly earthy and commonsensical in Thomas’ work, despite his flights of academic rhetoric. Josef Pieper, one of the great Thomists of our century, recalls a conversation he had as a student with one of his philosophy professors. Young Pieper was filled with enthusiasm for the writings of Schelling and Hegel, the nineteenth-century German romantic idealists. The teacher smiled and said, “Well, that’s fine confectionary sugar and cake frosting; it’s tasty and beautiful, but not very good for you. Open the books of Thomas Aquinas and you will find some good brown bread, solid and nutritious.” We see this brown-bread quality particularly in Aquinas’ insistence upon the body and the senses in our knowledge of God.
The Thomistic emphasis upon the unity of body and soul is perhaps no more clearly and dramatically expressed than in Aquinas’ treatment of the state of the blessed in heaven. In a later section of this chapter, I shall describe in greater detail Thomas’ view of the experience of heaven, but for now I want simply to show that it is the whole human person, body and spirit, who enjoys the fullness of the vision of God. For Aquinas, paradise is no disembodied, purely intellectual state of affairs; on the contrary, it is richly imagined as the blissful fulfillment of the totality of human being:
At the resurrection the soul will not resume a celestial or ethereal body, or the body of some animal. . . . No, it will resume a human body made up of flesh and bones, and equipped with the same organs it now possesses.13
In a word, it is I who am saved and not some aspect, some dimension of myself. It is I in my concrete humanity who aspire to God to achieve my hoped-for fulfillment. To be sure, Thomas Aquinas holds that the soul is, in itself, immaterial and hence immortal, but the soul is built for a body and remains, as it were, deeply unsatisfied without a body.
Since, therefore, the natural human soul is naturally united to the body, . . . it has a natural desire for union with the body. Hence the will cannot be perfectly at rest until the soul is again joined to the body. . . . Therefore man’s final happiness requires the soul to be again united to the body.14
The intense experience of God enjoyed by a disembodied soul is real but radically incomplete, since it lacks the corporeal “feel” that makes it distinctively human. In this life, a stunning vision or a beautiful thought produces a satisfying bodily reaction, an “e-motion,” literally, a movement in the flesh. So the vision of God—if it is to be humanly complete—must involve the body to which the soul is so intimately connected.
Of course the heavenly body, though in continuity with the earthly flesh, is different precisely because it is in such close harmony with the soul. It is as though the clarity and simplicity of the soul “shines through” the resurrected body, giving it a new spiritualized quality:
Holding the body completely under its sway, the soul will render the body subtle and spiritual. The soul will also bestow on the body a most noble quality, namely, the radiant beauty of clarity. . . . As a tool is to him who plies it, [the body] will be endowed with agility.15
That last image is powerful. Many musicians comment that when they are deeply involved in the music, there is a sort of symbiosis between them and their instruments. So great is this feeling of unity, they say, that the instrument “plays them.” One of the characteristics of our sinful existence is a disharmony between body and soul, a loss of attunement between flesh and spirit. Indeed, one could argue that so much of the dualism that has plagued our tradition has its roots precisely in this sinful state of affairs, this regrettable but undeniable tension between body and soul. In our egotism and fear, the body does in fact often seem an encumbrance to the soul, an instrument that remains stubbornly out of tune or unresponsive to the player. Heaven, for Thomas Aquinas, is that state of being in which the divinely sanctioned union of body and soul is fully realized, finally attained, a place where the beauty of one enhances and calls out to the beauty of the other.
Thomas expands upon this vision in the Summa contra Gentiles, where he argues that the resurrected flesh is free of all “corruption, deformity, and defect.”16 Also, the risen body, he thinks, will continue to take pleasure in the exercise of its senses, exulting in physical beauty. We notice once more that the physical is not left behind or bracketed in Thomas’ understanding of heaven; rather, paradise, though it is beyond all particular places, must include somehow the characteristics of space and color and sound; it must be a condition in which human beings feel at home.
Now, I realize that some of this can strike us as rather naïve. Indeed, if we follow Thomas’ discussion of heaven through to the end, we find some fanciful observations concerning the age and behavior of the blessed. But there is in Thomas’ vision a healthy instinct that must be continually emphasized in the face of dualisms of all sorts. Thomas is convinced that the creation of the integral human being was not a mistake, but was rather an expression of God’s artistic creativity and ingenuity. God made us good—body and soul—and God thus intends that we live our lives and reach our final consummation precisely as embodied souls, or better, as ensouled bodies. From our more enlightened scientific perspective, it probably seems that Thomas is overstating the continuity between the earthly and the risen body, but we can, and must, it seems to me, respect his fundamental intuition that it is the whole person who, under the influence of God, moves to salvation.
In speaking of the human person as the image of God, Thomas Aquinas joins a long and venerable theological tradition whose roots are ultimately biblical. The book of Genesis tells us that God created Adam in his own image and according to his likeness, thus establishing the special dignity of the human in distinction to the other creatures. In the patristic period, particularly in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and Augustine, this similarity between the divine and the human was greatly emphasized, the imago Dei emerging as the “spark” of God’s life in each person, the orientation of the human being toward union with God. The imago is the central organizing principle in Bernard of Clairvaux’s series of sermons on the Song of Songs, writings that were to have an incalculable influence on the development of the spiritual tradition through John of the Cross and beyond. The imago Dei is so important to theological and spiritual writers because it gives a sense of the possibility of union with the divine, which is the goal of all spiritual striving. If we are, to some degree, like God, we can aspire to taste and see the divine; if we have within us something like a spark of God’s life, then we are not hopelessly exiled from the sacred presence, and our deepest hopes are then not in vain.
Like so many of his predecessors, Thomas sees the divine spark precisely in the dynamism of the human spirit. Following Aristotle, he says that the mind is “in a certain sense, all things,” meaning thereby that the human spirit is capable of knowing and reaching out to all expressions of being.17 There is a tremendous range to the mind, a limitless and restless curiosity. It is never satisfied simply knowing material things, but rather it pushes ever outward and upward, seeking to know the formal, the universal, the abstract, and the spiritual.
The intellectual soul as comprehending universals, has a power extending to the infinite; therefore, it cannot be limited by nature to certain fixed natural notions, or even to certain fixed means whether of defense or of clothing, as is the case with other animals, the souls of which are endowed with knowledge and power in regard to fixed and particular things.18
To be sure, certain human beings can be compelled by circumstances to remain at the level of animals, concerned exclusively with the necessities of life, but Thomas’ point is that this forced restriction of the mind is a sort of denial of the human soul and its limitless aspirations.
In the striking phrase of the twentieth-century Thomist Bernard Lonergan, the mind wants to “know everything about everything.”19 Its object, the food after which it hungers, the drink that alone can satisfy it, is Being itself, the totality of the real, everything about everything.
As our intellect is infinite in power, so does it know the infinite. For its power is indeed infinite inasmuch as it is not terminated by corporeal matter.20
It is said in The Soul that the soul is, “in some manner, all things,” since its nature is such that it can know all things.21
We have just seen in the preceding section how passionately Thomas insists on the coming together of soul and body, but here we see the balancing passion for the freedom and expansiveness of the mind. Precisely as immaterial, the human spirit is not tied to the worldly, the particular, the matter-of-fact. Not exclusively sensate, the spirit, as the word itself suggests (spiritus), is able to breathe, to fly, to wing its way to the far reaches of whatever is. It is a kind of mirror of being, the clear glass in which all that is can be reflected.
At this point, it is most important to recall Thomas’ understanding of God. As became clear in chapter 2, God for Aquinas is not one being among many, not the supreme being, but the ground of the real, ipsum esse subsistens, the sheer act of existing. As such, God is the root and source of all of creation, the font from which finite being continually flows. Therefore, to say that the human mind is oriented to the whole of reality is for Thomas simply to say that it is oriented to God, toward that fullness of being that undergirds, suffuses, and infinitely surpasses all things. This openness of the spirit to the divine is the “royal dignity,” the glory of the human, that which makes us, in a word, the imago Dei:
The image of God is in man . . . first, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men.22
We are the reflections of God inasmuch as we are the clear pools in which God’s reality can be mirrored. Thomas’ point is that we are “built for” union with the divine, marked as it were with the stamp of God’s being. And as we’ve come to expect, this clarification is not merely of theoretical interest. In fact, one could say that the whole of Aquinas’ theology and spirituality rests upon this insight. Because we are “predestined,” branded with the mark of God, we are nothing but hunger and thirst for the divine life. Every energy, every power, every thought and action of ours is, explicitly or implicitly, animated by the divine power, drawn by it and determined by it.
Steven Spielberg has hinted at this classically Christian idea of the imago Dei in his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In time-honored style, Spielberg chooses what lies just beyond the frontier of the known—in this case, UFOs and extraterrestrials—to symbolize and evoke the numinous dimension of God. Early in the film, alien spacecraft appear over a peaceful Midwest town on a summer night. The townspeople who see these unexpected visions are at the same time frightened and fascinated, repelled and irresistibly attracted. Their response suggests, of course, the religious attitude described by Rudolf Otto: in the presence of the divine, one is simultaneously overawed and captivated.23 Several of the witnesses are marked, “branded,” by the blazing light of the spacecraft, and they carry on their bodies afterward a sort of sunburn. This mark penetrates beyond the level of the skin and sears their hearts and minds. They feel compelled, in an obsessive way, to seek out the mountain where the alien mother ship will descend and establish contact with the earth. Overcoming the objections of family and friends, withstanding numerous attacks and surmounting impossible obstacles, two of these witnesses make it to the mountaintop for the ecstatic encounter with the extraterrestrials.
There are obviously numerous religious symbols employed in this film; in fact, it could be read as a compendium of the spiritual life, detailing the movement from conversion through repentance to union. But I want simply to focus on the symbol of the brand, the mark, as an evocation of the imago Dei. Once they were touched by the supernatural power of the spacecraft, the witnesses’ lives were transformed: they were unable to focus on anything but reunion with the ones who had marked them. It was as though the aliens had planted a magnet in them that was then ineluctably drawn to the great magnet of the mountain of encounter. This mark, this inner compulsion, this “magnet,” is something like the image of God in us. Whether we are saints or sinners, whether we seek fame or wealth or spiritual wisdom, whether we live responsibly or irresponsibly, we are inevitably drawn to God as to our final end. The mountain of encounter, union with the divine, is written into our souls; there is, if you will, a picture, an icon, of this “place” in our hearts, and we follow it whether we want to or not.
The image of God abides ever in the soul, whether this image be so obsolete, as it were clouded, as to amount to nothing . . . or obscured and disfigured, as in sinners; or clear and beautiful as in the just.24
The restlessness of the human being as she makes her way through life is a function of this imago, this predestination. We are never satisfied with anything less than the encounter, the union. Even if we have achieved all that one can reasonably desire, we want more because there is this fascinating, annoying, compelling hunger in us for the divine.
What becomes clear too in the above-cited text is the marvelously Catholic confidence that the imago can never be totally lost, despite the most blinding ignorance and the most debilitating sin. Even in the worst condition, there is still reason to hope, precisely because of the unbreakable bond between Creator and creature. In some of his more extreme texts, Martin Luther suggests that the imago Dei had been destroyed by sin and that as a consequence there is no continuity between the divine and the human.25 Thomas never adopts such a radical position. For him, sin and stupidity can obscure, can darken the image, but they can never shatter it. The imago is the beautiful jewel that, even when spattered with mud, catches and reflects back some of the divine light. It is that fundamental goodness that can never be totally perverted; it is that wholesome hunger that can lead us finally to the bread of life.
At this point, we ought to be hearing the overtones of a theme that has been sounded frequently in this book. In affirming the presence of the imago in all people, even in sinners, Thomas is subtly turning back a negative spiritual attitude. As we have seen before, one of the ruses of the sinner is to claim independence from God in sin itself. In the darkness, self-absorption, and despair of his sinful soul, he can find refuge from the awful press of God. We can hear the cry of such a sinner in Francis Thompson’s classic poem:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from him.26
This is the sinner who wants to sever any tie, loosen any bond, unravel any connection to God, someone whose entire life becomes an elaborate attempt to flee. Through time and space he runs, and most devastatingly, in the darkness of his mind, he conceals himself, wanting to hide from the face of God. This is a portrait in miniature of someone who purposely attempts to shatter the imago Dei because he finds its “weight” too much to bear. But in the spirit of Thomas Aquinas, Francis Thompson reminds us that there is no escape from “those strong Feet that followed, followed after.” The “Hound of Heaven” is not so easily put off the trail:
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
“All things betray thee, who betrayest me.”27
Even as the sinner retreats into the encircling forest gloom of his rebellion, his imago gives him away, guiding the divine bloodhound on his hunt. Try as he might to cover it, to put it out, to quench it, the sinner cannot darken the light of the imago Dei that shines out from his own heart, beckoning to the searching God.
Another route of escape that Thomas’ doctrine of the imago cuts off is that of a false or misguided humility. Eager to be free of the divine press, one might claim that she is unworthy of God, incapable of imaging or reflecting God in any way. To this person Thomas urges a frank acceptance of her royal dignity as a child of God. This doctrine of the imago teaches that our basic relationship to the divine is not that of sinner to savior (though that is certainly a dimension of our rapport with God), but rather that of child to parent. At the depths of our being, we are a reflection of the divine beauty, the divine power, the divine mind. There is a “divinity” within us that seeks full expression and full union. This intrinsic holiness of the person is expressed in the Hindu tradition in the greeting gesture of the joined palms, signaling that one is saluting the divinity in the other. It is also implicit in the curious Austrian and South German salutation, “Grüß Gott,” which means literally “greeting to God.” When one says “Grüß Gott” to a friend, he hails the divine spark in that person. Thomas Aquinas, the spiritual master, clearly sees this hidden divinity and compels his reader to see it, to accept it, to come to terms with it.
Perhaps the greatest danger that Thomas highlights in these texts on the imago is a sort of forgetfulness of soul, losing sight—through sin or ignorance or indifference—of who we are in our depths. And it is especially here that I see the tremendous relevance of these texts for our time. There is a rebirth of interest today in the ancient category of soul. Care of the Soul, a book dealing with the cultivation of one’s spirituality, sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks, and a recording of Gregorian chants sung by an obscure group of Spanish monks rocketed up the Billboard charts.28 These phenomena speak to me of a hunger for the things of the soul after too long a dominance by the rational, the pragmatic, the practical. We are made by God and are therefore built for God. When these facts are forgotten in our technological, economically driven society, the national soul dries up, withers through lack of use. Toward the end of his life, C.G. Jung composed a beautiful meditative book entitled Modern Man in Search of a Soul.29 In this text he witnesses to the growing spiritual aridity of our time, and he argues that a Third World War can be avoided only if human beings begin to cultivate in a systematic way the mysterious divine ground that is the source and center of who they are. Aquinas’ writings on the human person are extremely “soulful,” reminding us of our dignity and destiny as children of the divine. And as such, they are enormously helpful especially to us pragmatic, commonsensical Americans. Let us follow this soulful path as we look at his texts dealing with the ultimate happiness of the human being.
It is one of the common beliefs of the great atheists of modern times that the human being is rendered less than human by the belief in God. For the little-known but enormously influential atheist Ludwig Feuerbach, God is a projection of our idealized self-image. According to this nineteenth-century German philosopher, we take whatever we want to be—all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful—and we project it outward in the form of an imaginary supreme being. Then, in a sort of neurotic reversal, we beg that reality (through prayer) to give us back some of what we have given to it. The result of this unfortunate inner game is that we do not realize ourselves as we should. Lost in contemplation of and reverence for our own imaginary construction, we never seek to make ourselves more intelligent, more compassionate, more powerful. Religion, for Feuerbach, becomes therefore the great halter of progress, the negation of authentic humanity.30
Feuerbach’s theory was to have a decisive impact on his younger contemporary Karl Marx, who argued that belief in God is an “opium of the people.”31 Marx meant, of course, that the fantasy of God and eternal life dulls our sensitivity to our concrete economic and political suffering in the here and now and thus prevents us from making real improvements in our lives. Religion functions as a sort of drug and, like all narcotics, it produces a distorted view of the world and results in irresponsible behavior. For Marx, the irresponsible behavior that flows from religion is just this indifference to improving the lot of alienated and exploited victims of the capitalist system. Once more, the belief in God diminishes us.
A twentieth-century disciple of Ludwig Feuerbach was the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Like his nineteenth-century forebear, Freud thought that religion is a kind of projection, but he specified the nature of this projection in terms of psychoanalytic theory. For Freud, the belief in God is a childish, wish-fulfilling fantasy, an imaginary realization of our deepest and most powerful desires.32 We want so intensely to live forever, to see justice triumph over injustice, to find meaning in the midst of a meaningless world, that we fantasize—and then project outward—the existence of a super reality who will make these wishes come true. Religion is thus like a waking dream, a fantastic realization of what we want but, in fact, cannot realize. As was the case with Feuerbach and Marx, so for Freud this belief is not a harmless mistake, an innocent indulgence; on the contrary, it stands in the way of progress. As long as we remain religious, says Sigmund Freud, we rest at a primitive, childish level of psychological development, never fully embracing freedom, never assuming responsibility, never developing a critical intelligence—and thus never really coming to maturity.
What these three atheists have in common is the conviction that the more God is affirmed, the less we human beings become; the more God is emphasized, the more we are diminished. They assume, in short, what I have called a competitive relationship between God and the world, a zero-sum game in which one partner grows at the expense of the other. Filled with a proper zeal for the betterment of humanity, these thinkers all feel obliged to dispense with the chief competitor to our progress, God. This general atheist perspective is given its most pointed expression in an argument for the nonexistence of God formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre: if God exists, I cannot be free; but I am free; therefore, God does not exist.33 If there is a supreme being who controls the universe and human affairs, who dominates the universe, who competes with us, then there can be no real freedom. Thus, the fact of our freedom and dignity effectively moves God off the stage.
The only proper answer to these atheists, in my view, is to affirm, as I have at various points in this book, the noncompetitive relationship between God and the world. Because God is not a supreme being, but rather Being itself, God does not enter into a rapport of rivalry with the universe or with any creature in it. As the ground of being, the deepest source of the universe’s existence, God is that power in which we find our authentic freedom, in whom we can be most ourselves. Therefore, we do not have to eradicate God in order to be ourselves completely; on the contrary. It is in surrendering to the alluring call of the divine that we are most free, most ourselves, most at home. It is this understanding of the God-world relationship that inspires Thomas’ extraordinarily rich analysis of the “final end” or ultimate happiness of the human being: we come home to ourselves only in embarking on the fascinating journey outward to God.
In a Buddhist perspective, desire is the chief spiritual problem. Precisely inasmuch as we cling to our desires, say the Buddhists, we remain caught in the realm of illusion and suffering. When we let go of desire, blowing out the candle of egotistic craving, we discover that nirvana which is the “goal” of the spiritual life. Like most of his Christian forebears, Thomas Aquinas proposes a different way, a spiritual path that begins and ends with desire.
Whenever a human being acts, she acts with a particular end or purpose in mind. Thus, the reader of this book is perusing its pages, presumably, to learn something about Thomas Aquinas or about the spiritual life. Now, if we continue to analyze a given act, to ask ever-more-penetrating questions about it, we see that its intentional range opens up remarkably. Thus, you might be reading this book in order to learn something about Aquinas’ thought so that you can be better prepared for a course on Aquinas that you will be taking next fall, so that you can fulfill one of the requirements for a master’s degree, so that eventually you might be in a position to pursue a doctorate, so that someday you might become a university professor, so that you can pass on the wisdom of the spiritual tradition in a profound way, so that you can move other people into more intimate communion with God, so that thereby you can fulfill the deepest sense of vocation that you have, so that, in an ultimate sense, you might be happy. With regard to any act that we perform, says Thomas, we could do a similar analysis, opening up the ever-greater context of desire in which that act is situated. In any case, he claims, we come in the end to a final or ultimate goal that, whether we are explicitly aware of it or not, is determining what we do. This is, as I suggested above, nothing but the desire to be happy, to be finally satisfied, to be at peace. Without this basic craving of the heart, we would never do anything:
If there were no last end, nothing would be desired, nor would any action have its term, nor would the intention of the agent be at rest; while if there is no first thing among those that are ordained to the end, none would begin to work at anything.34
Just as there must be a first mover with regard to physical change in the universe, so must there be a first mover of the will, an uncaused cause of the movement of the heart, and this is none other than the desire for perfect contentment. Even someone who commits suicide does so, in an admittedly twisted way, out of a desire for happiness. Again, most of us are entirely unaware of this deep conditioning of the will as we go about our daily business. But whether we are tossing a baseball, listening to a lecture, mindlessly watching a television program, or idly whistling to ourselves, we are, indirectly at least, desiring our ultimate fulfillment.
What Thomas expresses in philosophical language is something that is reflected in the mythological literature of the world: the sacred quest. Transhistorically and transculturally one can see in drama, liturgy, poetry, and dance this theme of the journey, the search for the ever-elusive prize that alone will make life meaningful. Less than a century before Aquinas wrote, there appeared in the West the first versions of the Grail legend, composed by Chretien de Troyes and Robert de Boron. In these first tellings of the tale, the Grail, the cup that Christ used at the Last Supper and that caught some of his blood as it poured from his side, is in the possession of the Fisher King, a man who bears a mysteriously incurable wound. As long as he suffers, the country that he rules languishes. Only if a naïve and innocent man finds the Grail—and has the temerity to ask about its meaning and purpose—will the Fisher King be healed and the fortunes of his country revived. Early in the story, the knight, Perceval, stumbles upon the castle of the king and sees the Grail carried in a magnificent procession, but he is too stunned or too intimidated to ask the meaning of this mysterious object. Accordingly, he is expelled from the castle and the king remains wounded. The rest of the story is the account of Perceval’s adventurous quest for the Holy Grail, his attempt to rediscover the castle of the wounded king and to bring healing to him and his nation.
The Grail effectively symbolizes what Aquinas calls the “last end,” that goal that animates the journey of one’s life and that alone can satisfy and bring healing to the soul. For Thomas, and for the authors of the Grail legends, human life is basically an endeavor, a quest, a gradual opening out of will and consciousness. As Perceval makes his way through five painful years of searching for the Grail, he gradually discovers the true significance of this object that has become his obsession. Similarly, for Thomas Aquinas, the human heart and mind expand as they push outward toward the happiness that they crave. It is only in the course of the adventure that is human striving that a person comes fully to understand and appreciate that mysterious reality that alone can satisfy. Along the way, he tends to settle on goals or ends that are not ultimate, and it is his very dissatisfaction that spurs him on toward his proper fulfillment. Much of the energy and dynamism of the spiritual life for Aquinas flows from this sometimes satisfying, often disappointing, frequently confusing, and always dramatic quest for the Holy Grail of joy.
Having determined that all people are questing for ultimate contentment, Aquinas next endeavors to search out the nature of this happiness and to discover the process by which it can be obtained. In the course of this analysis, he considers most of the holy grails that have been sought by human beings over the centuries, and he shows how they fall short in various ways of the true Grail. What he shows most fundamentally are the myriad paths by which one’s “soul,” one’s deepest center and source of life, can be lost.
First he wonders whether our ultimate happiness consists in the possession of wealth—as many seem to have thought over the ages.35 There are, he says, two types of wealth: natural and artificial. Natural wealth is that which satisfies the basic desires of the human body: food, clothing, transportation, shelter, and the like; whereas artificial wealth, or money, is that which is invented by human beings in order to facilitate exchange. Now, natural wealth cannot be the final end because it exists for something greater—namely, the overall “support of human nature.”36 What Thomas means here is that food, shelter, clothing, and transportation are means to the end of general bodily contentment; they are meant not to be enjoyed for their own sake, but rather to give rise to a sense of satisfaction and peace. Thus, they cannot, in themselves, be what human beings ultimately desire. With regard to artificial wealth—money, stocks, bonds, investments, etc.—we are even further from the ultimate goal of one’s life because such things are used only for the procurement of natural wealth, only to buy those objects that give us bodily satisfaction. In neither case, concludes Aquinas, do we finally rest in our material possessions. Instead we treasure them as values subordinated to higher ends. If we were to prize our wealth as the highest good, we would be, says Thomas, in the grip of a sort of spiritual—we might say psychological—illness. We would be overwhelmed by what the medievals called “concupiscence” or misguided desire.
This pithy analysis of wealth, drawn largely from Aristotle, has a remarkably contemporary resonance. We live in a culture that is dominated by the concupiscent desire for what Thomas calls natural and artificial wealth. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, has observed that in the Middle Ages the tallest building in a town would be the church, since spiritual values were seen as self-evidently the most important; in the Renaissance, the government headquarters came to dominate the city since the “ultimate concern” of the community had begun to shift to the affairs of this-worldly power. Today, continues Campbell, even a casual glance at one of our great cities reveals that a third shift has occurred. If one surveys the skylines of downtown New York or Chicago, one is hard-pressed to notice any church steeples.37 Indeed, even the bishops’ cathedrals, the foci of spiritual activity, St. Patrick’s and Holy Name, are tucked away, lost in the shadows of the towering secular buildings that dwarf them. And the mayors’ offices in those two cities—the centers of political power—are also relatively inconspicuous. But what cannot be missed, what brood over the cities like sentinels, what block out the sun and obscure the night sky are the mighty temples of business and wealth: the Empire State Building, the Willis Tower, the Standard Oil Building. If, as Ruskin indicated, we can sense the ethos of a people most clearly in the “book of their art,” in what they concretely produce, then there is no doubt that we as a society are under the sway of wealth.38 In fact, “the American dream,” now exported around the globe, is tantamount to material success, to the amassing of possessions, and its influence can be seen in ubiquitous advertising and in the excesses of popular culture. To have more and more, to be richer and richer, to guarantee our security through “things” is, I would submit, a sort of American original sin—and a poison that has spread well beyond the confines of our borders.
In his simple arguments, St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that this sort of concupiscent desire for wealth is soul-destroying, since it aligns our properly infinite hunger for joy with an object that can never satisfy that hunger:
For when we already possess them [material goods] we despise them, and seek others: which is the sense of Our Lord’s words: “Whosoever drinketh of this water,” by which temporal goods are signified, “shall thirst again.” The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect and that the sovereign good does not consist therein.39
Paul Tillich commented that concupiscence is the “attempt to cram the whole world into one’s mouth,”40 futilely trying to satisfy the thirst for God with something less than divine. This very psychological/spiritual problem, implies Tillich, leads to the addictive behavior so typical of our time. Whether someone is addicted to wealth, power, pleasure, or drugs, one circles obsessively around a finite object, trying again and again to fill up the unlimited emptiness he feels within. This addictive style is beautifully symbolized in the story that Thomas invokes in the above example—namely, that of the woman at the well: “whosoever drinketh of this water will thirst again.” Thomas is searching for that “object” that alone can finally satisfy the thirst of the soul.
Having excluded wealth as this final end, he next considers honors, fame, and glory.41 Some people are relatively uninterested in material goods, preferring above all the good opinion of others, the glory that shines on them because of their accomplishments and virtues. In a certain sense, this choice of a final end represents a greater refinement of spirit than the option for material wealth, presupposing a dedication to great ideals and a willingness to sacrifice one’s self-interest. But Thomas reveals the subtle spiritual dangers involved in identifying this value with the highest good. First, he says, honor is given to someone in recognition of a virtue, achievement, or goodness, and it is thus a sign or symbol, an indicator of perfection—and not itself a perfection. Therefore, it can in no sense be identified with the final end of a human being. What Thomas underscores here, in a word, is ambition:
Virtue’s true reward is happiness itself, for which the virtuous work; whereas if they worked for honor, it would no longer be virtue but ambition.42
When the fleeting sign of goodness is sought as a good in itself, we see another peculiar skewing of ultimate concern, another sort of psychological/spiritual disorder.
Similarly, fame and glory, which consist, as Ambrose says, in being well- known and praised, cannot be themselves the ultimate joy of a human being because they are so fleeting, so insubstantial, and so often mistaken:
We must observe that human knowledge often fails, especially in contingent singulars, such as are human acts. For this reason, human glory is frequently deceptive.43
One could be famous and highly thought of—but for all the wrong reasons. As is obvious in our experience, it is frequently those people who exhibit the fewest virtues who are the most vociferously praised and widely celebrated. We know how often people are impressed by the stupid, the vulgar, the simplistic, and the sensuously pleasurable but unmoved by authentic virtue, truth, and beauty. Thus, it is altogether possible—indeed likely—that fame and esteem are counter-indications of one’s real goodness.
Once more, I think that these observations of Aquinas are of some relevance to our time in which celebrity itself sometimes seems to be the ultimate concern. Rock stars, movie actors, singers, athletes, politicians, even criminals—the various gods proposed by the popular culture—emerge as models to be emulated. Certain television shows celebrate celebrity itself, as if being well-known—having one’s fifteen minutes of fame as Andy Warhol archly predicted for all of us—was itself worthy of our attention.
But it is just this sort of obsession with glitter and glamor—what Thomas calls glory—that leads to a loss of soul. It is obvious to anyone with any life experience that the stars of today are, with rare exceptions, forgotten tomorrow. As Paul Simon says in his song “The Boy in the Bubble,” “every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.” Celebrities come and go, buoyed up by the fleeting bubble of public opinion, tossed about on the wave of “glory.” And, to be sure, this phenomenon is not restricted to the world of entertainment and popular culture. As Thomas himself seems to indicate, the lust for glory is manifested in ambitions of all kinds, the desire not to serve but to be admired for one’s prominence. This soul-sickness can creep into the hearts of politicians, lawyers, business executives, academics, and priests. When seeking after this ephemeral goal, one finds oneself on what the medievals called “the wheel of fortune,” the ever-rotating circle of fortuna, luck, prominence, public adulation. One can be on the top, but one’s stay there is necessarily short, since the wheel inexorably turns. In time, one is inevitably on the bottom, cursing one’s fate and longing for the next moment in the sun. On this wheel of glory, a person is like the sinners in the first circle of Dante’s Inferno, turning and turning, buffeted by the winds of desire and lust, chasing first this banner then that, but making no progress and finding no anchor. The point is to stand not on the outside of the wheel, on the ever-rotating rim, but rather to find one’s anchor in the center, that still point that remains the same despite all change. This deepest center, this quiet place of rest and stability, that divine ground which we discover in prayer, is what Thomas is searching for in this analysis of the final end.
If neither material wealth nor the admiration of others qualifies as the Holy Grail, then perhaps the hedonists are right in saying that bodily pleasure is the joy that we all ultimately seek. Indeed Thomas admits that pleasure seems to be something pursued purely for its own sake; no one wonders why we want to experience bodily pleasure. Yet he insists at the same time that the pleasure sensed by the body is but a “trifle as compared with the good of the soul.” In order to understand what he means here we have to recall that the soul is that capacity of ours to be open to the fullness of reality, that dynamism that pushes us out to know everything about everything, to contemplate Being itself. It is our capacitas universi, our capacity for the universe. But the bodily senses are oriented toward the particular, toward this sight, this sound, this experience. Their range, in short, is far more restricted than that of the soul. Therefore, the ultimate good, the final joy, of human life, that which satisfies the broadest and deepest of our desires, cannot be something as restricted as a bodily pleasure, but must on the contrary be an infinite value appreciated by the soul:
Consequently it is evident that that good which is fitting to the body, and which causes bodily delight . . . is not man’s perfect good, but is quite a trifle as compared with the good of the soul.44
Once more, Thomas Aquinas is inviting us to ecstasy. Were we convinced that our ultimate good consists in pleasure, we would never leave the confines of our own bodies, never transcend the basic joys associated with satisfying biological needs for food and sex and comfort. But as Thomas continually insists, we were built for more than that; we were built for the universe, for a constant leap of self-transcendence in love. Placing bodily pleasure at the center of one’s life is the quickest route to what Paul Tillich calls “self-complacent finitude,” the self-satisfied, spiritually lazy attitude of resting in oneself. Thomas’ anthropology assumes that there is a restlessness in all of us, an inner goad, a gadfly of the heart, that spurs us on to a vision of the fullness of reality. An orientation to pleasure above all things is a putting out of that inner fire, a surrender to spiritual torpor and sloth. Now, as should be clear from an earlier section of this chapter, Thomas has no quarrel with the body and indeed remains convinced that bodily pleasure accompanies even the vision of God, but he is equally convinced that the placing of pleasure at the center of one’s life is tantamount to spiritual suicide.
How often it happens that someone who has spent the first half of his life in a single-minded pursuit of pleasure finds that a bottoming out occurs at midlife. As he makes the transition to the second half of life, he finds himself in a wasteland, a desert of depression, anxiety, and fear. The objects and activities that he used to savor now leave him flat and deeply unsatisfied. I cannot help but observe that this dryness of soul is remarkably typical of many in our culture today. Sated with every pleasure imaginable, many people remain stubbornly unfulfilled. In the language of Jungian psychology, such people are shifting from the narrow concerns of the ego to the deeper and broader spiritual concerns of the Self. They are painfully opening out in the realization that the soul is hungrier than they had imagined, that they have a destiny beyond the narrow limitations of bodily satisfaction. For the Jungians, this midlife desert experience is of decisive spiritual significance and power, for it is the only way that one’s psyche is jarred into deeper life and vision.
I would argue that Thomas Aquinas makes a very similar case. His diagnosis of the spiritual illness of so many in our pleasure-oriented society would be “shrinking of soul,” a narrowing down to the particular, the egocentric. And his recommendation would be to burst the self-imposed boundaries of the soul and fly outside of oneself on the sheer energy of one’s desire for the ultimate. He wants us to lift up our eyes “to the mountains” from whence comes our help (Ps. 121:1), to open wide the vision of the spirit to broader horizons.
Not wealth, not glory, not bodily pleasure, the final joy of the human being must be that which “lulls the appetite altogether,” that which satisfies every longing, that which corresponds to the infinite craving of the human heart.
Now the object of the will, i.e., of man’s appetite, is the universal good. . . .
Hence it is evident that nothing can lull the human will but the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Thus God alone can satisfy the will of man.45
With this pithy comment, Thomas has found the Holy Grail. Because we are “wired” for God from the beginning, God alone is the end of human life. Only when we leap out of ourselves in a radical embrace of the fullness of reality will our desire be quenched; only when we hook our unlimited longing to an unlimited good will we find the joy for which we were created. Nothing less than everything, than Being itself, than the divine energy will fill up the emptiness of the human heart. Nothing other than a concrete and complete imitation of Christ, the ecstatic lover of God, will bring us to life.
Does this mean that we must eschew any good other than God, that we must turn radically away from wealth and pleasure and practical achievement, embracing the life of a contemplative monk? By no means. But we must place the love of God at the center of all, making it the ground and reason for everything else that we do. Just as God does not compete with the world, so the love of God is not in competition with other ends and goods and goals. Once the divine center is clearly established in one’s life, one can, as Augustine implied, do as one wills, singing, playing, relating, trading, entering into relationships—all for the glory of God.
The Holy Grail is what Thomas Aquinas calls the “beatific vision,” the sight, or rather the experience, of God. Can we have this vision in this life? Yes, says Thomas, when we accept the divine power as the goal and focus of our lives, when we give ourselves to God in prayer, when we lose ourselves in love and contemplation, we are experiencing—in a vague and anticipatory fashion—the beatific vision. In this sense, we can be happy, joy-filled, in this life. No gloomy pessimist, Thomas is convinced that we were created for happiness, for the imitation of the divine joy. At the same time, he holds that absolute happiness, full vision of the divine reality, is reserved for the life that comes beyond this one, when our receptive capacities are expanded through the gift of God’s grace. This last observation is of decisive significance. Since the fullness of joy lies beyond the range and scope of this life, we will always be restless this side of death. Since the beatific vision is completely had only in the life to come, we will never be fully satisfied, finally content, totally at rest in this life. Rather, all of one’s earthly existence is characterized, appropriately, by a hunger, a longing, a push outward and upward, a stubborn dissatisfaction. And therefore no utopia—of a political, economic, or psychological kind—should ever be expected. No program, no restructuring of institutions, no revolution, and no personal reorientation will ever result in human bliss; in biblical language, no Tower of Babel will ever reach up to God. But, as I suggested above, this should not frustrate us; rather, it should spur us on. When he was a young man, G.K. Chesterton was convinced that ultimate happiness could be had in this life—and thus he found himself in a constant state of disappointment because that happiness refused to materialize.
It was only, he said, when he became a Christian and realized that one was not meant to be fully content in this life that he began to enjoy himself! What changed in Chesterton was the way that he related to the world: once he knew that he didn’t have to cling to it in a desperate attempt to derive happiness from it, he relaxed and allowed its simple beauty and joy to enter in.
Once more it all comes down to ecstasy. God, who is nothing but love, has planted in the human heart an impulse to love. We are branded, marked, stamped with the image of love, and we are compelled, from our earliest days, by the hunger for love. When we fail to love, we are miserable, and when we enter into love, we are filled with life. We are wired for self-forgetfulness, built for the journey out of ourselves, lured finally by the “love that moves the planets and the stars.” All of this is Thomas Aquinas’ way of saying that we are “made in the image and likeness of God” and endowed with an immortal soul. The greatest tragedy is not failing to live up to the divine call (who does not fail after all?) but rather forgetting about our destiny altogether, living as if we were not children of God, acting as if we were not hungrily pursued by the hound of heaven. For Thomas Aquinas the greatest tragedy is loss of vision, loss of breadth, loss of divine ecstasy, loss of soul.
And this human drama, this mystical journey into the divine, does not take place in some rarefied spiritual realm, cut off from earth, from color and relationship and sight and sound. Rather, it is an adventure of the entire person, of the embodied soul and the ensouled body, of the incarnate spirit that, in its strange beauty, uniquely mirrors something of God’s being. God created us the way he did—flesh and spirit—because, like an artist, he loves wonderful hybrids, and he invites us to come even to the innermost courts of heaven clothed still in the body he gave us. To bring the grubby flesh right into the heart of the beatific vision is one of Aquinas’ humanist masterstrokes.
Enfleshed, built for ecstasy, destined for a deifying beatific vision, we are all in the image of Jesus Christ. Thomas’ “theological anthropology” can be summed up in the phrase, “to live in Christ Jesus.” To live in the self-forgetting and self-transcending love of God, to allow the divine and human to meet and mingle in one’s very flesh, to open the eyes of the soul to the vision of God is to live in Christo. It is, in a word, to be a disciple.
1. See Plato, Cratylus 400c, Phaedo 51e–62c, Gorgias 493a, Republic 586a, and Phaedrus 520c: “That was the ultimate vision, and we saw it in pure light because we were pure ourselves, not buried in this thing we are carrying around now, which we call a body, locked in it like an oyster in its shell” (trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997], 528).
2. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.7, in Catechism of the Catholic Church 294.
3. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 11.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1.75.4.
5. Summa theologiae 1.93.3.
6. Summa theologiae 2-2.25.5.
7. See, for instance, Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Soul 2 ad. 14.
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 3.126.3.
9. Summa theologiae 1.98.2 ad. 3.
10. Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work, in Plotinus: The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B.S. Page (London: Faber, 1956), 1.
11. Plotinus, The Enneads 6.9.11, trans. Andrew Louth, in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 51.
12. Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H.G. Baynes, rev. R.F.C. Hull, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read et al., vol. 6 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. chap. 11.
13. Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology 1.153.
14. Compendium of Theology 1.151.
15. Compendium of Theology 1.168.
16. Summa contra Gentiles 4.86.4.
17. Summa theologiae 1.14.1.
18. Summa theologiae 1.76.5 ad 4. Cf. Summa theologiae 1.86.2: “Never does our intellect understand so many things, that it cannot understand more.”
19. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 350–351.
20. Summa theologiae 1.86.2 ad. 4.
21. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth 2.2.
22. Summa theologiae 1.93.4.
23. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, 2nd ed., trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950).
24. Summa theologiae 1.93.8 ad. 3.
25. See, for instance, Martin Luther, Commentary on Genesis, vol. 2, trans. John Nicholas Lenker (Minneapolis, MN: Luther, 1910), 95: “If man, having been created both ‘in the image’ and ‘in the likeness’ of God, had not fallen, he would have lived forever. . . . But by sin both this ‘likeness’ and this ‘image’ were lost.”
26. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven,” in Selected Poems of Francis Thompson, 2nd ed. (London: Burns & Oates, 1908), 51.
27. Thompson, 51.
28. Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). On the astonishing popularity of Chant, an album of Gregorian chants by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, see Kory Grow, “Flashback: Spanish Monks Ignite Gregorian ‘Chant’-Mania,” Rolling Stone, March 15, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gregorian-chant-album-monks-808107/.
29. Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, 1933).
30. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Mary Ann Evans (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).
31. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131.
32. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. Gregory C. Richter, ed. Todd Dufresne (Toronto: Broadview, 2012), 92–95, 98–100.
33. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber, ed. John Kulka (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 28–29.
34. Summa theologiae 1-2.1.4.
35. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.1.
36. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.1.
37. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 118–119.
38. John Ruskin, St. Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen, 1894), vii.
39. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.1 ad. 3.
40. Quoted in Langdon Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000), 129.
41. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.2–3.
42. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.2 ad. 1.
43. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.3.
44. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.6.
45. Summa theologiae 1-2.2.8.