CONCLUSION
All of Christian theology and spirituality centers around a few basic questions: Who are we? Who or what is God? How do we and God come together? As I have suggested throughout this book, it is the last of these three questions that is the most fundamental and the most important. For a Christian, the answer to that third question is Jesus the Christ. In him, we see the harmonizing, the soulful embrace, of the aching human spirit and the ecstatic outreach of God. In him, we know who we are in the deepest sense and we realize, to our delight and surprise, just who God is. To put it in the pithy language of the theologians, anthropology and theology are read, for Christians, always in light of Christology.
Throughout this book I have tried to show that Thomas Aquinas, like John of the Cross, like Teresa of Avila, like Meister Eckhart, like Augustine and Origen, like Francis de Sales, like Thomas Merton, is a Christian spiritual master. Like those great doctors of the soul, Thomas is continually luring his reader onto the ground of the Gospel, onto the field of force opened up by Jesus Christ. And as I have continually maintained, for Aquinas this Gospel way of being is characterized by ecstasy. Christians are those people who, electrified by God’s leap out of himself in love, realize that, in the words of Thérèse of Lisieux, their vocation is love.1
The only proper response to the self-forgetting of the ground of being is our own radical self-forgetting in love. Thus, who is God for Thomas Aquinas? God is that strange and disturbing reality whose love and power and goodness infinitely surpass our puny capacity to understand or our pathetic attempts to control. Who are we? We are those creatures who are—whether we like it or not—tied to this divine storm, this uncontrollable force, this enigma, this abyss. And thus we are those whose lives are fulfilled in surrender and obedience—in the concrete imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. As Thomas so often repeats, God’s being is diffusive of itself, and as he so often implies, our lives are found in laying them down in service of that ecstasy.
For Thomas Aquinas, God’s most characteristic act is the jest of the Incarnation, and our appropriate response is sustained and soul-expanding laughter. Everything else is commentary.