Thomas’ Spiritual Path
Thomas Aquinas’ contribution to the Church and to Western culture in general has been so great that it is exceedingly difficult even to approach him, much less to understand him completely. He was a philosopher, scientist, mystic, theologian, scriptural commentator, and, in all things, a saint. For me, that last title is at the same time the most overlooked and the most illuminating. When one interprets Thomas merely as a rationalist philosopher or theologian, one misses the burning heart of everything he wrote. Aquinas was a saint deeply in love with Jesus Christ, and the image of Christ pervades the entire edifice that is his philosophical, theological, and scriptural work. Above all, Thomas Aquinas was a consummate spiritual master, holding up the icon of the Word made flesh and inviting others into its transformative power.
Toward the end of his life, after having struggled to compose a text on the Eucharist, Thomas, in an act of spiritual bravado not in keeping with his quiet nature, hurled his book at the foot of the crucifix, inviting Christ himself to pass judgment. According to the well-known account of this episode, a voice came from the statue of the crucified Jesus announcing that Thomas had written well concerning the sacrament and offering him a reward in recompense for his labors: “What would you have?” the voice asked. “Non nisi te, Domine” (nothing but you, Lord), responded the saint.1 It is my conviction that this mystical conversation between servant and Master is a sort of interpretive key to the whole of Aquinas’ life and thought: he wanted nothing more than Christ, nothing other than Christ, nothing less than Christ. He strove to walk in the path of discipleship and, in all of his writings, to show that path to others.
Now, I realize that my reader might, at this point, be wearing a puzzled frown. For many, Thomas Aquinas—whose writings are dry, recondite, often impenetrable—seems an unlikely candidate for the title of spiritual guide. His highly philosophical and abstract style appears to be diametrically opposed to the more earthy, affective, and personal approach of such recognized spiritual writers as, say, Meister Eckhart or John of the Cross. However, it is fascinating to note that both Eckhart and John of the Cross are profoundly marked by the theology of Aquinas. The former sat in Aquinas’ chair of theology at the University of Paris and drank deeply from the wells of Thomas’ wisdom. And John of the Cross’ mystical poetry is built on the structure of Aquinas’ theology.
One of the most significant blocks to appreciating Thomas as a spiritual master is simply the fact that we do not share some of his basic assumptions about the role and purpose of theology. Many commentators—including the Protestant Paul Tillich and the Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar—have remarked that a great and problematic shift occurred around the year 1300.2 At that time, theology came to be seen as a formal university discipline and was distinguished from what we might today call spirituality. The most prominent mystics, poets, and spiritual guides of the postmedieval period tended not to be theologians; rather, they stayed away from the centers of “scientific” thought, preferring, in some sense, to go underground.
But prior to 1300—that is, from the earliest centuries of the Church up until the time of Thomas Aquinas—there was no significant split between theology (talk about God) and spirituality. Many of the significant spiritual masters of the patristic period—Origen, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Ambrose—were what we would call theologians. All of these figures were interested, finally, in the transformation, conversion, and salvation of human beings. Their theology was not abstract speculation for its own sake; on the contrary, it was a sort of spiritual direction, an attempt to draw people into the imitation of Jesus Christ. It is interesting to note that neither Origen nor Augustine nor Jerome was writing for tenure or to impress an academic audience. Instead, they were writing, first and foremost, as pastors, passionately interested in the salvation of souls. Even the most challenging, philosophically oriented texts in the Fathers—and there are plenty of them—are meant not simply to illumine the mind but to open up the heart. It seems to me that if one had asked St. Augustine to distinguish between his theological writings and his spiritual writings, the saint would have been at a loss.
Though he differs with Augustine and the other Fathers on certain issues, Thomas Aquinas stands firmly in the patristic tradition that I have just described. As he says in the very first article of the Summa theologiae, the entire purpose of theology is to raise believers outside of and beyond themselves to a union with the God who cannot fully be grasped. All that Thomas wrote is in service of the salvation offered in Jesus Christ. His thought is meant to be above all a guide, a series of landmarks on the journey into God.
Thomas was born in either 1225 or 1226 in the family castle at Roccasecca near the town of Aquino, situated between Rome and Naples.3 His father, Landulf, was a minor nobleman and his mother, Theodora, was descended from Norman and Neapolitan gentry. Thomas’ family was deeply involved in the complex and shifting politics of the day that pitted pope against Holy Roman Emperor. In an attempt to improve the family’s prospects and to mollify the Church, the five-year-old Thomas was sent to the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino to receive his basic education and eventually, it was hoped, to become abbot of that influential monastery.
Too many commentators have overlooked the importance of the young Aquinas’ stay with the Benedictines. There he learned the rudiments of the contemplative life and there he fell in love with the Scriptures, especially the Psalms. The mature Thomas would understand theology as essentially an elaboration of the sacra pagina, the sacred page of the Bible, and he would present contemplation as the highest achievement of the human being. The seeds of these developments were planted, no doubt, at Monte Cassino. There is an illuminating story associated with Thomas’ Monte Cassino period. It seems that at the age of five the future master of theology was attending a basic catechism class during which the teacher quite naturally was making frequent reference to God. With disarming honesty and straightforward curiosity, the youthful Aquinas rose to his feet and asked, “But, master, what is God?” It was a question he never ceased to pose throughout his life.
After nine years with the Benedictines, Thomas was compelled, for political reasons, to leave the monastery, and he took up what we would call undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Naples. There he studied under Peter of Ireland, a professor who dared to lecture on the metaphysical works of Aristotle, the Greek, pre-Christian philosopher whose thought had been condemned by several popes.
It is most important to pause here and to reflect on the revolutionary impact that Aristotle’s thought was having on Christendom at this time. Certain works of the great philosopher—those dealing with logical and grammatical issues—had long been known and commented upon in Europe, but at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Aristotelian texts on metaphysics, the existence of God, and the nature of the soul began to arrive in the Christian world. These texts seemed to challenge many basic Christian beliefs concerning the immortality of the soul, creation, and the transcendence of God, and they were therefore formally suppressed by ecclesial authority. But to some Christian thinkers, these Aristotelian ideas were captivating, representing as they did a more rational, scientific perspective on the great questions of God and the world. Aristotle seemed to be urging Christians to turn to the concrete, to the real, to this world in order to appreciate the movement of God. To certain Christian philosophers, the thought of Aristotle was like a breath of mountain air blowing away the clouds of otherworldly mysticism and obscurantism that had for so long characterized theological speculation. In short, Aristotelianism was an exciting and dangerous revolutionary movement in the Christendom of the early thirteenth century, and young Thomas Aquinas became one of its most enthusiastic and important adepts.
The young radical became even more intensely countercultural when he embraced the other great revolution of his time: the mendicant movement. While still a university student at Naples, Thomas Aquinas took the habit of the preaching friars of St. Dominic. Like his contemporary, Francis of Assisi, Dominic de Guzman felt that the Christian Church needed to be revitalized through a return to the radicality and simple power of the Gospel message, and thus he gathered around him a band of brothers dedicated to lives of poverty, preaching, and unquestioning trust in God. Dominic sent his followers to the great urban centers, especially to university cities such as Paris and Bologna, where their preaching would have the profoundest impact. What was perhaps most impressive—and scandalous—about the Dominicans was that they were literally beggars, poor men going from door to door humbly but confidently asking for food and financial support. The presence of these mendicants, these fools for Christ, in the leading cities of Europe was, for some, a thrilling reminder that the Gospel lifestyle could still be concretely led; but for others, it was a shock and an embarrassment.
In becoming a Dominican, Thomas allowed himself to be swept up in the élan of this exciting movement, this back-to-basics evangelicalism. And therefore, as Josef Pieper points out, Thomas combined in his person the two great radicalities of his day: Aristotelianism and Gospel simplicity.4 As an Aristotelian radical, he was opting for this world, for science, for reason, for the beauty of the senses, and as a Gospel radical, he was opting for the life of the spirit, for trust, for deep faith in the love of God. It was this splendid coming together of what were, for many, mutually exclusive commitments that animated and gave special color to all that Thomas would eventually write.
When Thomas joined this peculiar band in 1244, donning the costume of a beggar, he of course profoundly unnerved and disappointed his family. Keep in mind that they had hoped he would return to Monte Cassino, a well-appointed and richly endowed monastery, as a lordly abbot. Instead he had joined a strange and upstart group of radicals, throwing away as he did his wealth, his title, and his position. Chesterton avers that for a person of Aquinas’ status to join the early Dominicans was comparable to running away and marrying a gypsy—or, in an even more contemporary comparison, to joining a cult.5
On his way to Paris to commence his formal Dominican studies, Thomas was kidnapped by his brothers and forced to return to the family castle at Roccasecca, where he was for all practical purposes kept as a prisoner in a tower. His parents and siblings hoped that eventually he would abandon his adolescent idealism and embrace a more respectable career choice, but Thomas stood firm, refusing various enticements and temptations that were placed before him. One famous legend has it that the young prisoner chased a prostitute from his cell, shouting and brandishing a torch—and no doubt frightening the girl half to death.6 Another tradition has it that Thomas used his time in the tower to commit the entire Scripture to memory. Incredible as it sounds, such a feat is not entirely out of the question, given Thomas’ prodigious mind. Indeed, according to some of his contemporaries, the thousands upon thousands of Scripture quotes in his theological writings were culled not from research but from memory, as if the saint were simply reading from a book.
In time, his family relented and the young friar was released and allowed to continue his Dominican studies. Recognizing his remarkable talent, Thomas’ superiors sent the young man to the undisputed intellectual capital of Christendom: Paris. In the middle of the thirteenth century, the University of Paris was a magnet drawing scholars from all over Europe to hear and argue with the most subtle theological and philosophical minds of the time. The youthful and unruly students lived in crowded hostels on the left bank of the Seine and attended lectures, sometimes indoors, but also frequently on the streets, listening to various professors proclaiming their doctrines in the open air. The Paris style of theology—brash, skeptical, rational, somewhat irreverent—represented a departure from the dominant and more conservative monastic approach. In the schools of the Latin Quarter, it appeared as though any question, even the most daring, was fair game.
When he arrived in the new Athens of Paris in 1245, the young Thomas Aquinas found his context, his home. He also found his master and mentor in Albert, the Dominican scientist and philosopher, who, even in his own lifetime, was called “the great.” Under Albert, Aquinas continued even more intensely the clandestine study of Aristotle that had begun with Peter of Ireland. In 1248, Thomas followed Albert to Cologne, becoming the great man’s assistant and intellectual apprentice. While studying in Cologne, Thomas, taciturn, self-effacing, and by no means slender, was given the nickname “the dumb ox of Sicily.” When Albert heard of this, he told his other students: “I assure you the bellowing of that ox will one day fill the world.”7
In 1252, Thomas returned to Paris to begin what we would call postgraduate or doctoral studies in theology. For four years, he studied the Scripture and the standard theological textbook of the age, the so-called Sentences of Peter Lombard. These “sentences” were various patristic quotations that Lombard, a scholar-bishop of Paris, had gathered around central theological themes. Thomas’ commentary on the Sentences—a sort of doctoral dissertation—announces early on the novelty and radicality of his approach. In 1256, when he was still only in his late twenties, Aquinas became a master of theology and began to lecture in Paris.
It is vitally important to pause here and consider what were the tasks and responsibilities of a master of theology in Thomas’ time, for to understand the nature of this role is to grasp the heart of Aquinas’ theological project. The first responsibility of a Parisian master of theology was, interestingly enough, to preach. The breaking open of the Word of God for the benefit of the students and faculty at the university was considered the paramount work of the professor. It is my contention that this preaching orientation can be seen in even the most abstract and recondite of Thomas’ writings. As a magister of theology, his purpose is never simply to satisfy the curiosity of the mind; rather, it is to change the lives of his readers, to transform their hearts, in a word, to move them to salvation.
The second task of the master was biblical commentary. Thomas’ principal academic responsibility was not to lecture in philosophy or metaphysics or even systematic theology but rather to illumine and explain the sacra pagina, the sacred page of Scripture.8 It is interesting—and highly regrettable—that among Aquinas’ least known works are his biblical commentaries, precisely those presentations that were, at least in principle, at the very heart of his project.9 Aquinas scholars are discovering only today the scriptural “feel” and focus in all of his more formally theological tracts.
The third and final responsibility of the magister was to raise and resolve those thorny questions that emerged from biblical commentary. The major forum for this theological exploration was the event that the medievals called a quaestio disputata, a disputed question. A disputed question took place in public, the master presiding over a large and sometimes raucous group of students and faculty. In a lively exchange, he would entertain objections from the floor, respond to the best of his ability, and finally resolve the question at hand, perhaps reveling in cheers or enduring catcalls from the floor. Thomas Aquinas was the most respected master of the quaestio disputata in Paris. Obviously, many professors carefully avoided this high-pressured and potentially embarrassing forum, but Thomas seemed to thrive in it, disputing far more often than any of his colleagues.
The best known of Aquinas’ works—his great Summa theologiae, or summary of theology—is a reflection of this method. In the Summa, Thomas relentlessly raises question after question, stubbornly puts forward objection after objection, and finally gives his resolution and response. To some, this approach can seem tiresome and terribly dry, perhaps even a betrayal of the life-giving purpose of theology. But this is a misunderstanding, for behind the scholarly page, one must hear the fast-moving, engaging, perhaps irreverent and humorous give-and-take that inspired it—and above all the biblical and homiletic concerns that gave rise to it. Even in his most formal works, Thomas Aquinas is the spiritual master, hearing, responding to, and guiding the eager and curious students that surrounded him.
Thomas taught as a master in Paris between 1256 and 1259, and it was during this period that he began work on his Summa contra Gentiles, which some have considered to be a handbook for Christian missionaries working among the Muslims.10 In 1259, Aquinas returned to his native Italy, and for ten years he served the papal court as a sort of official theologian at Anagni, Orvieto, Viterbo, and Rome. It was during these extraordinarily productive years that Thomas wrote many of his biblical commentaries, disputed questions, and massive commentaries on the works of Aristotle. And in the middle of the 1260s, Thomas began work on the masterpiece to which I have already alluded, the Summa theologiae.
In 1269, Aquinas returned for a second sojourn in Paris, staying in the City of Light until 1272. Then he journeyed once more across the length of Europe and established himself in his home province of Naples, where he continued work on the great Summa until shortly before his death in 1274.
Many have marveled at Aquinas’ staggering output (his collected works fill nearly fifty folio volumes) in the course of a relatively short career.11 Obviously, he was a great genius, but he was also a man who lived an intensely disciplined life. His day began with two Masses, one that he celebrated and a second at which he assisted, and continued, almost without interruption, as a cycle of reading, teaching, and writing. It is said that he dictated different works to as many as three secretaries at once, turning methodically from one to the other and rarely losing his train of thought. He would take a brief nap in the middle of the day, frequently dictating arguments in his sleep.12 He was, I think it would be fair to say, a workaholic, rarely resting or turning away from the tasks at hand; absolutely on fire with the desire to know God, Thomas pushed himself relentlessly and probably dangerously.
There are many anecdotes centering around the theme of Aquinas’ fits of abstraction.13 Many of his contemporaries reported that Thomas was utterly unaware of what was placed before him at table, some even claiming that one of his brothers had to watch over the saint lest he put something inedible in his mouth. Another story has it that he was able to endure a dreadfully painful medicinal bleeding without complaint because he was so lost in contemplation. The best known vignette in this genre has to do with Thomas’ somewhat comical dinner engagement with Louis IX, the saintly king of France. Against his will and at the urging of his superiors, Aquinas had accepted an invitation to dine with the king. In the midst of the lively and witty conversation, the philosopher sat in abstracted silence, as usual lost in thought. Then suddenly, much to the surprise and embarrassment of the other diners, Thomas brought down his fist upon the table, scattering plates and upsetting glasses. Thinking no doubt that he was still in his cell at the priory, Thomas said, “And that should settle the Manichees.”14 During the state dinner with the king of France, Aquinas had retreated into the recesses of his mind and had come up with an argument that could refute the dualistic heresy of the Manichees. One of Thomas’ Dominican brothers reminded him rather sternly that his outburst constituted an insult to the king, but Louis himself, more concerned for truth than decorum, ordered that a scribe be sent to write down the friar’s argument lest he forget it.
Thomas Aquinas was a mystic, someone whose life was literally ecstatic, caught up with God. Many of his brothers reported that, while saying Mass, Thomas would weep copiously, almost in a literal sense living through the Passion of Christ that he was celebrating and remembering. His socius and good friend Reginald of Piperno said that Thomas solved his intellectual problems not so much with thought as with prayer.15 Wrestling with particularly thorny theological problems, Aquinas would rest his head against the tabernacle and, with tears, beg for inspiration. A careful and attentive reading of the texts reveals that this mystical passion, this ecstatic response to God, paradoxically suffuses all that Thomas wrote in his admittedly dry and laconic style.
No account of the life and spirituality of Aquinas would be complete without a reflection on the events immediately preceding and surrounding his death. In Naples, on the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6, 1273, Thomas was, according to his custom, celebrating Mass in the presence of his friend Reginald. Something extraordinary happened during that Mass, for afterward Thomas broke the routine that had been his for the previous twenty years. According to one source, he “hung up his instruments of writing,” refusing to work, to dictate, to write. When his socius urged him to continue, Thomas replied very simply that he could not. Afraid that his master had perhaps become mentally unbalanced, the younger man persisted until Thomas, with a mixture of impatience and resignation, finally replied, “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.”16
To many, those are the most eloquent words that Thomas Aquinas ever uttered. After filling tens of thousands of pages with words about God, the great master very abruptly fell silent, convinced that everything he had written amounted to no more than refuse, perhaps persuaded that nothing finally can capture the strangeness and elusiveness of God. Some speculate that Thomas might have suffered a stroke (there is indeed some evidence that he was physically impaired after the December 6 incident) and others that he had what amounted to a psychological breakdown (many of his symptoms are consistent with burn-out, profound depression, or even midlife crisis).17 Whatever explanation we offer, the simple fact of his remarkable silence remains.
In January of 1274, Thomas visited his sister but was scarcely able to speak to her. She described him as stupefactus (dazed or out of his senses). According to some sources it was during this visit that Thomas told Reginald that his work seemed like straw “compared to what had been revealed to him.” If this is so, then Thomas’ silence takes on a stranger and more mystical quality.
Summoned to the Second Council of Lyons in early 1274, the dutiful Aquinas set out for France but fell ill on the way. Anticipating his death, Thomas asked to be taken to the Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova. It was there that he died on March 7, some say after composing a commentary on the Song of Songs.
It is intriguing to me how often Thomas uses the word “path” or “way” (via) in his writings. The whole of his master work, the Summa theologiae, is structured according to the way that leads from God to the world (exitus) and the way that leads from the world back to God (reditus). And the two paths come together precisely in the one who called himself the Way—namely, Jesus the Christ. It is only in recent Thomistic studies that the centrality of Christ has been adequately emphasized.18 Jesus is not an afterthought for Thomas, but rather the cornerstone and summit of his whole theology.
All of Christian life begins with Jesus because in him we see the meeting of two ecstasies, that of God and that of the human being. For Thomas, the most impressive and powerful aspect of the Incarnation is its surprise. God’s decision to join us human beings in our own flesh, in time and space, in all of the weakness and suffering of our finitude, is something in the presence of which astonishment is the only proper response. God must be a reality stranger, more powerful, more wonderful than we can imagine. Though God needs us not, though God is utterly self-sufficient, God nevertheless goes out of himself, in an unheard-of ecstasy, and becomes one of us. There is, in all of this, says Thomas, an excessive, ever-greater quality.
And the human being Jesus Christ, in perfect obedience and openness to this ecstatic God, forgets himself, goes out beyond himself in love, gives himself in a sort of imitation of divine ecstasy. And in this radical self-emptying, Jesus does not lose himself; rather, he becomes most fully himself, finding his deepest identity in union with God. This meeting of the ever greater, ever more surprising God and a self-transcending human being is the event of the Incarnation and the icon that presides over all of Thomas Aquinas’ spirituality. Jesus Christ teaches us at the same time who God is (a power of love greater than we can imagine) and how we ought to respond to God (sheer obedience, sheer ecstasy, sheer wonder). Jesus expresses the inexhaustible mystery that is God and the never-ending adventure that is the journey into God.
From the standpoint of Jesus, then, Thomas presents his doctrine of God, or better, his anti-doctrine. Aquinas never tells us what God is, only what God is not. His entire approach is to undermine all of our idolatrous attempts to turn God into something understandable or controllable, something we could manipulate or avoid. No, he tells us in a variety of ways, the God who appears in Jesus Christ is a power that is consummately surprising, captivating, alluring. All of this strangeness is caught in Thomas’ curious description of God as “simple.”19 As we shall see in a later chapter, this means that God is not a being like other beings in the world, that God is not even the highest or supreme being; God is rather Being itself, ungraspable, unknowable power. In describing God this way, of course, Aquinas is implicitly inviting his reader into a Christlike stance of obedience and wonder. Stop trying to reduce God to your level, he seems to say, and allow yourself to be drawn ecstatically into God’s mystery. At the heart of Thomas’ doctrine of God is, therefore, spiritual direction, the opening up of the heart.
It is from the same point of view that Thomas interprets the act of creation. Creation is not an act at the “beginning of time,” not a once-and-for-all emanation from God; rather, it is an ongoing, continual gift that flows from the life and being of God. The world is totally dependent, from moment to moment, on the sheer generosity of the Creator. Aquinas calls this creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. When we recall the Christological roots of Thomas’ theology, this teaching takes on great spiritual power. To be a creature means to be “nothing”—that is to say, pure openness and obedience in the presence of the Creator God. And, as the icon of Christ reveals, in this nothingness, in this ecstatic abandon, the creature most fully discovers herself. Various denials of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo are unmasked by Aquinas as sinful attempts to avoid obedience. To deny the Creator God is to live the illusion that one can find oneself apart from total surrender; it is to fly in the face of the Gospel injunction that those who cling to their life will lose it and those who lose their life for Christ’s sake will find it. Hardly abstract, the teaching on creation seeks to place us, once more, in the stance and attitude of the incarnate Son.
When Thomas speaks explicitly of the human being, he is, once more, under the influence of the icon of Jesus Christ. The human being for Thomas Aquinas is an energy and a dynamism pushing out toward God, toward that infinite mystery revealed in the surprise of the Incarnation. The human person is an emptiness that will not be filled, a hunger that will not be satisfied, by anything less than God. He insists that we have all been made to lose ourselves, as Christ did, in obedient wonder. Any attempt to root our lives in something other than God—in ego, money, power, praise, pleasure—will set up an unbearable tension, a sort of crisis of the heart. To walk in the path of Christ is to walk according to that deepest destiny that God has placed within us. Furthermore, Thomas embraces the wonderful and mysterious doctrine of human “deification.”20 According to this teaching, the ultimate purpose or end of human life is a radical sharing in the very dynamism of God’s own life. Aquinas is fond of quoting the patristic adage that God became human that humans might become God. For Thomas, human life is not played out simply in the cramped quarters of time and space; rather, it opens up and out to the infinite being of God himself, to a participation in the perfectly responsive love of Christ.
There are many books written on the spirituality of Thomas Aquinas. Most of these concentrate on the subjects that have come to be recognized as spiritual as opposed to theological: prayer, contemplation, liturgy, etc. As I hinted above, it is my conviction that such an approach is anachronistic and antipathetic to the spirit of Aquinas. The spirituality of Thomas is found not only in those texts that we tend to recognize as spiritual but, perhaps most clearly and profoundly, in his doctrine of God, in his Christology, in his understanding of the human person, and in his lyrical theology of creation. These are not the academic dimensions of St. Thomas; rather, they are the places where the life-giving encounter between the divine and human is articulated. Aquinas is most remarkably a spiritual master precisely in those difficult but vibrant theological texts in which he wrestles with the God of Jesus Christ.
I have spent a good deal of time examining the texts of Thomas Aquinas in the course of my studies. I tended to approach this great thinker in a rational and critical way hoping to find illumination for my mind. But I discovered that under the influence of his writings my life began to change and more than my mind was illumined. I discovered, in short, what Thomas himself would have taken for granted: good theology is mystical, prayerful, and transformative, and its final purpose is to “know” God—that is to say, to be one with God in intimate communion. My hope is to share some of that life-changing wisdom in the course of this book.