Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
The Poetry of St. Thomas
In the previous chapter, we spoke of St. Thomas’s scientific prose works. Here we may single out his religious poetry, which has carried his influence far beyond the narrow circle of thinkers for whom he seemed destined to write.
Remy de Gourmont’s admiration for the Office of Corpus Christi is well known. But as early as the seventeenth century, Jean de Santeul, author of Latin poems of some merit, declared that he would willingly exchange all his works for one of St. Thomas’s stanzas, as Gounod would have exchanged all his music for the chant of the Preface.
But we must first discuss whether St. Thomas considered that poetry had any doctrinal importance. M. Pierre Lasserre goes too far when he claims that in St. Thomas we have (as in Bossuet and Milton) “an epic rather than a philosophic type of intelligence.” That seems to me only a half-truth. While it is true that there is something epic about the general trend of Thomism, it is nonetheless due to the philosophical character of St. Thomas. He creates, or re-creates, the ideas by the value that he communicates to them; he does not merely display them as in a panorama.
There is a real musical symmetry about the Summa, not because of some artifice in the distribution of its materials, but in its very structure; it is sprung like a Gothic cathedral, a lyric of pure thought.
In St. Thomas, doctrine has become harmonious after the manner of a symphony. It vibrates freely in all its parts and undulates from end to end, without any of those intermissions which falsify the key and break the harmony, without unresolved discords or any but expressive silences, by which I mean mysteries. Mysteries are not empty voids. They are more full of meaning than is anything else, and it is their very depth that makes them unfathomable. As such, they serve as links to ensure cohesion. Their purpose in a synthesis is to give unity and strength, and, indeed, beauty to the whole.
In the brief sketch that we have given of this synthesis, one cannot fail to notice an underlying vein of poetry. To borrow Carlyle’s phrase about Shakespeare, “all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence.”34
St. Thomas sought the meaning of the whole visible world; what was its secret? His method is simplicity itself; he wrote down just what he saw, and his words are as clear as his vision. By this alone is he a poet, for a clear insight into the relations of all things is poetry in the deepest sense of the word, whether expressed in prose or verse.
Rhythm is the expression of the symmetry of time and space, a symmetry in the things themselves. Every poetic image is the expression of a relationship, and the deeper and truer the relationship, the more perfect the image. Looked at in this wise, the poet is an intuitive philosopher, and the philosopher a reflecting poet.
All philosophy is an attempt to express the meaning and relations of things to God, whether of nature, human life, history, thought, or action, wherever they occur in the universe. It sets out to give a view of the whole of reality as seen from within, with the relations that give it its unity and its divine order. Anyone who succeeds in doing this with inspiration must be hailed at once as prophet and poet.
In these sublime regions, the difference of medium is unimportant. The philosopher uses concepts rather than images and rhythm; he explains the concrete in abstract language, whereas the poet uses the concrete to explain even the abstract. But always it is God and creation, man and the world, that are the rich pasture of both the poet and the philosopher. The former, by his emotions and imagination, is in contact with everything that is, while the latter strives successfully to be Partout, dans l’univers, présent par sa pensée.
We may quote the following fine passage of M. Pierre Lasserre, which seems to us an apposite description of the poetic appeal of St. Thomas’s philosophy:
The comparisons and images which he continually creates, with the ease and fertility of a great poet, furnish a thousand means of accommodating to his readers the visions of his faith and of his religious poetry — means adapted to the scholastic setting in which he mounts them. Hence his intellectual harmony, and his easy transition from one idea to another, which, even when he leads us to the most dizzy heights of abstraction, gives a charm to the Contra Gentiles.35
Imagination and emotion in St. Thomas play a much larger part than is generally supposed.36 We are too much taken up with the idea to notice the medium that conveys it, much less the secret resonance and the profound silences to which we have referred. A dry phrase becomes infused with poetry when written by an inspired genius.
But, although St. Thomas is a poet in his use of metaphor and simile, nevertheless his thought is not dependent upon his images, but precedes them: he is the poet of the abstract and makes imagery subservient.
Once only did he attempt poetry in the technical sense of the word. Was it because he thought, with Etienne Burnes, that “Poetry is the dove, destined to be sent on ahead when reason has reached its limit”? This does not seem to have been his motive. He was simply asked to write hymns on the Holy Eucharist, and he who had written so profoundly on this mystery in prose found it easy to obey. He believed that this was not a distraction, but another means of teaching the truth.
The Holy Eucharist embodies, in the highest possible way, the same Divine Word, which is the object of reason and faith, and which dwelt among us and became our daily bread. The love of truth, the love of Truth itself, the love of the ideas that are reflected in truth, the love of this sacrament were all one to him. He who linked together the various dogmas of faith sings the praises of him who unites all the members of the Church. As this sacrament is for all, so his hymns are for all, whereas his abstract writings, in themselves at least, are meant for a few.
Here St. Thomas found an outlet for his love of the Liturgy, instilled in him by the Benedictines, and for his emotions, to which his syllogistic method gave little scope.
Even in his hymns, he avoids singularities or individual lyricisms and mystic flights of fancy. He sings a song for the whole Church and voices the fervor that all should feel. Yet, in voicing fervor so deep, he loses nothing of his simplicity or facility of writing.
He uses the first person, but in the plural: “nobis datus, nobis natus”; his eagerness to carry us along with him is shown in his Imperatives (subjunctive in form) “Praestet fides supplementum,” “Veneremur,” “Compar sit laudatio.” His poetry is always joyous and triumphant, without any of the gloom of Jansenism or of the violent emotion of the fifteenth century. As is only fitting in one dedicated to the service of all, his poetry is concrete, the poetry of things, just as in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. Again, by his use of stress and rhyme, he broke away from the ancient rules of prosody and came somewhere near the modern standard.
Both in argument and in form, then, his poetry is a simple extension of his didactic method. His lyrical form is one of ideas, not of burning words and ardent imaginings, although it is prompted by the same fervor of soul, which may be expressed and satisfied by either of these means.
He has no need to modify his method, or, as it were, change his state of soul, because his very philosophy had a poetic beauty, which was present to his mind when he turned to poetry. The beauty of his poems, like that of a diamond, is entirely the result of intense compression.
He differs from other great poets only superficially, for in all of them, it is the thought that makes the poem. In St. Thomas, the construction is more obvious, the song more reserved — characteristics which follow from that spiritual unity which, as we have said, was the basis of his teaching. His poetry is just as much bound up with his teaching as is his sanctity. Reason is always his guide, and the most rigorous exactitude is never sacrificed.
In reading his poetry, we are struck by its austerity, its terseness, and the avoidance of all unnecessary variety. It reads like a piece of music without accentuated pauses or unexpected marks of crescendo. It reminds one of Bach’s first prelude, without the false Ave Maria, or his eighth, resounding through a cathedral.
The following is the stanza so admired by Santeul:
Se nascens dedit socium, Convescens in edulium, Se moriens in pretium, Se regnans dat in praemium.37
In these four short lines, under a single rhyme, he treats of Christ’s birth and life, of the Last Supper, of his redeeming death and his eternal triumph.
This is yet a further instance of his extraordinary balance of mind, and in circumstances in which we might have expected him to have relaxed the rigor of his method. The fact that he is as insistent here as ever on the strict rules of logic applied to his symbols and imagery shows that all his gifts are identified in their primary source and witnesses to his striking unity of soul.