Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
St. Thomas’s Triumph
“The consequences of an undertaking are never fully foreseen,” writes M. Abel Bonnard. St. Thomas, quietly tracing on the parchment his difficult characters, could he have foreseen the tremendous repercussions of his work, or the brilliance of his personal greatness, in a posterity that seems obliged periodically to revive or to give new impetus to his teaching?
The very sound of the name Thomas Aquinas concentrates in itself the sum-total of his fame. Like Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Newton, and Pasteur, he has wholly absorbed admiration.
His destiny had been in some measure foreseen. We have already given the words of St. Albert the Great, prompted by the first, sudden blossoming of the genius of his young student. “He was the flower and glory of the world” was his final verdict when he who, more than any other, was developing Albert’s thought, was snatched untimely from their common work.
Albert had himself shown the possibilities, and partially realized them, although unsystematically enough. He was as the wood that the fire has caught but not wholly kindled; some twigs or branches burning, but as yet no blaze. He, with many others, waited for the one pure flame, and he saw it rise. The result justified expectations, and people marveled at the work that welded into a single doctrine the materials and incomplete conclusions which were all that existed when he began.
Bartholomew of Lucca was the first to call him Doctor Communis, a title given at Paris to anyone of universal repute. Even in his lifetime, Alexander IV, Urban IV, and Clement IV had sanctioned his teaching, and he was practically their mouthpiece. When the news of his death arrived, the Faculty of Arts, which, in its philosophical capacity, was chiefly concerned in the new learning, was unstinted in its praise. In writing to his superiors, it proclaimed him “a morning star, or a new star in the heavens.” They beg for his remains and undertake to raise an immortal monument to his memory.
Four years later, in 1278, the General Chapter held at Milan officially sanctioned his doctrine, which was henceforth to be a family treasure. It was the Church, however, that was to adopt, in ever greater degree, his intellectual armory. In 1318, addressing the delegates who came to petition for his canonization, Pope John XXII said, “This man has enlightened the Church more than all the other Doctors: one year spent on his works is more profitable than a lifetime devoted to other authors.” This means that he contains the bond which unites what others have left scattered: and the bond is more important than the sheaf.
Pope after pope, right up to the present day, has constantly reiterated this praise. There was a time when the cult of scholasticism waned. Under the influence of the pagan Renaissance, and later of Cartesianism, and lastly of the Encyclopedists, the fame of Thomas was not loath to hide its head from the world, in anticipation of a revival. But in the Church there was no wavering. The Church never once let go of his discovered treasure: it was regarded as of paramount importance for the defense of religion. Leo XIII spoke of it as “The Church’s protection and crown”: “It belongs to the treasured possessions of humanity,” as Barrès says, with less justice, of the Divina Comedia.
It may happen that renown of this kind defeats its own ends. Certain schools of thought, wishing, with this encouragement from the highest authorities, to be under his aegis, tried, by twisting St. Thomas’s teaching, to justify their own unthomistic theories. But this is a penalty of greatness and serves to emphasize it.
In another, but happier, sense, St. Thomas has been swamped by his own glory. Because he is Doctor Communis, his teaching is for all; he appears not so much a man, as a gigantic column of granite supporting the globe. Or we may put it more simply. The Summa Theologica has become part of the very texture of the Church; it was placed beside the Bible on the altar at the Council of Trent.
It would be false to conclude that St. Thomas has never met with reverses or hostility. He was too advanced for some of his contemporaries, too conservative for others, and, in any case, provocative enough to invite criticism and opposition. He was between two distinct currents of opinion: the Augustinian School on the one hand, and the Aristotelian Averroists on the other. What neither side could see was that he was more Augustinian and at the same time more Aristotelian than either of them, since he derived his own doctrine from the confluence of these two streams.
There were, then as always, conservatives and progressivists, rationalists and mystics. There were also rival schools, each with its keen adherents, regulars and seculars, Franciscans and Dominicans. It was inevitable that St. Thomas, although almost universally venerated, should frighten some, even of his brethren, and offend others. All greatness knows these trials, and it is fortunate if they do not succeed in paralyzing talent and hindering progress.
Albert the Great, who was the first to encounter this opposition, defended himself with vigorous language. St. Thomas did otherwise; he simply went on fearlessly and without anger. It is something of a surprise to the historian, reading these peaceful and impartial pages, to find that they were written in painful circumstances, when the dispute was at its height. Absorbed in deep thinking, he was unmoved by strife, intellectual or practical; it simply made him concentrate more on his thoughts. We today, now that his enemies are no more, imagine that this attitude was easy to adopt, but at the time it must have been heroic. Thus, his reverses only add to his glory. Never was there a calmer navigator in a storm; he braved the deep, sure of his course and confident that his ship was seaworthy, and he suited his tactics to the varying conditions of the sea.
His followers did not show the same patience. They answered the pamphlet entitled “Corrections of Frater Thomas” by one called “Corrections of the Corruptors of Frater Thomas,” but this little controversy was without great consequences. What was more important was the attitude of some authorities. The Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, avoided condemning him when he presided over the famous dispute that led to the condemnation of thirteen doctrinal propositions. In 1277, three years after the death of the saint, he made up for it by condemning, among others, twenty Thomistic propositions. About the same time, an English Dominican named Robert Kilwardby, Archbishop of Canterbury, censured his doctrine, as did his successor, the Franciscan John Peckham. The dispute continued until his canonization on July 18, 1323, and it needed the direct intervention of the Holy See, in 1324, to lift the ban that had been put on his writings forty-seven years before.
Yet these conflicts, doctrinal or personal, were merely incidental. St. Thomas’s greatness was established, never again to be called in question. He foresaw this himself to some extent, as we can gather from some of his own statements. In spite of his humility, he speaks as one who dominates all time and addresses himself to the future, rather than to his own changing age. One might expect that he should feel a certain exhilaration, should himself be conscious of that glory which was to be showered upon him.
There is, however, one very important and quite authentic incident that shows us his true attitude. On December 6, 1273, while he was saying Mass in the Chapel of St. Nicholas at Naples, he had one of his customary ecstasies, but of longer duration. When he came out of it, he confided to Brother Reginald, “Venit finis scripturae meae: ‘my writing has come to an end.’ ” And when his friend pressed him to finish his great work of the Summa, he replied, “Reginald, I can do no more. All that I have written seems now to me as so much straw.”
Some chroniclers add that he ordered the Summa to be burned, but there is no historical evidence for this, and it is unlikely. What does seem certain is that, as the result of a vivid intuition, or possibly of a real vision, he lost all desire to write and that, in this supreme realization of his own inadequacy, he cried, “I can do no more.”
It would not be very surprising if his continuous work over so many years, without any respite, should bring on some sort of mental fatigue, but there is certainly another consideration that might explain his resolve to cease writing.
Writing to Goethe of Beethoven’s last years, Zelter says, “His works seemed to give him a secret horror.” Zelter himself said, after composing his Ninth Symphony, and his Mass in Re, “I seem to have written but a few notes.” There is a striking resemblance between these utterances and that of St. Thomas. The greater the genius, the more conscious he is of his own shortcomings. “Selfknowledge is the death of hope.” When a man has easily achieved the difficult, he turns to the impossible. Especially in philosophy, every statement is a partial error, and silence is the whole truth. For us mortals, silence is the supreme expression of knowledge and comes only when one has experienced this pure intuition: Près de qui tout savoir est un entassement.38
Paul Valéry writes: “I am so doubtful about the connections of things, that I speak no more . . . I have not the courage to examine the details of this flash, which instantly throws a light on years of thought.”
St. Thomas began with the question: What is God? Thence, by an unbroken, never-receding route, he reached his ecstasy in God, in which his human force spent itself. This was as it should be. “All higher life begins and ends with its gods.” Our poor thoughts are as nothing in comparison with the Unknowable. In the end the prey must devour its pursuer.
The realization of the sublime unity of created things, as seen in God, must make a philosopher feel that his former account of them, by cause and effect, was a farce. As seen in God, and quite apart from the mystery of God himself, the created world is mystery enough, and to this also is due the final homage of silence.
St. Thomas tried to describe things, and succeeded in sketching only their outlines and silhouettes, exact and of great value, amid so many perverted notions, but mere shadows for all that. He had lost faith in the possibility of grasping the ever-growing infinity of truth. He had learned “that perfect teaching, that perfect knowledge of his own nothingness, that abdication, which is in the heart of every truly great man.” He had triumphed. He was enthusiastically hailed at his death as the “morning star,” but he had seen a light greater than his own, and human knowledge lay behind him, never more to be pursued.
But he is not saddened: the change is too happy. God gives him the truth, which his mind of its own accord could not grasp, and his own powerlessness only emphasizes the infinite power of God. He felt himself consummated in God and had nothing for which to live, for true glory, as he says, is to be found only in God. He had no ambition to make his doctrine a permanent monument to his memory: he was to pale before the pure light of his teaching. He gradually withdrew within himself. His humility had saved him from falling as so many great minds have fallen, but he knew that in his self-abasement, he was drawing nearer to God.
The end drew near. He devoted his last efforts to a commentary on the Canticle of Canticles. He died before the Host, as Bayard before the cross of his sword-hilt, and he was delivered from the phantoms and futile abstractions of this world, to contemplate Truth itself. A being thinks, only because it is imperfect. In his ecstatic glimpses of God, St. Thomas attained the right henceforth to forget his thought.
This supreme abdication makes us, his disciples, only venerate him the more, love him more intensely, and join our humble homage and filial loyalty to the greater praise which is his in heaven.