Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
St. Thomas’s Style
We must be careful not to dwell too long upon St. Thomas as a writer, for that would be to sin against brevity, and brevity is the chief characteristic of his style. He was unacquainted with that art of never having said enough, which many of our thinkers affect. His articles are short and compact, and the replies to objections even more so, but there is sublimity in his very silences.
Erasmus admired the Latin of the Summa, obviously not for its classical purity, but because of its high intellectual qualities, among which he certainly included this rich brevity, his stylus brevis, grata facondia — words that are found in the Office of his feast. It is the mark of a truly great mind to write with this nice discrimination, avoiding mere verbiage and giving only what is essential.
To those who are conversant with the problems that he discusses, St. Thomas is always clear, precisely because of his power of seizing upon what is of primary importance and of leaving out secondary matters. His commentators will readily obscure his meaning, in explaining some point of their own; for true illumination, we must go to the master. Fortunately, we still have his works to explain what his commentators are driving at! It is quite a relief to return to him after cutting our way through their entanglements. Novalis rightly says, “The supreme, the purest, is also the commonest and the most comprehensible. The more a science becomes difficult and complicated, the more it is derived, impure, and mixed.”
This brings us to another characteristic, closely akin to the first, if not identical with it — namely, his simplicity. By simple is meant a style that is not overcharged, complicated, or padded. St. Thomas’s simplicity of style is as perfect as his freedom from complications and digressions. He shows his intellectual power without making a show of it, like a Hercules who makes no parade of his strength. He avoids our modern pedantry, our attitude of mystery, our way of throwing dust into people’s eyes. His simplicity of style follows naturally from his simplicity of soul. All his phrases are the outcome of an ordered, sternly disciplined mind and exactly correspond to his ideas. He has no drapery; he sketches his ideas in the nude. He has no rhetoric, but, to use Claudel’s phrase, “an almost literal expression of reality.” His style is the style of a builder or engineer, who uses only primordial elements and basic means of assemblage.
This is all an effect of his objectivity. His style, like his thought, is objective, in that it is an exact replica of things. Each word represents a thing, each sentence a truth, each article a definite ensemble, each treatise a world. There is always an inherent order in his exposition. In drawing attention to the contents of the Summa, we saw that it revealed a complete system, and this is equally true of each article and of each proposition.
He writes direct from his mind, without recourse to the literary treasures that are the standby of most authors. He is hardly an “author,” or even a “man,” but rather a channel connecting us directly with intelligible truth.
We may with justice apply to him what Barrès says of Dante: “His grave, sculptural style is due to his immediate and composite vision of all spiritual truths.”
There is a hidden connection between his style and the philosophy that he set out to expound. His contemporary St. Bonaventure was Augustinian and mystical and wrote in quite a different strain; similarly, St. Anselm and St. Bernard. Carpaccio, Paolo Ucello, and Michelangelo, on the one hand, and Titian, Veronese, Rubens, and Delacroix on the other, have a way of painting that corresponds to their different visions of the world. They all represent beauty, but the beauty of St. Thomas is severe. His definiteness and compactness grace his style, as the portraying of muscles enhances the beauty of a naked Doryphore or Apoxyomenos. It is impossible to modify it, shorten it, or add to it without spoiling the whole system. As a model of scientific exposition, it is scarcely paralleled in the best pages of Aristotle, or, in modern times, by Goethe or Claude Bernard.
Yet his writing cannot be called monotonous. When thought reigns alone, there is monotony, in the etymological sense of the word, if the tonality of the thought remains unaltered, and there is variety if the tonality alters. Each individual has his own skin, which changes as the individual grows, and that is the only variation to which it is susceptible. St. Thomas does not mind repeating himself when there is need; he uses the same expressions over and over again, when the same thought recurs, thus guiding the reader and pointing the road through difficult territory instead of confusing him by false synonyms and elegant variations.
We spoke of St. Thomas’s sense of measure as one of the marks of his genius. It is equally evident in his literary form. He never pads; he never strains a point; he is never one-sided or unbalanced in his judgments. This again is the outcome of his philosophy, for he was dominated, not by the particular objects that he studied, but by their order and mutual dependence. Science is knowledge “by causes”; that is, it is concerned with the exact balance of coordinated series. Further, the essential of the entire creation is not this or that particular creature, but the cosmos.
He is just as impersonal in his exposition of truth as in his search for it. Without this character, he would not be objective, nor enjoy the same widespread influence. Impersonality is so bound up with truth that it impresses itself sooner or later on its followers. He who is far removed from himself and near to truth is, by that very fact, in contact with all intelligences.
Nevertheless, in reading him, we do have a sense of quiet power. Despite his dislike of ostentation, he cannot help impressing us. We feel that he is like a smoothly running machine, with all the power that its quiet implies. Here again is the art of the engineer. He substitutes for the playful humor of Plato, the grave serenity of Spinoza or Aristotle. It is an art free to follow its own deep longings. The free curve is the greatest achievement of geometrical precision.
The study of St. Thomas brings us peace; we derive confidence and joy from him, because we realize that all that he says proceeds from the love of truth, a love subject to God.
The epithet dry applied to his writings has no more meaning than when applied to Egyptian art, or to the metopes of the Parthenon or of the Throne of Venus at Thermes. A writer must be dry in that sense, if he is to say much in a few words and not put an obstacle between the mind and the truth.
We grant, however, that for a truly humanist presentation of thought, his style has its limitations, but these can be remedied by the cooperation of other thinkers and writers. The teacher need not be an orator; he may leave that to others. The organizer of ideas is not their popularizer. St. Thomas would have been the first to admit (indeed, he laid down the rules) that, besides the teaching by concepts and dogmatic propositions, there is the teaching by imagery, and the appeal to the emotions; to which are due the final triumph of truth in the world.
The builders of Memphis did not carve the colossal blocks destined for their temples. They measured them, cut them to size, and fitted them into place. It was left to those who came after to cut on them the story of their battles and royal hunts, and the images of their gods.