A student in search of truth…

Santuary windows of Köln Cathedral Source: reflectionsofbeauty.blogspot.com

All but totally destroyed by the Allied bombardment of the Second World War, the German city of Köln, today by virtue of its tall, dark cathedral, whispers but faintly to its former glory. Tourists to Köln are frequently told about the cathedral being the final resting place of the Magi, and of the hallowed history of the city as being one of the jewels of the Catholic Church's crown of universities. Köln is today a very modern city, yet below the foundations of imposing office buildings and financial houses, mixed in with the crushed rubble, are the memories of an era, when young men traversed kingdoms, seas and mountains in order to seek wisdom, in order to hear the words of great scholars touch their hearts and their minds.

It was in this bygone era that in 1250 a great theologian and botanist, Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), decided to leave the University of Paris, to found in Köln the Studium Generale. The reputation of Albertus Magnus had already been well-established, and even disinterested scholars knew the importance of the friar's arrival in the German city. What they could not have foreseen was the future greatness of a member of Albertus' entourage. Accompanying Albertus was one of his pupils from Paris. This student, born 25 years earlier in Aquino near Naples, was known simply as Brother Thomas. An aristocrat, Thomas had contravened his parent's wishes and entered the Dominican Order, the same Order to which Albertus belonged. Thomas revered his Master, and thus Albertus' decision to move his lectern to Köln was for the young Neopolitan an easy call to answer.

Now let us for a moment paint a picture of a rowdy lecture hall in Köln containing scholars uniformly conversant in Latin. From all around the Catholic world, students had gathered; tall and fair Scandinavians, short and olive skinned Spaniards, rose-complexioned Celts from Ireland; young men who had come together to take up the opportunity of hearing at least once in their lives the words of a Master; and to be able to tell their students, one day, that they were there when Albertus spoke with verve and life, the lectures they are now being required to read in dusty and decaying books.

Entering this scene is Friar Thomas, a portly, bull-like man, shy of countenance, well-aware that his physical appearance triggers off in the minds and on the tongues of his colleagues sardonic humour and parody. Soon after the great Master Albertus arrives. His ears catch the taunts thrown at his loyal pupil: "Dumb Ox" he hears, "Dumb Ox" he hears again, and placing his notes upon the lectern he turns and utters words prophetic to his audience: "some fine day the Ox will let out such a bellow of instruction, that it will sound to the four corners of the world".

A great mind…

Albertus' defence of Thomas is both legend and testament not only to the genius of his pupil, but also to the greatness of the Master. Thomas Aquinas would go on to become not only one of the greatest minds of the Church, but indisputably one of the greatest minds of human history. His teacher, Albertus, believed in him all the while.

St Thomas Aquinas

As for Thomas, he never lost sight of his goal, nor failed to appreciate the considerable talents that God had given him. The opinion of others did not matter to Aquinas more than his desire to do God's will. G.K. Chesterton in his biography, "St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox" makes the following conclusion about his subject:

"he had a massive and magnetic presence; he had an intellect that could act like a huge system of artillery spread over the whole world; he had that instantaneous presence of mind in debate, which alone really deserves the name of wit. But it never occurred to him to use anything except his wits, in defence of truth distinct from himself. It never occurred to Aquinas to use Aquinas as a weapon". (Chesterton, 1956, p. 194-195)

In a modern world where slander, invective and defamation are common place, and where knowledge is used as power to thwart rather than to nurture, one of the greatest minds that ever lived, used knowledge, wisely, seeking to teach others about the beauty of God and of humanity, while all the while never seeking to pay back in ridicule, those who derided him. Herein Chesterton makes a distinction between the formidable Aquinas – with his gentleness, and the less able Martin Luther, with his ever-flowing barrage of abuse.

At other times in his life we see Aquinas standing by his specially designed writing desk, (still in existence, with a piece cut out of it in order to allow for his considerable girth), ardently and patiently instructing his pupils in the profundity and knowledge of God; proposing, then refuting objections, and counter-objections, reading texts as far distant from the Catholic faith, as the known corners of the world were at the time, but all the while seeking to reconcile the truth they contained with the faith of the Church.

Where others were too fearful to explore, Aquinas dared to know more. When others perceived challenging your teacher to be insolence, Aquinas understood the veracity of the maxim, that no greater compliment could be paid a teacher, then for their student to one day outshine them in excellence. Aquinas dared to march to the beat of a different drum, because above all else he loved the source of all wisdom — and listened intently to the tune that God had given him to march with in this life.

Thus committed to, and centered in Christ and His Church — Aquinas was able to fearlessly use the wisdom of the Ancient, as well as the Arab and Muslim World, to discuss the historical and universal human longing for Truth in relation to God's Divine Revelation within the Catholic Church. Aristotle, Averroes (1126-1198), Avicenna (980-1037), and Plato, all make regular appearances in the writings of Aquinas, at a time when to do so, stood well in the face of a medieval suspicion of Greek culture and thought; (post-East-West Schism of 1054), as well as in the vast smoking shadow of the Crusades.

Aquinas' desire to see all sides of an issue – is clearly evident in the technique he uses in his great Summa Theologiae — in which he first proposes an argument contradictory to Church teaching, with all its many supporting and convincing theses, only to slowly, but fairly, dissect all the arguments, and present the validity of the teaching taught by the Church.

Pope Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris lauded the legacy of St. Thomas Aquinas stating that:

Pope Leo XIII

"Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because "he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all." The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith. With his spirit at once humble and swift, his memory ready and tenacious, his life spotless throughout, a lover of truth for its own sake, richly endowed with human and divine science, like the sun he heated the world with the warmth of his virtues and filled it with the splendor of his teaching. Philosophy has no part which he did not touch finely at once and thoroughly; on the laws of reasoning, on God and incorporeal substances, on man and other sensible things, on human actions and their principles, he reasoned in such a manner that in him there is wanting neither a full array of questions, nor an apt disposal of the various parts, nor the best method of proceeding, nor soundness of principles or strength of argument, nor clearness and elegance of style, nor a facility for explaining what is abstruse." (Leo XIII, 1879, par. 17)

In a world where the Catholic Church is often criticized and challenged, Aquinas is, and has been for many centuries, a bastion and shield, by which to repel the arrows and slings of heresy — yet, he is by no means an elixir or cure-all for the spiritual needs and yearnings of the entire Church, and nor would he have ever agreed to be.

Aquinas acknowledged the folly of a Church frozen fast by the belief that the Mystery of God, could be fully comprehended in any one era, and that the thirst for knowledge should consequently cease, when he wrote in Summa Contra Gentiles, I, ch. 8: "the primary condition for progress is to understand that truth surpasses all comprehension". (Chenu, 2002, p. 32) Thinking and speculating within the Church, must never cease — as no synthesis, of all the great Catholic thinkers and their thought, from Pentecost to our own Age, can even hint at the fullness of the Nature of God. If one believes that we can completely understand God — then what we hold in our mind, is a dream and phantasm, and not God. As such, the Church must be prepared to be continually surprised and refreshed by a Truth that speaks throughout the Ages, as it did to Aquinas, and Albert and Bonaventure and Newman — and to all men and women of good conscience and good Faith, in the future; men and women who emulate Thomas in how they, "follow the example of the Angelic Doctor, who never gave himself to reading or writing without first begging the blessing of God, who modestly confessed that whatever he knew he had acquired not so much by his own study and labor as by the divine gift; and therefore let us all … beseech God to send forth the spirit of knowledge and of understanding to the children of the Church and open their senses for the understanding of wisdom." (Leo XIII, 1879, par. 33)

Our collective search for "truth"…

We must read and we must know Aquinas; we must stand on his shoulders to reach the heavens, for ignorance of his work, is in itself, a massive loss to understanding the Divine presence in the history of humanity, and within the teachings of the Church. Yet we must also read Aquinas alongside other theologians and great Christians, who although they may not have written as much, nor perhaps as well — give us insights that enrich our knowledge of the Truth — and enhance our perception of the face of God. From Lyon to Alexandria, from Damascus to Kyiv, and beyond, the Church has a rich harvest, a seemingly never-ending vein of inspiration that can guide its members into a new millennium.

Scholasticism and science have their places in the Church — but only ever if married to a deep sense of mysticism; an awareness of a Truth that lies somewhere in the Darkness, a Truth calling us by name; a Truth: unfathomable, ineffable, incomprehensible, yet present to us, and more real to us, than the very breath that fills our lungs and the very touch of our mother's embrace; such a Truth our heart desires to see — even if our minds know that such this vision could cost us our lives; like the woman who is happy in this life, but gladly risks death in order to bring new life into the world.

Toward the close of his life, Aquinas had a mystical experience, a vision of God, and from that day forth he ceased to write. A man whose university thesis contained over a million words — had had his quill dried by the force of a vision. When asked why he had stopped writing, his simple reply had been that in comparison to what had just been revealed to him, his writings seemed liked straw. The man who had outshone many by the magnitude of his intellect had at the end of his life proven the truth of the words of St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians: "Now we see only reflections in a mirror, mere riddles, but then we shall be seeing face to face. Now I can know only imperfectly; but then I shall know just as fully as I am myself known." (1 Cornthians 13: 12, The New Jerusalem Bible)

Aquinas offers all of us hope, a hope to reach beyond, to seek God and reach for the heavens, not with selfish ambition, but with love; to explore with humility, to study without becoming discouraged, to research in honesty and openness, to be willing to change, to dare, to grow, to construct – Aquinas teaches us all these things and more. He teaches us, by his very life, that greatness lies not in any ounce of natural talent, but in the profound nature and awesome power, of humanity's desire for God; a desire so exquisitely expressed in one of his most famous hymns, Sacris Solemniss (1264), a hymn most famous today for its sixth stanza, Panis Angelicus, but which in its seventh tells us: "Thee, therefore, we implore, o Godhead, One in Three, so may Thou visit us, as we now worship Thee; and lead us on Thy way, That we at last may see the light wherein Thou dwellest aye."

©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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