Aquinas for Our Times

735 years ago Christendom faced unsettling times. Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of the saintly King Louis IX of France, had established his power over the Italian peninsula and he was ambitious to crown himself Emperor of the East in Constantinople. Fear of Charles's invasion pushed the Greeks to seek union with the Roman Church. Pope Gregory who was trying to settle his disputes with the German Empire, and attempting to reform the Church's hierarchy, and wanting to limit Charles's powers, called for an ecumenical council to be held in the French city of Lyon. In Paris, the great intellectual center of Europe, the university was exploding with conflicts between philosophers and theologians who attacked one another over the use of Aristotle, a pagan Greek thinker whose realism challenged the status quo of the day. The Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, who had been a prominent Master at Paris, condemned 13 propositions held by these Radical Aristotelians. Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome and others joined the Bishop in fighting this perceived radical element. In addition there was great animosity between the secular clergy like Henry and the mendicant clergy, like the Dominicans and Franciscans. All in all, the intellectual climate in Christendom was divisive. It became so violent that the Bishop of Paris even prohibited the professors and students at the university from discussing theology. Ideas, then as now, had political consequence. Throw into all of this the political ambitions and you can see how the populace was being alienated one group from another. Yes, 735 years ago Christendom faced very unsettling times.

It was in March of 1272 when Pope Gregory announced the Council of Lyon two years in advance of its start. He summoned bishops, abbots, and prelates as well as representatives from the universities like Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. Others who would attend the council were King James I of Aragon, as well as the Greek ambassador of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos along with members of the Greek clergy. The council also had the ambassador of the Muslim Khan of the Tatars. Truly it was to be a major world summit for its day.

Thomas Aquinas probably received his summons before Easter, which in 1272 was on April 24. This would mean that Aquinas was still teaching at Paris. Probably it came by papal currier sometime before he left for the General Chapter held in Florence, this was a meeting of the Dominican Order that regularly addresses legislation, government and policies. Even with his summons from the Pope for the council, the General Chapter still decided to assign Aquinas to Naples, sending him there to set up a Dominican School of Theology. Interestingly it was the ambitious King of Naples I mentioned, Charles of Anjou, who would pay Aquinas's pension for teaching. So, in his late forties he left the turbulence of Paris to meet the new challenges in his homeland of Naples, amid his kinfolk and numerous nieces and nephews. This move south is why he was able to attend the funeral of his brother-in-law, Roger the Count of Traetto, in August before he began teaching on October 15th in Naples. In the intellectual and political uncertainties of Christendom, Thomas continued working on what would become the last part of his great Summa of Theology. It was in the Spring of 1273 that Thomas gave his Lenten talks on our belief in God, called De Credo in Deum, and during this time he wrote his commentaries on the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster, really these were meditations on the two common prayers of the Church. It was also during this time that Aquinas was gaining great fame as a preacher and saintly man among the people. By December of 1273, Aquinas was very likely making his plans to travel to Lyon, a journey that would require him to depart in January if he wanted to arrive for its start in March. Among his teachings and duties as Regent he would preach and preside at various churches in Naples. On the Feast of St. Nicholas in early December he celebrated Mass at the church of St. Nicholas in Naples. It was during this Eucharist that Thomas had the now famous vision which legend has handed on to us. Here Thomas saw, knew in a new way the reality of God beyond his written words, something more than his mind could find words to describe. Legend tells us that he declared "All that I have written is as straw compared to the experience of God."

I imagine that it was with some reluctance, but out of a sense of obedience, that Aquinas undertook this journey from Naples to Lyon. We don't know the circumstances of his death, but we do know that in March he was transferred from the castle of his niece where he had been first brought to recover from an injury. As it became apparent that he would not live, they took him to the Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary and St. Stephen at Fossanova, south of Rome, where he could die in a religious house. And on March seventh, Thomas Aquinas ended his earthly life in the lush valley of Lazio where the first monks drained a swamp with a "new ditch," a fossa nuova, and built a monastery that tried to be a close copy of St. Bernard's own monastery of Clairvaux.

Even after his death, attacks against Aquinas and his teachings continued at Paris where in1277 the Bishop's decree was expanded to condemn 219 Thomistic propositions, as well as the condemnation by the wretched English Dominican Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Kilwardby. The Franciscans launched an attack on Aquinas seeking to correct his thought in what became known as the "Correctorium Controversy", and in 1278 the Dominican General Chapter legislated that all Dominicans must respect and defend Aquinas's writings. Fifty years later in 1323, with wide-spread popular acclamation on the part of the Italians, Pope John XXII canonized Aquinas a saint. It wasn't until 1369 when the Dominicans were able to move the saint's body from Fossanova to the Dominican Church in Tolouse, France. So on January 28th, 1369 Aquinas was finally laid to rest where he is to this day. It was Vatican II that moved Aquinas's feast from March to January in order to allow it to be celebrated outside of Lent.

In the centuries following his canonization there wasn't much made of Aquinas's writings, and apart from some Dominicans like John of St. Thomas and Thomas Cardinal Cajetan, it might have been forgotten. Not until the Council of Trent in the 16th century was there a rediscovery of this thought in addressing authentic Catholic thought in the Age of the Enlightenment. In 1567 Pope Pius V declared Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church. And almost 300 years later, on August 4, 1879, in Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII recommended Thomas Aquinas as a model for theological and philosophical studies. Thomas Aquinas, whose thought was forged in the furnace of Christendom's unsettled times, has persistently surfaced to guide Catholic thought.

So the question for me is what makes his thought so special? Why does Aquinas keep surfacing to help us think in a Catholic way, a way that draws faith and reason into the same room? I explored this question in my 2003 article called, "On the Persistence of Aquinas". What stood out to me is that for Thomas Aquinas Truth is not opposed to itself. For Thomas knowledge, understanding, ideas are all relational, they disclose to us something of a larger truth. That is why for Aquinas no idea is orphaned, they all have a kinship and only collectively, in one idea's solidarity to another idea, even if it seems opposed, can we see the whole family. For Thomas, all of creation is meant to teach us about ultimate realities of life and consequently, everything we learn only makes sense in relationship to the full body of knowledge. This is important especially when we think in little bits, small ideas that are caged in the compartments of our minds and not allowed to engage one another. Ideas for Aquinas are sociable things that need to encounter one another, to exchange and be changed by their playing with one another. Our problem today is that we isolate our ideas; we corral our favorite ideas into a pen and then keep all the other unlikeable ideas away. Our favorite ideas are safely locked up in the barns our minds make and we are uneasy with any intruding idea.

One of Thomas's greatest gifts to human thought was to always ask the question of relationship. Here he followed the thought of Aristotle for its realistic sense of things. "How does this relate to other things?" The fancy Latin phrase he used was "ad aliquid" which simply meant at, to, or for, someone, somebody, something.. I call this relational thinking and it means that one needs to think making connections, linking ideas in order to get the whole.

Allow me to demonstrate by giving you a brain teaser. I need three volunteers to help me. (pause) Your job is to watch people's faces and notice what happens and how they look, their expressions, reactions and emotions. Now for everyone else: When you know the answer to this puzzle I want you to stand up and watch the faces of everyone else. I don't want you to say a word or in any way to communicate the answer to anyone. If you do I will mock and ridicule you as spoil sports. Do you all understand? So when you know the answer, stand up if you are able, and remain silent as a rock. RIDDLE: I have a face but no head, hands but I have no arms, and I run but I have no legs. What am I? (repeat and allow people to figure the answer) [After most have figured it out get observations from volunteers] Now for my volunteers. What did you notice, what did you observe? [confusion, impatience, boredom, consternation, pleasure, delight]

This game demonstrates both intellectual delight, when the mind puts the pieces together and goes beyond the unconnected facts to the bigger picture. It also shows us how ideas, if isolated to mean only one thing and not to be in relationship to and with other ideas, keep us from making the connections that make life meaningful. Why is this important? Today many people fall too easily into particular ideologies and think that this set of ideas is the answer and everything else is wrong. I think Thomas would be critical of ideologies. The common dictionary meaning of the term is "The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. or "an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation". At any rate, ideologies run the risk of isolating ideas, which is not what Thomas invites us to see nor is it what allows us to flourish as human beings. Truth isn't one dimensional serving as a big stick to hit someone else over the head. Truth is manifold and its many dimensions can't be appreciated in isolation. This is what I appreciate most in Aquinas, his sense of the many dimensions of truth and yet, it's unity. You see this in Aquinas's Summa and how he treats even the arguments of his opponents, seeing in what ways they are right and in what way their ideas either serve to relate us to the true, or to isolate us in error. It is this relational thinking that allows us to be sacramental, to know and to love what eye has not seen nor ear heard.

We too live in unsettled times and our ideas, our thinking, has become segregated, alienated by opposing ideologies. This has happened, or we have let it happen, by not forcing, demanding our ideas to engage one another. By not subjecting ideas to such exchanges, the real rub of thinking, they become isolated and alienated. Aquinas used Aristotelian realism to challenge the Platonist idealism of his day. In doing so he drew ideas together in dispute, demanding that they prove themselves not in isolated ideologies but in the commerce of even opposing ideas. Only in this way can we get beyond the conceptual limits of our petty superficial thinking, and genuinely encounter the generous enormity of Truth itself. Words must do more than manipulate or spin one's opponent. Words must help us meet the larger reality of the True and I fear we are failing to do so as a nation. We have a moral responsibility to allow this dance of ideas to push us beyond the straw of our self serving ideologies. If our ideologies become more important than the Truth, if we snipe at one another instead of struggle to understand the other, if we arrest our thinking at the simplistic and shun the necessary efforts to appreciate life's complexities, then we fail to genuinely honor the divine gift of intelligence. I believe that there must be an ethics of understanding, a moral responsibility to seek the meaning of a person and not the meanness born of our fears. Throughout the centuries Thomas Aquinas has surfaced to help us think more clearly and to engage our ideas more respectfully. Unsettled times need people to return to the well of wisdom and engage ideas as galaxies of the True. Our times need women and men of faith to listen and to learn what God is showing us in the remarkable clues hidden in creation. We need people dedicated to the fullness of Truth and who do not cling to its shards out of fear. Yes we face unsettled times, but I believe the Church has rightly given us a guide in the Holy Spirit at work in Thomas Aquinas.