When I finally made it to university, I went to a school named for Thomas Aquinas in Saint Paul, Minnesota; like him, I studied philosophy, theology and the corpus of classics as well.
The University of St. Thomas was a grand place; it felt like a university, with its stately aedificia, stout buildings made from massive blacks of blonde-sandstone quarried from the bluffs along the Mississippi.
The moment I passed through the arches, walking into the quadracento, I felt that I had arrived at the place of dreams. Though I am proud to be an alum, my actually experience of the institution was rather hum-drum, and yet when I look back, I can see that my time at St. Thomas was reasonably well spent; my studies adequately prepared me for advanced studies elsewhere (though barely); I continued my research in theology, in the history and philosophy of religion, when I had graduated, and my focus narrowed to the field of Christian studies called soteriology. My work to this point is not as exhaustive as our patron’s achievement with his Summa Theologica, which remains a unique accomplishment in the history of Western thought…though it is ongoing.
The Summa, it should be noted, is more important for the mode of thinking that Aquinas transmitted his ideas in, than for the conclusions he presented in its pages, because he allowed his revolutionary mind to be constrained by a careful, cautious and conservative approach to theology, which had the result of making him a defender of the Church’s many errors, rather than there reformer…reform would come as a result of his work, though it would be centuries in the making.
St. Thomas successfully bridged the gap between the ancient philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al, and the proto-renaissance period of Western Europe, re-discovering the use of intellectual tools such as formal logic and discursive reasoning, which came to him from the Jewish scholar Maimonides, and the Muslim scholar Averroes; he re-employed them in a way that allowed Europeans to leave the Dark Ages, clearing a path for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason that followed.
Saint Thomas Aquinas died on March 7th, 1274. In 1969 the Catholic Church moved the day we celebrate his feast from March 7th to January 28th, therefore we celebrate his sainthood today.
Thomas Aquinas was Italian by birth and a member of the Dominican order by choice; he is counted among a group of theologians known as the “scholastics,” whose influence marks the beginning of the University era in Europe, a movement that was spearheaded by religious orders such as Aquinas’s own Dominicans…he was famous in his day.
Thomas died while making a pilgrimage along the Appian Way. Death took him at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, and the monks there, fully cognizant of his fame and knowing that he would become a saint of great renown, (in the spirit of the age) they coveted the relics of his body.
After his death, his hosts boiled his carcass down to the bones and then polished those to preserve them in good order. They kept all the water from the cauldron they had dissolved his body in, for distribution in the relic-and-indulgence trade. For years the Cistercians refused to turn his remains over to his Dominican brothers, parceling out his bones and the water they had recovered, bit by bit and keeping his skull until the very end.
The University of Saint Thomas, has a vial of that water in its collection of sacred artifacts…a silly business, really, and beneath the dignity of the intellectual giant that Aquinas was known to be.
On his death bed it is reported that Thomas gave those attending him an estimation of the value of his own contribution to the doctrine and dogma of the church, of which he said: everything is straw…it is only straw.
There is a prayer that he wrote, it is carved into a column of the main entrance to the school grounds at the University in St. Paul, the same arches that I walked through my first day on campus (and many more times after that); it is two stories below the offices of the Philosophy Department (which I belonged to), I recited that prayer aloud with classmates every day that I was there.
It is a prayer that I carry with me still, as if it were written in my heart:
Grant, o' merciful God: that I may ardently desire, prudently examine, truthfully acknowledge and perfectly accomplish what is pleasing to thee for the sake of your name
In the year 2026 CE,
seven hundred and fifty-two years after the death of St. Thomas, the world has
become lost in another kind of dark ages, which is odd and sadly ironic because
the current tide of anti-rational, anti-intellectual sentiment that has taken
its grip on us has been seeded through the prevalence of digital media
platforms that are in themselves a function of our mastery of light as a means
of communication…there is some irony here.
We now find ourselves living in a milieu that disdains the truth, science and knowledge, in a way that undermines the roll of reason in public discourse.
It is saddening.
In Western Europe the so-called dark ages are considered to have begun around the year 500 CE, with the reign of the emperor Justinian who insisted that there be a homogenous culture throughout the empire. He demanded that all Roman citizens become Christian or leave; at which point tens of thousands of artisans, merchants, traders and teachers did just that…they left.
The Justinian expulsions took place roughly seven hundred and fifty years after the golden age of the philosophers, and roughly seven hundred and fifty years before St. Thomas wrote his Summa.
Let me be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything inherently ominous in the pattern of years I have articulated, the numbers themselves are arbitrary and it would be unreasonable to suppose otherwise. However, we would be wise to acknowledge the trend, the descent into darkness has a cycle of its own, as doe the return of the light. We have fallen into this before and we are susceptible to do so again…this is what it means to be human, and by coincidence roughly 750 years have passed since the Summa was penned, putting us at the apex of the cycle and marking the beginning of the nadir’s long approach; we are teetering on the brink of disaster right now.
The overall fragility of our situation, our sitz im leben (setting in life), brings to mind the saint’s final words…it is all straw, he said, nothing but straw.
Everything we have built since Thomas Aquinas paved the way for the enlightenment, including our own liberal-democracy, as well as the acknowledgement of and acquiescence to the universality of human rights…like straw, it could all blow away with the wind, or burn up in a flash.
Reason save us!
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