Knowing Saint Thomas

In my spare moments I have begun the long, slow process of re-reading my doctoral thesis. It is now over 17 years old, and I have not really revisited it since my defense. I expect the exercise of re-reading to be both helpful and painful at the same time. The topic of the thesis is focused upon how Saint Thomas read Sacred Scripture, using his unfinished exposition of the Psalms as the basis for the study. Here is how the dissertation begins:

The Vision of Saint Thomas

Santi di Tito, 1593

1. Knowing Thomas

Thomas appeared to Dante in the neighborhood of Peter Lombard, Gratian and Siger of Brabant, near to Anselm, Albert and Bonaventure.⁽¹⁾  The poet shows Thomas and his friends singing the celestial hymn and moving to the prompting rhythm of wisdom.  Thomas gives Dante three discourses, lectures really, all serving to deepen a pilgrim’s taste for the wisdom that comes from charity.  A generation later, Catherine of Siena will hear Thomas’s name in the same Breath with Augustine and Jerome; he would himself have considered this much higher company.  She knew him as a teacher of Scripture, associated with the two great Latin Doctors of Scripture, suffused with the same light of the intellect’s eye that makes all entrance into the bright darkness of the Sacred Text fruitful for the Church: light for the sake of reading, reading for the sake of light.⁽²⁾  Had Thomas heard Catherine’s word while still in his earthly tent, it would more likely have made him sing a Psalm of gratitude to the Father than would even Dante’s depiction of earthly disputes resolved into heavenly paradoxes of charity. Thomas simply thought of himself as a teacher of Scripture, and on Catherine’s hearing, such is also what the Father sees him to be. Dante and Catherine paradigmatically witness to what would become reflected to us as a varied and lively tradition of reading Thomas the teacher, a tradition not so much filled with opposing characterizations, as filled with diverse accounts of the whole taken from a reading of many parts.  This is of course the only way to account for the whole, but the path through the parts yields assorted depictions of the whole exactly reflective of the length and depth of the stops made along the way.  There is almost too much in Thomas for any one laborer to take into account, and for this reason, Catherine had an advantage over Dante.  She did not labor over Thomas so much as she labored over love, and along the way received a clear perception of Thomas’s teaching exactly proportionate to her passion for the One whom Thomas loved and for whom he labored.  Dante would not have begrudged her the advantage, for he knew something about grace and its providential dispositions.  Thomas’s vision of the mysteries that surround and move us has left deeper impressions upon history than even many of his best students realize. The thoughts and expressions of poets and saints sink deeply into time, even if in a hidden way; but as Thomas would tell us, the hiding has its purposes in the divine pedagogy.  John of the Cross, being both poet and saint, seems a particularly strong witness to this hidden side of Thomas’s influence.  This one, too, knew what Thomas saw, in a way similar to the way Thomas saw it.⁽³⁾  The point is though, that John, Catherine and even Dante, did not strive for an “it” or a “what” at all. Always, with Thomas as guide, they sought the One who willed in the unity of the Godhead first to be our end, consenting in his particular flesh to be also our way.  Words, and the thoughts they struggle to convey, prepare the way for love which propels the soul to seek its proper object who is Truth hidden so that He might be revealed, finally, to trained and clear eyes.  Love attains the res.  Lacking Dante’s lyric grace and Catherine’s burning, bursting heart, and bereft of John’s share in both, most of us seeking to learn from Thomas are left to labor over his texts; we study words and history. We wait for critical editions, reliable sources, cogent, reasonable and persuasive arguments. This is as it should be, according to the wise dispositions of graceful providence. But if we seek to catch a glimpse of Thomas’s vision, honestly approaching him on his own terms, we cannot but have the lessons of those loftier souls habitually and quietly in mind.  Labor that does not stretch toward Him whom Thomas loved will never know Thomas in the way he most would want to be known.  

+df

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1:

Paradiso, Canto X through Canto XIII.

2:

Il Dialogo, cp. lxxxiv-lxxxv.

3:

See especially, Romance sobre el evangelio “in principio erat Verbum,” Canción 7.