Saint Thomas Aquinas, Patron Saint of Philosophy, Angelic Doctor of the Church

When I finally made it to university, I went to a school named for Saint Thomas Aquinas in Saint Paul, Minnesota; I studied philosophy and theology, and the classics too.

The University of St. Thomas was a grand place. It felt like a university, with its tall stately buildings made from massive blacks of light-tan sandstone, a stone that is ubiquitous quarried from the river bluffs along the Mississippi. The moment I passed through the arches into the quad I felt like I had arrived.

My time at St. Thomas was reasonably well spent; my studies adequately prepared me for advanced studies elsewhere (barely); I continued my theological work when I had graduated from there.

My work thus far, in the philosophy and history of Christian soteriology, is not as exhaustive as our Patron Saint’s achievement with his Summa Theologica (thus far), which remains a unique accomplishment in the history of Western thought. Nevertheless, my work is ongoing, and may one day make the mark.

The Summa, it should be noted, is more important for the mode of thinking St. Thomas  transmitted his ideas in than for the conclusions he presented in its pages. His revolutionary mind was ultimately constrained by a careful, cautious and conservative approach to theology that made him a defender of Church’s errors, rather than a reformer.

Regardless, 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; 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 died on March 7^th, 1274.

In 1969 the Church moved the day we celebrate his feast to January 28^th, we celebrate his sainthood today.

Thomas Aquinas was Italian by birth and a member of the Dominican order; he is counted  among the “scholastics” and he was famous in his day. He died while making a pilgrimage, going along the Appian Way. Death took him at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, and the monks there, fully cognizant of his fame, knowing that he would become a saint of great renown, coveted the relics of his body.

His hosts boiled his carcass down to the bones, and polished those to keep them clean and preserve them in good order. They kept all the water from the cauldron his body dissolved in for distribution in the relic-trade; they refused for years to turn his remains over to his Dominican brothers, parceling out his bones and the water bit by bit over years, 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 he gave an estimation of the value of his own contribution to the doctrine and dogma of the church, of which he said: everything is just straw.

There is a prayer that Thomas wrote, it is carved into a column of the main entrance to the school grounds at the University, the same arches that I walked through, my first day on campus, two stories below the offices of the Philosophy Department (which I belonged to). I recited that prayer aloud every day I attended classes.

It is a prayer that I carry with me, 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 praise and glory

Of thy name

 

In the year 2024 CE, seven hundred and fifty years after the death of Saint 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, scientia, science and knowledge, and which 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 on a homogenous cultural throughout the empire, that all Roman citizens become Christian or leave. Tens of thousands of artisans, merchants, traders and teachers did just that…they left. This was roughly the same length of time, seven hundred and fifty years after the golden age of the philosophers, and roughly seven hundred and fifty years before Saint 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 of darkness has a cycle all of its own. We have fallen into this before and we are susceptible to do so again; this is what it means to be human.

 Once we have fallen it could take centuries to find the light again, and we are teetering on the brink of disaster.

 The overall fragility of our situation, our sitz im leben, our setting in life, brings to mind St. Thomas’s final words when reflecting of the body of his work…it is all straw, he said, nothing but straw.

 Everything we have built since the St. Thomas paved the way for the enlightenment, including liberal-democracy and acquiescence to human rights, could blow away with the wind, or burn up in a flash.

 Reason save us!