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, theology and the classics too.

The University of St. Thomas was a grand place; it felt like a university, with its stately buildings made from massive blacks of the blonde-sandstone quarried from the bluffs along the Mississippi.

The moment I passed through the arches, walking into the quad, I felt like I had arrived.

Looking back, I have to say 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 when I had graduated from there.

My work thus far has been in the philosophy and history of Christian soteriology. It 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 surpass his 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, tools 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 died on March 7^th, 1274.

In 1969 the Church moved the day we celebrate his feast to January 28^th, therefore 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 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 (in the spirit of the age).

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 dissolved his body in, for distribution in the relic-trade. For years they refused to turn his remains over to his Dominican brothers, parceling out his bones and the water they had recovered, bit by bit, 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 straw.

There is a prayer that St. Thomas 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, 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 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 praise and glory

Of thy name

 

In the year 2025 CE, seven hundred and fifty-one 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, scientia…science and knowledge, serving to undermine 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 culture throughout the empire. He demanded that all Roman citizens become Christian or leave; 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 of darkness has a cycle 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, and by coincidence roughly 750 years have passed since the Summa was penned.

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

 The overall fragility of our situation, our sitz im leben, or 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, including the acknowledgement of and acquiescence to human rights, could blow away with the wind, or burn up in a flash.

 Reason save us!