Saint Thomas

“ True religion felt the nearness of God without caring to see the mechanism. Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure, or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the Government; a two- sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of society seemed for the moment to need. ”

“ According to him, we must clear this triple hedge of thorny abstractions in order to understand the production of a sphere of brass. Under such a regimen, imbecility soon makes its appearance. Saint Thomas himself considers, "whether the body of Christ arose with its wounds—whether this body moves with the motion of the host and the chalice in consecration—whether at the first instant of conception Christ had the use of free judgment—whether Christ was slain by himself or by another?" Do you think you are at the limits of human folly? ”

“ Take as the text of thy thesis: 'He watereth the hills from above: the earth is filled with the fruit of Thy works. Ps. ciii. 13.'" On the morrow, after a struggle between S. Bonaventura and himself for the last place, Thomas, as being the younger, gained it. He preached from the text given him, and it has been regarded as a prophecy of the influence which the new doctor was to exercise over Christendom. The day on which he took his degree was the 23rd October, 1257.
The epoch on which we have now entered is the most glorious period of our saint's life. ”

“ Like his great teacher Albert, Thomas was respected even more for his piety than for his learning. Not long after his death, people began to speak of him as a saint. Though he was the most learned man of his time, he was considered to have given an example of heroic virtue. ”

“ And I am in debt to certain men but have not the wherewithal to pay them. If only one of these sons had been left to me, he would have helped me to live.” And the saint gave him his skin, and said unto him, “Lay this upon thy sons”; and when the man did as the saint commanded him, the three sons rose up from the dead straightway. And this miracle was noised abroad immediately in all the cities. And the priests of the idols were filled with wrath, and they stoned Saint Thomas, the apostle, with stones, and their hands withered. ”

“ Strange as it sounds, although man thought himself hardly treated in respect to freedom, yet, if freedom meant superiority, man was in action much the superior of God, Whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas, under restraints that man never would have tolerated. Saint Thomas did not allow God even an undetermined will; He was pure Act, and as such He could not change. Man alone was allowed, in act, to change direction. What was more curious still, man might absolutely prove his freedom by refusing to move at all; ”

“ While Thomas was writing his articles on the fourth Sacrament, he was praying one day in a chapel dedicated to S. Nicolas, when, as the story goes, the figure on the crucifix turned towards him and said, "Thomas, Thou hast written152 well of Me; what reward desirest thou?" "Nought, save Thyself, Lord," was the saint's spontaneous reply. ”

“ Thomas's own order, the Dominicans, but of the Benedictines, it will be seen that it was not because of any esprit de corps, but out of the depths of his great admiration for the saint, that his words of praise were written:
"It has been shown abundantly that no writer before the Angelical's day could have created a synthesis of all knowledge. The greatest of the classic Fathers have been treated of, and the reasons of their inability are evident. ”

“ If there were but one soul alone to enjoy God, it would be blessèd, even though it were without a single fellow-creature whom it could love.” [294]
(iv) And yet St. Thomas’s own deeply Christian sense, explicit sayings of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part, certain of the fuller apprehensions of the Greeks, can make the great Dominican again uncertain, or can bring him to entirely satisfactory declarations, on each of these points. For we get the declaration that direct knowledge of individual things, and quasi-creative operativeness are essential to all true perfection. ”

“ Thomas himself, attempt at times to combine, with the noblest Platonic and the deepest Christian teachings, certain elements, which, in strictness, have no place in an Incarnational Religion.
(iii) For, at times, the fullest, deepest Action is still not conceived, even by St. Thomas, as a Harmony, an Organization of all Man’s essential powers, the more the better. “In the active life, which is occupied with many things, there is less of beatitude than in the contemplative life, which is busy with one thing alone,—the contemplation of Truth” ”

“ Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord. For he then explains Matt. xviii, 10, “their,” the children’s, “Angels see without ceasing the face of their Father who is in Heaven” as teaching that “the action (operatio) , by which Angels are conjoined to the increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempiternal” ”

“ In God's providence, man was as nothing. With a proper sense of duty, every solar system should be content to suffer, if thereby the efficiency of the Milky Way were improved. Such theology shocked Saint Thomas, who never wholly abandoned man in order to exalt God. He persistently brought God and man together, and if he erred, the Church rightly pardons him because he erred on the human side. Whenever the path lay through the valley of despair he called God to his aid, as though he felt the moral obligation of the Creator to help His creation. ”

“ No doubt, many good Christians and some heretics have been shocked at the tour de force by which they felt themselves suddenly seized, bound hand and foot, attached to each other, and dragged into the Church, without consent or consultation. To religious mystics, whose scepticism concerned chiefly themselves and their own existence, Saint Thomas's man seemed hardly worth herding, at so much expense and trouble, into a Church where he was not eager to go. ”

“ After these words he hastened to the prison,
and sought the apostle, saying with weeping:
'My brother knew not, Lord, that thou wert the apostle
of the living God, and he hath highly sinned.'
Then he quickly unbound him, and besought him to receive
costly raiment. Then said the Lord's servant:
Yet knowest thou not that those who follow Christ
and desire to possess heavenly virtues,
wear not splendid garments nor fleshly adornings. ”

“ And they all believed on our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Saint baptized them with Christian baptism, and he taught them the Law of the Church. And after this Thomas went to the city of Kenas, and to the city of Makedonya, and he preached to the men therein in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when the kings and governors heard about them, they seized him, and shut him up in prison. Now the king had a wife, and she and many of the people who were with her came unto the saint secretly, in prison; and he taught them the way of God, and many believed on his words. ”

“ Then the king Gondophorus said to his brother:
' Since it is made for me, I think that it is mine;
let the apostle make for thee another work like it;
if, however, he cannot make another,
it may serve us both to possess this one.'
Then said the holy apostle: ' The Saviour hath builded
unnumbered dwellings and spacious palaces
from the beginning of the world magnificently in heaven;
and they can be purchased with true faith. ”

“ A Church which embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the Virgin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint- Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than any modern State can afford to be. Radical contradictions the State may perhaps tolerate, though hardly, but never embrace or profess. Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought. ”

“ Thomas that an angel of light may be recognised by the peace and quietness he leaves in the soul. She is never visited in this way, but she afterwards abides in peace and joy; so much so, that all the pleasures of earth together are not comparable to one of these visitations.
"3. She never commits a fault, nor falls into an imperfection, without being instantly rebuked by Him who speaks interiorly to her. ”

“ No, nor yet, being as bad as we are, I doubt not at all but that in conclusion, however base Christendom be brought, it shall spring up again, till the time be come very near to the day of judgment, some tokens of which methinketh are not come yet. But somewhat before that time shall Christendom be straitened sore, and brought into so narrow a compass that, according to Christ's words, "When the Son of Man shall come again"—that is, to the day of general judgment—"thinkest thou that he shall find faith in the earth?" ”

“ Even theologians—even the great theologians of the thirteenth century—even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself—did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God; ”

“ I rear the building, so that the roof shall surmount
all edifices, and it shall be fair without,
and the work shall nevertheless be more beautiful within.
"Whatsoever there be in marble or in glorious building,
I verily make, and if thou wilt commit to me
boys to teach, I will instruct them truly.'
Then said Abbanes: 'Excellent is the man
who hath such workmen; he is better than any king.'
Thomas answered him: ' Excellently thou hast spoken. ”

“ He is the greater saint, whatever his state of life may be, whose love of God and his neighbor is more pure, more ardent, and more perfect; for charity is the soul and form of Christian perfection.
But it has been disputed whether the contemplative or the active life be in itself the more perfect. St. Thomas answers this question,336 proving from the example of Christ and his apostles, that the mixed life, which is made up of both, is the most excellent. ”

“ Thomas have been such great luminaries of the Church. True, the Church is not ‘a school of Metaphysicians,’ who dispute without docility, as did the ancient sects of philosophers. Yet she is a school in which St. Paul teaches that Charity is more perfect than Hope, and in which the holiest Doctors declare, in accordance with the principles of the Fathers, that Love is more perfect, precisely because it ‘abides in God, not in view of any benefit that may accrue to us from so doing.’” “I know well,” he writes to a friend, “that men misuse the doctrines of Pure Love and Resignation ”

“ While man moved about his relatively spacious prison with a certain degree of ease, God, being everywhere, could not move. In one respect, at least, man's freedom seemed to be not relative but absolute, for his thought was an energy paying no regard to space or time or order or object or sense; but God's thought was His act and will at once; speaking correctly, God could not think; He is. Saint Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God was Necessity, as Abelard seems to have held, but he refused to tolerate the idea of a divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself. ”

“ XXIII How can any faithful wise man dread death so sore, for any respect of shame, when his reason and his faith together can shortly make him perceive that there is no true shame in it at all? For how can that death be shameful that is glorious? Or how can it be anything but glorious to die for the faith of Christ, if we die both for the faith and in the faith, joined with hope and charity? For the scripture plainly saith, "Precious in the sight of God is the death of his saints." ”

“ His father, Landulph, was count of Aquino, and lord of Loretto and Belcastro: his mother Theodora was daughter to the count of Theate. The saint was born towards the end of the year 1226. St. Austin observes, [2] that the most tender age is subject to various passions, {524} as of impatience, choler, jealousy, spite, and the like, which appear to children: no such thing was seen in Thomas. The serenity of his countenance, the constant evenness of his temper, his modesty and sweetness, were sensible marks that God prevented him with his early graces. ”

“ Thus S. Thomas was nephew of Frederick the First and Henry the Fourth, and cousin of Frederick the Second, and could claim connection with the royal houses of Arragon, Sicily, and France. Yet, noble and illustrious as he was by birth, he was to be made nobler and more illustrious still by the brightness of his virtues and by the splendour of his intellect.
The saint's father seems to have combined a martial spirit with a firm devotion to the faith. Theodora, a woman of immense energy of character, kept herself in control by severe fasts and frequent vigils. ”

“ How many Romans, how many noble hearts of other sundry countries, have willingly given their own lives and suffered great deadly pains and very painful deaths for their countries, to win by their death only the reward of worldly renown and fame! And should we, then, shrink to suffer as much for eternal honour in heaven and everlasting glory? The devil hath also some heretics so obstinate that they wittingly endure painful death for vain glory. And is it not then more than shame that Christ shall see his Catholics forsake his faith rather than suffer the same for heaven and true glory? ”