Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 170
January 28, 2013
"St. Thomas and St. Francis" by G.K. Chesterton
St. Thomas and St. Francis | G.K. Chesterton | From
St. Thomas Aquinas
Let me at once anticipate comment by answering to the name
of that notorious character, who rushes in where even the Angels of the Angelic
Doctor might fear to tread.
Some time ago I wrote a little book of this type
and shape on St. Francis of Assisi; and some time after (I know not when or
how, as the song says, and certainly not why) I promised to write a book of the
same size, or the same smallness on St. Thomas Aquinas. The promise was
Franciscan only in its rashness; and the parallel was very far from being
Thomistic in its logic. You can make a sketch of St. Francis: you could only
make a plan of St. Thomas, like the plan of a labyrinthine city. And yet in a
sense he would fit into a much larger or a much smaller book. What we really
know of his life might be pretty fairly dealt with in a few pages; for he did
not, like St. Francis, disappear in a shower of personal anecdotes and popular
legends. What we know, or could know, or may eventually have the luck to learn,
of his work, will probably fill even more libraries in the future than it has
filled in the past. It was allowable to sketch St. Francis in an outline; but
with St. Thomas everything depends on the filling up of the outline. It was
even medieval in a manner to illuminate a miniature of the Poverello, whose
very title is a diminutive. But to make a digest, in the tabloid manner, of the
Dumb Ox of Sicily passes all digestive experiments in the matter of an ox in a
tea-cup. But we must hope it is possible to make an outline of biography, now
that anybody seems capable of writing an outline of history or an outline of
anything. Only in the present case the outline is rather an outsize. The gown
that could contain the colossal friar is not kept in stock.
I have said that these can only be portraits in outline.
But the concrete contrast is here so striking, that even if we actually saw the
two human figures in outline, coming over the hill in their friar's gowns, we
should find that contrast even comic. It would be like seeing, even afar off,
the silhouettes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or of Falstaff and Master
Slender. St. Francis was a lean and lively little man; thin as a thread and
vibrant as a bowstring; and in his motions like an arrow from the bow. All his life
was a series of plunges and scampers: darting after the beggar, dashing naked
into the woods, tossing himself into the strange ship, hurling himself into the
Sultan tent and offering to hurl himself into the fire. In appearance he must
have been like a thin brown skeleton autumn leaf dancing eternally before the
wind; but in truth it was he that was the wind.
St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow
and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart
from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional
and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy. St. Francis was so
fiery and even fidgety that the ecclesiastics, before whom he appeared quite
suddenly, thought he was a madman. St. Thomas was so stolid that the scholars,
in the schools which he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce. Indeed, he
was the sort of schoolboy, not unknown, who would much rather be thought a
dunce than have his own dreams invaded, by more active or animated dunces. This
external contrast extends to almost every point in the two personalities.
It
was the paradox of St. Francis that while he was passionately fond of poems, he
was rather distrustful of books. It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that
he loved books and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or
scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who
would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any
wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he
answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read." St.
Francis was very vivid in his poems and rather vague in his documents; St.
Thomas devoted his whole life to documenting whole systems of Pagan and
Christian literature; and occasionally wrote a hymn like a man taking a
holiday. They saw the same problem from different angles, of simplicity and
subtlety; St. Francis thought it would be enough to pour out his heart to the
Mohammedans, to persuade them not to worship Mahound. St. Thomas bothered his
head with every hair-splitting distinction and deduction, about the Absolute or
the Accident, merely to prevent them from misunderstanding Aristotle. St.
Francis was the son of a shopkeeper, or middle class trader; and while his whole
life was a revolt against the mercantile life of his father, he retained none
the less, something of the quickness and social adaptability which makes the
market hum like a hive. In the common phrase, fond as he was of green fields,
he did not let the grass grow under his feet. He was what American millionaires
and gangsters call a live wire.
It is typical of the mechanistic moderns that,
even when they try to imagine a live thing, they can only think of a mechanical
metaphor from a dead thing. There is such a thing as a live worm; but there is
no such thing as a live wire. St. Francis would have heartily agreed that he
was a worm; but he was a very live worm. Greatest of all foes to the go-getting
ideal, he had certainly abandoned getting, but he was still going. St. Thomas,
on the other hand, came out of a world where he might have enjoyed leisure, and
he remained one of those men whose labour has something of the placidity of
leisure. He was a hard worker, but nobody could possibly mistake him for a hustler.
He had something indefinable about him, which marks those who work when they
need not work. For he was by birth a gentleman of a great house, and such
repose can remain as a habit, when it is no longer a motive.
But in him it was
expressed only in its most amiable elements; for instance, there was possibly
something of it in his effortless courtesy and patience. Every saint is a man
before he is a saint; and a saint may be made of every sort or kind of man; and
most of us will choose between these different types according to our different
tastes. But I will confess that, while the romantic glory of St. Francis has
lost nothing of its glamour for me, I have in later years grown to feel almost
as much affection, or in some aspects even more, for this man who unconsciously
inhabited a large heart and a large head, like one inheriting a large house,
and exercised there an equally generous if rather more absent-minded
hospitality. There are moments when St. Francis, the most unworldly man who
ever walked the world, is almost too efficient for me.
St. Thomas Aquinas has recently reappeared, in the current
culture of the colleges and the salons, in a way that would have been quite
startling even ten years ago. And the mood that has concentrated on him is
doubtless very different from that which popularised St. Francis quite twenty
years ago.
The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed
that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he
is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by
exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same
element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he
is not what the people want, but rather what the people need. This is surely
the very much mistaken meaning of those words to the first saints, "Ye are
the salt of the earth," which caused the Ex-Kaiser to remark with all
solemnity that his beefy Germans were the salt of the earth; meaning thereby
merely that they were the earth's beefiest and therefore best. But salt seasons
and preserves beef, not because it is like beef; but because it is very unlike
it. Christ did not tell his apostles that they were only the excellent people,
or the only excellent people, but that they were the exceptional people; the
permanently incongruous and incompatible people; and the text about the salt of
the earth is really as sharp and shrewd and tart as the taste of salt. It is
because they were the exceptional people, that they must not lose their
exceptional quality. "If salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be
salted?" is a much more pointed question than any mere lament over the
price of the best beef. If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by
the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately
rebuked for worldliness by the world.
Therefore it is the paradox of history that each
generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. St. Francis had a
curious and almost uncanny attraction for the Victorians; for the nineteenth
century English who seemed superficially to be most complacent about their
commerce and their common sense. Not only a rather complacent Englishman like
Matthew Arnold, but even the English Liberals whom he criticised for their
complacency, began slowly to discover the mystery of the Middle Ages through
the strange story told in feathers and flames in the hagiographical pictures of
Giotto. There was something in the story of St. Francis that pierced through
all those English qualities which are most famous and fatuous, to all those
English qualities which are most hidden and human: the secret softness of
heart; the poetical vagueness of mind; the love of landscape and of animals.
St. Francis of Assisi was the only medieval Catholic who really became popular
in England on his own merits. It was largely because of a subconscious feeling
that the modern world had neglected those particular merits. The English middle
classes found their only missionary in the figure, which of all types in the
world they most despised; an Italian beggar.
So, as the nineteenth century clutched at the Franciscan
romance, precisely because it had neglected romance, so the twentieth century
is already clutching at the Thomist rational theology, because it has neglected
reason. In a world that was too stolid, Christianity returned in the form of a
vagabond; in a world that has grown a great deal too wild, Christianity has
returned in the form of a teacher of logic. In the world of Herbert Spencer men
wanted a cure for indigestion; in the world of Einstein they want a cure for
vertigo. In the first case, they dimly perceived the fact that it was after a
long fast that St. Francis sang the Song of the Sun and the praise of the
fruitful earth. In the second case, they already dimly perceived that, even if
they only want to understand Einstein, it is necessary first to understand the
use of the understanding. They begin to see that, as the eighteenth century
thought itself the age of reason, and the nineteenth century thought itself the
age of common sense, the twentieth century cannot as yet even manage to think
itself anything but the age of uncommon nonsense.
In those conditions the world
needs a saint; but above all, it needs a philosopher. And these two cases do
show that the world, to do it justice, has an instinct for what it needs. The
earth was really very flat, for those Victorians who most vigorously repeated
that it was round, and Alverno of the Stigmata stood up as a single mountain in
the plain. But the earth is an earthquake, a ceaseless and apparently endless
earthquake, for the moderns for whom Newton has been scrapped along with
Ptolemy. And for them there is something more steep and even incredible than a
mountain; a piece of really solid ground; the level of the level-headed man.
Thus in our time the two saints have appealed to two generations, an age of
romantics and an age of sceptics; yet in their own age they were doing the same
work; a work that has changed the world.
Again, it may be said truly that the comparison is idle,
and does not fit in well even as a fancy: since the men were not properly even
of the same generation or the same historic moment. If two friars are to be
presented as a pair of Heavenly Twins, the obvious comparison is between St.
Francis and St. Dominic. The relations of St. Francis and St. Thomas were, at
nearest, those of uncle and nephew; and my fanciful excursus may appear only a
highly profane version of "Tommy make room for your uncle." For if St.
Francis and St. Dominic were the great twin brethren, Thomas was obviously the
first great son of St. Dominic, as was his friend Bonaventure of St. Francis.
Nevertheless, I have a reason (indeed two reasons) for taking as a text the
accident of two title-pages; and putting St. Thomas beside St. Francis, instead
of pairing him off with Bonaventure the Franciscan.
It is because the
comparison, remote and perverse as it may seem, is really a sort of short cut
to the heart of history; and brings us by the most rapid route to the real
question of the life and work of St. Thomas Aquinas. For most people now have a
rough but picturesque picture in their minds of the life and work of St.
Francis of Assisi. And the shortest way of telling the other story is to say
that, while the two men were thus a contrast in almost every feature, they were
really doing the same thing. One of them was doing it in the world of the mind
and the other in the world of the worldly. But it was the same great medieval
movement; still but little understood. In a constructive sense, it was more
important than the Reformation. Nay, in a constructive sense, it was the
Reformation.
About this medieval movement there are two facts that must
first be emphasised. They are not, of course, contrary facts, but they are
perhaps answers to contrary fallacies. First, in spite of all that was once
said about superstition, the Dark Ages and the sterility of Scholasticism, it
was in every sense a movement of enlargement, always moving towards greater
light and even greater liberty. Second, in spite of all that was said later on
about progress and the Renaissance and forerunners of modern thought, it was
almost entirely a movement of orthodox theological enthusiasm, unfolded from
within. It was not a compromise with the
world, or a surrender to heathens or heretics, or even a mere borrowing of
external aids, even when it did borrow them. In so far as it did reach out to
the light of common day, it was like the action of a plant which by its own
force thrusts out its leaves into the sun; not like the action of one who
merely lets daylight into a prison.
In short, it was what is technically called a Development
in doctrine. But there seems to be a queer ignorance, not only about the
technical, but the natural meaning of the word Development. The critics of
Catholic theology seem to suppose that it is not so much an evolution as an
evasion; that it is at best an adaptation. They fancy that its very success is
the success of surrender. But that is not the natural meaning of the word
Development. When we talk of a child being well-developed, we mean that he has
grown bigger and stronger with his own strength; not that he is padded with
borrowed pillows or walks on stilts to make him look taller. When we say that a
puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual
compromise with a cat; we mean that he becomes more doggy and not less.
Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a
doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out; and the point
here is that the enlargement of medieval theology was simply the full
comprehension of that theology.
And it is of primary importance to realise this
fact first, about the time of the great Dominican and the first Franciscan,
because their tendency, humanistic and naturalistic in a hundred ways, was
truly the development of the supreme doctrine, which was also the dogma of all
dogmas. It is in this that the popular poetry of St. Francis and the almost
rationalistic prose of St. Thomas appear most vividly as part of the same
movement. There are both great growths of Catholic development, depending upon
external things only as every living and growing thing depends on them; that
is, it digests and transforms them, but continues in its own image and not in
theirs. A Buddhist or a Communist might dream of two things which
simultaneously eat each other, as the perfect form of unification. But it is
not so with living things. St. Francis was content to call himself the
Troubadour of God; but not content with the God of the Troubadours. St. Thomas
did not reconcile Christ to Aristotle; he reconciled Aristotle to Christ.
Yes; in spite of the contrasts that are as conspicuous and
even comic as the comparison between the fat man and the thin man, the tall man
and the short: in spite of the contrast between the vagabond and the student,
between the apprentice and the aristocrat, between the book-hater and the
book-lover, between the wildest of all missionaries and the mildest of all professors,
the great fact of medieval history is that these two great men were doing the
same great work; one in the study and the other in the street. They were not
bringing something new into Christianity; in the sense of something heathen or
heretical into Christianity; on the contrary, they were bringing Christianity
into Christendom. But they were bringing it back against the pressure of
certain historic tendencies, which had hardened into habits in many great
schools and authorities in the Christian Church; and they were using tools and
weapons which seemed to many people to be associated with heresy or heathenry.
St. Francis used Nature much as St. Thomas used Aristotle; and to some they
seemed to be using a Pagan goddess and a Pagan sage.
What they were really
doing, and especially what St. Thomas was really doing, will form the main
matter of these pages; but it is convenient to be able to compare him from the
first with a more popular saint; because we may thus sum up the substance of it
in the most popular way. Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that
these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom. Perhaps it may be
misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us
from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek
philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in
its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God
back to earth.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Excerpts and Articles
• Author Page for G.K. Chesterton
• The God in the
Cave | G.K. Chesterton
• What Is America? |
G.K. Chesterton
• Seeing With the Eyes of G.K. Chesterton | Dale Ahlquist
• Recovering The Lost Art of Common Sense | Dale Ahlquist
• Common Sense Apostle &
Cigar Smoking Mystic | Dale Ahlquist
• Chesterton
and Saint Francis | Joseph Pearce
• Chesterton and
the Delight of Truth | James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Life and
Theme of G.K. Chesterton | Randall Paine | An Introduction to The
Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton
• Hot Water and
Fresh Air: On Chesterton and His Foes | Janet E. Smith
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Summa Theologica (hardcover) | St. Thomas Aquinas
•
Summa Theologica (softcover) | St. Thomas Aquinas
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Aquinas: On Reasons for Our Faith | St. Thomas Aquinas
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Guide to Thomas Aquinas | Josef Pieper
•
The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas | Josef Pieper
•
John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas | John Paul II
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St. Thomas Aquinas and the Preaching Beggars | Brendan Larnen, Milton Lomask, and Leonard Everett Fisher
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St. Thomas Aquinas Commentary on Colossians | St. Thomas Aquinas
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Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy | David Berger
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Trinity in Aquinas | Gilles Emery
"St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thirteenth Century" by Josef Pieper
St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thirteenth Century | Josef
Pieper | From the opening chapter of Guide to Thomas Aquinas | January 28th
| Ignatius Insight
So bound up is the life of St. Thomas Aquinas with the thirteenth century that
the year in which the century reached its mid-point, 1250, was likewise the
mid-point of Thomas' life, though he was only twenty-five years old at the time
and still sitting at the feet of Albertus Magnus as a student in the Monastery
of the Holy Cross in Cologne. The thirteenth century has been called the
specifically "Occidental" century. The significance of this epithet
has not always been completely clarified, but in a certain sense I too accept
the term. I would even assert that the special quality of "Occidentality"
was ultimately forged in that very century, and by Thomas Aquinas himself. It
depends, however, on what we understand by "OccidentaIity." We shall
have more to say on this matter.
There exists the romantic notion that the thirteenth century was an era of
harmonious balance, of stable order, and of the free flowering of Christianity.
Especially in the realm of thought, this was not so. The Louvain historian
Fernand van Steenberghen speaks of the thirteenth century as a time of
"crisis of Christian intelligence"; [1] and Gilson comments:
"Anybody could see that a crisis was brewing." [2]
What, in concrete terms, was the situation? First of all we must point out that
Christianity, already besieged by Islam for centuries, threatened by the
mounted hordes of Asiatics (1241 is the year of the battle with the Mongols at
Liegnitz)—that this Christianity of the thirteenth century had been
drastically reminded of how small a body it was within a vast non-Christian
world. It was learning its own limits in the most forceful way, and those
limits were not only territorial. Around 1253 or 1254 the court of the Great
Khan in Karakorum, in the heart of Asia, was the scene of a disputation of two
French mendicant friars with Mohammedans and Buddhists. Whether we can conclude
that these friars represented a "universal mission sent forth out of
disillusionment with the old Christianity," [3] is more than questionable.
But be this as it may, Christianity saw itself subjected to a grave challenge,
and not only from the areas beyond its territorial limits.
For a long time the Arab world, which had thrust itself into old Europe, had
been impressing Christians not only with its military and political might but
also with its philosophy and science. Through translations from the Arabic into
Latin, Arab philosophy and Arab science had become firmly established in the
heart of Christendom—at the University of Paris, for example. Looking
into the matter more closely, of course, we are struck by the fact that Arab
philosophy and science were not Islamic by origin and character. Rather,
classical ratio, epitomized by Aristotle, had by such strangely
involved routes come to penetrate the intellectual world of Christian Europe.
But in the beginning, at any rate, it was felt as something alien, new, dangerous,
"pagan."
During this same period, thirteenth-century Christendom was being shaken
politically from top to bottom. Internal upheavals of every sort were brewing.
Christendom was entering upon the age "in which it would cease to be a
theocratic unity," [4] and would, in fact, never be so again. In 1214 a
national king (as such) for the first time won a victory over the Emperor (as
such) at the Battle of Bouvines. During this same period the first religious
wars within Christendom flared up, to be waged with inconceivable cruelty on
both sides. Such was the effect of these conflicts that all of southern France
and northern Italy seemed for decades to be lost once and for all to the corpus
of Christendom. Old monasticism, which was invoked as a spiritual counterforce,
seems (as an institution, that is to say, seen as a whole) to have become
impotent, in spite of all heroic efforts to reform it (Cluny, Cîteaux, etc.).
And as far as the bishops were concerned—and here, too, of course, we are
making a sweeping statement—an eminent Dominican prior of Louvain, who
incidentally may have been a fellow pupil of St. Thomas under Albertus Magnus
in Cologne, wrote the following significant homily: In 1248 it happened at
Paris that a cleric was to preach before a synod of bishops; and while he was
considering what he should say, the devil appeared to him. "Tell them this
alone," the devil said. "The princes of infernal darkness offer the
princes of the Church their greetings. We thank them heartily for leading their
charges to us and commend the fact that due to their negligence almost the
entire world is succumbing to darkness." [5]
But of course it could not be that Christianity should passively succumb to
these developments. Thirteenth-century Christianity rose In Its own defense,
and in a most energetic fashion. Not only were great cathedrals built in that
century; It saw also the founding of the first universities. The universities
undertook, among other things, the task of assimilating classical ideas and philosophy,
and to a large extent accomplished this task.
There was also the whole matter of the "mendicant orders," which
represented one of the most creative responses of Christianity. These new
associations quite unexpectedly allied !hemselves with the institution of the
university. The most important university teachers of the century, in Paris as
well as in Oxford, were all monks of the mendicant orders. All in all, nothing
seemed to be "finished"; everything had entered a state of flux.
AIbertus Magnus voiced this bold sense of futurity in the words: Scientiae
demonstrativae non omnes factae sunt, sed plures restant adhuc inveniendae; most of what exists in the realm of knowledge
remains still to be discovered. [6]
The mendicant orders took the lead in moving out into the world beyond the
frontiers of Christianity. Shortly after the nuddle of the century, while
Thomas was writing his Summa Against the Pagans, addressed to the mahumetistae et pagani, [7] the Dominicans were founding the first
Christian schools for teaching the Arabic language. I have already spoken of
the disputation between the mendicant friars and the sages of Eastern faiths in
Karakorum. Toward the end of the century a Franciscan translated the New
Testament and the Psalms into Mongolian and presented this translation to the
Great Khan. He was the same Neapolitan, John of Monte Corvino, who built a
church alongside the Impenal Palace in Peking and who became the first
Archbishop of Peking.
This mere listing of a few events, facts, and elements should make it clear
that the era was anything but a harmonious one. There is little reason for
wishing for a return to those times—aside from the fact that such wishes
are in themselves foolish.
Nevertheless, it may be said that in terms of the history of thought this
thirteenth century, for all its polyphonic character, did attain something like
harmony and "classical fullness." At least this was so for a period
of three or four decades. Gilson speaks of a kind of "serenity." [8]
And although that moment in time is of course gone and cannot ever again be
summoned back, it appears to have left its traces upon the memory of Western
Christianity, so that it is recalled as something paradigmatic and exemplary, a
kind of ideal spirit of an age which men long to see realized once more,
although under changed conditions and therefore, of course, in some altogether
new cast.
Now as it happens, the work of Thomas Aquinas falls into that brief historical
moment. Perhaps it may be said that his work embodies that moment. Such, at any
rate, is the sense in which St. Thomas' achievement has been understood in the
Christian world for almost seven hundred years; such are the terms in which it
has repeatedly been evaluated. Not by all, to be sure (Luther called Thomas
"the greatest chatterbox" among the scholastic theologians [9]); but
the voices of approbation and reverence have always predominated. And even
aside from his written work, his personal destiny and the events of his life
unite virtually all the elements of that highly contradictory century in a kind
of "existential" synthesis. We shall now speak of these matters at
greater length, and in detail.
First of all, a few remarks regarding books.
The best introduction to the spirit of St. Thomas is, to my mind, the small
book by G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas. [10] This is not a scholarly work in the proper
sense of the word; it might be called journalistic—for which reason I am
somewhat chary about recommending it. Maisie Ward, co-owner of the British-American
publishing firm which publishes the book, writes in her biography of Chesterton
[11] that at the time her house published it, she was seized by a slight
anxiety. However, she goes on to say, Étienne Gilson read it and commented:
"Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my life
and I could never have written such a book." Still troubled by the
ambiguity of this comment, Maisie Ward asked Gilson once more for his verdict
on the Chesterton book. This time he expressed himself in unmistakable terms:
"I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever
written on St. Thomas. . . . Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a
'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in
studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or
three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit'
of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. . . . He has said all that
which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic
formulas." Thus Gilson. I think this praise somewhat exaggerated; but at
any rate I need feel no great embarrassment about recommending an
"unscholarly" book.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Fernand van Steenberghen, Le XIIIe siècle. In Forest, van Steenberghen, and de Gandillac, Le
Mouvement doctrinal du Xle au XIVe siècle. Fliche-Martin, Histoire de l'Eglise
vol. 13 (Paris, 1951), p. 303.
[2] Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in
the Middle Ages (London and New York,
1955), p. 325.
[3] Friedrich Reer, Europäische Geistesgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1953), p.147.
[4] Marie-Dominique Chenu, Introduction à l'etude de St.
Thomas d'Aquin (Paris—Montreal,
1950), p. 13.
[5] Gustav Schnürer, Kirche und Kultur im Mittelalter (Paderborn, 1926), II, p. 441.
[6] Liber primus Posteriorum Analyticorum, tract. 1, cap. 1 Opera Omnia. Ed. A. Borgnet (Paris, 1890), tom. 2, p. 3.
[7] C. G. 1,2.
[8] Gilson, History,
p. 325.
[9] Joseph Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1939), I, p. 352.
[10] Heidelberg, 1956.
[11] Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York, 1943), p. 620.
Editor's note: Pieper's book was originally published in English
in 1962 by Pantheon Books. The Ignatius Press edition was published in 1991.
Related Ignatius Insight Links/Articles:
• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor of the Church | Various Authors
• The Roots of Culture | by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | The Foreword to Josef Pieper's
Leisure: The Basis of Culture
• Philosophy and the Sense For Mystery | An excerpt
from For The Love of
Wisdom: Essays On the Nature of Philosophy
Other Books & Resources Relating to St. Thomas Aquinas:
•
Summa Theologica | St. Thomas Aquinas
•
Sermon in a Sentence, Vol. 5: Thomas Aquinas | Selected/arranged by John P. McClernon
•
Guide to Thomas Aquinas | Josef Pieper
•
The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas | Josef Pieper
Saint Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox" | G. K. Chesterton
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Summa of the Summa | Peter Kreeft
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Shorter Summa | Peter Kreeft
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John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas | John Paul II
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St. Thomas Aquinas Commentary on Colossians | St. Thomas Aquinas
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Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy | David Berger
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Trinity in Aquinas | Gilles Emery
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The Quiet Light: A Novel about St. Thomas Aquinas | Louis de Wohl
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St. Thomas Aquinas and the Preaching Beggars | Brendan Larnen, Milton Lomask, and Leonard Everett Fisher
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is widely considered to be one of
the finest Catholic philosophers of the 20th century. He was
educated in the Greek classics and the writings of St. Thomas
Aquinas. He was a professor of
philosophy at the University of Münster in Germany. His books have
earned international acclaim from both Catholic and non-Catholic
scholars. Read much more about his life and work on his IgnatiusInsight.com Author
Page .
The Glory Days of “Guy Nation”
The Glory Days of “Guy Nation” |
Mark McCormick | Catholic World Report
Don’t look now, ladies, but the Guys have you right
where they want you
We are truly living in unprecedented times. These are the
glory days of Guy Nation. In the
words of one charming member, “Mmm, mmm, mmm. Mmm, mmm!”
What is Guy Nation? To be clear, Guy Nation does not
necessarily subscribe to any political affiliation, nor is it contained within
any particular socio-economic boundary. It includes guys of all ages, races,
incomes, creeds, and pick-up lines.
Guy Nation rests on the firm foundation of three
all-important precepts:
1) Guys should stay as immature as possible for as
long as possible (also known as the Peter Pan Precept).
2) Guys must avoid responsibility wherever and
whenever possible.
3) Pleasure is the greatest of all “goods”, being more important than security,
emotional attachments, truth, love, and similar silly stuff.
All of these precepts have been in play ever since guys
ventured out of their caves to kill animals with sticks and called it dinner.
Yet widespread acceptance has been hard to come by. Until recently, that is.
Finally, after centuries—even millennia—of dreams and struggles, Guy Nation
began to become a reality in the 1950s. Guy Reality!
Through effective advertising, legal precedents, and the
sheer, pajama-powered force of Hugh Hefner's aloof coolness, guys convinced
women that becoming primarily sexual objects was a good and healthy thing. Mr.
Hefner (“May his name be praised!” exclaims Guy Nation) had women lining up for
the privilege of being viewed as bodies detached from personality, intellect,
and soul—all for the pleasure of guys! (And for the aggrandizement of his
personal fortune, but far be it for Guys to hold it against him.)
But all of this lusting after carefully produced and
airbrushed images was just the first step toward Guy Nation. The girlie
magazine dream needed to somehow become reality. Fortunately for the budding
Guy Nation, there was a crack team of Guy Scientists working on the solution
during the 1950s, including Drs. Gregory Pincus, Min Chueh Chang, John Rock,
and Carl Djerassi (“May their collective names be praised!” shouts Guy Nation).
Through their diligence and persistence—even in the face of strong evidence
that the chemicals they used might be harmful to women—they gave the world The
Pill, the first oral contraceptive. At last, at last, guys could have all the sexual
carousing and pleasure they wanted without having to be bothered with stuff
like marriage, commitment, relationships, pregnancies, and pesky little ones.
It was, however, going to be a tough sell in some quarters.
January 27, 2013
Why Do We Believe?
Why Do We Believe? | Stephen J. Morrissey | Homiletic & Pastoral Review
The dynamics of Catholic faith-building are thus severely attacked today by many in the sciences who quite glibly point out that the evidence of science trumps the evidence of religion.
The Year of Faith is a most appropriate time to address a significant
problem that many Catholics wrestle with: Why do we believe in a
beneficent God and the doctrines of the Catholic Church? “Faith” is the
common response to that question, but faith in what? What is the
evidence upon which that faith rests, and is it reliable? Does the
Church ask for blind, unreasoned faith? Amidst the current onslaught of
atheistic claims that the “hard” evidence from science has solved the
mystery of the universe’s origin and that God had nothing to do with it,
the challenge before us is whether Catholics are clinging to outmoded
thoughts, lingering from a primitive past, with no provable evidence.
Even if these challenges do not lead to an outright rejection of
religious belief among the faithful, their constant assertions in the
culture certainly engender doubt and indifference among many. They
probably account for much of the notoriously large number of Catholic
adults, especially the younger ones, who no longer practice their faith.
The dynamics of Catholic faith-building are thus severely attacked
today by many in the sciences who quite glibly point out that the
evidence of science trumps the evidence of religion. At a time when
the hard evidence of “wonder science” is increasingly seen as supporting
atheism, and obviating the “delusions” of religion, people will
naturally question the “softer” evidential foundations of Catholic
faith.
Therefore, it is essential to remind people, now and then, of the
genius of the human mind for wrapping itself around abstract,
philosophical evidence to arrive at truth.
We are physical, sensing creatures, and so to prove something, we
naturally opt for hard physical evidence when we can get it. It is
usually clear and inarguable. Consider that in a court of law, murder
suspects are rarely found guilty on the basis of circumstantial
evidence, but rather on direct, physical evidence such as surveillance
camera photos, tape recordings, eye witness reports, signed confessions,
DNA samples, fingerprints, a murder weapon, a dead body. Therefore,
theories, pre-conceived notions, innuendoes, hunches, hearsay, and
philosophy have no place here.
But, we are also thinking, reasoning human beings. It is the human
mind that has historically kept humanity from extinction. Given the
proven capabilities of this brain, and the immateriality of religious
issues, wouldn’t use of intellectual, philosophical evidence alone have
the advantage over physical data in the search for God? This is the
central issue here: the nature of the evidence for God. If we rely
solely on empirical evidence—as atheism would have us do—then, we will
never find God, and never honor the real superiority of the human mind.
January 26, 2013
“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for Sunday, January 27, 2013 | Carl E. Olson
Readings:
Neh 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10
Ps 19:8, 9, 10, 15
1 Cor 12:12-30 or 12:12-14, 27
Lk 1:1-4; 4:14-21
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of the restoration of the Jews to the promised land following the Babylonian exile (c. 587-538 B.C.). The many years spent by the dislocated people of God in Babylon had a profound effect on the attitude and identity of the Jewish people. It is estimated that of the two to three million Jews given permission to return home, less than 50,000 took up the offer.
As Peter Kreeft notes in his book, You Can Understand the Bible, “We usually prefer comfort to freedom. Life in Babylon had been comparatively easy, but the trek to Jerusalem was 900 miles long … Not only that, but once they arrived, they faced a ruined land, city, and temple, along with the formidable task of rebuilding” (Ignatius Press, 2005; p. 68).
As today’s reading from Nehemiah describes, it was not just a physical rebuilding; in fact, the heart of the restoration was spiritual, religious, and liturgical. The people had to hear anew the book of the law and relearn the meaning and purpose of the law. The law shaped and defined the Jewish people, for it oriented them toward God and showed who they were in relation to him. Hearing the words read by the prophet Ezra, the people gave their assent and praise: “‘Amen, amen!’ Then they bowed down and prostrated themselves before the LORD.”
Fast forward a few hundred years to a small synagogue in Nazareth. The setting was significant The exact origin of the synagogue (meaning “house of assembly”) as a regular place of Jewish gathering is unknown, but some scholars believe it can be located in the Babylonian exile, when synagogues were needed as places of worship for Jews so far removed from the Jerusalem temple. During the time of Christ, the synagogue was an established place for reading and teaching the law and the prophets.
St. Luke describes, in today’s Gospel, how Jesus “went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day.” The young man appeared to be just one of many ordinary, devout Jews. To those who heard Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, he was simply the son of a carpenter (Lk. 4: 22). But he was not long removed from being baptized in the Jordan and being tested in the desert; he was ready to embark upon his public ministry. And that ministry began and was marked throughout by the proclamation of God’s word—after all, every utterance of Jesus was a proclamation of that word by the Word, the Incarnate logos.
Like Ezra, he was a priest and he spoke as a prophet. Like Ezra, he unrolled the scroll and he read from the law and the prophets. Yet, whatever the similarities, the essential differences are summed up in his concluding words: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Ezra, Isaiah, and all of the other prophets told the people to worship, love, and obey God; Jesus said the same, but also made it known that he was God (cf. Jn. 8:54-59). His priesthood was singular; his words were uniquely authoritative. The passage from Isaiah was fulfilled because the word of God had gone forth—not merely from the mouth of a human prophet, but into the world as the word who had assumed human nature: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth…” (Jn 1:14).
The ministry of Christ—the anointed one—was to proclaim glad tidings to the poor, grant liberty to captives, give sight to the blind, and free the oppressed. This is true restoration from the ancient exile of both Jews and Gentiles in the land of sin and darkness. Every man is invited by the Messiah to leave the land of sin and enter the promised rest. “He set the captives free,” wrote Cyril of Jerusalem, “having overthrown the tyrant Satan, he shed the divine and spiritual light on those whose heart was darkened.”
(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the January 24, 20120, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
A Younger Generation Marches for Life
A Younger Generation Marches for Life
| John Burger | Catholic World Report
The 2013 March for Life, which marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, was a youthful and youth-filled event.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the beginning, Nellie Gray imagined there would be a
need for one march for life. It was a
year after the Roe v Wade
decision, and there was perhaps just enough outrage that people felt a
legislative remedy could be attained.
“But then we realized that Congress wasn’t going to help, so we had a
second,” Gray reflected.
And a third, and a fourth…
Today, the 2013 March for Life marked the 40th anniversary of Roe
v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which struck down most abortion laws in the United
States. It was the first March for Life without Gray, who died last August at
the age of 88. But for those who knew her and worked with her, and for
thousands of people who have been to the annual event in the past, her spirit
was everywhere.
The story of her initial naiveté was revealed in a moving video tribute to
the attorney-turned-activist, which was broadcast on large jumbotrons for the
hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers gathered on the National Mall. Jeanne
Monahan, the new leader of the march, and others extolled Gray’s dedication,
perseverance and spunk, and a younger generation — which made up perhaps 90% of
the rally and march—seemed by their enthusiasm more than ready and willing to
take up her mantle.
Gabrielle Hoekstra, for example, attending the march for the first time,
finds that more and more young people are becoming more pro-life -- or at least
are open to listening to pro-life ideas.
“It’s something I feel very passionate about,” said Hoekstra, a junior
studying aeronautical science at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in
Daytona Beach, Fla. “When I was younger my parents were active in local crisis
pregnancy centers. When you go to college you realize there are a lot of people
out there who are prochoice, and it’s important to stand in your values and
have the reasons to support them. Coming to places like this you can get
together with other people who share your values and educate yourself more so
you can defend your prolife position.”
January 25, 2013
Salon.com author: "So what if abortion ends life?"
Because, hey, it's all about the mother. Everything. Always. Oh, and one's feelings. So insists Mary Elizabeth Williams:
Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.
When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.
When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?
We’re so intimidated by the wingnuts, we get spooked out of having these conversations. We let the archconservatives browbeat us with the concept of “life,” using their scare tactics on women and pushing for indefensible violations like forced ultrasounds.
She later writes:
My belief that life begins at conception is mine to cling to. And if you believe that it begins at birth, or somewhere around the second trimester, or when the kid finally goes to college, that’s a conversation we can have, one that I hope would be respectful and empathetic and fearless.
But, hey, pro-lifers are the "wingnuts" and irrational zealots! Good grief. Rod Dreher writes, on the American Conservative site:
By conceding that the unborn child is a human life, it seems to me that Mary Elizabeth Williams endorses infanticide. At least she’s not hypocritical about it. But it sure is ghoulish. If the fetus is fully human, why does the mother have the right to end the life of a human being, for any reason at all (which is Williams’s position). If the law recognized Williams’s view that the fetus is fully human, then it would call abortion a form of murder, almost by definition.
Can you think of another situation in which fully human beings lived under conditions in which their master had the right to kill them with impunity, because there were nothing more than property? Of course you can. Nice historical company Mary Elizabeth Williams keeps.
Sure, Rod, resort to logic and historical precedent. Don't you know these sort of complicated questions should be settled with angry rhetoric and namecalling?
Related articles
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Peter Kreeft on what to do about abortion
Salon.com's 'So What' Moment About Abortion
Media Alert: "UnPlanned" Author Abby Johnson "Exposes the Lie"
Abortion and the Will to Power: 'So what if abortion ends a life?' asks Salon writer
"Abortion Ends Life? So What?" Here be Monsters. - UPDATED
“We’ve wandered in the desert for 40 years..."
“We’ve wandered in the desert for 40 years..." | John Burger | Catholic World Report
10,000 gather for the opening Mass for the National Prayer Vigil for Life in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON,
D.C. —
The New Evangelization and the pro-life movement are converging, and it must
begin with each individual Christian, says Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston.
The Year of Faith is a perfect opportunity for Catholics to contribute to the
culture of life by working on their own sanctity.
The
cardinal celebrated the opening Mass for the National Prayer Vigil for Life on
the night before thousands of people marched for life to mark the 40th
anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Some 10,000 people gathered on the evening of
January 24 for the Mass, which is held each year at the Basilica of the
National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. As in years past, the pews and
aisles were overflowing with people, including many teens and young adults from
across the country. Many people had to view the Mass on closed-circuit
television screens in the basement crypt church.
Cardinal
O’Malley was the principal celebrant and homilist of the Mass because he is chairman
of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities. But he was joined by
some 500 priests, deacons and seminarians, bishops and cardinals, making the
opening procession some 40 minutes alone. Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York,
president of the USCCB; Donald Wuerl of Washington; Francis George of Chicago,
and Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, Teaxs, were among the concelebrants,
as well as Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, apostolic nuncio to the United
States.
The
Mass was followed by confessions, a Rosary, night prayer and Holy Hours
throughout the night. The vigil concluded on the morning of Jan. 25 with
Morning Prayer and a closing Mass, at which Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas was
the principal celebrant and homilist.
Participants
were then able to attend the March for Life in downtown Washington, along
Constitution Avenue to the Supreme Court building.
Ignatius Press book praised as "a bright ray of devotional greatness"
The book is Thomas Howard's Hallowed Be This House: Finding Signs of Heaven in Your Home (new edition; also available as in Electronic Book Format), reviewed on the "Musings of a Christian Humanist" blog by Robert Woods:
As with Erasmus, I affirm that The Imitation of Christ by
Thomas A'Kempis is the grandest of devotional reads. The devotional
books that litter the bookstores, especially the local Christian
bookstore are more shaped by the lowest 
common denominator of trivial
therapeutic drivel, the "cutting edge" madness of the management class,
or silly self-help books that know nothing about the complexities of the
human self and never address the matter of how a self so open to self
deception can really help that same self. The insipid devotional books
reign supreme.
In
this dismal situation there is a bright ray of devotional greatness that
arrives. Actually, it is making a bit of a second coming. Originally
published in 1976, Thomas Howard's Hallowed Be This House has been reprinted by Ignatius Press. My wife and I have been reading
it (almost finished) and it has changed our sense of place. ...
The
book is filled with insights from scripture, anthropology, history,
literature, psychology, sociology, and theology. A truly
cross-disciplinary devotional book exploring the intersection between
heaven and home, embodiment and habitat, space and spirit. I'm confident
that if asked, Thomas Howard would agree that this is a Christian
Humanistic devotional.
I interviewed Dr. Howard last month about the book and some related topics. Here is one question and response:
CWR: How did the idea for Hallowed Be This House originally come about? Do you think there is an even greater need today for a sense of the hallowed and the sacred than there was when you first wrote the book in the 1970s?
Thomas Howard: I think the original idea for the book came to me gradually. It must have been the fruit of a lifetime of reading and teaching Western literature, where one finds, up until at least the Enlightenment, the assumption of an ordered, hierarchical, and blissful Universe. Even the pagans assume this. But in my young adulthood, I found myself moving from the very faithful and good Protestant Evangelicalism of my family into the Anglican Church, where at least the notions of hierarchy, sacrament, and liturgy are remembered. Also, of course, I became soaked in the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friend Charles Williams. In all of these writers, one finds the ordinary stuff of quotidian life treated as though that stuff bespeaks—what shall we say? Glory? Ultimacy? The Truth of things? Splendor? Yes—all of that. The ordinary is not ordinary. It trumpets joy, freedom, and virtue to us mortals if we will pay attention.
Is there a greater need today to see things this way than when I wrote the book in the 1970s? Yes. In the decade of the 1960s, when my wife and I were living in New York, which became the eye of the storm, Western Civilization as it has been known for millennia collapsed. The moral order was overthrown with great zest, and this overthrow is always, inevitably, the prelude to the collapse of any civilization. I myself would see signs of hope, however, in the papacies of John Paul II and of Benedict XVI, with, in the latter case, the promulgation of the Year of Faith. This is a clear call to the Church to reassert, very strongly, the real substance of the Catholic Faith, which is more, far more, than a matter of “it’s nice to be nice,” which perhaps has been the impression conveyed to the laity in common parish homiletics in the wake of what obviously concerns the Holy Father at the moment—namely the training of seminarians, for perhaps a century, in “the historical critical method” of reading Scripture.
Read the entire interview on the CWR site.
"Islam is built on a rejection of the main tenets of Christianity."
William Kilpatrick, the author of Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West, was recently interviewed by FrontPageMag.com. Here is part of that interview:
FP: What do Christians need to understand about the differences between Islam and Christianity?
Kilpatrick: Islam is built on a rejection of the
main tenets of Christianity. It rejects the Trinity, the Incarnation,
the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. There is a Jesus in the Koran but
he seems to be there mainly for the purpose of denying the claims of
Jesus of Nazareth. Muhammad seemed to have realized that if the
Christian claim about Jesus was true, then there would be no need for a
new prophet and a new revelation. Consequently, in order to buttress
his own claim to prophethood it was necessary for him to cut Jesus down
to size. Thus the Koran tells us that “he was but a mortal” and only
one in a long line of prophets culminating in Muhammad.
John the Baptist said of Jesus that “He must increase but I must
decrease.” Muhammad preferred it the other way around. For him to
increase it was necessary for Jesus to decrease. Christians need to
realize that Jesus is in the Koran, not because Muhammad thought highly
of him but because Muhammad saw him as a rival who needed to be put in
his place. The problem is that in using Jesus for his own purposes,
Muhammad neglected to give him any personality. The Jesus of the Koran
is more like a stick figure than a person. Whether or not one accepts
the claims of the Jesus of the Gospels, he is, at least, a recognizable
human being who goes fishing with his disciples, attends wedding feasts
and gathers children about him. By contrast, the Jesus of the Koran
seems to exist neither in time nor space. The Koranic account of him is
completely lacking in historical or geographical detail. There is no
indication of when he lived, or where he conducted his ministry, or the
names of his disciples or his antagonists such as Herod and Pilate. In
other words, he seems to be nothing more than an invention of
Muhammad’s—and not a very convincing invention at that. In this regard
it’s instructive to note that the Koran rails constantly against those
who claim that “he [Muhammad] invented it himself.”
In sum, Christians who think that Muslims revere the same Jesus as they do need to better acquaint themselves with the Koran.
FP: Why do you think there is so much ignorance in the West about Islam?
Kilpatrick: Much of the ignorance can be explained
in terms of multicultural dogma combined with self-censorship. In the
West the multicultural ideology has attained the status of a religion.
Christians believe that Jesus saves, but multiculturalists believe that
diversity saves. And to question the dogmas of diversity is tantamount
to heresy. Nowadays heretics aren’t burnt at the stake, but they are
threatened with loss of reputation and loss of employment, and
sometimes, as in the cases of Geert Wilders and Elizabeth
Sabaditsch-Wolff, they are hauled before courts.
As a result, people learn to engage in self-censorship or what Orwell
called “crimestop.” They won’t allow themselves to think certain
thoughts or to explore certain avenues of inquiry. This is particularly
true in regard to Islam. By now, just about everyone understands which
thoughts about Islam are permissible and which are not. As Andrew
McCarthy points out, this results in a kind of “willful blindness”
toward Islam. Like the people in The Emperor’s New Clothes we deny the evidence of our own eyes when it conflicts with the official narrative. In short, we prefer to remain ignorant.
Read the entire interview.
You can also read the Introduction to Kilpatrick's book, right here on Insight Scoop. And Kilpatrick was interviewed at length by Catholic World Report in late November 2012.
Related articles
New: "The Price To Pay: A Muslim Risks All to Follow Christ"
The Introduction to "Christianity, Islam, and Atheism" by William Kilpatrick
Islam's Rise and the West's Denial
Muhammad: Man or Myth?
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