IT is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, formerly (I think it's formerly but don't care enough to formally look it up) the official and required theologian of Catholic orthodoxy. I've never warmed up to Aquinas, I have to admit, finding that he was way too wedded to medieval and late classical Latin language theology and thoroughly invested in the misogyny that infects late classical and later Christianity but which I do not find nearly as present in the New Testament and not at all in the recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel. And that's only one of the things about Aquinas that leaves me cold and unconvinced.
I think that today, in 2021, the alleged allegiance to Aquinas is a pretty good indication as to whether someone is a Catholic who is also a Christian and a Catholic who is only one in some imaginary, false anti-Christian pre-Vatican II cult supported by billionaires and millionaires, the modern version of the secular potentates and monarchs who did their best to suppress Christianity, the good news for the poor, the downtrodden, the suffering, neutering the most radical of egalitarian forces, the motive of right-wing "Christianity" Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox today, including much of the clergy and leadership of those bodies and denominations.
In looking around this morning, I found this interesting sermon by Karl Rahner, one of the most prominent theologians of the 20th century. I have read any number of both accusations by right-wingers in the Catholic Church and by those who are eager and ready to move on from the 13th century as re-imagined and codified by the corrupt late Renaissance hierarchy and codified as rigid, official theology when the reaction against the Reformation gave the writings of Aquinas the status they had and may still have, to some extent. Reading it I was struck by how Rahner went past the text of Aquinas's massive Summa Theologica and other writings by pointing out the inadequacy of human theology, without exactly saying that.
"To reflect upon Thomas Aquinas as patron of theological studies does not mean merely to think back on some man in History or on his influence in Western thought. Because we are Christians, we are linked to him; we can actually see him as a fellow Christian in the community of saints. Those Christians who have gone before us into the assembly of saints are not dead; they live. They live in perfection, that is, in the true Reality which is also powerful and present among us today. Some of them we can call by name. These Christian men and women can be more real and more important I or its than theoretical principles or abstract ideas. In many ways they are even more real than we are, for they are with God. They love us; we love theta [them?]. They are present at the eternal liturgy of heaven, and intercede there for its [us?] their brothers.
In comparison to the saints' present existence, their past. history on earth is comparatively of little significance. They now live the quintessence of our life on earth in an eternal form, and the Reality in which they exist is in the last analysis the ground of all reality on earth. They do not belong to the past at all, except insofar as they have lived on earth in past history. Actually they have run ahead, hastened forward into the future, a future waiting for us. To look at a saint., then, is not. to look at something abstract or impersonal, something dead, but rather to sec a concrete person, a unique individual, once alive on earth and now eternally alive, someone who loves and praises, someone who is blessed and redeemed.
There are a number of reasons that this was interesting to me, first had nothing to do with Aquinas but with Rahner who has often been either accused (by the enemies of "modernism") of or, by Rahner's would be supporters, praised for denying the actual existence of the soul, the person after death. If he believed what was attributed to him on that count he could never have written what he did in this sermon. It is one of the most interesting ideas I've read about what the afterlife, of us dying into God, would have to mean, including the meditation worthy passages where I assume there are two serious typos in either the translation or the transcription. The perfection of love that would require us either getting beyond or seeing beyond (as we take earthly reality into account) which is required of us by the Gospel ("Love one another as I have loved you,") but which is only imperfectly possible while we are here, in the body. In line with the piece about how you might meditate on the Lord's Prayer, this matches the prayer that "they will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven," I don't think Jesus would have had us pray for what is impossible, clearly the "new heaven and new Earth" would mean that the Earth we live in is not the one of the future, no matter what N. T. Wright might say about that. If "material reality" means anything it is that the only partially realized vicissitudes which define physical reality can only support what is supported by its limitations and conditions and what is described as an eternal existence is not, under present understanding of physics, sustainable. I think that part of currently fashionable theology is not sustainable under modern understandings of that anymore than the equality of women and the possibility of LGBTQ people living full and good lives was in 13th century understanding.
But this is supposed to be about Aquinas and the massive work of theology that he produced. Karl Rahner said at the start of his article that he had to consider Aquinas in three areas. He starts by his assumptions about Aquinas that would come from his present sainthood before discussing his life's work in relation to his life's experience.
Three things strike me about one of history's Christians, Thomas Aquinas. (1) He was a friar, a monk; (2) he was a theologian; (3) he was a mystic."
I will leave it to you to read about the brief section on the conditions that surrounded his role as a theologian but it is as a mystic that, as actually turned off by Aquinas's theology as I am, I find something that is reported about him late in life as leading me to respect him. Rahner gives a brief mention of it.
"When we speak of Thomas as a mystic we do not mean that he had frequent ecstasies or visions or that he was a little introverted or overly concerned about his own experiences. There seems to he nothing of this in his writings. Yet Thomas was a mystic. He knew about "the hidden Godhead," Adoro te devote, latens deitas (Devoutly I adore thee, hidden Deity). He knew the hidden God. He spoke of the God who pervades and determines everything in silence. He spoke of a God beyond everything holy theology could say about him. He spoke of the God he loved as inconceivable. And he knew about these things not only from theology but from the experience of his heart. He knew and experienced so much that in the end he substituted silence for theological words. He no longer wrote, and considered all that he had written to be "straw." As he lay dying, he spoke a little about the Canticle of Canticles, that great song of love, and then was silent. He became silent because he wanted to let God alone be heard in lieu of those human words he had spoken for us.
Thomas lives. He may seem far away but he is not in reality, for the community of saints is close. The saints come to us overshadowed by the brilliance of the eternal God into whom they have plummeted through the centuries. But God is not a god of the dead but of the living, and whoever has gone home to him, lives. And so Thomas lives. The question for us is: Does our faith live? For it is through our faith that Thomas can become part of our own life."
It has to stand as one of the rarest of things for an academic, a scholastic, a writer of a huge, major piece of thought that took enormous effort, both in the preparatory study and in the writing, revising, editing (with a friggin' quill pen, not a word processor or even text editor) and final draft, to then declare that his enormous, impressive, life's work is as nothing, mere "straw" something that later hierarchs would ignore as they gave that straw a status which became totalitarian in its potential oppressiveness, the opposite of the freedom which is promised to be a result of knowing the truth, why Catholic right-wingers pretend that they study and take Aquinas dead serious and apply the writings that he more or less repudiated, himself, to modern life, looking in it for means of opposing, for example, the rights of women, prisoners, workers, the poor. I think if Aquinas had any idea of the use his writings would be put to in later centuries I think he wouldn't have started to write it.
So I can think well of Thomas Aquinas but not for the reasons most people would. I disagree with much of what he wrote and I think the use that has been put to has been generally unfortunate. I honor him for that great act of humility, of honesty, of giving up everything he had, what he had created. I think in the end anyone, modern theologians as well as those of the 13th century and the fifth, need to understand that as cool as they want their thinking to be, as removed from corrupting biases and a priori considerations, we are not a party to the perfect knowledge that would be required to do that, everything we think, everything we want, everything we want to be true or feel we must hold to be true is a product of our own minds, our pasts, our own experiences and there is nothing to be done about that. It is as true for the hardest of hard science and mathematics and even more so as we deal with more complex realities than those most reputable of modern idols in our imaginations deal with.
When I got up this morning, I have to say, writing about Thomas Aquinas was nothing I expected to be doing.
