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(Thomist spirituality) refers
to the spiritual life and teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225/26-1274) and
of those who belong to his school. As a child, so it is said, Thomas was
already asking the question ‘what is God?’ and this remained the central
pre-occupation of his life. He opted for the Dominicans rather than the
Benedictines for reasons that remain unknown but the intellectual concerns of
the new Order may have appealed to him as well as its commitment to countering
the neo-Manichean ideas of the Cathars. In practice this meant developing a
theological approach in which an appreciation of the goodness of creation was
central.
Thomas had
already been introduced to the philosophy of Aristotle at Naples and his
studies under Albert the Great in Paris strengthened his interest in the newly
translated works of Aristotle. On the face of it Aristotle seemed less
promising an ally for Christian theology than the more religiously minded
Plato. In fact there was little of Plato’s work available in the 13th
century although he had already had a significant impact in the development of
theology in the Patristic period. In any case Thomas found in Aristotle the
ally he needed for supporting the theological affirmation of created reality.
Issues that are central to Christian life and thinking such as creation itself,
human individuality and integrity, grace and freedom, incarnation and sacrament
– all receive fresh and exciting treatment in the light of Aristotle’s
scientific, ethical and metaphysical teachings.
Thomas’ holistic
anthropology – his understanding of the essential unity of body and soul in the
human individual – is a distinctive and original contribution to human thought.
Much moral and spiritual wisdom follows from his conviction that the human is
essentially a physical being, that the soul needs the body just as the body
needs the soul, and that there is no human knowing, even the highest forms of
spiritual understanding, that do not depend on what has been experienced
physically. It has been claimed that Thomas is the first Christian philosopher
to take the corporeal character of human existence calmly. For Thomas the human
body is even essential to what he calls ‘the well-being of our eternal
happiness’: no one had given such honour to the human body before.
With
characteristic provocativeness, G.K.Chesterton says that Thomas, with Francis
of Assisi, saved the west from spirituality. By this he means that the
affirmation of the goodness of creation by Francis and Thomas strengthened a
characteristically Christian understanding of the Word becoming flesh and of
God seeing all that he had made and finding it very good. The world itself is
already gift of God in virtue of the mystery of being or existence that is
found at the heart of the smallest thing there is. On this view all one needs
is an ant or a leaf to initiate a meditation on existence that will lead
ultimately to God. In the thought of Thomas Aquinas we find a mysticism of
being in which the divine presence is recognised primarily in God’s creative
and continuing emanation – Thomas does not fear the term – that is the being of
things. Because it is created in the image of God the human creature has the
capacity to receive the gift of being with awareness and gratitude.
His most famous
work, the Summa Theologiae, was intended as a moral theology, concerned
with the living out of the Christian life understood as the human creature’s
pilgrimage of return to God. A key, structuring theme of this work is beatitudo,
blessedness or bliss. Thomas uses this term to characterise the Trinitarian
life of God in which creation and salvation originate. He uses it also to refer
to the final end or fundamental desire that moves human beings to moral and
spiritual searching. Beatitudo is what Jesus Christ brings because it is
he who in fact opens the way for human entry into the blessed life of God.
Thomas did not live to write the parts of the Summa devoted to
eschatology but it is clear from what he did write that the blessedness to
which we may now look forward is beyond anything human hearts can conceive.
Thomas speaks of
the human appropriation of beatitudo in terms of grace and deification.
His understanding of grace is essentially Trinitarian. The Son and the Spirit
have been sent by the Father to bring the world within God’s embrace so that it
might share in God’s own life of knowing and loving. Grace refers to the
strengthening and elevation of nature that attends the indwelling of the divine
persons. Grace operates within the human capacities for knowing and loving and
conforms human beings to ‘the Word that breathes Love’. Graced humanity is
Word-bearing and Loving, made to be like God.
In practice this
happens through the virtues or gifts of faith, hope and charity with the many
actions, expressions, initiatives and practices to which they give rise and
which constitute the pastoral and spiritual life of Christian individuals and
communities. The life of the believer, stimulated and sustained by Christ in
his Church, is nevertheless a life lived in mystery, since in this life, Thomas
says, we can only be united with God as with an unknown. Faith is profoundly
paradoxical for him. It is a firm assent unsupported by evidence sufficient to
satisfy the intellect. It is a speaking or articulation whose hold on truth
reaches beyond what the words used contain. It touches a reality signified by
those words, which yet remains unknown. ‘It is in the dark night of ignorance’,
he writes, ‘that we come closest to God in this life’ (In I Sentences 8,1,1).
For Thomas,
wisdom means knowing that we do not know God. We are viatores or
travellers who live in a tension towards that which is and is not yet ours. We
live then by hope, a virtue whose characteristic act is prayer, which Thomas
describes as ‘the interpreter of desire’. Prayer is the struggle of mind and
mouth to find words for what the heart wants.
Thomas
understands charity to mean friendship with God. No longer simply creatures or
servants, we are established in friendship with God by Jesus Christ (John
15.15) so that we become God’s partners and co-workers in caring for the world
and guiding its progress. It is in this friendship of charity that we begin
already to experience beatitudo as we are brought to participate in the
nature of God who is love.
Christ won this
gift for us through his passion and the sacraments are the fruits of his
passion. They adapt the gift of divine life or grace to the kind of creature we
are: linguistic, sign-making, social, political, physical, ritual-celebrating
and historical. We know from the witnesses who testified to his way of living
that Thomas’s personal spiritual life was centred on the celebration of the
Eucharist. His devotion to the Eucharist is still to be seen in the poetry he
composed to accompany the liturgies of Corpus Christi. Having been to
confession and celebrated the Eucharist, he then spent his day studying the
Word of God, trying to penetrate and expound wisdom’s truth in a sustained and
creative theological life.
In his life of
Jesus, Thomas describes him as a wandering teacher whose mission was to serve
truth in a life of poverty, prayer and preaching. Thomas sought to imitate this way of living,
devoting himself without reserve and without ambition to the ministry of study
and teaching. Some sections of the secular clergy reacted strongly to the
emergence of the mendicant orders and sought to have their way of life
disallowed. Thomas wrote a number of works in defence of the new form of
religious life. At the heart of the friar’s life, he said, is obedience, the
highest exercise of human freedom as a person entrusts himself completely to
God and to God’s unfolding plan for the world. He argued that this was a valid
way of following Christ whose love and obedience are the world’s salvation.
Thomist
spirituality, at least as we see it in Thomas himself, combines intellectual
dedication and discipline with a comparatively simple life of prayer and
liturgical practice. On 6th December 1273, the feast of Saint
Nicholas, Thomas had an experience during the Eucharist that led him to give up
writing. He had often cited a saying of Pseudo-Dionysius to the effect that the
search for God involves not just learning about divine things but experiencing
them, literally ‘suffering’ them (non solum discens sed et patiens divina).
This saying became reality for him on that day. He had given his life to
contemplation, meaning the study of the Word of God. Now, it seems, he was
brought to that place of silence of which the Christian mystical tradition had
always spoken, into those mists within which – as Thomas well knew – God is
said to dwell.
Further Reading
Thomas F.O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas Theologian, University of
Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana and London, 1997
William H.Principe, Thomas Aquinas’ Spirituality, Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984
J.-P.Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master
(translated from the French by Robert Royal), Catholic University of America
Press, Washington DC, 2003
Simon Tugwell, Albert and Thomas, The Classics of Western
Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1988
James A.Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His life, thought, and
works Oxford, Blackwells, 1974 (second edition Washington DC, 1983)
A.N.Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and
Palamas, Oxford University Press, 1999
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