38. Saint Thomas Aquinas

As a Dominican, I am going to propose to you another saint, whose greatest contribution to my mind, is to have reconciled elements too often opposed to Christianity. Let's see how he went about it.

"It is in studying their genesis, that one gains the best understanding of things." It is therefore important to know that the young Thomas had to face the fury of his family at the very moment that he was making his fundamental choice. But when to the great disappointment of his parents, who went so far as to sequester him in the house by force, in their efforts to change his mind, Thomas categorically rejected the monastic life, it is clear that in no way did he despise its discipline nor its rigors. No Angelism on that score! He was well aware of the importance of asceticism in order to cultivate a solid liberty in face of the desires of the body and of the imagination. Neither did he despise the regular organisation of the abbeys. Laboratories of fundamental research, they lead to permanent prayer, in the meditation of Scripture, celebration of the Liturgy and contemplation.

This genius who was to become the greatest intellectual of his time, certainly did not find fault with the richness - almost a scandal at the time - of these monastic libraries so carefully kept, which were to ensure the continuity of Western civilisation. Thomas revelled in all that, and was to find it with the Preachers who inherited the same values. But why did he refuse to give pleasure to his parents by choosing an Order that was new, fragile and less reassuring? Through an adolescent's simple opposition to family authority? Perhaps there was an element of that in it - even though Freud was not yet born - but there was then a new attitude to authority, in the community as well as in society, and it had to do with power as well as with the mind.

It meant passing from the patriarchal model to the model of fraternal community, which presupposes equality and unanimity. But first we have to understand the "why?" A Religious Order is defined by its mission, by its final objective, so the question here is to pass from priority of prayer to a priority of the gospel's transmission. Consequently, it means a shift from "stability" to itinerant preaching, and from economic security, to the dependence of a mendicant; from manual work geared to auto subsistence, to intellectual work freely given in the service of others. "To vow mendicancy, wrote Pere Chenu, meant in the thirteenth century, to refuse categorically, institutionally, economically, the Church's feudal system with its benefices, collection of the dime... and all this in order to extract from these heavy feudal regimes the liberty of the Word of God... poverty is then, by its very nature, the efficacious symbol of the primal act of evangelical reawakening..." It is in truth a new Order, and not only in the sense of another congregation, but it is another Order, because it belongs to another order!

And it is controversial, we must admit; controversial, because first of all, it was a question of self-defence. Without the protection of the Royal Archers, lectures would not have resumed at the Saint-Jacques convent in I255, and without St. Thomas's defence in I256 and in I270, the threatened Order of St. Dominic might have disappeared.

The diocesan clergy had such a poor understanding of what these new Religious stood for, that by every means in their power, they endeavoured to clip their wings, forbidding them for example - an amusing detail - to have clocks! Clocks in the literal sense would never be wanting, nor unfortunately in the figurative sense also. Public opinion likewise, did not understand these "false monks" and Matthew of Paris explained that "the world was their cell and the ocean their cloister". So then, let us recognise that St. Thomas was indeed controversial!

For Jesus did not found monasteries, but He created apostles. Thomas in Q. I06, is not afraid to point out that love has different degrees, and that those who choose to be undisturbed behind monastic walls, do not necessarily love God more than those who accept to travel far away, in order to serve Him in their contemporaries.

In my youthful enthusiasm, I innocently chose this text for the invitation card to my Solemn Profession. A Carmelite prioress wrote to me: "our life too is difficult!" Certainly! But we are not rivals for the most difficult contest! If you think you would be happier in another mode of life, then change!

Change then of a new Order, choice of the apostolic life in itinerancy and in poverty. The Word became Flesh! And we know how! At the same time, a positive choice for the intelligence.

As Truth is holy, the intelligence is a place of holiness! It is as simple as that, and it is so very important! "In St. Thomas, the doctor is a holy man, given that this holy man is holy because he is doctor, and that this doctor is doctor because he is holy" Wonderful unity! Wonderful coherence which is always evident in him, in what he thinks, in what he teaches and in what he lives.

What is separated elsewhere, indeed in opposition, is reconciled in Thomas Aquinas, unified in synergy. If he distinguishes, it is to unify, if he argues, it is the better to reconcile. It is no longer a question of the body on one side and the soul on the other, but of an animated body, no longer action and contemplation, but what he calls a mixed life, in which experience and knowledge are no longer two but one. "Through the love of friendship, the Friend is in his friend, in that he espouses the happy events and the misfortunes of his friend. It is also natural for friends to wish for the same things, to suffer and to enjoy the same things... in such wise, that the Friend appears to be in his Friend and to, identify with him. Conversely, the Friend is in the Loved one, in that the latter wishes and acts according to the desires of his Friend, whom he regards as another self."

A man cannot love Christ in the same way as a woman does. But he can love Wisdom, desire to espouse her and wonder at her logic as well as at her fantasies. It is for these anthropological and not just historical reasons, that the Order of Preachers is three dimensional, with its sisters. friars and lay members.

To love the friend, there is nothing like being associated with what he does, with what he feels and with what he lives. "As the Father has loved Me, I also have loved you. As the Father has sent Me, I also send you." To resemble Him as much as possible, to be His spokespersons, His lieutenants, and to be one in the same passion, in one perfect humanity, in one Breath with Him "He who welcomes you, welcomes Me; he who listens to you, listens to Me, thus to the One who sent Me."

It is love that permits one to know and of this is born understanding. It no longer grace, which supplants nature or interferes with it, but it is grace which assumes nature and perfects it. The more christian I am, the more am I called to become just, generous, artistic, intelligent. The more christian I am, the freer I am, for it is no longer a question of the Law on one side and my liberty on the other, nor of opposition between what is permitted and what is forbidden, but my personal conscience as my direct guide and before which I am responsible, just as I am responsible for informing and refining it. It is a theology of the intelligence, to claim that the more I believe, the more I dare to ask questions; the more I believe, the greater is my desire to understand and to know, to experiment and to verify. Thus St. Thomas questions everything and we would do well to imitate him for if our churches are empty and our sermons boring, it is perhaps because we do not dare to ask the vital questions being posed by our contemporaries.

Poor Thomas! Like all the great masters, he has suffered the betrayal of narrow minded followers. The breath of his thinking attracts certain weak minds, who attempt to capture his thoughts and put them in cold storage. But these thoughts escape their prison, and it is these very disciples who are renewed, becoming a little more intelligent in the process! In comparaison with other well known thinkers, like Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, I prefer Thomas Aquinas. His disciples do less damage!

For St. Thomas obliges one to ask questions. He does so as would a child "Does God exist? It would seem that He does not! etc." It is a theology bristling with intelligence and a philosophy of happiness! God is love and He made us to be happy. And if there are commandments, summed up in the greatest of them i.e. the commandment to love, it is because when you leave preoccupation with yourself by loving your brothers and sisters, you will be the happiest of men!

Life, "real life" is the life of God, and this life is fundamentally relation. And in the life of the Trinity, it is relation which constitutes the person. As for us, we exist before we enter into a relationship, before we love. St. Thomas says that in God what is foremost is relation We are called to enter into that exchange which is life, by giving and receiving, by dying and rising, by plunging into the baptismal waters, so as to emerge fully alive!

St. Thomas is buried in Toulouse in the church of the Jacobins. I go there sometimes to pray to him and to confide to him the Order of Preachers, our mission. St. Thomas was not a monk, but better still, he realised his ambition of being "monos", unified. He reconciled in himself and around him what should never have been separated, because with an alert heart and intelligence he knew how to love. St. Thomas is a model of synthesis and of unification, and for me, everything can be summed up in his motto: "Quantum potes, tantum aude!" Dare as much as you can!