His classmates would never have voted him Most Likely to Succeed.
He pressed the scales at something like 300 pounds. He was shy and spoke slowly, if he happened to speak at all. His fellow students mocked him in Latin as bos mutus, “the dumb ox.”
His mentor Albert (who would go down in history as Albertus Magnus, “Albert the Great”), had a different take. “You may call him a dumb ox, but I say his bellowing will be heard around the world.”
Albert was right. Thomas Aquinas, who was born in 1225 and died 49 years later, was unquestionably the most important philosopher of the Middle Ages. His perspectives, generally known as Thomism, represent one of the few “living philosophies” that have endured for centuries without being tossed onto the scrapheap of intellectual history.
His many enthusiastic fans, including professor Peter Kreeft of Boston University, suggest that he belongs on a short list of the wisest and most intelligent human beings who have ever lived.
What makes Thomas such an extraordinary figure?
He was inclusive. Aquinas honored both Christian faith and human reason without pitting them against each other. He collected everything “good, true, and beautiful” into a single system, happily borrowing from secular and non-Christian religious sources. Few people have ever undertaken such a project. Thomas is one of the very few who actually seem to have succeeded.
Without question, he was a literary savant.
Thomas’ mind was so nimble that he could dictate four different manuscripts to four different scribes simultaneously. He personally scratched out more than 50,000 pages, all with a quill pen. We’re talking about something like 10 million words, or the equivalent of 50 fair-sized books.
His masterpiece, Summa Theologica – which touches on virtually every philosophical issue known to humanity – runs to about 4,000 pages in modern editions.
Thomas rarely wrote “drafts.” When he committed his thoughts to paper, they usually arrived in final form – ready for publication and scholarly discussion (even nine centuries later).
At every step, he avoided extremes. He pursued what might be called Common Sense, routinely taking a centrist position with regard to controversial questions. Kreeft admires his clarity, simplicity, and directness of style. Thomas typically came right to the point, yet his writing always seems profound.
It would be fun to think that his family, from his earliest years, recognized that they had a genius on their hands.
But it was not to be. Thomas’ father was a powerful Italian count who had political aspirations for his son. During the Middle Ages, that typically meant rising through the hierarchy of the Church. Thomas, he thought, should aspire to be an abbot. That would give him a leg up in the competition to become pope.
Thomas had no such dreams. He yearned to join the Dominicans as a monk.
In those days the Dominicans, like the Franciscans, were wandering beggars. They were essentially the religious hippies of the 13th century.
His father flipped out. He ordered his other sons to kidnap Thomas and hold him in one of the family castles until he came to his senses. But even after a year of domestically-enforced exile, Thomas remained committed to his monastic destiny.
His father reluctantly let him go. Ultimately he became a professor of theology at the newly established University of Paris. The rest is philosophical history.
Thomas loved to walk. He chose not to ride donkeys, the preferred mode of transportation of his day, wishing to spare those gentle beasts the challenge of his great bulk. One day, as he came over a crest, the sun came out and illuminated the magnificent valley that lay just ahead. His traveling companion sighed, “Wouldn’t it be great to be the owner of everything you see?”
In reply Aquinas sighed, “I’d rather be the owner of that one missing page of Aristotle.”
Kreeft points out that Thomas believed, deep in his heart, that one page of truth outweighed everything he could see.
Well, maybe not everything that he could see.
Something happened to Thomas in 1265 that changed his life. While in the midst of working on his Summa Theologica, he had a powerful personal encounter with the risen Christ.
No one knows what Thomas saw. It seems to have been a mystical experience that transcended his powers of description. What we do know is that he put down his scholarly pen, never to lift it again – which is why the Summa, arguably the greatest theological work in the history of Christianity, remains unfinished to this day.
“Compared to what I have seen,” he later said, “everything I have ever written looks to be straw.”
Straw was essentially worthless. It was typically used to surround dung – which meant Thomas’ assessment of his own work was negative in the extreme.
He wasn’t the first saint, however, to make such a comparison.
The apostle Paul, having made the case that he might have grounds to regard himself as a spiritually self-made man, pushes that all aside: “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:7-8).
The Greek word translated “garbage” is skubala. Other translations opt for “rubbish,” “filth,” “refuse,” and “dung.” Beginning Greek students are inevitably surprised to discover that that last word, “dung,” is unquestionably closest to what Paul intended.
For Paul, anything in his life that threatened the supremacy of Jesus – including his own so-called loftiest achievements – were only worthy of being flushed.
This isn’t to say that the best gifts God’s servants give to the world are somehow not wonderful. They’re inspired, after all, by God’s own Spirit.
But Thomas kept things in perspective.
We can get so excited about the things that Jesus provides – his mercy, his forgiveness, his friendship, his grace, and our chance to share such things with others – that it’s possible to forget that Jesus himself is the One True Gift.
Thomas knew that in the depths of his soul.
Which means the dumb ox was definitely no dummy.
Comments