Chapter XLI: Introduction: The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries (12)

Men gathered around St. Francis then and pleaded to be allowed to follow his mode of life. Some of the men who thus came to him were the choice spirits of the times. Thomas of Celano, who was to be one of the Master's favorite disciples and subsequently to be his most authoritative biographer, was one of the great literary geniuses of all times, the author of the sublime Dies Irae. While most of his first companions were men of such extreme simplicity of mind that the world has been rather in an amused than admiring attitude with regard to them, there can be no doubt that this simplicity was of itself an index not only of their genuine sincerity of heart, but of a greatness of mind that set them above the ordinary run of mankind and made them live poetry when they did not write it. The institute established by St. Francis was destined, in the course of the century, to attract to it some of the great men of every country. Besides Thomas of Celano there was, in Italy, Anthony of Padua, almost as famous as his master for the beauty of his saintly life; Jacopone Da Todi, the well-known author of the Stabat Mater, a hymn that rivals in poetic genius, the Dies Irae; Bonaventure, the great teacher of philosophy and theology at the University of Paris, and the writer of some of the sublimest treatises of mystical theology that were to be text books for the members of the Franciscan order, and of many other religious bodies for centuries after his death, indeed down to even our own times. There was Roger Bacon, in England, the famous teacher of science at Paris and at Oxford; and that Subtle Doctor, Duns Scotus, whose influence in philosophical speculation was destined never quite to disappear, and many others, the pick of the generations in which they lived, all proud to look up to Francis of Assisi as their father; all glad of the opportunity that the order gave them, to pass their lives in peace, far from the madding crowd with its strifes and competition, providing them constantly with opportunities to live their own lives, to find their own souls, to cultivate their own individualities untrammelled by worldly cares.

Francis' success in this matter and the propaganda of his influence will not be so surprising to Americans of this generation, if they will only recall what is still a precious memory in {264} the minds of men who are yet alive, that efforts to found a community not unlike that of the Franciscans in certain ways, attracted widespread attention even in our own country half a century ago. After all, the men who gathered at Brook Farm had ideas and ideals not so distant from those cherished by St. Francis and the early members of the Franciscan Order. Their main effort was also to get away from worldly cares and have the opportunity to work out their philosophy of life far from the disturbing influence of city life, in the peaceful pursuit of only such agricultural efforts as might be necessary to ensure them simple sustenance, yet at the same time enforce from them such exercise in the open air as would guarantee the preservation of health. The men of Brook Farm were, in the eyes of their generation, quite as far from practical ideas as were the early Franciscans. It must not be forgotten, however, that these men who thus attempted in the Nineteenth Century what St. Francis succeeded in accomplishing in the Thirteenth, in their subsequent careers succeeded in impressing themselves very strongly upon the life of the American people. Much of what is best in our Nineteenth Century life would be lost if the Brook farmers and what they accomplished were to be removed from it. Men of ideals are usually also men of working ideas, as these two experiences in history would seem to show.

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ST. ELIZABETH--THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)

ST. LOUIS--THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)

ST. CLARE--THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)

It was not alone for the men of his generation, however, that Francis was destined to furnish a refuge from worldly care and a place of peace and thoughtful life. We have already said that it was by chance, certainly without any conscious intention on Francis' part that the Franciscan order for men which is usually spoken of as the First Order came into existence. The last thing in the world very probably that would ever have entered into the mind of Francis when he began to lead the simple life of a poor little man of God, was the founding of a religious order for women. We tell elsewhere the story, of St. Clare's interest in St. Francis' mode of life and of the trials that she underwent in order to obtain permission and opportunity to fashion her own life in the same way. The problem was even more serious for women than for men. St. Francis considered that they should not be {265} allowed to follow the Franciscan custom of going out to seek alms and yet required that they should live in absolute poverty, possessing nothing and supporting themselves only by the contributions of the faithful and the work of their hands. St. Clare attempted the apparently impossible and solved the problem of a new career for the women of her time.

It was not very long before St. Clare's example proved as infective as that of St. Francis himself. While in the beginning the members of her family had been the most strenuous objectors against her taking up such an unwonted mode of existence it was not long before she was joined in the monastery of St. Damian where her little community was living, by her sister who was to become almost as famous as herself under the name of St. Agnes, and by her mother and other near relatives, from Assisi and the neighborhood. This Second Order of St. Francis to which only women were admitted proved to have in it the germ of as active life as that of the first order. Before the end of the Thirteenth Century there were women Franciscans in every country in Europe. These convents furnished for women a refuge from the worried, hurried, over-busy life around them that proved quite as attractive as the similar opportunity for the men. For many hundreds of years down even to our own time, women were to find in the quiet obscurity of such Franciscan convents a peaceful, happy life in which they occupied themselves with simple conventual duties, with manual labor in their monastery gardens, with the making of needle work in which they became the most expert in the world, with the illuminating of missals and office books of such artistic beauty that they have become the most precious treasures of our great libraries, and with the long hours of prayer by which they hoped to accomplish as much in making the world better as if they devoted themselves to ardent efforts of reform which, of course, the circumstances of the time would not have permitted.

Finally there was the Third Order of St. Francis, which was to gather to itself so many of the distinguished people of the century whose occupations and obligations would not permit them to live the conventual life, but who yet felt that they must be attached by some bond to this beautiful sanctity that was {266} entering into all the better life of the century. The Third Order was established so as to permit all the world to become Franciscans to whatever degree it considered possible, and to share in the sublime Christianity of the founder whom they all admired so much, even if they were not able to imitate his sublimer virtues. Into this Third Order of St. Francis most of the finer spirits of the time entered with enthusiasm. We need only recall that Louis IX. of France, the greatest Monarch of the century, considered it a special privilege to be a follower of the humble Francis, and that St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the daughter of a king, the wife and mother of a ruling prince, gave another example of the far-reachingness of Francis' work. Dante was another of the great members of the Third Order and was buried in the habit of St. Francis, glorying in the thought of the brotherhood this gave him with the saint he loved so much.

All down the centuries since, other distinguished men in many countries of Europe were proud to claim the same distinction. Modern science is supposed to be unorthodox in its tendencies and electricity is the most recent of the sciences in development. Three of the great founders in electricity, Volta, Galvani and Ampere, were members of the Third Order of St. Francis and at least one of them, Galvani, insisted on being buried in the habit of the order six centuries after the death of his father Francis in order to show how much he appreciated the privilege. There is no man who lived in the Thirteenth Century who influenced the better side of men more in all the succeeding ages down to and including our own time, than the poor little man of God of Assisi. He is just coming into a further precious heritage of uplift for the men of our time, that is surprising for those who are so buried in the merely material that they fail to realize how much the ideal still rules the minds of thinking men, but that seems only natural and inevitable to those who appreciate all the attractiveness there is in a simple life lived without the bootless hurry, the unattaining bustle and the over-strained excitement of the strenuous existence.

What St. Francis and his order accomplished in Italy another great Saint, Dominic, was achieving in the West. The {267} fact that another order similar to that of St. Francis in many respects, yet differing from it in a number of essential particulars, should have arisen almost at the same time shows how profoundly the spirit of organization of effort had penetrated into the minds of these generations of the Thirteenth Century. While poverty was to be the badge of St. Dominic's followers as well as those of St. Francis, learning was to replace the simplicity which St. Francis desired for his sons. The order of preachers began at once to give many eminent scholars to the Church, and for three centuries there was not a single generation that did not see as Dominicans some of the most intellectual men of Europe. Leaders they were in philosophy, in the development of thought, in education, and in every phase of ecclesiastical life. The watch dogs of the Lord, (Domini Canes) they were called, punning on their name because everwhere, they were in the van of defense against the enemies of Christianity. That the Thirteenth Century should have given rise to two such great religious orders stamps it as a wonderfully fruitful period for religion as well as for every other phrase of human development.

In order to understand what these great founders tried to do, the work of these two orders must be considered together. They have never ceased, during all the intervening seven centuries, to be the source of great influence in the religious world. They have proven refuges for many gentle spirits at all times and have been the homes of learning, as well as of piety. While occasionally their privileges have been abused, and men have taken advantage of the opportunities to be idle and luxurious, this has happened much seldomer than the world imagines. Not a single century has failed to show men among them whom the world honors as Saints, and whose lives have been examples of what can be accomplished by human nature at its best. They have been literally schools of unselfishness, and men have learned to think less of themselves and more of their labor by the contemplation of the lives of these begging friars. What they did for England, the Rev. Augustus Jessopp, a non-conformist clergyman in England, has recently told very well, and the more one studies their history, the higher the estimation of them; and the more one knows of {268} them, the less does one talk of their vices. Green in his "History of the English People" has paid them a tribute that it is well to remember:--

"To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the
aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the
opening of the Thirteenth Century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic
was aroused at the sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire
and sword to win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. 'Zeal,' he
cried, 'must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity
by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth.' His fiery
ardor and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the mystical piety, the
imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life of Francis
falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the time.
In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take
Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all: he flings his very
clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and
God. His passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun
for his brother; he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister
the Water. His last faint cry was a 'Welcome, Sister Death.'
Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim was the
same, to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile
knowledge with orthodoxy, to carry the Gospel to the poor. The work
was to be done by the entire reversal of the older monasticism, by
seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their
fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the
preacher, the monk for a friar. To force the new 'brethren' into
entire dependence on those among whom they labored the vow of
Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the 'Begging Friars' were
to subsist on the alms of the poor, they might possess neither money
nor lands, the very houses in which they lived were to be held in
trust for them by others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which
welcomed their appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome,
the jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the parochial
priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in a few years around
Francis and Dominic, and the begging preachers, clad in their coarse
frock of serge, with the girdle of rope around their waist, wandered
barefooted as {269} missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in
Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and
toiled among the poor."

SIDE CAPITAL (LINCOLN)

{270}

XVII

AQUINAS THE SCHOLAR.

No one of all the sons of the Thirteenth Century, not even Dante himself, so typifies the greatness of the mentality of the period as does Thomas, called from his birthplace Aquinas, or of Aquin, on whom his own and immediately succeeding generations because of what they considered his almost more than human intellectual acumen, bestowed the title of Angelical Doctor, while the Church for the supremely unselfish character of his life, formally conferred the title of Saint. The life of Aquinas is of special interest, because it serves to clarify many questions as to the education of the Thirteenth Century and to correct many false impressions that are only too prevalent with regard to the intellectual life of the period. Though Aquinas came of a noble family which was related to many of the Royal houses of Europe and was the son of the Count of Aquino, then one of the most important of the non-reigning noble houses of Italy, his education was begun in his early years and was continued in the midst of such opportunities as even the modern student might well envy.

It is often said that the nobility at this time, paid very little attention to the things of the intellect and indeed rather prided themselves on their ignorance of even such ordinary attainments as reading and writing. While this was doubtless true for not a few of them, Aquinas's life stands in open contradiction with the impression that any such state of mind was at all general, or that there were not so many exceptions as to nullify any such supposed rule. Evidently those who wished could and did take advantage of educational opportunities quite as in our day. Aquinas's early education was received at the famous monastery of Monte Cassino in Southern Italy, where the Benedictines for more than six centuries had been providing magnificent opportunities for the studious youth of Italy and for serious-minded students from all over Europe. {271} When he was scarcely more than a boy he proceeded to the University of Naples, which at that time, under the patronage of the Emperor Frederick II., was being encouraged not only to take the place so long held by Salernum in the educational world of Europe, but also to rival the renowned Universities of Paris and Bologna. Here he remained until he was seventeen years of age when he resolved to enter the Dominican Order, which had been founded only a short time before by St. Dominic, yet had already begun to make itself felt throughout the religious and educational world of the time.

Just as it is the custom to declare that as a rule, the nobility cared little for education, so it is more or less usual to proclaim that practically only the clergy had any opportunities for the higher education during the Thirteenth Century. Thomas had evidently been given his early educational opportunities, however, without any thought of the possibility of his becoming a clergyman. His mother was very much opposed to his entrance among the Dominicans, and every effort was made to picture to him the pleasures and advantages that would accrue to him because of his noble connections, in a life in the world. Thomas insisted, however, and his firm purpose in the matter finally conquered even the serious obstacles that a noble family can place in the way of a boy of seventeen, as regards the disposition of his life in a way opposed to their wishes.

The Dominicans realized the surpassing intelligence of the youth whom they had received and accordingly he was sent to be trained under the greatest teacher of their order, the famous Albert the Great, who was then lecturing at Cologne. Thomas was not the most brilliant of scholars as a young man and seems even to have been the butt of his more successful fellow-students. They are said to have called him the dumb one, or sometimes because of his bulkiness even as a youth, the dumb ox. Albert himself, however, was not deceived in his estimation of the intellectual capacity of his young student, and according to tradition declared, that the bellowings of this ox would yet be heard throughout all Christendom. After a few years spent at Cologne, Thomas when he was in his early twenties, accompanied Albert who had been called to {272} Paris. It was at Paris that Thomas received his bachelor's degree and also took out his license to teach--the doctor's degree of our time. After this some years further were spent at Cologne and then the greatness of the man began to dawn on his generation. He was called back to Paris and became one of the most popular of the Professors at that great University in the height of her fame, at a time when no greater group of men has perhaps ever been gathered together, than shared with him the honors of the professors' chairs at that institution.

"Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas
Aquinas, form among themselves, so to speak, a complete
representation of all the intellectual powers: they are the four
doctors who uphold the chair of philosophy in the temple of the
Middle Ages. Their mission was truly the reestablishment of the
sciences, but not their final consummation. They were not exempt
from the ignorances and erroneous opinions of their day, yet they
did much to overcome them and succeeded better than is usually
acknowledged in introducing the era of modern thought. Often, the
majesty, I may even say the grace of their conceptions, disappears
under the veil of the expressions in which they are clothed; but
these imperfections are amply atoned for by superabundant merits.
Those Christian philosophers did not admit within themselves the
divorce, since their day become so frequent, between the intellect
and the will; their lives were uniformly a laborious application of
their doctrines. They realized in its plenitude the practical wisdom
so often dreamed of by the ancients--the abstinence of the disciples
of Pythagoras, the constancy of the stoics, together with humility
and charity, virtues unknown to the antique world. Albert the Great
and St. Thomas left the castles of their noble ancestors to seek
obscurity in the cloisters of St. Dominic: the former abdicated, and
the latter declined, the honors of the Church. It was with the cord
of St. Francis that Roger Bacon and St. Bonaventure girded their
loins; when the last named was sought that the Roman purple might be
placed upon his shoulders, he begged the envoys to wait until he
finished washing the dishes of the convent. Thus they did not
withdraw themselves {273} within the exclusive mysteries of an
esoteric teaching; they opened the doors of their schools to the
sons of shepherds and artisans, and, like their Master, Christ, they
said: "Come all!" After having broken the bread of the word, they
were seen distributing the bread of alms. The poor knew them and
blessed their names. Even yet, after the lapse of six hundred years,
the dwellers in Paris kneel round the altar of the Angel of the
School, and the workmen of Lyons deem it an honor once a year to
bear upon their brawny shoulders the triumphant remains of the
'Seraphic Doctor.'"

For most modern students and even scholars educated in secular universities the name of Aquinas is scarcely more than a type, the greatest of them, it is true, of the schoolmen who were so much occupied with distant, impractical and, to say the least, merely theoretic metaphysical problems, in the later Middle Ages. It is true that the renewed interest in Dante in recent years in English speaking countries, has brought about a revival of attention in Aquinas's work because to Dante, the Angelical Doctor, as he was already called, meant so much, and because the Divine Comedy has been declared often and often, by competent critics, to be the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas of Aquin in verse. Even this adventitious literary interest, however, has not served to lift the obscurity in which Aquinas is veiled for the great majority of scholarly people, whose education has been conducted according to modern methods and present-day ideas.

As showing a hopeful tendency to recognize the greatness of these thinkers of the Middle Ages it is interesting to note that about five years ago one of St. Thomas's great works--the Summa Contra Gentiles--was placed on the list of subjects which a candidate may at his option offer in the final honor school of the _litterae humaniores_ at Oxford. There has come a definite appreciation of the fact that this old time philosopher represents a phase of intellectual development that must not be neglected, and that stands for such educational influence as may well be taken advantage of even in our day of information rather than mental discipline. For the purposes of this course Father Rickaby, S. J., has prepared an annotated translation of the great philosophic work under the title, {274} "Of God and His Creatures," which was published by Burns and Oates of London, 1905. This will enable those for whom the Latin of St. Thomas was a stumbling block, to read the thoughts of the great scholastic, in translation at least, and it is to be hoped that we shall hear no more of the trifling judgments which have so disgraced our English philosophical literature.

The fact that Pope Leo XIII., by a famous papal bull, insisted that St. Thomas should be the standard of teaching in philosophy and theology in all the Catholic institutions of learning throughout the world, aroused many thinkers to a realization of the fact that far from being a thing of the dead and distant past, Thomas's voice was still a great living force in the world of thought. To most people Leo XIII. appealed as an intensely practical and thoroughly modern ruler, whose judgment could be depended on even with regard to teaching problems in philosophy and theology. There was about him none of the qualities that would stamp him as a far-away mystic whose thoughts were still limited by medieval barriers. The fact that in making his declaration the Pope was only formulating as a rule, what had spontaneously become the almost constant practice and tradition of Catholic schools and universities, of itself served to show how great and how enduring was St. Thomas's influence.

In the drawing together of Christian sects that has inevitably come as a result of the attacks made upon Christianity by modern materialists, and then later by those who would in their ardor for the higher criticism do away with practically all that is divine in Christianity, there has come a very general realization even on the part of those outside of her fold, that the Roman Catholic Church occupies a position more solidly founded on consistent logical premises and conclusions than any of the denominations. Without her aid Christian apologetics would indeed be in sad case. Pope Leo's declaration only emphasizes the fact, then, that the foundation stone of Christian apologetics was laid by the great work of St. Thomas, and that to him more than any other is due that wonderful coordination of secular and religious knowledge, which appoints for each of these branches of knowledge its {275} proper place, and satisfies the human mind better than any other system of philosophic thought. This is the real panegyric of St. Thomas, and it only adds to the sublimity of it that it should come nearly six centuries and a half after his death. To only a bare handful of men in the history of the human race, is it given thus to influence the minds of subsequent generations for so long and to have laid down the principles of thought that are to satisfy men for so many generations. This is why, in any attempt at even inadequate treatment of the greatness of the Thirteenth Century, Thomas Aquinas, who was its greatest scholar, must have a prominent place. The present generation has had sufficient interest in him aroused, however, amply to justify such a giving of space.

When Leo XIII. made his recommendation of St. Thomas it was not as one who had merely heard of the works of the great medieval thinker, or knew them only by tradition, or had slightly dipped into them as a dilettante, but as one who had been long familiar with them, who had studied the Angelical Doctor in youth, who had pondered his wisdom in middle age, and resorted again and again to him for guidance in the difficulties of doctrine in maturer years, and the difficulties of morals such as presented themselves in his practical life as a churchman. It was out of the depths of his knowledge of him, that the great Pope, whom all the modern world came to honor so reverently before his death, drew his supreme admiration for St. Thomas and his recognition of the fact that no safer guide in the thorny path of modern Christian apologetics could be followed, than this wonderful genius who first systematized human thought as far as the relations of Creator to creature are considered, in the heyday of medieval scholarship and university teaching.

Those who have their knowledge of scholastic philosophy at second hand, from men who proclaim this period of human development as occupied entirely with fruitless discussion of metaphysical theories, will surely think that they could find nothing of interest for them in St. Thomas's writings. It is true the casual reader may not penetrate far enough into his writing to realize its significance and to appreciate its depth of knowledge, but the serious student finds constant {276} details of supreme interest because of their applications to the most up-to-date problems. We venture to quote an example that will show this more or less perfectly according to the special philosophic interest of readers. It is St. Thomas's discussion of the necessity there was for the revelation of the truth of the existence of God. His statement of the reasons why men, occupied with the ordinary affairs of life, would not ordinarily come to this truth unless it were revealed to them, though they actually have the mental capacity to reach it by reason alone, will show how sympathetically the Saint appreciated human conditions as they are.

"If a truth of this nature were left to the sole inquiry of reason,
three disadvantages would follow. One is that the knowledge of God
would be confined to few. The discovery of truth is the fruit of
studious inquiry. From this very many are hindered. Some are
hindered by a constitutional unfitness, their natures being
ill-disposed to the acquisition of knowledge. They could never
arrive by study at the highest grade of human knowledge, which
consists in the knowledge of God. Others are hindered by the claims
of business and the ties of the management of property. There must
be in human society some men devoted to temporal affairs. These
could not possibly spend time enough in the learned lessons of
speculative inquiry to arrive at the highest point of human inquiry,
the knowledge of God. Some again are hindered by sloth. The
knowledge of the truths that reason can investigate concerning God
presupposes much previous knowledge; indeed almost the entire study
of philosophy is directed to the knowledge of God. Hence, of all
parts of philosophy that part stands over to be learned last, which
consists of metaphysics dealing with (divine things). Thus only with
great labour of study is it possible to arrive at the searching out
of the aforesaid truth; and this labour few are willing to undergo
for sheer love of knowledge.

"Another disadvantage is that such as did arrive at the knowledge or
discovery of the aforesaid truth would take a long time over it on
account of the profundity of such truth, and the many prerequisites
to the study, and also because in youth and early manhood the soul,
tossed to and fro on the {277} waves of passion, is not fit for the
study of such high truth; only in settled age does the soul become
prudent and scientific, as the philosopher says. Thus if the only
way open to the knowledge of God were the way of reason, the human
race would (remain) in thick darkness of ignorance: as the knowledge
of God, the best instrument for making men perfect and good, would
accrue only to a few after a considerable lapse of time.

"A third disadvantage is that, owing to the infirmity of our
judgment and the perturbing force of imagination, there is some
admixture of error in most of the investigations of human reason.
This would be a reason to many for continuing to doubt even of the
most accurate demonstrations, not perceiving the force of the
demonstration, and seeing the divers judgments, of divers persons
who have the name of being wise men. Besides, in the midst of much
demonstrated truth there is sometimes an element of error, not
demonstrated but asserted on the strength of some plausible and
sophistic reasoning that is taken for a demonstration. And therefore
it was necessary for the real truth concerning divine things to be
presented to men with fixed certainty by way of faith. Wholesome,
therefore, is the arrangement of divine clemency, whereby things
even that reason can investigate are commanded to be held on faith,
so that all might be easily partakers of the knowledge of God, and
that without doubt and error (Book I. cix)."

A still more striking example of Thomas's eminently sympathetic discussion of a most difficult problem, is to be found in his treatment of the question of the Resurrection of the Body. The doctrine that men will rise again on the last day with the same bodies that they had while here on earth, has been a stumbling block for the faith of a great many persons from the beginning of Christianity. In recent times the discovery of the indestructibility of matter, far from lessening the skeptical elements in this problem as might have been anticipated, has rather emphasized them. While the material of which man's body was composed is never destroyed, it is broken up largely into its original elements and is used over and over again in many natural processes, and even enters into the composition of other men's bodies during the long succeeding generations. Here is a problem upon which it would {278} ordinarily be presumed at once, that a philosophic writer of the Thirteenth Century could throw no possible light. We venture to say, however, that the following passage which we quote from an article on St. Thomas in a recent copy of the Dublin _Review_, represents the best possible solution of the problem, even in the face of all our modern advance in science.

"What does not bar numerical unity in a man while he lives on
uninterruptedly (writes St. Thomas), clearly can be no bar to the
identity of the arisen man with the man that was. In a man's body,
while he lives, there are not always the same parts in respect of
matter but only in respect of species. In respect of matter there is
a flux and reflux of parts. Still that fact does not bar the man's
numerical unity from the beginning to the end of his life. The form
and species of the several parts continue throughout life, but the
matter of the parts is dissolved by the natural heat, and new matter
accrues through nourishment. Yet the man is not numerically
different by the difference of his component parts at different
ages, although it is true that the material composition of the man
at one stage of his life is not his material composition at another.
Addition is made from without to the stature of a boy without
prejudice to his identity, for the boy and the adult are numerically
the same man."

In a word, Aquinas says that we recognize that the body of the boy and of the man are the same though they are composed of quite different material. With this in mind the problem of the Resurrection takes on quite a new aspect from what it held before. What we would call attention to, however, is not so much the matter of the argument as the mode of it. It is essentially modern in every respect. Not only does Thomas know that the body changes completely during the course of years, but he knows that the agent by which the matter of the parts is dissolved is "the natural heat," while "new matter accrues through nourishment." The passage contains a marvelous anticipation of present-day physiology as well as a distinct contribution to Christian apologetics. This coordination of science and theology, though usually thought to be lacking among scholastic philosophers, is constantly typical of their mode of thought and discussion, and this example, far from {279} being exceptional, is genuinely representative of them, as all serious students of scholasticism know.

Perhaps the last thing for which the ordinary person would expect to find a great modern teacher recommending the reading of St. Thomas would be to find therein the proper doctrine with regard to liberty and the remedies for our modern social evils. Those who will recall, however, how well the generations of the Thirteenth Century faced social problems even more serious than ours--for the common people had no rights at all [at] the beginning of the century, yet secured them with such satisfaction as to lay the foundation of the modern history of liberty--will realize that the intellectual men of the time must have had a much better grasp of the principles underlying such problems, than would otherwise be imagined. As a matter of fact, St. Thomas's treatment of Society, its rights and duties, and the mutual relationship between it and the individual, is one of the triumphs of his wonderful work in ethics. It is no wonder, then, that the great Pope of the end of the Nineteenth Century, whose encyclicals showed that he understood very thoroughly these social evils of our time, recognized their tendencies and appreciated their danger, recommended as a remedy for them the reading of St. Thomas. Pope Leo said:

"Domestic and civil society, even, which, as all see, is exposed to
great danger from the plague of perverse opinions, would certainly
enjoy a far more peaceful and a securer existence if more wholesome
doctrine were taught in the academies and schools--one more in
conformity with the teaching of the Church, such as is contained in
the works of Thomas Aquinas.

"For the teachings of Thomas on the true meaning of liberty--which
at this time is running into license--on the divine origin of all
authority, on laws and their force, on the paternal and just rule of
princes, on obedience to the higher powers, on mutual charity one
towards another--on all of these and kindred subjects, have very
great and invincible force to overturn those principles of the new
order which are well known to be dangerous to the peaceful order of
things and to public safety."

{280}

For this great Pope, however, there was no greater teacher of any of the serious philosophical, ethical and theological problems than this Saint of the Thirteenth Century. His position in the matter would only seem exaggerated to those who do not appreciate Pope Leo's marvelous practical intelligence, and Saint Thomas's exhaustive treatment of most of the questions that have always been uppermost in the minds of men. While, with characteristic humility, he considered himself scarcely more than a commentator on Aristotle, his natural genius was eminently original and he added much more of his own than what he took from his master. There can be no doubt that his was one of the most gifted minds in all humanity's history and that for profundity of intelligence he deserves to be classed with Plato and Aristotle, as his great disciple Dante is placed between Homer and Shakespeare. Those who know St. Thomas the best, and have spent their lives in the study of him, not only cordially welcomed but ardently applauded Pope Leo's commendation of him, and considered that lofty as was his praise there was not a word they would have changed even in such a laudatory passage as the following:

"While, therefore, we hold that every word of wisdom, every useful
thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with
a willing and grateful mind. We exhort you, Venerable Brethren, in
all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to
spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic
faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the
sciences. The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say--for if anything is taken
up with too great subtlety by the scholastic doctors, or too
carelessly stated--if there is anything that ill agrees with the
discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever
way, it does not enter Our mind, to propose that for imitation to
Our age. Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the
doctrines of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth
clearly his solidity and excellence over others. Let the academies
already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this
doctrine, and use it for refutation of prevailing errors. But, lest
the false for the true or the corrupt for the pure be drunk in, be
watchful that the doctrine of Thomas {281} be drawn from his own
fountains, or at least from those rivulets which derived from the
very fount, have thus far flowed, according to the established
agreement of learned men, pure and clear; be careful to guard the
minds of youth from those which are said to flow thence, but in
reality are gathered from strange and unwholesome streams."

Tributes quite as laudatory are not lacking from modern secular writers and while there have been many derogatory remarks, these have always come from men who either knew Aquinas only at second hand, or who confess that they had been unable to read him understandingly. The praise all comes from men who have spent years in the study of his writings.

A recent writer in the Dublin _Review_ (January, 1906) sums up his appreciation of one of St. Thomas's works, his masterly book in philosophy, as follows:

"The _Summa contra Gentiles_ is an historical monument of the first
importance for the history of philosophy. In the variety of its
contents, it is a perfect encyclopedia of the learning of the day.
By it we can fix the high-water mark of Thirteenth Century thought,
for it contains the lectures of a doctor second to none in the great
school of thought then flourishing--the University of Paris. It is
by the study of such books that one enters into the mental life of
the period at which they were written; not by the hasty perusal of
histories of philosophy. No student of the Contra Gentiles is likely
to acquiesce in the statement that the Middle Ages were a time when
mankind seemed to have lost the power of thinking for themselves.
Medieval people thought for themselves, thoughts curiously different
from ours and profitable to study."

Here is a similar high tribute for Aquinas's great work on Theology from his modern biographer, Father Vaughan:

"The 'Summa Theologica' is a mighty synthesis, thrown into technical
and scientific form, of the Catholic traditions of East and West, of
the infallible dicta of the Sacred Page, and of the most enlightened
conclusions of human reason, gathered from the soaring intuitions of
the Academy, and the rigid severity of the Lyceum.

"Its author was a man endowed with the characteristic notes of the
three great Fathers of Greek Philosophy: he possessed {282} the
intellectual honesty and precision of Socrates, the analytical
keenness of Aristotle, and that yearning after wisdom and light
which was the distinguishing mark of 'Plato the divine,' and which
has ever been one of the essential conditions of the highest
intuitions of religion."

As a matter of fact it was the very greatness of Thomas Aquinas, and the great group of contemporaries who were so close to him, that produced an unfortunate effect on subsequent thinking and teaching in Europe. These men were so surpassing in their grasp of the whole round of human thought, that their works came to be worshiped more or less as fetishes, and men did not think for themselves but appealed to them as authorities. It is a great but an unfortunate tribute to the scholastics of the Thirteenth Century that subsequent generations for many hundred years not only did not think that they could improve on them, but even hesitated to entertain the notion that they could equal them. Turner in his History of Philosophy has pointed out this fact clearly and has attributed to it, to a great extent, the decadence of scholastic philosophy.

"The causes of the decay of scholastic philosophy were both internal
and external. The internal causes are to be found in the condition
of Scholastic philosophy at the beginning of the Fourteenth Century.
The great work of Christian syncretism had been completed by the
masters of the preceding period; revelation and science had been
harmonized; contribution had been levied on the pagan philosophies
of Greece and Arabia, and whatever truth these philosophies had
possessed had been utilized to form the basis of a rational
exposition of Christian revelation. The efforts of Roger Bacon and
of Alfred the Great to reform scientific method had failed; the
sciences were not cultivated. There was, therefore, no source of
development, and nothing was left for the later Scholastics except
to dispute as to the meaning of principles, to comment on the text
of this master or of that, and to subtilize to such an extent that
Scholasticism soon became a synonym for captious quibbling. The
great Thomistic principle that in philosophy the argument from
authority is the weakest of all arguments was forgotten; Aristotle,
St. Thomas, or Scotus became the criterion of truth, and as Solomon,
whose youthful wisdom had {283} astonished the world, profaned his
old age by the worship of idols, the philosophy of the schools, in
the days of its decadence, turned from the service of truth to
prostrate itself before the shrine of a master. Dialectic, which in
the Thirteenth Century had been regarded as the instrument of
knowledge, now became an object of study for the sake of display;
and to this fault of method was added a fault of style--an
uncouthness and barbarity of terminology which bewilder the modern
reader."

The appreciation of St. Thomas in his own time is the greatest tribute to the critical faculty of the century that could be made. "Genius is praised but starves," in the words of the old Roman poet. Certainly most of the geniuses of the world have met with anything but their proper meed of appreciation in their own time. This is not true, however, during our Thirteenth Century. We have already shown how the artists, and especially Giotto, (at the end of the Thirteenth Century Giotto was only twenty-four years old) were appreciated, and how much attention Dante began to attract from his contemporaries, and we may add that all the great scholars of the period had a following that insured the wide publication of their works, at a time when this had to be accomplished by slow and patient hand-labor. The appreciation for Thomas, indeed, came near proving inimical to his completion of his important works in philosophy and theology. Many places in Europe wanted to have the opportunity to hear him. We have only reintroduced the practise of exchanging university professors in very recent years. This was quite a common practise in the Thirteenth Century, however, and so St. Thomas, after having been professor at Paris and later at Rome, taught for a while at Naples and then at a number of the Italian universities.

Everywhere he went he was noted for the kindliness of his disposition and for his power to make friends. Looked upon as the greatest thinker of his time it would be easy to expect that there should be some signs of consciousness of this, and as a consequence some of that unpleasant self-assertion which so often makes great intellectual geniuses unpopular. Thomas, however, never seems to have had any over-appreciation of his own talents, but, realizing how little he knew compared to {284} the whole round of knowledge, and how superficial his thinking was compared to the depth of the mysteries he was trying, not to solve but to treat satisfactorily, it must be admitted that there was no question of conceit having a place in his life. This must account for the universal friendship of all who came in contact with him. The popes insisted on having him as a professor at the Roman university in which they were so much interested, and which they wished to make one of the greatest universities of the time. Here Thomas was brought in contact with ecclesiastics from all over the world and helped to form the mind of the time. Those who think the popes of the Middle Ages opposed to education should study the records of this Roman university.

Thomas became the great friend of successive popes, some of whom had been brought in contact with him during his years of studying and teaching at Rome and Paris. This gave him many privileges and abundant encouragement, but finally came near ruining his career as a philosophic writer and teacher, since his papal friends wished to raise him to high ecclesiastical dignities. Urban IV. seems first to have thought of this but his successor Clement IV., one of the noblest churchmen of the period, who had himself wished to decline the papacy, actually made out the Bull, creating Thomas Archbishop of Naples. When this document was in due course presented to Aquinas, far from giving him any pleasure it proved a source of grief and pain. He saw the chance to do his life-work slipping from him. This was so evident to his friend the Pope that he withdrew the Bull and St. Thomas was left in peace during the rest of his career, and allowed to prosecute that one great object to which he had dedicated his mighty intellect. This was the summing up of all human knowledge in a work that would show the relation of the Creator to the creature, and apply the great principles of Greek philosophy to the sublime truths of Christianity. Had Thomas consented to accept the Archbishopric of Naples in all human probability, as Thomas's great English biographer remarks, the Summa Theologica would never have been written. It seems not unlikely that the dignity was pressed upon him by the Pope partly at the solicitation of powerful members of {285} his family, who hoped in this to have some compensation for their relative's having abandoned his opportunities for military and worldly glory. It is fortunate that their efforts failed, and it is only one of the many examples in history of the short-sightedness there may be in considerations that seem founded on the highest human prudence.

Thomas was left free then to go on with his great work, and during the next five years he applied every spare moment to the completion of his Summa. More students have pronounced this the greatest work ever written than is true for any other text-book that has ever been used in schools. That it should be the basis of modern theological teaching after seven centuries is of itself quite sufficient to proclaim its merit. The men who are most enthusiastic about it are those who have used it the longest and who know it the best.

St. Thomas's English biographer, the Very Rev. Roger Bede Vaughan, who is a worthy member of that distinguished Vaughan family who have given so many zealous ecclesiastics to the English Church and so many scholars to support the cause of Christianity, can scarcely say enough of this great work, nor of its place in the realm of theology. When it is recalled that Father Vaughan was not a member of St. Thomas's own order, the Dominicans, but of the Benedictines, it will be seen that it was not because of any _esprit de corps_, but out of the depths of his great admiration for the saint, that his words of praise were written:

"It has been shown abundantly that no writer before the Angelical's
day could have created a synthesis of all knowledge. The greatest of
the classic Fathers have been treated of, and the reasons of their
inability are evident. As for the scholastics who more immediately
preceded the Angelical, their minds were not ripe for so great and
complete a work: the fullness of time had not yet come. Very
possibly had not Albert the Great and Alexander (of Hales) preceded
him, St. Thomas would not have been prepared to write his
master-work; just as, most probably, Newton would never have
discovered the law of gravitation had it not been for the previous
labors of Galileo and of Kepler. But just as the English astronomer
stands solitary in his greatness, though surrounded and {286}
succeeded by men of extraordinary eminence, so also the Angelical
stands by himself alone, although Albertus Magnus was a genius,
Alexander was a theological king, and Bonaventure a seraphic doctor.
Just as the Principia is a work unique, unreachable, so, too, is the
'Summa Theologica' of the great Angelical. Just as Dante stands
alone among the poets, so stands St. Thomas in the schools."

Probably the most marvelous thing about the life of St. Thomas is his capacity for work. His written books fill up some twenty folios in their most complete edition. This of itself would seem to be enough to occupy a lifetime without anything more. His written works, however, represent apparently only the products of his hours at leisure. He was only a little more than fifty when he died and he had been a university professor at Cologne, at Bologna, at Paris, at Rome, and at Naples. In spite of the amount of work that he was thus asked to do, his order, the Dominican, constantly called on him to busy himself with certain of its internal affairs. On one occasion at least he visited England in order to attend a Dominican Chapter at Oxford, and the better part of several years at Paris was occupied with his labors to secure for his brethren a proper place in the university, so that they might act as teachers and yet have suitable opportunities for the education and the discipline of the members of the Order.