Redeem the Time

In my experience, Thomists of the strict observance believe that Thomism is the hardware that will run any software. And increasingly I have come to suspect that they just may be right. That worthy Dominican, Father Benedict Ashley, somewhere writes that a distinctive contribution of Thomas to the Christian tradition was his insistence that study and the intellectual life are not merely means to an end but an almost sacramental means of the end itself, which is our sanctification. In this way, too, it is the case that to be an educated Catholic is to be in some important sense a Thomist.

-Father Neuhaus, On the Square

The hardware that will run any software. Hah!

In some ways I like the metaphor, but too much software—too much “Catholic” software—is designed so that it won’t run on Thomist hardware. Yet I suppose that sort of software isn’t really software at all. Rather, these are viruses of the trojan horse variety that try to ruin the hardware, or annoying adware and pop-ups that never cease their attempts to prevent you from doing anything with it.

The hollow charges of “rationalism,” hurled against St. Thomas by those who don’t understand him, need to stop if theology wants to be theology again. Hell, you need to understand St. Thomas even if you want to “change culture” and “speak to the modern world” and all the other things that modern theology is always talking about but never doing. Anyhow, its nice to hear the truth—to be an educated Catholic is to be a Thomist in some important sense, but not many Catholics know or admit that. Which makes one wonder how many Catholics are educated.

I am a tired Catholic who needs to go to sleep. Researching land use policy has that effect sometimes. Other times it can be interesting, but then again we must remember that truth and goodness (and beauty—is it kosher for me to say that?) are convertible with being, so anything can be interesting given a nature that naturally desires to know.

There is a notion of the contemplative life that one could draw from modern undergraduate and graduate schools that is cartoonish and false. The implication is that contemplation looks down upon the active life and consists in scholarship that draws solely from a lifetime of quiet reception to wisdom. To be contemplative is defined in an extreme and negative way: it is seen as a life that is not active, whereas the so-called active life is seen to consist in politics, business, or the usual life of human beings in which they have to do lots of things other than study or navel gaze.

Part of the reason for this is that young people go to college and graduate school—young people who haven’t yet figured out exactly what they want to do with their lives—and thus they read what they perceive to be the various distinctions and differences of vocations and careers (that they are also ignorant of) into what the words “active” and “contemplative” mean. This is similar to the opinion of some of those who were against the early Dominican order.

According to Russell Hittinger, on page 270 of The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in the Post-Christian World (read a review here):

William of Saint-Amour, a doctor of the Sorbonne, charged that the “double spirit” of action and contemplation embodied by the mendicants was a novel way of life that perverted the principles of both civil and ecclesiastical society. The mendicants, he asserted: violate the principle of a society of contemplatives by seeking to act on others rather than being purely receptive of divine grace . . .

It is hardly ever appreciated that St. Thomas Aquinas lived and breathed in an order unlike most others. The more “contemplative orders” would not have allowed him to travel, teach, preach and write as he did. Hittinger continues on page 271 with a paragraph I wish every student of St. Thomas was required to understand:

Thomas contends that the “active life” consists of more than political rule and mercantile pursuits. Granted that religious are neither magistrates or businessmen, they are “active” in other ways, including the communication of knowledge and wisdom by teaching and preaching. The active life, generically understood, is the communication of gifts. In this, all agents imitate God. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a society that is in every aspect receptive. Although societas is an analogous term, every society, he argues, is constituted by “communications” whereby goods are given and received. In Thomas’s works, every analogous use of the word societas is mirrored by uses of the word communicatio: communicatio oeconomica, communicatio spiritualis, communicatio civilis, and so forth. The word communicatio simply means making something common, one rational agent participating in the life of another. Society, for Aquinas, is not a thing, but an activity.

Think about what St. Thomas actually did: he defended his order from those inside and outside the Church who hated it, wrote advice to political leaders, wrote a lengthy work of apologetics to convert Muslims, wrote commentaries about a philosopher almost completely new to the western world, wrote a “textbook” for beginning theology students, and generally sought and fought to answer the most pressing, cutting-edge theological and philosophical issues of his time. He did all this mostly by drawing on his vast knowledge of the Church Fathers and Sacred Scripture and employing the power of prayerful reasoning.

Again, when he wrote about Aristotle, and incorporated Aristotle’s thought into his own thinking, he was writing about something that was largely new to the western world. He made Aristotle part of the tradition again, because he dove headlong into the rancorous issues of his time and argued that Aristotle was largely right. To think we should imitate him in all ways is presumptous of both our abilities and our knowlege of our own time, but as he is one of the Saints and the Doctor of the Church his life and works ought to be taken as a sort of exemplar—particularly for those of us who wish to focus our lives on studying and teaching truth.

Siris has some thoughts about Alanyzer’s thoughts concerning St. Thomas Aquinas and “Pure Act.” (Siris found this via Fides Quaerens Intellectum).

The Shulamite is already in action in the comments sections.