Episode 182: St. Thomas Aquinas - 700 Years Canonized!

This is Father Gregory Pine. And this is Father Jacob Bertrand Jancic. And welcome to God's Planning. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Father Jacob Bertrand. Father Gregory. We haven't been in studio together in some number of days and or months. Both apply. Ever. Okay. Well, here we are, and it's good to see you. And how are things? State of your soul. Oh gosh, not, we can't do that. That gets dark really quickly. So we're going to avoid that. I'm well. Things are good, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm not in Hanover right now. So I was going to say it's cold. That's always the easy thing to talk about. It's like the miserable weather wherever you live, which isn't really miserable. It's just weather. So, but yeah, things are good. Just standard parish living in the middle of winter in the Upper Valley. But I'm away from there right now. A little break. A little respite. And that's that, you know. Can't say much more. No, one cannot. And you? I'm doing well. I also live in a valley, a different one. Whether it's Upper or Lower, I haven't yet determined. But it's a valley known for its cheese, as are all valleys in Switzerland. So things in the Cheese Valley. That's delicious. Yeah, yeah. So the cows are doing well. They have been transferred from the Upper Pastures to the Lower Pastures. Sometimes by helicopter. And they seem pleased about the whole affair. And I was supportive from a distance. They're still making cheese, the cows? They are. At a lower altitude. Natural. Yeah. You don't want them trapped in an avalanche. I imagine shoveling out your cows is an ordeal. Yeah, it is. It's quite difficult, unless they're wearing avalanche tracker devices, which I would recommend for all cows hiking in the Swiss Alps. Boom. All cows listening to this episode. Speaking of cows, though, okay. So there's a story told of St. Thomas Aquinas. At one time, his fellow student brothers jokingly looked out the window and said, Thomas, there's a cow flying out here. And he came to the window, saw no cow flying, because it's the real world, not the fake world. And they snickered, and they were like, ha, ha, ha, we got you. And he said to them, I would rather believe that a cow flies than that of religious lies. Well, I don't mean to be the bad guy here, but I'm going to be. I don't think that ever happened, because the answer rhymes in English, and I'm sure he wasn't speaking English. Yeah. So I'm not convinced that that translates well. I was going to try to make something up in the limited Latin that I have, but I failed, at least in this time. But stay tuned, viewers, listeners, because maybe in 28 minutes, I'll have made something up. But that leads us seamlessly, no seams, none, into our topic for today, which is St. Thomas Aquinas, because this year marks 700 years since his canonization. Actually, we're in the midst of an especially abundant season of St. Thomas celebration, because this year is 700 years since his canonization. And then next year is 750 years since his death. And then the following year is 800 years since his birth. So hard to keep straight, but easy to celebrate. Canonization, death, birth. Exactly. Oh, that's easy. It's just reverse order. Exactly. So you can expect 16 encyclicals on the theme from the Holy Father. He's already told us. So I thought that we could chat about St. Thomas Aquinas, maybe tell some of our favorite St. Thomas stories, insofar as they've been a source of inspiration for us, and I imagine for the church entire. So get us started. Some favorite St. Thomas stories. Gosh, that's a lot of pressure. When I think of St. Thomas, often what comes to mind, this isn't a St. Thomas story per se, but it's another seamless transition into what I actually want to talk about. I think we had to take a class. Were we in the class together? The Life and Work of St. Thomas Aquinas. So it's a class we take our first spring. Is that right? Yeah. So first year at The House of Studies, we take a class on St. Thomas, his life, and his work. So we talk about his life and his work. Oh, my gosh. And the professor that we had for it was very intense, and one of the things that he had us do is sort of memorize the timeline of his life, the chronology of his life, and he would call on different people. At the beginning of each class, one of us would get called on to recite the timeline, as far as we've kind of gotten up to that point in his life in chronological order. But later in the semester, if you got called on, the more you had to remember. It reminded me a lot of that icebreaker game where you have to remember somebody's name and work backwards, and you're like, dang, I sat in the wrong spot in the circle because I'm at the end, and I'm never going to remember the names of all these people I don't care about. It's kind of like that, but we do care about St. Thomas. So when I think about his life, I often think about that class, and please don't call on me kind of thing, because yeah, I don't remember. But favorite stories about St. Thomas. It's a good question. I don't know. One of them, well, because we're starting with canonization, I'm going to start towards the end of his life. And I guess it's less St. Thomas, but more after his death. So he died in a Benedictine monastery, not in one of ours, right? Is that, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And this is really, I like telling people this about St. Thomas, because it kind of reveals the bizarre gruesomeness of collecting relics. So the monks boiled his body just to collect the bones, because they didn't want to hand them back over to the Dominicans. And so he's been kind of tossed around after his death a lot. So there was that, and then we got his body, and then the French now have his body because of the French Revolution, or his bones, at least his relics. Now, why does that inspire me? I don't really know, but it's a story that I like about St. Thomas. I mean, there are a lot more. We'll talk about more serious things, but that's at least, keep that in mind. In mind it is kept. Great. I was this past summer in Toulouse at the Couvent de Jacobin, where his bones are. I celebrated mass with my sister and a friend, which was great. I celebrated mass for my sister and a friend. My sister did not con-celebrate, let the record show. I'm sure in France, I would have been fine with a lot of the... So his bones are still there, and well testified to as like real in the sense that sometimes you get a mix of bones when you're moving relics about, and people claim that things are his bones when they're not his bones. But it's like when they did tests on the bones of St. Mary Magdalene and Marseilles, this is a first century woman who came from the region, which is present day Palestine. It's like, okay, let's go. Might be her. Chances are good. Okay. So some of my favorite St. Thomas stories, starting with his youth, you may think of these similar things that you think about flying cow stories, but apparently he would walk around the house with his little hand all balled up. And when his mother kind of prized whatever scrap of paper he had in his hand, it had the words Ave Marie on it. So Father Andrew Hofer recounts that story when he describes his Marian devotion. Sometimes you hear things said about St. Thomas like he didn't love Our Lady. We'll get to that at the end of the episode. And another thing is when he was given at the age of five to the monastery of Monte Cassino as a boy oblate, basically for his education. He was famous, not famous. I mean, he was known for tugging on the habits of the Benedictines in the monastery and asking them, what is God? Which is awesome. Because when I was five, I was asking like, when's the next meal? And instead, St. Thomas is asking deep, beautiful, contemplative questions. I imagine the monk's reaction to that was sort of like to swat him away because that would have been so obnoxious. I mean, great, it's beautiful, right? But it's also like, hit, beat it. Okay, well, let's go back and forth on the story of his choice to become a Dominican and then how his family felt about that. So when Monte Cassino, I think, was set about by Frederick Hohenstaufen, he had to leave, maybe at the age of 15. And then he went to the University of Naples to finish his studies, his initial studies. And when he was there, he met the Dominicans at one of their first convents because the order had just been founded in 1216 and this would have been in the 1240s. And so he decided to join them. But his parents had great designs on his life. They wanted him to be the abbot of Monte Cassino, the aforementioned Benedictine monastery. And so he tried to kind of sneak out of Italy for his novitiate, but that didn't work. So I don't know if you have favorite parts of what followed afterwards, but. Oh yeah, no, I mean, like, good on his mom because like, Mrs. Aquinas was like, really, that's not the last name, just so you know. But she was good. I mean, she was a woman that knew what she wanted. So when she learned that her son had joined this like ragtag group. So the thing with becoming abbot of Monte Cassino is that it came with a great deal of prestige. It was a massive monastery, tons of land, tons of money. The church in the Middle Ages had this clout in ways that it didn't before or after. So this was a really big thing. And so for her youngest son, who knows if he would have been, but they had their sights set on it for him to say, I'm going to go join this group of beggars and live poorly. But it was like, not a chance. So she sent her other sons to kidnap him, basically. And she kidnapped Thomas. I don't know if you can kidnap. I guess you can kidnap your own son. Yeah. So she did that and brought that to one of their castles in Roca Seca, right? In Roca Seca, and it kind of locked him away, thinking that, well, you can leave when you go back to the Benedictines. Now then we enter into a battle of wills and the divine will ended up winning, not Mrs. Aquinas's will. But Thomas was there for about a year, locked away. And during that time, his family, probably at the behest of his mother, tried a whole host of ways to convince him not to be a Dominican. Now, I believe, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but Thomas was in the Dominican habit at this point. That's what I remember. I don't know, yeah. He wore his habit the whole time. He refused to take off the habit. So a few, besides being locked away, the sort of famous story here is that they sent up, probably maybe, I don't know, his brothers or someone sent up a prostitute to try to get Thomas to sin against his vow of chastity. That didn't work. Thomas chased the woman out with a hot poker from the fireplace. I was going to say from the furnace, but it's fireplace. And as she ran out of the room, he traced the cross on the back of the door with the, whatever, from the hot poker. And it's from this episode, or after that, St. Thomas was girded with a cord around his waist by angels. And from that time, never suffered a temptation against chastity again. And some of you who are listening might be familiar with the angelic warfare confraternity, this confraternity that the order supports, endorses. That's part of the order that works to promote chastity in our own lives and in the world at large. But it comes from this episode of St. Thomas chasing this woman out and being girded by angels. So pretty cool. When I first thought I would love to be a Dominican priest, it was reading the life of St. Thomas Aquinas in the book, The Quiet Light by Louis de Waal. Just like historical fiction, super charming. Half of the book is about his sister Theodora and her like man interest, Serpere's root. I mean, it's great. But that time, his temptation and then his triumph and then his being girded by the angels with a special grace of chastity. And then there's this other encounter that Louis de Waal recounts where St. Thomas was in the process of memorizing sacred scripture, as one does, and his sisters would come to his cell and taken in the double sense of kind of monastic room slash place of imprisonment. And they would ask him questions about the faith. And there's this one story where his sister Murata asked him, Thomas, how does one become a saint or how do I become a saint? To which he responds, desire it. Which I found especially beautiful, not in the sense that we have to will it ourselves and God's not gonna give us any help, but in that God gives us desires. He heals and grows those desires and provided we follow those desires to their term, they'll lead us to him. And St. Thomas is portrayed in the book as being sorrowful that St. Benedict loses one of his sons when he decides to go from Monte Cassino to the Dominicans. But his sister Murata ended up becoming a Dominican abbess herself. So kind of cool little exchange there. A Benedictine abbess. A Benedictine abbess, yep, sorry. Okay, so any other final stories from St. Thomas's life of his sanctity, of his scholarship, of his other word that starts with an S? I don't know, I just wanted to have a list of three. Sanctity, scholarship. Superness. Abundance. Yes, exactly. I think, well, we should probably mention at least the end of his life when he stopped writing. So towards the end of his life in the, well, he died in what, 1274? So he was on his way to the second council of Leon and had some sort of incident where he fell off the horse that he was riding or whatever. He became sick, so this is why he ended up not going to the council. He never made it to the council. But that sort of sparked really the end of his, at least career, writing-wise, but also the beginning of the end of his life. So I don't know if you want to describe that a little bit. I think it said it was the Feast of St. Nicholas, so December 6th, 1273, the year before he died, that he was said to have had a mystical vision. And when asked about the vision, he said, compared with what I have seen, everything that I have written is as so much straw. So some people will say that he had a kind of glimpse of the beatific vision, like as it were, God pulled back the veil on eternity or on heaven and gave St. Thomas a sneak peek of what lay in store. But as a result of which, it brought him to silence. Or it brought him to a new stage of his contemplative life where he felt less motivated, or was less motivated to write any further. Not to say that he disavowed everything that he had written, because if he had done that, he would have burned it. Thankfully, he didn't. But in the sense that he realized its relative importance. It's such a great grace to be able to think about and to write about God. But at the end of the day, what we want is God himself. And we treasure those things insofar as they mediate that encounter. And so he just had a very profound experience of that. And it's very beautifully recounted in a book by Joseph Pieper called The Silence of St. Thomas, which is delightful and short, which is a killer combo. Okay, so maybe then at this stage, we can think a little bit about the sanctity of St. Thomas. We've highlighted some stories. And certainly it's helpful to meet St. Thomas the saint before you engage with St. Thomas the doctor of the church. Because sometimes people will say his writings are a bit dry, or they're a bit abstract, or they're a bit difficult. But when you meet him as a saint and you see some of these stories, you're more motivated, I think, to engage with his work because you realize that it issues from such a rich interior life. So yeah, are there particular virtues or particular graces that we see in St. Thomas's life that we can highlight now? Yeah, I would say two things that are kind of, well, I guess one is a story and one is kind of a recounting something of his life and of his work. So I don't know if they're particular virtues, but I'm going to say what I want to say anyways. So yeah, towards the end of his life, Thomas had this vision too from the cross where the Lord spoke to him and said, Thomas, you've written well of me. What do you seek or what do you desire? What do you want? And it said that Thomas replied to our Lord, non nisite domine, nothing but you, Lord. And for that, that's one of, that's I think the moment in Thomas's life that sticks out, that stands out to me the most. You were just talking about desires a moment ago, but yeah, we're often easily distracted by the things of this world or by our projections of what we want our relationship with the Lord to look like or what we think our sanctity ought to look like. And those not always inherently evil or bad or sinful, but they become stumbling blocks, distractions. And just that simple line, nothing but you, Lord, is, I mean, it's at the heart of the Christian life, just to sue our Lord and that's it. So I guess you can attribute all sorts of virtues to that theological virtues, the virtue of perseverance, you know, whatever that might be in its various forms in our own lives. But for me, Thomas's words there ring true and powerful in my own life, in my own thought, in my own prayer. The other thing too, or yeah, the other thing that I am thinking of is also goes along with what you were saying, sometimes criticisms of St. Thomas come along the lines of him being too scholastic, too cold, too removed. You know, there's not emotion or affect in what he writes and it's just like dry and boring. And maybe in some ways, because it's kind of the project of what he was doing in a way he was kind of writing, like the Summa by way of example, it's kind of like a science, it's like a textbook. It's not like a work of emotional spirituality, you know, but that doesn't mean that that's not there. And I think we see his love for our Lord, his desire for our Lord, especially when he talks about the Eucharist and all the sort of hymns and the prayers that we're familiar with for the Feast of Corpus Christi and that we use at adoration and benediction, Thomas wrote these. And I think in these, in the words that he wrote to worship our Lord in the Eucharist, there's such like a depth of friendship and desire and real love for our Lord that it just kind of like sets the heart on fire. And this is why the churches used these prayers and hymn and turn them into hymns and stuff throughout the centuries. So those two, again, I don't know if I would, perhaps the virtue of worship of whatever, but of charity, I think too there, but those stick out in pretty significant ways in my mind. Yeah. Thinking about the Eucharist, it's said that when St. Thomas was writing the treatise on the Eucharist and the Summa Theologiae at the end of his life, so this would have been in 1273, because it's like some of the last questions that he wrote, that when he would encounter a difficulty, obviously it's one of the most difficult teachings in the church's doctrine, he would go to the chapel and then he would lean his head against the tabernacle in supplication, which I find especially beautiful. We lived with a man for a time in our life who would sometimes do similar things. He used two canes and he would toddle his way into the chapel at random hours and sometimes embrace the tabernacle. I think of St. Thomas in that regard. I received that as counsel from my spiritual director when it comes to navigating graduate studies. I was describing the fact that in the midst of four-hour and 35-minute work periods, I feel like slamming my hand in the freezer door at multiple junctures. He's like, yeah, don't do that. You might just visit the chapel. I was like, great. Yeah, sounds better. St. Thomas is a great lover of the Eucharist. It was said that he would celebrate Mass and then he would serve another Mass as an act of thanksgiving. Mass might take 25 minutes to celebrate and then he would serve an additional 25-minute Mass just to come down from the experience. That's pretty wild. Things about St. Thomas that I love especially are his wisdom in the sense that St. Thomas sees the thing for what it is and he tries to call the thing by what it is. Yeah, I know it's just easy to be motivated by other things when we are researching or when we're reading or writing or communicating in whatever way, shape, or form. I think in the 21st century, people want to say something new. They want to say something clickable. They want to say, you know, whatever. But with St. Thomas, he's just passionate about the truth and he knows for a fact the truth serves only its slaves and he will willingly embrace that servitude until his last breath. And so when he was at Faustinova at this monastery where he eventually died, he makes this kind of last will and testament where he submits all that he has thought and written to the judgment of the church for his ultimately for love and service of the church that he wrote what he did. So when you read St. Thomas Aquinas, I think one of the things that I love about it and why his thought has a lot of traction in the last, you know, 50 years is because it corresponds. I think that when you read really smart Christians, sometimes you're like, that's awesome, but I don't know how to cobble together something to communicate further. It's like I have to memorize a bunch of things, but I don't know how they all fit. Whereas when you read St. Thomas, you're like, ooh, I think he's helping to mediate an encounter with reality itself. And so it's orderly, right? It's wise and it commends, you know, the very clarity of the thing commends it to your study. So his devotion, you know, his life of worship, his life of wisdom, we talked a little bit about his life of chastity and that one encounter with the prostitute and the way that the angels girded him with a belt, which, you know, the angelic warfare confraternity continues to promote. So St. Thomas, great, strong lover of God. Maybe for some final thoughts, any things that we want to set the record straight on, any things that we want to add by way of clarification or emphasis? I don't know. Well, one thing stands out. Great, I see, right? The Immaculate Conception, the one time Thomas was ever wrong. But he really wasn't wrong. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Well, we just had an episode on the Immaculate Conception. So I think Fr. Joseph Anthony and Fr. Patrick talked a little bit about it, but you'll often hear people say, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas was wrong and that calls into question, dot, dot, dot, and thus and such. He was wrong for the right reasons. Let's be clear. Amen. So St. Thomas Aquinas wanted to make sure that we didn't say that people were saved by someone other than Christ or people didn't stand in need of salvation. And so he's concerned that the Blessed Virgin Mary is saved by Christ, but he didn't yet get the whole time travel piece that Blessed John Dunskotas figured out subsequently. So we profess now that Our Lady was preserved from sin. We're liberated from sin, but all of that comes from Our Lord's passion, death and resurrection. But Thomas couldn't quite see it that way. And so he wanted to make sure that Our Lady was saved by our Lord Jesus Christ. And so he has her conceived in sin, but immediately sanctified in the womb. Whereas in the subsequent tradition, we see it for what it is. So that's a good one. A good one to have good or a good one to get straight. And St. Thomas, you know, he says some things that are indebted to the biology or to the cosmology of his day, which are incorrect, which we know now to be incorrect, but he often distances himself from the scientific theory and makes his philosophical and theological points in a way that endures or in a way that will often transcend the limitations of his age. Yeah, I don't know. Other things, thoughts, hopes, dreams? I think more of a general kind of, I don't know, like 50,000 foot view of St. Thomas already mentioned this sort of, I think unfair criticisms of Thomas being dry, scholastic, unapproachable, often levied by those who haven't spent time praying with getting to know or reading St. Thomas. So I think you mentioned a book earlier by Joseph Pieper. There are a bunch of other texts that are sort of summaries of Thomas or good ways to get in to learn about, to read him and to learn about and become familiar. I too have read that novel by Louis de Waal, The Quiet Light on St. Thomas's life. So if Thomas isn't part of your life or a friend in your spiritual life, there are ways to begin to access him. And I think you're absolutely right that we have to know the saint, the man, first. If you just open the summa in the middle and kind of guess, it's true. So yeah, the perennialness of St. Thomas is, yeah. And maybe we could recommend just some ways to start studying St. Thomas. So we read that book, The Quiet Light, which I think is a great place to start for readers of all levels. And then if you're thinking a little more like St. Thomas, the philosopher and theologian, we, in that course that we described, read Joseph Pieper's Guide to Thomas Aquinas, which is good and helpful. He's always clear. And then we also read Jean-Pierre Tourelle's introduction. So there's a two-volume introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas. The first one is Life and Works, which is kind of more academic-y. And then the second one is Spiritual Master, which is, you know, it still has footnotes, but it's thinking more about the kind of overarching spiritual vision of St. Thomas Aquinas. So those books are super helpful. And then people also read G.K. Chesterton's The Dumb Ox, which is wild and Chestertonian. So you'll learn more about G.K. Chesterton than you do about St. Thomas Aquinas, as is always the case. Delightful man to learn about, though. So that's another one. I don't know if you have go-to things or things you recommend. Yeah, I like Father Walter Farrell's My Way of Life as a sort of spiritual summary of the Summa. I think that's really beautiful. It can be a little dense, but I think is a nice way to access some of St. Thomas's thoughts, especially in a spiritual kind of less academic or scholastic kind of way. So I'd add that to the list. Nice, yeah. And then if you're thinking of reading St. Thomas himself, people forget St. Thomas was a Dominican friar, so he preached. You think about the three responsibilities of a university professor were to read sacred scripture and comment it, to dispute in the context of the classroom and the public square, and then to preach. So he preached academic sermons, but he also preached popular sermons. And it's said that he would move his audience and himself to tears when he preached in his native tongue. So a good place that I recommend for people to start are his sermons on the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, just wheelhouse Christianity. And Sophia Institute Press has collected those together in what they call the Aquinas Catechism, although they change the names of their books maybe every 20 years. So maybe it's got a different name now. Three Greatest Prayers, I think it was named that at some point. Yeah, I have that volume titled that way. Okay. And then Sophia also publishes an Aquinas prayer book, which is a nice little introduction to St. Thomas, the strong lover of God. And then going from there, if there are particular books of the Bible that you're interested in, St. Thomas commented about a third of the sacred scriptures. So he commented two of the gospels. He commented all of Paul's letters, so through Hebrews and including Hebrews. And then he also commented some Old Testament books. So maybe if you're interested, for instance, in the Gospel of John, you can read St. Thomas. It'll be a little more theological than other commentaries, but still very enlightening, still very beautiful. Yeah, anything else? I think that's a good place to start. Nice. Yeah. A good place to start indeed. So in this, yeah, in this year that commemorates the 700th anniversary of his canonization as we gear up for these three years of St. Thomas celebration, what did we say, 16 encyclicals will be written? 27? That's what you said. Okay, yeah, perfect. Yeah, we'll certainly be praying through the intercession of St. Thomas Aquinas for, you know, our listeners, for their growth in the spiritual life, borne on by prayer and by study. So, boom. Any final thoughts? Go St. Thomas. Go Team St. Thomas. Go St. Thomas individually. Go all associated with him. Boom. All right. So thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Godsplaining. If you are considering making a donation to the podcast, please consider doing so monthly through patreon.com slash godsplaining. Please be sure to review the episode, to like and subscribe on your podcast app on YouTube, depending on where you consume these things. 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