Tuesday, January 28, 2003

We are celebrating the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, priest and doctor of the church. In the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, we read the words: “I pleaded and the spirit of wisdom came to me, I preferred her to scepter and throne and deemed riches nothing in comparison with her, nor did I liken any priceless gem to her.”

This is a great image of the wonderfulness of wisdom,  that it’s superior to everything else we can possibly obtain.  Wisdom is understanding God, understanding everything around us the way God understands things.  It’s a knowledge that is the deepest of all knowledge.

It’s striking that the Book of Wisdom refers to wisdom as “her”, as though there was nothing greater to compare wisdom to than a beautiful woman.  I prefer her to scepter and throne, to riches nothing else can compare.  St. Thomas Aquinas recognized that and he pursued Wisdom in an extraordinary way, not only because he was a brilliant man but because he loved God with all his heart.  The two together, wisdom and love of God,  are what made him a great theologian.  Theologians are not just men or women who know theology and who know about God. They are also people who are very much in love with God. And Thomas Aquinas was.  He came from a very important family and, as a young man, discovered the Dominicans, shortly after the Dominicans had been established as a religious order in the early 13th century.  

St. Thomas was attracted to the holiness of his brothers in the Dominican order and he was attracted to the idea of preaching and learning about God.  He was a brilliant man.  He loved God with all his heart and decided to follow this way, though he came from an important family, and his family was upset.  They even locked him up for a few years in their castle to try to knock some sense into his head and get him to abandon this craziness of becoming a Dominican, a preacher, and a poor man who would have nothing.  But Thomas recognized he had everything because he’d be able to pursue the wisdom of God, and he’d be able to love God with all his heart. So after two years his family gave up and let him go, and he went back to pursuing his vocation as a Dominican.   He became a great learned man in the University of Naples, and later on in Paris.  He was able to draw the truth from the reality around him, the truth from the scriptures and the things that God has revealed through the centuries. He was able to reach into those things and determine how they applied to the world as we know it.  He based a great deal of his philosophy on Aristotle, but also on Plato and not only on those brilliant pagan thinkers, but also on the Fathers of the Church.  He was able to bring all these thoughts together and synthesize them to help us better understand the Eucharist, the Church, and the sacraments. He wrote about the Our Father, and about the divinity and humanity of Christ.  He helps us understand how something can be one thing even when it appears to be something entirely different.  He was a profound thinker and defender of the Holy Eucharist and of Jesus’ real presence in the Blessed Sacrament.  The hymn “Adoro te Devote”, which is a very famous old hymn, was composed by Thomas. 

Thomas was a very gentle soul and he really was in love with God.  When God appeared to him in a vision, after he had written so well, Our Lord said to him, “ You have written well of me Thomas, what would you have as a reward?” Thomas immediately responded, “You, My Lord.”  That was all he wanted, and of course that’s eventually what he received because Our Lord did bring him to himself.  St. Thomas died at a relatively young age, when he about fifty years old. Before he died, he had another vision in which God revealed himself to Thomas in such a way that all of the writings of Thomas —which were brilliant insights into God’s nature – then seemed to the saint to be “straw”. Thomas’ assistant, Br.. Reginald, tried to convince him to finish the last books of his masterpiece, the “Summa Theologica”. Thomas couldn’t, because after having seen what he had seen of God’s wisdom, all his earthly knowledge and learning seemed unimportant and inadequate.

Thomas was a very holy man, and he died in a very saintly way.  He is a great example to us that the pursuit of wisdom should be placed over every other thing in our lives. 

There are many things that present themselves as good to us, but the pursuit of wisdom, the desire to know the truth, is our highest good. If we know the truth about ourselves, about God, and about the world, we are free.  And that’s one of the things that Thomas reveals to us through his writing, that the truth conquers ignorance, it helps us to be more confident in being able to defend our faith, and it leads to true freedom and lasting happiness. This knowledge helps us at times when we do not feel inclined to make an effort to read more about our faith, to learn more about the teachings of the church, to understand more about the sacraments, prayer, and the church.  The world really doesn’t understand these things.  In the “New York Times”, in the secular media, the Catholic church is not presented accurately.  And yet we rely heavily on these sources for information, and so do our colleagues at work. To really understand the Church,  we have to say: “ I want to know the truth so I can counter whatever confusion there may be in the world about the church,  the sacraments,  the priesthood, celibacy, and euthanasia. The Church’s stand on these, and other, issues  are a bulwark against the ignorance and therefore the enslavement of falsehood which the world suffers from today. “

So let’s ask St. Thomas Aquinas to inspire us to have that longing for wisdom that he had — not just for the sake of knowing more,  but in order to love God more and then to love others. We ask the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Mother — to whom St. Thomas had great devotion — to intercede for us. 

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