…..all is straw.
St. Thomas Aquinas undertook a monumental task when he chose to write one of the most ambitious and intellectual works ever known: the Summa Theologiae. It was intended to be a teaching manual and its purpose was not to impress scholars but to teach beginners. He even said so in the introduction: “Because the doctor of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners”.
It is enormous. Clocking in at nearly two million words, 512 question and 2,700 articles it dwarfs the bible ( 783,000 words ) and even War and Peace ( 587,000 words ). As a Vajrayana buddhist and a software engineer, I find it fascinating for two reasons: the articles follow a style of formal debate encoded into text ( much like the tradition of Vajrayana monks debating buddhist philosophy ) and that each article resembles modern programming logic.
IF objection
THEN analyze
RETURN solution
HANDLE exception
It’s divided into three major parts: God and creation, human life and ethics, and Christ and salvation. Many of his psychological insights anticipate modern cognitive science in his analysis of emotion, motivation, habit, decision-making, pleasure, addiction and moral development.
Among the many revolutionary characteristics of this work, it integrated Aristotle with Christianity. Before Aquinas, Aristotle had been viewed with suspicion but he showed that reason and faith are compatible, and that science and theology are compatible. Ultimately, Summa Theologiae influenced Western civilization profoundly with its influence extending into law, ethics, philosophy, political theory and psychology.
If western philosophy were software, Plato could be thought of as a theoretical framework, Aristotle as a logical engine, Augustine as a spiritual architecture and Aquinas as the full operating system.
Amazingly, Aquinas did not consider it to be his greatest work at the end because he left it incomplete and that it what had to happen in his evolution.
Christian thinkers often distinguish Cataphatic theology, which is knowing God through concepts versus Apophatic theology which is knowing God beyond concepts. Aquinas spent his life in the former and at the end, the latter. The bar bisecting the former from the latter took place on December 6, 1273.
On the feast of St. Nicholas, Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel at Naples and during Mass, Aquinas had an intense mystical experience. We do not have Aquinas’s own description but immediately afterwards, he stopped writing completely and refused to continue his greatest work, the Summa Theologiae. He became quiet, withdrawn and contemplative. His close friend Reginald of Piperno urged him to continue writing and his famous quote was…
“I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems to me as straw”.
He never wrote again and three months later, in March 1274, he died at age 49.
You can use science to describe love. Synapses fire, and chemicals are released. While that is true, the experience is greater. St Thomas Aquinas climbed the mountain of reason and realized that the summit was beyond words.
What did he mean by “straw” ? He did not mean that his writings were false. He meant something much deeper. In medieval symbolism, “straw” has specific meanings:
- – Useful but temporary
- – A support, not the thing itself
- – Something that helps reach the real thing
Aquinas believed that reason and faith are compatible and that human intellect can know truth about God.
Then suddenly: silence.
After his mystical experience Aquinas realized that direct experience of God surpasses intellectual knowledge of God. It does not contradict it.
It surpasses it.
Like reading about music versus hearing it.
Like studying love versus being in love.
His writings were true but were only shadows compared to the reality.
Aquinas never said reason is useless. He spent his life proving its importance, but realized that reason is limited. The point here is that reason alone is not the final encounter with reality.
Aquinas never returned to complete Summa Theologiae, and it stopped abruptly. The Church later completed it using his earlier writings.
What he said was “My greatest achievement is small compared to the truth itself” and that is the opposite of intellectual pride. Aquinas was the greatest intellect of his era.