Heythrop College Homily for the Mass of the Feast of St Thomas Aquinas
For St. Thomas Aquinas our natural way of being is good. We are good because the goodness of God is gifted to all living things and constitutes them. We come to know this goodness as truth (Veritas) through two channels of revelation for Thomas. The channel of ‘natural revelation’ which is acquired through correct reasoning about nature and the channel of ‘supernatural revelation’ or grace which is acquired through Tradition (understood as Scripture, the prophets, the magisterium all inspired by the Holy Spirit). Grace and nature operate in harmony to bring us to know the truth of our goodness and of the goodness of God.
Celebrating the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in a Catholic College within a secular University illuminates something of the meaning of what we are about at Heythrop College. Even more than displaying a magnanimous gesture in a Jesuit college to a Dominican thinker, it goes to the very heart of how we understand the meaning of teaching and learning theology, philosophy, and the social sciences here. St. Thomas, more than any other Catholic thinker has inspired us with a vision of how grace and nature, faith and reason, the secular and the sacred, church and culture correlate with one another, as Pope Benedict speaks of it, or put simply, fit together. St. Thomas’ appropriation of Aristotelian thought and his use of it to think the faith in the thirteenth century is truly revolutionary for its time and he would, unsurprisingly perhaps, be considered suspect for it by the church authorities. Thomas is a precursor of what would later arise in the Renaissance and its aftermath as a Christian humanism the attempt to think the human within a Christological and Trinitarian framework. As the great 20th Century German medievalist Martin Grabmann noted, Thomas is one of the greatest Christian thinkers about culture even, he thought, excelling what Dante would achieve in his Divine Comedy. Why is this? What is it about Thomas’ thought that gives him such force and such depth even for us today? In what will become characteristic of later thinkers like Hegel in the German idealist tradition, Thomas understands in his own dialectical method of theology and philosophy just how grace negates, affirms, and re-orders human culture. He draws on the best of human culture (and that’s Aristotle for him) and confronts it with the Christian Tradition. Not in a way, as in some theological circles today which too easily settle for simply a rejection of secular culture nor in a way which as in nineteenth century Liberal Protestantism and some Catholic currents too easily simply accommodated the Tradition to secular culture; but rather, he seasons secular culture with the Tradition just like salt seasons food. Supernatural revelation dialectically correlates with natural revelation.
This spirit of seasoning is no better shown than in one of the mottos of the Dominican order to which Thomas belonged: Contemplata aliis tradere – To contemplate and to share the fruits with others. In silence and contemplation, in the school of prayer, God gives wisdom to us. It is, as Jacques Maritain would say, a special way of knowing that we receive as people who pray, who celebrate the sacraments, and who engage in charitable works: infused knowledge as the mystical theologians will call it. We can only give what we have first received in prayer, sacramental celebration, and charitable and even political action. Yes, political action too, since what we do of goodness is ultimately what is done with us by God, as David recognises in our first reading today (2 Sam 7: 18-19, 24-29). As he puts it, “Who am I, Lord God, and who are the members of my house that you have brought me to this point.” Notice the passive construction of this phrase to manifest the challenging paradox of all human action personal, social, and political oriented towards the good. David is here speaking of the establishment of the Kingship of Israel, the house of David and the revelation that this is God’s action for the people of Israel. This is beautifully echoed in our Psalm today too (Ps 132) and the response we sang “The Lord God will give him the throne of David, his father.” Thomas expresses this mystery well when he comments in his meditation on today’s Gospel, Mk 4: 21-25, that “We ought to do good because all things are naturally intended to do good and whenever a person sacrifices themselves, that is a sign of divine goodness. The goodness of God is poured forth in all things. It is a great indication of divine goodness that each creature is compelled to make some sacrifice.” Sacrifice or intention oriented towards the good is our union with God in the operations of prayer, the celebration of the sacraments, and all our daily actions. This is a way to understand those challenging words of our Gospel today, “Take care what you hear. The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you, and still more will be given to you. To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not even what he has will be taken away.” Only goodness can increase as it is, it exists, evil no matter how seemingly real it may appear is ultimately in itself non-being or nothingness, as St. Augustine will speak of it in his Enchiridion and City of God.
This is why St. Thomas is such an important thinker for us at a college like Heythrop situated in a secular university. He inspires us to believe in all human culture naturally oriented towards the good and this is what the diverse rational operations of theology, philosophy, and the social sciences at their best manifest. All which humans create in culture through theology, philosophy, the social sciences, music, art, natural sciences, sport and so on; all which manifest our natural way of being embodied rational creatures is good and reflects however dimly, the goodness of God.
If for Portia, it is “mercy which seasons justice” for our great Dominican thinker it is grace which seasons nature. Amen.
Anthony J. Carroll SJ.