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St. Thomas Aquinas, Pray for Us

"Aristotle became the new God. His writings, inflated by misleading commentaries, were inadequate in themselves, while their excessive naturalism, together with some particularly serious blemishes, threatened to lead Christian thought astray... Even the teaching on God was endangered... God has no definite personality; there is no affirmation of providence, nor even of his freedom in creating. While he is admitted as the final cause, his efficient causality, if not openly denied, is at least made very doubtful.

Similarly, Aristotle makes the soul something above matter; it is "separate"; it comes to the body "from without," as it were "by the door." There is no certitude that it belongs to the individual, that it guarantees him a really spiritual and immortal life, that it makes him really responsible. He leaves it an open question whether morality is a mere whim, or corresponds to a divine order. Everything is vague and ambiguous enough to enable commentators ... to interpret it in a sinister sense.

People began to be known as Aristotelians ... and their Christianity was at a low ebb. Under the aegis of "the Philosopher" and his followers, they disputed the most fundamental & certain of the Catholic dogmas. The creation of the world in time, the divine government & Fatherhood, the individuality & immortality of the soul, free will, and moral responsibility gave place to an eternal world, an abstract God cut off from all communication with his creatures, a unique Intellect for all men, which alone was immortal, a strict determinism, physical & psychological, which rules out all responsible action. That was knowledge. The Christian faith, the basis of civilization & the mother of all learning, could not be openly attacked, but there was always this bias, which was later to call forth St. Thomas's most indignant protests.

There was only one thing to be done: to take over the new doctrines & restate them: to refine the gold. Instead of casting aside the finest of all human philosophies, out of a kind of cowardly prudence, was it not better for Catholics to adapt it to Christian thought, by interpreting, revising, completing it, and thereby to make it their own? That was what St. Thomas set out to do."

-A. G. Sertillanges OP, St. Thomas Aquinas - Scholar, Poet, Mystic, Saint

"[St. Thomas Aquinas's] holiness was intellectual, and he gave intellectual expression to the deep, mystical experiences of the greatest souls. His inner, mystical life, his secret communing with God, become in his writings so many abstract concepts, to all appearances as lifeless as the principles of geometry.

He does not use the language of a St. Teresa or a Ruysbroek or a John of the Cross. His vocation was to be a constraining and sobering influence; everything was subordinated to his proper work of teaching, which was not allowed to suffer for the sake of discussing what had no direct bearing on his teaching. The heart and the imagination must be rigorously subordinated to the intelligence.

His asceticism, his religion, his holiness, his oblation, adoration, holocaust was the right use of his reason. "The hero," says Emerson, "is he who is steadfastly concentrated," and it is in this sense that St. Thomas was a genius in philosophy, morality, and mysticism."

-A. G. Sertillanges, OP, Thomas Aquinas - Scholar, Poet, Mystic Saint

A Different Worldview and a Different History; Catholicism and Orthodoxy

The Roman Catholic Scholastic thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote in his massive work, the Summa Theologiae, that theology is the "highest scientia" since a high degree of rationality is required to understand the most important and complex philosophical concepts about God. The universities that developed during the Scholastic period in the Christian West were intended to teach students how to deal in this "science" of theology through rigorous conceptual analysis. Theology was considered to be the preeminent Scholastic endeavor, a good thing in many ways. Yet, as a result of the high regard for logic and rationality in medieval Roman Catholicism, those who studied and taught (the "doctors") came to be more highly regarded than the monks and nuns (the "religious") whose main vocation was to pray.

Theology began to be expounded by scholars outside of the context of prayer, pastoral ministry, and liturgical worship. Pelikan traces this specific change in the West through the changing job description of the theologian. He notes that, between AD 100 and 600, most theologians were bishops; from 600 to 1500 in the West they were monks. But after 1500, Western theologians are university professors: "Gregory I, who died in 604, was a bishop who had been a monk; Martin Luther, who died in 1546, was a monk who became a university professor. Each of these lifestyles has left its mark on the job description of a theologian." After the sixteenth century in the West, the task of theology increasingly became separated from its earlier moorings to the worship of the community and the spiritual disciplines.

From an Eastern Orthodox point of view, knowledge of God comes only from an encounter with the God who has revealed Himself: "What may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them" (Rom. 1:19). Thus, theology can never be separated from prayer, worship, and contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Metropolitan Ware affirms that all true Orthodox theology is mystical: "Just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology, when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism, 'academic' in the bad sense of the word." That is to say, Orthodox mystical theology guards against either unacceptable extreme: subjective and heretical, or arid and academic.

- A Basic Guide to Eastern Orthodox Theology, Eve Tibbs