by Kevin Vost
3G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (New York: Doubleday Image, 1956), 80.
4Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 85, art. 7.
5In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that 22.8 percent of more than thirty-five thousand American adults polled about their religious beliefs identified themselves as either atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” up from 16.1 percent only seven years before. Michael Lipka, “10 Facts About Atheists,” Pew Research Center, June 1, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/01/10-facts-about-atheists/.
6Pope John Paul II, encyclical letter Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998), preamble. Pope Benedict XVI spoke as well of the “friendship” of reason and faith in his papal address of March 24, 2010.
7Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 49, art. 1.
8Ibid., I, Q. 1, art. 8.
9Ibid., I-II, Q. 1, art. 10.
10Pope Leo XIII exhorted the Church to “restore the golden wisdom of Thomas and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic Faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences.” See Pope Leo XIII, encyclical Aeterni Patris (August 4, 1879).
11Thomas’s brief letter can be found online in various formats and translations. I found the original Latin and an English translation in a wonderful little book by St. Thomas Aquinas and Victor White, How to Study: Being the Letter of St. Thomas Aquinas to Brother John, De Modo Studendi (Oxford: Oxonian Press, 1953). An English translation also appears spread throughout the chapters of A. G. Sertillanges and Mary Ryan, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1948).
12Truth from the human perspective is the correspondence between reality and our understanding of it, conformity between thing and thought. Not only do created things conform or correspond to God’s thought, but “His act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being and intellect.” Truth does not merely exist in God, as it can in us, but “He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth.” Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 16, art. 5.
Part 1
Navigating the Small Streams of Knowledge
Chapter 1
Speak Slowly and Carry a Big Heart and Mind
Be slow to speak, and slow to enter the common room where people chat.
Docility: The Willingness to Be Taught
Who better to learn how to learn from than one of the world’s greatest teachers and the patron saint of scholars? Thomas, echoing Aristotle, wrote that “a characteristic of one possessing science is the ability to teach.”13 This is because a learner is “in potency” to learning; that is, he has an active, yet unrealized, potential to acquire new knowledge, but he must be led to that knowledge by someone in whom it is already actualized, someone who already knows what the student is trying to learn. Not only was Thomas’s own potential for learning certainly unusual, and perhaps unsurpassed, but he was always extremely docile, that is, willing to learn from others, for “docility” derives from the Latin docere — to teach.
Docility seems to have lost its connection to the willingness to be taught and has connotations of passivity and subservience, something to be avoided. But Thomas’s docility could not have been more vibrant and active. He sought knowledge about the highest of things and sought out the very best teachers, both those living, such as his mentor St. Albert the Great, and those no longer living, such as the greatest philosophers and Church Fathers who lived before him, most notably St. Augustine and Aristotle, whose names and writings appear hundreds of times in the Summa Theologica.
Thomas’s greatest teacher of all, however, was Jesus Christ, the God-Man and the “most excellent of teachers,” who taught not through writings but in “that manner of teaching whereby His doctrine is imprinted on the hearts of His hearers” and “as one having power” through the words and deeds of His life.14
Thomas not only devoured the teaching of his human mentors but also digested, altered, corrected, and improved them at times, making the truths that they discovered his own through a lifetime of thought and experience. It was his lifelong zeal as a student, along with the grace of God, that rewarded Thomas with the knowledge and wisdom that equipped him so well to teach others.
Let’s examine in this chapter, then, a few ways he can teach us all to yearn to learn and to acquire the kind of knowledge that someday might turn us all into some manner of teachers — those who help spread the golden wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, full of valuable nuggets culled not only from the earth, but from the Good News of that greatest of teachers, Jesus Christ.
First, we will look at the brief letter St. Thomas wrote when Brother John asked him for study tips; then we’ll explore the depths of meaning in his first simple precept: “Be slow to speak, and slow to enter the common room where people chat.”
A Letter of St. Thomas to Brother John on How to Study15
Because you have asked me, Brother John, most dear to me in Christ, how to set about acquiring the treasure of knowledge, this is my advice to you; namely, that you should choose to enter by small rivers, and not go straight into the sea; for difficult things should be reached by way of easy things. Such is therefore my advice on your way of life:
Be slow to speak, and slow to enter the common room where people chat.
Hold fast to purity of conscience.
Do not cease to make time for prayer.
Love to be frequently in your cell, if you wish to be admitted to the wine cellar.
Show yourself amiable to everybody, or at least try; but become overly familiar with no one, for familiarity breeds contempt and introduces complications that will impede study.
Also, do not get enmeshed in the words and deeds of worldly people.
Above all, flee from aimless conversations.
Do not fail to imitate the lives of saintly and noble men.
Do not place value on who says what, but rather, commit to your memory what true things are said.
Try to understand whatever you read and to verify whatever is doubtful.
Put whatever you learn in the cupboard of your mind as if you were filling a cup to the brim.
“Seek not the things that are too high for thee.”16
Follow in the footsteps of blessed Dominic, who brought forth useful and wonderful leaves, flowers, and fruits in the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts for as long as life was his fellow traveler. If you shall have followed these steps, you will be able to attain whatever you desire. Farewell!
On the Benefits of Engaging the Intellect before the Tongue
We covered Thomas’s introductory paragraph in our introduction. His first piece of advice — “be slow to speak” — recalls the old maxim “Still waters run deep.” There is certainly a sense in which each of Thomas’s precepts are commonplaces, ordinary bits of advice embodying the kind of common sense that experienced parents or grandparents might share. Perhaps your parents or grandparents even told you long ago that God gave us two ears and only one mouth! Well, there is good reason that such maxims become common over time. Indeed, we are at risk if we should ever forget them. “The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims,” wrote Father Sertillanges a few generations ago.17 This first bit of wisdom is scriptural as well: “Be quick to hear, slow to speak (James 1:19); “Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent” (Prov. 17:28). Abraham Lincoln, steeped in Scripture, would quip, “It is better to remain silent and seem a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt!”
To be slow to speak entails that we think before we speak, that we listen to others while they talk, rather than merely preparing our own response, and that we take time as well to listen to God speaking within us first so that the Holy Spirit can teach us what to say (see Luke 12:12). Such slo
wness of speech builds in us docility both to earthly teachers and to the Heavenly Teacher.
In regard to this first maxim, Thomas clearly practiced what he preached. Indeed, that is how he acquired his nickname “the Dumb Ox”! Thomas was barely out of his teens when he went to the University of Paris to study with his great mentor, St. Albert the Great, the quintessential German professor, who would go on to become the patron saint of scientists. Judging by Thomas’s massive frame and very quiet demeanor, his fellow students assumed he was a not-very-bright country bumpkin, and they dubbed him the Dumb Ox. The most literal meaning of “dumb” is an inability or unwillingness to speak, and its secondary meaning, as you well know, is dull-wittedness. Well, one day, one of his more considerate fellow students offered to “help” the young ox with a difficult lesson. The normally taciturn Thomas proceeded to explain the passage to him with a depth of understanding that made the student’s jaw drop.
St. Albert, their master, had been aware of Thomas’s prodigious mental powers all along. He informed his students that the “bellowing” of the Dumb Ox would one day be heard around the world. Brother John sought his bellowing in their day — and here we are, in all parts of the world, attentively listening to his wise bellowing nearly eight hundred years later!
Thomas gave one other piece of advice here, grown from his experience in religious community life. He warns Brother John not too readily to seek out the common gathering room if the purpose is merely to chat, distracting him from things that really matter. We might think of such common, chatting rooms in our own lives, be it the office water cooler, the gym’s locker room, a local pub, or wherever it might be, and ask ourselves if we enter them too eagerly and too frequently, frittering time away that might be better spent in more important endeavors.
Doctor’s Orders ✍
Prescription for Taming Your Tongue and Unleashing Your Mind
Reflect
Which lessons within this chapter struck a chord with you? Have you trained yourself in docility, becoming willing to learn from anyone who might possess knowledge or perspectives you may lack? Do you tend to speak first and think later, with perhaps at times unfortunate results? If so, can you work on slowing down just a bit and training your tongue to look before it leaps? Do you like to think and grow in knowledge but are too reticent to speak out and share what you have learned with others? A motto of St. Thomas’s Dominican Order is “to share with others the fruits of contemplation,” and Thomas himself would write: “For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so it is better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.”18 And, of course, the greatest Teacher of all advises us not to hide our lights under baskets or keep our talents buried under the ground (see Matt. 5:14–16; 25:14–30).
Read
Wonderful insights on Thomas’s letter on study can be found in Victor White’s Letter of St. Thomas to Brother John, if you can track down a copy, (perhaps through interlibrary loan, as I did). First published in 1947, it is barely more than forty delightful pages long. Happily, far more readily available in multiple editions is A. D. Sertillanges’s aforementioned masterpiece, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First published in French in 1920, this book is also inspired by Thomas’s letter and contains more than 180 pages of elaborative insights. St. Thomas also writes specifically and briefly about docility as a part of the virtue of prudence in his Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 49, art. 3. Among Thomas’s other writings bearing on learning is his De Magistro (On the Teacher), as can be found in Mary Helen Mayer, M.A., ed., The Philosophy of Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas.19
Remember
Thomas was a master of learning, of reasoning, and indeed of remembering, too (as we’ll see in chapter 7). At this point in our journey upstream, I’ll simply invite you to memorize the gist of the meaning (not the exact words — which were originally in Latin anyway!) of at least one of each chapter’s lessons as we progress through the book. To give you a head start: chapter 1’s title was “Speak Slowly and Carry a Big Heart and Mind.”20 It addressed this Thomistic precept: “Be slow to speak, and slow to enter the common room where people chat.” To listen before you speak is certainly one key lesson worth remembering.
Got it? Good. Now let’s continue our way upstream as St. Thomas reveals to us how maintaining a pure conscience and the habit of frequent prayer will lead us not only to knowledge, but to happiness and holiness, too.
13St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), 366. “Science” is used in the broadest sense here, synonymous with “knowledge,” from the Latin scire, “to know.”
14Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, Q. 42, a. 4, citing Matt. 7:29.
15I put this English version together after reviewing the original Latin text in Father White’s aforementioned book, along with his translation and other translations available online. The twelve bulleted precepts are addressed in order in each chapter of this book, though the second and third precepts, as well as the fifth and the seventh, are combined in this book’s chapters 2 and 4 because of their close interconnections. That simplifies things a bit and leaves us with a nice round ten chapters of reasonable length.
16Sir. 3:21. “Seek not what is too difficult for you” in the RSVCE.
17Sertillanges and Ryan, The Intellectual Life, 21.
18Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 188, art. 6.
19St. Thomas Aquinas, De Magistro, in The Philosophy of Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Mary Helen Mayer (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1929).
20Yes, you are correct. It’s a play on President Roosevelt’s famous maxim, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” For our purposes, we forgo the stick and replace it with a loving heart and a mind that thirsts for truth.
Chapter 2
The Power of Pure Prayer
Hold fast to the purity of conscience. Do not cease to make time for prayer.
How Purity of Heart Benefits the Mind
We study to seek truth, and Truth Himself declared to us, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). Only when our heart, our conscience, and our will are pure, free from the distractions of temptation and the stains of sin, can our intellects gaze clearly upon truth. Prudence is the virtue that guides the moral virtues of temperance, fortitude, and justice, but it also depends on them. It is through the exercise of virtues such as self-control and courage that we can discipline our minds to focus on what is truly important and then act to achieve it. Moral virtue strengthens and sharpens our powers of understanding so that they may better “penetrate into the heart of things.” We will not achieve the heights of intellectual virtue, of knowing the true in the manner of St. Thomas, without at the same time climbing and growing in the moral virtue of striving to seek only what is truly good.
St. Thomas was well aware of how temptations toward sexual impurity and other bodily sins can draw our hearts and minds away from the things that matter most. In writing about the “daughters” of the vice of acedia (or spiritual sloth) he declared, echoing the philosopher Aristotle, that “those who find no joy in spiritual pleasures have recourse to pleasures of the body.”21
Indeed, when Thomas as a young man had dedicated his life to preaching and teaching Christ’s gospel as a member of the new, humble Dominican Order, his biological brothers were so outraged that they captured him on the road to Paris and took him back to the family’s castle. There, his brothers explicitly endeavored to remove his mind from spiritual things through a powerful temptation to bodily pleasure. They introduced a beautiful young courtesan into his room, whereupon Thomas brandished a log from the fireplace and chased her out the door, making a sign of the cross on the door with the firebrand when he slammed it shut behind her! Pious legend reports that angels then came to his aid and g
ave him a girdle of chastity, whereupon he was never again tempted by sensual bodily pleasures, as he immersed himself totally in the joys of the intellect and the spirit.
Of course, we all have different bodies, temperaments, and dispositions, and some of us, by nature, suffer greater temptations to impurity than others do. As a young man, St. Augustine famously prayed that God would give him chastity, “but not yet.” St. Paul wrote of the war between the flesh and the spirit, and how easy it is for carnal, enfleshed human beings to leave undone the good things we want to do while doing the evil things that we hate (see Rom. 7:13–22), echoing Christ’s warning to Peter that in matters of temptation, “the spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matt. 26:41).
Thomas has provided a rather abstract-sounding but exceedingly practical bit of advice that can go a long way toward helping the spirit conquer the flesh so that we can focus upon higher things: “Hence, the most effective remedy against intemperance is not to dwell on the consideration of singulars.”22
Lust, the most powerful challenge to the virtue of temperance and purity of heart, thrives on singulars, especially visual images of particular enticing bodies. Unfortunately, advertisers and the purveyors of popular media know this so well that we are perpetually bombarded by images purposely designed to arouse our lusts, be it on television shows and commercials, in movies, in newspapers and magazines, or plastered greater than life-size on unavoidable roadside billboards. The styles of dress, attitudes, and manners of behavior they promote bear fruit in the attire and demeanor of real flesh-and-blood men and women. Males, by our nature, are especially prone to distraction by these images, both through the media and in daily life. What, then, are we to do?