How to Think Like Aquinas
Page 4
4.When a person studies to know the truth above the capacity of his intelligence. Might this ring any bells? “Seek not the things that are too high for you,” said Sirach (3:21) and St. Thomas in his letter on study. Here again, we must study within the limits of our abilities, bearing in mind and thanking God that, as our knowledge base grows, so too will our capacity to reach truths that rise progressively higher.
The virtue of studiousness, then, reins in our desire to study the wrong things for the wrong reasons and fires our desire to learn the highest, most important things of God within our capacity, in a virtuous circle that increases both our desire and our capacity to know the things that matter the most.
Happily for us, the exercise of any virtue brings with it the wholesome pleasure that comes from perfecting and utilizing the powers God has given us. When we have trained ourselves to yield less often to both the fleeting distractions of curiosity and the sloth of intellectual laziness, the virtue of studiousness will bring pleasures of its own, so that we will come to enjoy being frequently in our earthly study cells as we wait to spend eternity learning the glories of the universe from its Maker in His heavenly chambers.
Doctor’s Orders ✍
Prescription for Three More Rs to Study in Your Study
Reflect
What lessons did you glean from this chapter? Could your study “cell” use a little remodeling? Might you train yourself to turn off potential distractions, such as e-mail, your cell phone, or the TV, while you devote time to study? If you feel the need to check e-mail, surf the Web, and so forth before you get down to business, have you considered setting a time limit (you can use a timer) so that your time will not be frittered away? Do you need to organize your desk and shelves so you have what you need when you need it? Could you try to grow in your appreciation of periods of silent solitude, or perhaps soft, muted instrumental or chanted background music while you study? Have you considered how to make more conducive to study the places where you have to sit and wait? Are you going to be stuck at an airport with hours of idle time between flights, or perhaps in a doctor’s or a dentist’s waiting room? Consider sitting far from the noisy television sets, and rather than picking up a celebrity magazine, bring along a worthwhile book to dig into. You never know what surprising goods might come from it. Indeed, I once made a new doctor/Catholic author friend that way!47
Read
Speaking again of reading, and now of reading recommendations, let’s emphasize again that the act of reading itself can be an exercise in the virtue of studiousness, and again, how just carrying a book can sometimes produce interesting results! Just last week at an airport in Dallas, I noticed a trim, muscular African American waiter, who I guessed to be in his 30s or 40s, efficiently attending to all his customers. He was not my waiter, but he came over to tell me how pleased he was to see that I had a fairly hefty biography sitting on my table.48 He told me that he observes thousands of people a year as they eat or wait for their planes, and he sees fewer and fewer people with books, as more and more travelers sit immersed in the flittering worlds of their cell phones or the airport’s ubiquitous television screens. He noted what a wonderful thing it is to be able to enter into and linger in the worlds that good books bring us, and he said he makes it a point to talk to every book reader he sees in the restaurant! I thanked this thoughtful, studious gentleman for his comments and assured him I could not agree more. This man knew the value of the virtue of studiousness. If you would care to read more about studiousness itself, as well as its nemesis, curiosity, I direct you to Thomas’s Summa Theologica, II-II, questions 166 and 167.
Remember
Do you remember our chapter’s title and its key themes? And, just out of curiosity (if you’ll forgive me), I wonder if you can recall at this point the key themes of our previous chapters. Got them? Great! If you don’t have them, don’t fret. St. Thomas has also given us wonderful guidelines to perfect powers of memory. We’ll examine them in chapter 7 and then use them throughout the remainder of this book.
38Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 150, art. 1.
39Song of Sol. 1:4. In the Latin Vulgate Bible that St. Thomas used, Solomon’s Canticle of Canticles 1:3 uses the word cellaria for cellars or storerooms.
40Cf. Sertillanges and Ryan, The Intellectual Life, 168–169. The good Father Sertillanges makes a case for what might be an exception to silence in solitude at times: “Who does not know that in listening to music an intellectual may get an impression of greatness, beauty, and power which is immediately transposed into his ordinary modes of thinking, furthers his purposes, colors his customary themes, and will presently enrich his work? . . . Music has this precious quality for the intellectual that as it conveys no precise ideas, it interferes with none. It awakens states of soul, from which each one in his particular task will draw what he will.” (Admittedly, Father Sertillanges was not referring explicitly to listening to music while studying. He wrote long before the day of CDs and computers. I will still use it to justify my playing classical music or Gregorian chant softly as I study and write. In fact, let me check right now. Okay, currently playing is Haydn’s sprightly Symphony No. 23 in G. No wonder I’m enjoying this session in my cell! My favorite pieces of soft background music for studying and writing, by the way, are the symphonies and Masses of Anton Bruckner. Check them out someday and enjoy!)
41Thomas quite agreed with the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that “all men by their nature desire to know.”
42Prov. 27:11, as cited in Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 166, art. 1.
43Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 166, art. 1.
44Ibid., II-II, Q. 167, art. 1.
45From St. Albert’s Commentary on St. Matthew, as cited in Paul Murray, The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink Called Happiness (New York: Burns and Oates, 2006), 93. See Psalm 19 (18):1.
46Summa Theologica, I, Q. 47, art. 1.
47In 2015, while attending an appointment with my wife, I noticed that her doctor kept glancing at a book I had with me. He asked what it was, and I told him it was a biography of Blessed Jordan of Saxony, St. Dominic’s successor at the helm of the Order of Preachers, and that I was working on a book on Dominican saints. The doctor beamed a great smile as he told us that he was Catholic, too, and had just written a work of fiction about doctors who cherished life in a futuristic world in which the Hippocratic oath upholding life had been replaced by the “Kevorkian” oath, inspired by the twentieth-century American champion of “physician-assisted suicide,” Jack Kevorkian, also known as “Doctor Death.” Indeed, we got so carried away with author-to-author banter that we almost left the office without getting a prescription for my wife!
48For those who might care to know, it happened to be Harlow Giles Unger’s Lafayette. Oh, and my doctor friend’s book is The Kevorkian Oath by Richard E. Brown, M.D.
Chapter 4
The Benefits and Perils of Friendliness to Study
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.
On the Friendliness That Is Called Affability49
Thomas explains in his other writings that amiability, affability, or simply put, friendliness, is a part of the virtue of justice, something we owe to every person we meet.50 Such fraternal charity also helps promote the kind of peace and goodwill that are most conducive to study. Brother John would not likely study so well if he fueled animosity and murmuring among his brethren, and neither will we study very well if we’ve aggrieved those with whom we live and study, be they fellow students or family members. Still, recognizing always that moral virtues generally involve a golden mean, a just right balance between too much and too little of a good thing, Thomas warns against an excess of friendliness that may
complicate study by drawing our attention to trivial interpersonal issues and that may stir animosity toward us if our attentions to another are overbearing and bring to light our weaknesses. Thomas warns of two vices contrary to friendliness: the vice of excess, called flattery, and the vice of deficiency, called quarreling.
As for flattery, Thomas cites an intriguing medieval gloss51 on Ezekiel 13:18 of the Vulgate. It appears as follows in the Summa Theologica: “Woe to them that sew cushions under every elbow.” Thomas notes that the gloss says, “That is to say, sweet flattery. Therefore, flattery is a sin.”52 Thomas explains that when we exercise the virtue of friendliness, we seek to bring pleasure to those with whom we work and live, but we do not hesitate to bring displeasure to another when our affability would encourage another person in some evil intention or condone an evil act. Indeed, one of the traditional seven spiritual acts of mercy, each of which Thomas describes as “a charity through the medium of mercy,”53 is to “reprove the sinner.”54 We sometimes display our friendliness when we explain our disapproval of a companion’s statement or act for his own good. The flatterer praises companions regardless of what they say or do, “sewing cushions under every elbow” to comfort and to please, but to his friend’s and his own detriment.
In describing the vice of deficient friendliness, called quarreling, Thomas notes that, while the friendly person generally hopes and strives to please others, the quarrelsome person derives pleasure from displeasing others. The quarrelsome person finds it agreeable to disagree and takes joy in contradicting those around him. Thomas approvingly cites Aristotle, who wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, book 4, chapter 6, that “those who are opposed to everything with the intent of being disagreeable, and care for nobody, are said to be peevish and quarrelsome.”55 These people are “aginners”: they don’t care what you argue for; they are going to speak out “agin” it!
Surely, we can see the simple practicality of this bit of advice to Brother John. When it comes to enhancing our capacity to study, flattery will get us nowhere, and quarreling will stir resentments and passions unsuited to the peace and tranquility that facilitate study. Either kind of familiarity is bound to breed contempt and interfere with study.
Though Thomas was studious and prone to deep contemplation by his natural disposition, he built upon nature with self-discipline and training and perfected it through his openness of God’s grace. Though perhaps at his best and most fulfilled in the realm of solitude, study, and prayer, Thomas felt that his highest calling was to share the truths he had gleaned with his neighbors, including the friars he lived with, the students he taught, and, in the broadest sense, those of us who read him today, and who will read him, God willing, until kingdom come!
Further, the cerebral, self-sufficient Thomas did indeed practice the affability that he preached. One touching and amusing story relates that a young friar arrived at the Dominican convent in Paris for the first time and wanted to see its wonderful sights. A prior advised him to ask one of the religious there to give him a tour of the city. The first man the young friar chanced upon was a quite large, placid-looking man. He told the man that the prior said he had to show him around. The large friar complied for the next few hours, without a word of complaint, even when his young companion chided him at times for moving too slowly to suit him. We can imagine that young friar’s reaction when he later found out from others that the humble tour guide he had pressed into service was the world’s foremost professor and theologian, Thomas Aquinas!
Ora et Labora — et Ludo!
Ora et labora, “pray and work,” is a classic Benedictine motto that our great Dominican scholar knew and practiced well. He also knew the wisdom of the later aphorism that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” and that is where ludo comes in to play, since ludo is Latin for “play.” Thomas addressed the value and the virtues of play and playfulness in the Summa Theologica.
Hear Thomas, for example, on the value of playful games, even for the scholar in pursuit of knowledge and holiness (indeed, even for a saint loved by Christ):
Just as weariness of the body is dispelled by resting the body, so weariness of the soul needs be remedied by resting the soul; and the soul’s rest is pleasure. . . . Now suchlike words or deeds wherein nothing further is sought than the soul’s delight, are called playful or humorous. Hence it is necessary at times to make use of them, in order to give rest, as it were, to the soul.56
And how does the saint loved by Christ figure in? Well, between our ellipsis in the paragraph above, Thomas relates a delightful story from St. John Cassian’s book Conferences of the Fathers, about Christ’s “beloved disciple,” St. John the Evangelist. A group of observers was scandalized when they saw St. John playing with some of his disciples. (How intriguing a scene! Don’t you wish you were there to see it?) John saw that one man in that easily scandalized troop was carrying a bow and arrow. He asked the man to shoot an arrow into the air, and several more after that. He then asked the man if he could keep shooting them indefinitely. The man replied that he could not, because if he continued to do so, the bow would eventually break. Thomas concludes the little story as follows: “Whence the Blessed John drew the inference that in a like manner man’s mind would break if its tension were never relaxed!”57
Thomas, like St. John Cassian before him, and St. John the Evangelist before both of them, clearly saw the value of some good, clean fun, in moderation, of course. Indeed, in his next article in the Summa, Thomas does warn of the harm and sinfulness of excessive play, and of jesting that is rude, scandalous, or obscene. In his final article on the topic, though, he explicitly encourages us to be mirthful with our companions: “In human affairs, whatever is against reason is a sin. Now, it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment.”58 Indeed, as a champion of “moderate mirth,”59 Thomas would advise lovers of knowledge not to be buffoons incapable of seriousness, but neither would he advise us to be party poopers! Work, pray — and, sometimes, play!
From Friendliness to Friendship
I would venture that most of you reading this book are not like Brother John. You are not friars, monks, canons, sisters, or nuns living together in a cloister (though I certainly hope and pray that some of you are!). My point is that regardless of our state of life and living situation, we should all be friendly toward all the people with whom we live and study.
We are also especially blessed if we have the opportunity to form particular friendships, intimate bonds with one or a few friends, whom we may come to treat as “a second self ” and consider their happiness to be as important as our own. Thomas knew quite well Aristotle’s discussion of a class of friendships based on the provision of mutual pleasures, a second based on utility, or the practical use friends can be of to one another, and a third, highest, truest form of friendship, based on each friend’s virtue and serving to heighten the virtue of each. And far beyond even “the Philosopher’s”60 insights, Thomas knew that Christ came to earth so that He would no longer call us “servants,” but “friends.”61 Indeed, Thomas’s magnificent treatise on the ultimate God-given virtue of charity is based on the principle that “charity is the friendship of man for God.”62
With our focus on study and thinking, an overview of all of Thomas’s insights on charity and friendship would take us way too far up a different stream, but I’ll conclude with just one more Thomistic insight on friendship and virtuous works (such as study):
[Aristotle] draws a conclusion concerning the good, that friendship between virtuous men is good and is always increased in goodness by exemplary conversation. Friends become better by working together and loving each other. For one receives from the other an example of virtuous work which is at the same time pleasing to him. Hence it is proverbial that man adopts noble deeds from noble men.63
Certainly among the world’s most notable examples of virtuous frie
nds spurring each other on toward the loftiest heights of virtue and the noblest deeds of study was that holy friendship between mentor and student, between the Church’s “Universal Doctor” and her “Angelic Doctor,” between the patron saint of scientists and the patron saint of scholars. I refer, of course, to the earthly friendship between St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. (Can we even begin to imagine the sublimity of their friendly conversations in heaven?)
In sum, then, we should be friendly to all, but not overly familiar, and should be watchful for a few virtuous friends with whom, through fruitful conversations and noble deeds, we might pull our oars in unison and row more strongly together up the stream toward ever deeper seas of knowledge and truth.
Doctor’s Orders ✍
Prescription for Finding the Right Balance between Friendliness and Studiousness
Reflect
Have you been friendly enough, or perhaps too friendly with others before or while you need to get down to business and study? If you are a student, have you shunned an invitation to a study group that might be of help to you or to your fellow students? If you’ve joined such a group, do you help rein in the gossip and small talk so you can spur each other on to greater learning? Do you cultivate virtuous friendships and talk with your friends about noble things, such as how to grow wiser and holier?
Read
St. Thomas addresses the virtue of friendliness we owe to everyone in question 114 of his Summa Theologica, II-II. He treats of the value of humor and play in question 168. His masterful exposition of charity as friendship with God begins with question 23, article 1. I’ll note as well that I’ve written about Thomas’s treatment of friendship in relation to the writings on friendship of Aristotle, Cicero, and the Cistercian abbot St. Aelred of Rievaulx.64