Some Inspiring Thoughts

Dear Friends,

I'd like to share with you some excerpts from a wonderful book, written by Gerald Vann in 1939, that I stumbled upon in our cathedral's library.  I can't recommend it enough!  For although it was written in the early 20th century, its message couldn't be more urgent and applicable to our own time.  Even though I have encountered the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas various times during my academic studies, our professors tended to focus much more on Karl Rahner and other modern thinkers.  The tendency nowadays is for many to view Aquinas' methods as a dry, dated, and overly-academic approach to studying theology.  This book has truly opened my eyes and allowed me to see what a treasure his writings, especially the Summa Theologica.

As future priests and stewards of the mysteries of God, it behooves us to be good sons of Holy Mother Church, and as Scriptures says, to be good servants taking the best of both the old and the new in order to bring the light of the Gospel message to all peoples.  That being said, I highly recommend the above book to all who are interested in learning more about our Faith and Catholic worldview!

Below I will be sharing with you some of my favorite parts of this book with a series of blog posts, quoting directly from Gerald Vann's own words. I will also add some commentary (with definitions of terms pulled from internet sources) in order to help make it easier to digest.  No copyright infringement is intended.  Sit back, relax, pour a fresh cup of steaming coffee, and let's get those mental gears turning! Buckle up for here we go!  Enjoy and God bless!

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Pages 142-145

"We have already seen that, for St. Thomas, the whole of life is to be expressed in terms of religion and charity- of that metaphysical loss of selfhood in God which is so far beyond any merely ethical quality of unselfishness. (Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses.)   Morality has value ultimately as an expression of that metaphysical orientation of being, as a giving of what is demanded by the transcendent Logos, and as a giving whose motive is love.  But the gift must be complete, and the imperfection inherent in all acosmist theories(Acosmism, in contrast to pantheism, denies the reality of the universe, seeing it as ultimately illusory, and only the infinite unmanifest Absolute as real.)- all the negative ways of life that simply abandon created things, life on earth, and action in the world, as valueless- is precisely that they are limited in giving; they make restrictions in the name of a holocaust."

"Thomas saw clearly that to love God is to love also the things that He has made. (This is one of the views that separates us as Catholics from other faiths:  Everything, insofar as it is, is good, since it is created by God.) All truth is from the Holy Spirit, and, in the same way, everything good is from God and ought, if the offering of self is to be as complete a gift as possible, to be included in the gift.  The lover's cry is always, 'I wish I had more to give,' and the spirit of man gives most when, being most alive, it has most to give." (In giving of ourselves, do we receive.  God totally gives Himself to us, so too, we are called to totally give ourselves to Him, as Christ laid down His life for us.)

"Thus, the love and knowledge of created things, the love of science and learning, the love of nature and art, the love of men, the eudaemonist (Eudaemonism: A system of ethics that evaluates actions in terms of their capacity to produce happiness.) search for perfection and happiness, and the love of Christ even as Him from whom we have life more abundantly- all these things are not only compatible with, but are also demanded by, the fullest loss of self in the Godhead.  The giving of self and everything else, which is the essence of Christian marriage, has its divine parallel."

"This is again the key to St. Thomas' personalism, which is so far removed from the individualism of the modern West.  The latter is characteristic of the shallowness of the rationalist-activist outlook, in which the accent is always on doing, and therefore on the doer.  (As an aside here, we can observe this oftentimes during Mass at your typical parish: the tension between being and doing.  Benedict XVI reminded us that in the quest for full implementation of "active participation," we must understand that the highest priority goes to interior participation and sacred silence, not merely outward actions.)  Thomist personalism is able to safeguard and indeed to emphasize the value and importance of the person, because it sees the perfection of the person as essentially centered in God, and , derivatively, in other ends outside the self.  The individual has a right to happiness and to the desire for happiness; the individual person is more important than the state, (A concept we would do well to remember in this day and age.) but the individual finds his happiness and perfection in the service of God and of society."

"There is also a place for art; indeed, creativity is the natural right of every man, on whatever material or kind of material it may be his vocation to work.  There is a place for that human love which finds its expression in procreation.  There is a place for that passing on to others of the fruit of contemplation that is the intellectual parallel of the passing on of physical life, for all these things are in fact simply a giving of life to others in order ultimately to have more to give to the Other.  (meaning God)  The acosmism, and therefore the negation of life, so common in the mysticisms of the East, are thus avoided; so, equally, are the self-seeking, the individualism, the activism, and the commercialism of the West."

(Here comes an valuable summary of Thomas' method and its importance:)

"The originality of St. Thomas in all of this is twofold.  It consists, first, in the perfection with which he wove the endless threads of thought and of life into an organic unity, making these diverse interests not merely compatible but interdependent and elaborating them into a hierarchy that leads every detail of the manifold back to the one; second, in the fact that he made sure, by keeping his thought free from physical theories and maintaining it always on the metaphysical, and therefore eternal, plane, that his synthesis would not be a dated system, would not be something static, final, and therefore bound to become obsolete. (As many today allege.)  Thomism, as he left it, is "a vital organism, embryonic, but endowed with an infinite capacity for the assimilation of new truth and for adjustment to new conditions and environments without loss of its substantial identity.  This precisely was his great gift to mankind: an ultimate synthesis, centered in God, so elemental and so elastic that it could include all future discovery and speculation, and, in so doing, both enrich itself and give unity to all human knowledge, past, present, and future.  The tragedy of the subsequent history of Scholasticism and of European thought in general is its failure to have understood and utilized that gift to the full." (quoting: White, Scholasticism, 27.)  (This is a huge and vital point:  Thomism was never meant to be understood as a static and dated system.  Aquinas himself would have wanted it to be active and engaging, always seeking the Truth, wherever it may be found, in order to bring others to the Faith.  It is up to us now, to help in the recovery of this viewpoint.)