Silence Of St Thomas
By Josef Pieper
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Josef Pieper
Josef Pieper, perhaps the most popular Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century, was schooled in the Greek classics and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also studied philosophy, law, and sociology, and he was a professor at the University of Munster, West Germany. His numerous books have been widely praised by both the secular and religious press.
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Silence Of St Thomas - Josef Pieper
III
I
ON THOMAS AQUINAS
HIS LIFE AND WORK
A chance perusal of any of Augustine’s writings, even a page from his most abstract work, On the Trinity, will convey the unmistakable impression: this was thought and written by a man of flesh and blood. But let someone take a similar glimpse into the tight structure of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, and he will be tempted to ask: Were these sentences really set down by a living man or did not rather the objective content formulate itself undisturbed—neither blurred nor warmed—by the breath of a living thinker? The vital products of Augustine’s thinking never allow us to forget their source in his personal life, from which they spring forth like the blossom from its root and stem. But the language of St. Thomas suggests its origin in a living mind as little as crystal suggests the essential liquid from which it is formed.
Yet only on a superficial interpretation would one infer from the untroubled and unhurried serenity of the work that the author himself lived in freedom from outer or inner disturbances. On the other hand, it is certainly clear that the Summa Theologica can only be the work of a heart fundamentally at peace. St. Thomas did not discover and map out his majestic outline of Christian teaching in the silence of the cloister cell.
It was not in some idyllic sphere of retirement cut off from the happenings in the world that he lived out his life. Such presentations, as untrue to history as they are impermissibly simplified, not only color, or rather discolor in many particulars the conventional portraits of Thomas; they frequently have an effect on biographical studies which make higher claims to accuracy.
The very fact that a work of such unperturbed objectivity and such deep, radiating peace could grow from a life which, far from being untroubled, consumed itself in strife, gives us an insight into the special quality of the man. His work, incidentally, shows immediate reflection and evidence of an outspokenly combative cast of mind, which, however, even in the heat of battle, was never divorced from the norms of truth and love and consequently never lost its fundamental peace. The writing On the Perfection of the Spiritual Life, originating in his forty-fifth year, ends with the following words: If anyone wishes to write against this, I will welcome it. For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction, according to the saying: ‘Iron is sharpened by iron.’ (Prov. 27:17). And between us and them may God judge, Who is blessed in eternity. Amen.
Count Landulf of Aquino, Lord of Loretto and Belcastro, was one of the most loyal vassals of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II. During the years of the sharpest struggle between Emperor and Pope his youngest son Thomas was preparing himself for an office both remote and superior to the conflict—the priestly office of preaching the truth. He was studying at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino which at that time also served as an imperial castle, situated on the border between Hohenstaufen and papal territory. Under these circumstances, Thomas could hardly expect a secure life sheltered from external disturbances and dangers.
In the first months of the year 1239, when Frederick II was excommunicated, Monte Cassino came directly into the zone of battle. The garrison of the castle, half of which had to be supported by the abbey, was more than doubled. The fortifications were expanded by order of the Emperor himself, who had first entered his Sicilian kingdom twenty years previously at this very spot. In this same year, the monks had to leave their monastery. Among their company was the fifteen-year-old Thomas Aquinas.
This exodus led the boy to Naples—to the beginning of his particular destiny; it took him permanently out of seclusion and thrust him into the heated center of all the intellectual battles of that time. The University of Naples, founded in the year of Thomas’s birth, was the first pure state university,
—not a school for seminarians but a school for imperial officials.
¹ Frederick II had designed it to work against the Church. Here, according to custom, Thomas studied the liberal arts.
What is most important is that, under the tutelage of the Irishman, Peter of Hibernia, he became acquainted with the writings of Aristotle, which were at that time extremely suspect in the Church. Aristotelian!
was an abusive epithet in the mouths of the orthodox, comparable to nihilist, freethinker, man of the Enlightenment.
It was in Naples, too, that the flame of that urban youth movement,
which was filling the ranks of the first generation of the mendicant orders, was first kindled in the heart of the young nobleman.
These two words, Aristotle
and mendicants,
indicate the two most important disputes which in the first half of the thirteenth century rocked Christendom with a passionate violence we can scarcely understand. Both Aristotle and the mendicant orders stood in the midst of a storm of approvals and rejections. At the time when Thomas came to Naples, hardly a decade and a half after the death of St. Francis of Assisi (1226), the two mendicant orders had not yet achieved any general recognition. On the contrary, all papal recognitions and privileges could not prevent the representatives of the established society—the temporal lords, the rising, urban middle class and the secular clergy—from calling these remarkable new poor men
demented
(which was partly understandable), and even heretical
or sons of the Anti-Christ.
This, of course, did not stem the upsurge of the young spiritual movement, nourished as it was by so many sources, among them the fundamental historical impulse of the