“Now, the Angel of the Schools was emphatically a great and shining light. To write his life is not so much to deal with the subject of his personal history, as to display the stretch of his power and the character of his influence. Indeed, few of the great cardinal thinkers of the world have left much private history to record. Self was hidden in the splendor of the light which bursts out from it—just as the more brilliant the flame, so much the more unseen is the lamp in which it burns. It stands to reason that the more widespread the influence which such men as these exert, so much the wider must be the range taken by the writer over the field of history and theology and philosophy if he wishes adequately to delineate the action of their lives. The private history of S. Thomas of Aquin could be conveniently written in fifty pages, whilst his full biography would certainly occupy many thousand pages.”(Pp. iii., iv.)
The view which is thus sketched out is a large one. We have said that the author presents not merely his hero, but his hero's surroundings. But, in studying his mind and his work, he does not content himself with making a vivid background of the thirteenth century. One century is the child of another, and mind is educated by mind. The past is the seed of the future, and no time can be understood without understanding the times that gave it birth. This is especially true of the times when history accumulates most rapidly, and of minds to whom it is given to fashion history as it is made. Prior Vaughan finds the story of S. Thomas' intellectual work commencing far back in the work of those men whom he calls the “columnal fathers” of the church. He therefore takes his reader back to primitive ages—to the desert, the laura, the early conflicts of God's servants with paganism, with heresy, and with worldliness. He sets before him S. Anthony, in the majesty of his single-hearted union with Christ; S. Athanasius, worthy disciple of such a master, unsurpassed in the great opportunities of his life and the strength with which he rose to meet them; S. Basil, the monk that fought the world, and overcame it; S. Gregory Theologus, the vates sacer of the fourth century, who sang in verse and in rhythmical prose the song of the consubstantial Son of God. He introduces us to S. Augustine, to S. Ambrose, to S. Gregory the Great, and points out how essential a feature, in the greatness of S. Thomas, is the way in which he has reproduced all that was eternal and “catholic” in the thoughts of the men whom God has set up to be the pillars of the doctrine of his church. With other saints, it would, perhaps, be superfluous to trace their connection with the fathers; with the author of the Summa, it is indispensable.
“The Columnal Fathers and the Angelical were in completest harmony; they were knit together by the monastic principle. The intellectual hinges of the Universal Church (speaking humanly) have been monastic-men—that is to say, men who, through an intense cross-worship and a keen perception of the beautiful, threw up all for Christ; and through
‘The ingrained instinct of old reverence,
The holy habit of obedience,’
loved, labored, suffered for him, and died into his arms.
“For the one thread which pierces through all, and maintains a real communication between the Angelical and the heroes of the classic age—which creates a brotherhood between S. Thomas of the thirteenth century and the great athletes in the second and the third—which makes the ‘Sun of the Church’ illuminate the ‘Pillar of the World,’ and so reciprocally—that is to say, which renders S. Thomas and S. Anthony one in spirit and in principle—was this, that their beings were transformed into a supernatural activity, through an intense and personal love of their Redeemer.
“This was the one special lesson which the Angelical drew from the wilderness and the fathers, which came to him through S. Benedict, indeed, but rather as a principle of quies than of exertion. In the desert athletes, and those who followed them, he found that principle operative, and almost military in its chivalrous readiness to combat and spill blood in defence of truth. It lent to him what it exhibits in them also—breadth of view, largeness, moral freedom, stubborn courage, generosity of heart, expansion of mind, and an electric light of intellect, which bear about them a touch of the Eastern world. How could the Angelical read Anthony's life, or follow Athanasius in his exiles, or see Basil so heroically rigid in his defence of right, or hear, in imagination, Gregory Theologus pouring out a stream of polished eloquence, without being impressed by truth's grace and music; how could he watch S. Chrysostom, all on fire with his love of God and with his discriminating sympathy for men, or [pg 035]think of the ascetic Jerome, battling single-handed in the wilderness, or perusing his Scripture in the cave; how could he dwell in spirit with S. Ambrose or S. Gregory the Great, or follow the career of the passionate, emotional, splendid S. Augustine, without expanding in heart and mind towards all that is best and greatest—all that is most noble and most fair in the majestic character of God's tenderly-cherished saints?
“Had he not known them so intimately, great as he was, his mind would have been comparatively cramped, his character most probably would have been less imperial in its mould, and there would have been less of that oriental mightiness about his intellectual creations, which now reminds one of those vast monuments of other days, which still are the marvel of travellers in the East, and the despair of modern engineers.”(II., pp. 523-5.)
A great portion of the second volume is taken up with the exposition in detail of these thoughts and ideas. We do not think that any one who has thoroughly seized the author's point of view will be sorry that so much space is given to the lives and characters of men who are not the immediate subject of the book. The truth is, that the full significance of S. Thomas of Aquin has been very much overlooked in modern times. The non-Catholic theory has always been that he was a voluminous “scholastic,” more acute than most of his sort, perhaps, but mediæval, hair-splitting, and unprofitable. The Catholic theory has done him greater justice; but even the Catholic schools have too much forgotten S. Thomas. There is an interesting passage in one of Lacordaire's letters, in which he tells the Abbé Drioux, who has done so much for S. Thomas in France, how he read the Angelical every day, and yet how long it had been before he had come to know him! And then he speaks with some depreciation of that “Positive” theology which has pretended to take the place of the scholastic form and discipline. The great preacher was familiar with the spiritual wants of the world in their widest aspect, and he no sooner came to know S. Thomas of Aquin than he saw that he was face to face with the mind that has said more truth about God and man, and said it better, than any one man who has ever lived; and he has said it so well, because he has not said it out of his own consciousness, but first saturated himself with the living truth of the immortal fathers, and then reproduced in his own way what God had thus himself imparted to the world.