The influence which S. Thomas owed to the study and meditation of the great fathers was surpassed—or rather, we ought to say, most powerfully shown—by the impressions made upon his heart, even more than his mind, by his early bringing up. Every one knows that the Angel of the Schools, who was of the noblest blood of Italy, spent his early years in the great arch-monastery of Monte Casino. Prior Vaughan has no hesitation in making the assertion that Thomas of Aquin never lost what he acquired from the monks of S. Benedict during those seven childish years that he spent with them in the cloisters of the great abbey. He was never a professed Benedictine, although he would, in the natural course, have become one without making any explicit profession, had not the troubles of the times forced the monks to flee from the abbey. But the Benedictine or monastic spirit, the principle of quies, as our author calls it, with the vivid appreciation of the kingship of Christ, Thomas took away with him when he went forth and carried with him to the work he had to do. The new mendicant orders that had recently been founded were schools of activity, [pg 036] aggressive, moving hither and thither, pitching their tents in great towns, and lifting their voices in universities. Their saints were to be fitted for the regeneration of a new phase of the world. But in the saints themselves it was only an outward change. The essential spirit remained the same. That spirit had been the heirloom of the old monastic orders, and it could never be out of date. In the men who were to do the greatest things in the new life of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the old spirit of the cloister must be found strong and deep. In the man who above all was to stand forth as the sum and crown of the middle age, that contemplative, immovable, far-seeing realization of “the person of Christ” must exist as heroically as in Anthony of the Desert or Benedict of the Mountain. And it was S. Thomas' Benedictine training that contributed much to make him such a man.
“The monks thought much, but talked little; thus the monastic system encouraged meditation, rather than intellectual tournaments; reserve rather than display, deep humility rather than dialectical skill. The Benedictines did not aim so much at unrestrained companionship of free discussion as at self control; not so much at secular-minded fantasy as at much prayer and sharp penance, till self was conquered, and the grace of God reigned, and giants walked the earth. Self-mastery, springing from the basis of a supernatural life, moulded the heart to sanctity, and imparted to the intellect an accuracy of vision which is an act of nature directed and purified by grace. Theodore, Aldhelm, Bede, Boniface, Alcuin, Dunstan, Wilfrid, Stephen, Bernard, Anselm, these names are suggestive of this influence of the monastic system.”(I., p. 26.)
It is one of the aims of the book to bring out the view that the prince of scholastics and the king of dialecticians was a man of the purest and deepest “monasticism.” But he was not destined to be as an Anselm, a Bernard, or a Hugh of S. Victor.
The Saint was sent to Naples for the prosecution of his studies, and whilst there he asked for and received the habit of S. Dominic. The author gives a brilliant sketch of Naples as it was under the sway of Frederick II. He then devotes a whole chapter to a “study” of the new orders of S. Francis and S. Dominic, for the purpose of bringing out vividly before the reader the new world that was springing up and the new race of men that the church was calling forth to deal with it. We have no space to quote from this chapter, but, even taken apart from its connection with S. Thomas, it is full of interest and life.
Thus was Thomas of Aquin prepared and equipped; prepared by the great fathers and by S. Benedict, equipped in the armor of the Order of intellectual chivalry. And what was the work before him? Who were his enemies, his friends, his neighbors, his assistants? In answer to these questions we have the chapters on “Abelard, or Rationalism and Irreverence”; on “S. Bernard, or Authority and Reverence”; on the “Schools of S. Victor”; on the “Arabian and the Jewish Influence in Europe”; on “William of S. Amour”; on “Paris and its University”; and on “Albert the Great.” Some of these chapters relate, as will be seen, to men who were not contemporaries of S. Thomas. But if Abelard, and S. Bernard, and William of Champeaux had passed away in the flesh, their influence or their views still lived on when Thomas wrote. And we see the full significance of these chapters on the great schools of thought, orthodox and heterodox, when we arrive at the second [pg 037] volume, and find the author showing in detail how the Angel of the Schools, in some part or other of his voluminous writings, met and refuted every form of prevalent error, and, whilst majestically laying down principles for all ages, never forgot to clear up the difficulties of his own time. The rationalism of Abelard, the emanation doctrines that Arabian subtlety had elaborated out of the reminiscences of the old Gnosticism, the errors of the Greek schismatics, the perversity of the Jews, are all encountered by his never-resting pen, either in some one of his numerous Opuscula, varying in length from an essay to an octavo volume, or else in one or other of his two great Sums, or perhaps in more places than one, the refutation being the more complete as the writing becomes more mature. As for the two greatest and most prominent of his enterprises—the Christianizing of Aristotle and the formation of a complete Sum of theology—it was to be expected that Prior Vaughan should fully enlarge upon them. The chapters on “S. Thomas and Aristotle,” and “S. Thomas and Reason,” in the second volume, form a good introduction to the study of the Angelic Doctor, and at the same time give the enquiring mind some notion of how S. Thomas has performed one of the greatest feats that genius ever accomplished—the successful and consistent “conversion” of the greatest, the most original, and the most precise of heathen philosophers into a hewer of wood and carrier of water for the faith.
We would gladly dwell on the three chapters at the end of Vol. I., in which the writer, in reviewing the writings of the Saint in defence and exaltation of monasticism, gives a useful and spirited history of the whole of that exciting contest which took its beginning in William of S. Amour's book called Perils of the Last Times. It seems really impossible to say how much the religious state, humanly speaking, owes to the man who wrote the book Against Those who attack the Service of God and Religion, and that On the Perfection of the Spiritual Life.
Passing now from the more remote surroundings of the hero of the story to the immediate scene of the greatest portion of his labors, we venture to believe that one of the most popular parts of this work of Prior Vaughan's will be his animated description of the university system of the thirteenth century, and of the University of Paris in particular. He has spared no pains in getting at correct details and putting them artistically together. M. Franklin's splendid and comparatively unknown labors on mediæval Paris have supplied him with matter that will be found nowhere else. Paris is the natural type of the great mediæval university. More central and accessible than Oxford, safer than Bologna, freer than Naples, and founded on a wide and grand basis, the University of Paris soon grew into a formidable assemblage of men who, whilst ostensibly votaries of science, were not unprovided with excitable spirits and rough hands. Students gathered, rich and poor, great doctors taught, munificent founders, like Robert of Sorbon, bestowed their money or their influence, the monks of all orders gathered round silently, and to some extent distrustfully, from Citeaux, from Cluny, even from the Grande Chartreuse, with the Benedictines of S. Germain, the Premonstratensians—their church was where now stands the Café de la Rotonde—and the Augustinians. As for the Dominicans and Franciscans, they, as may be supposed, were [pg 038] early on the spot, to teach quite as much as to learn. The following is a sketch of the men who flocked to the great university—at least of one considerable class:
“There were starving, friendless lads, with their unkempt heads and their tattered suits, who walked the streets, hungering for bread, and famishing for knowledge, and hankering after a sight of some of those great doctors, of whom they had heard so much when far away in the woods of Germany or the fields of France. Some were so poor that they could not afford to follow a course of theology. We read of one poor fellow on his death-bed, having nothing else, giving his shoes and stockings to a companion to procure a Mass for his soul. Some were only too glad to carry holy water to private houses, selon la coutume Gallicane, with the hope of receiving some small remuneration. Some were destitute of necessary clothing. One tunic sometimes served for three, who took it in turns—two went to bed, whilst the third dressed himself and hurried off to school. Some spent all their scanty means in buying parchments, and wasted their strength, through half the night, poring over crabbed manuscript, or in puzzling out that jargon which contained the wisdom of the wisest of the Greeks. Whole nights some would remain awake on their hard pallets, in those unhealthy cells, trying to work out some problem proposed by the professor in the schools. But there were rich as well as poor at Paris. There was Langton, like others, famous for his opulence, who taught, and then became Canon of Notre Dame; and Thomas à Becket, who, as a youth, came here to seek the charm of gay society.” (I., p. 354.)
Amid all the noise, turmoil, and disputes of the huge colony of students, numbering more thousands than Oxford or Cambridge at this day can show hundreds, the great Dominican convent of S. James was a grand and famous centre of light and work. S. Dominic was not long before he settled in Paris. At first the friars lived in a mean hired lodging, apparently on the Island of Notre Dame. But soon their reputation for poverty and learning attracted the notice of influential benefactors, and they had a house of their own. It was dedicated to S. James the Apostle, and quickly became not only a great monastery but a famous school. The Dominican Order, divinely founded for a want of the time, soon began to show in front of the progress of the age, and to lead instead of following. It was here, in S. James, that Alanus de Insulis and Vincent of Beauvois wrote histories and commentaries; it was here that Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas lectured and wrote; and the crowd of lesser names that are mentioned on its rolls about this time, less distinguished but still distinguished, would take long to enumerate. It was for S. James that S. Dominic himself had framed a body of rules. These rules are most striking, as given in the pages of Prior Vaughan. They show how a saint and monastic legislator feels the “form and pressure” of the times, and how he provides for a new feature in monasticism. To read these rules, one feels tempted to say that the Dominicans sacrificed everything to give their men a first-rate course of studies. But we must remember the midnight vigil and the perpetual absence and the long silence. Still, the cloisters of S. James were different enough from those of Monte Casino. There was a great hall at S. James', where professors taught and whither students thronged to hear—how different from the remote cloister of Jarrow, where Venerable Bede taught his younger brethren for so many years on the quiet flats between the Wear and the Tyne! The cells knew the light of the midnight lamp, the cloisters resounded with disputation, the young students of the Order [pg 039] were men of few books—a Bible, a copy of the Historia of Petrus Comestor and of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, was all their private library. But half the day was spent face to face with a professor and with each other, and the want of books was not much felt. And what an education it must have been to listen to and take down the Summa contra Gentiles of the Angel of the Schools! As we have said, the whole of these two chapters is instinct with the liveliest description, and we cannot do better than recommend readers to go to it and judge for themselves.
We must reserve what we have not yet touched upon, viz., the personal life of the Saint himself, for another notice. It must not be supposed that Prior Vaughan passes over the person of S. Thomas in his anxiety to show us what sort of a world he lived in. It will soon be seen, on making some slight acquaintance with the book, that the strictly biographical portion is in reality most successful; the story is well told, and, like all stories of sanctity and supernatural heroism, goes straight to the heart.