There's little profound today, my friends - but I need to get to the blog periodically, just to keep fit. :) I'm embarrassed (though not sorry) to admit that I nearly laughed aloud during the brief sermon at today's Eucharist. The homilist (a priest for whom I have very high regard, by the way) is a highly intelligent and learned man (... how I envy that doctorate from Oxford...), but I have a strong sense that he is keenly aware that he is very handsome, and has a bit of the peacock in him. Though Fr X is of my own generation, he makes many references as if he were just sooooo ancient, and many more to being 'fat'. This leaves a sour taste in my mouth, I shall admit. Since X is far from being a nonagenarian (and those in my family who are would be insulted were that taken to mean that they had declined), and many who genuinely have weight problems would envy his size, I am inclined to sense an ego game - 'let me say how fat I am so you can tell me you envy how I look.' It vaguely reminds me of how, in the hearing of people who are lucky to have a potato on their plates, uppity women would go on about how it was just so difficult to find good staff or a place to store the yacht these days.
Today, in the course of a sermon which highlighted a few things about my old friend Thomas, Fr X got on his "repentant but hoping to be forgiven" look and said, "Thomas Aquinas was... a sweet man... and, as it comforts me to remember... had a weight problem." (From what contemporaries said of Thomas, back in the days when being fat did not mean mental problems, self hatred, a subconscious desire to be unattractive, or the 'suicidal' tendency to destroy one's health, and the like, Fr X could have fit into Thomas's back pocket.)
The blend of Thomas and the best of the Eastern theologians, which is the approach I ultimately embraced, can be wonderful - at its best, it produces Karl Rahner. The trouble that I have seen in Anglo-Saxon countries (and let me include the country which produced the nuns and priests of my childhood, who spoke English brilliantly but would have smacked me had I ever called them Anglo-Anything) is that blending Thomas with Calvin is an effect akin to that of combining diesel fuel and fertiliser a la Oklahoma City... and it's probably obvious which of the two I consider to be the fertiliser. Calvin is all depravity, our weakness, deprivation, a disgusting idea that wealth is a sign of virtue and poverty an indication of wickedness. What I
love best in Thomas is his utterly positive view of creation (an endless process), and of our human nature. Even in treating of the greatest human wickedness, Thomas saw us as good but failing to reach the potential for which we were created.
I went through a period (probably around the time when I wasn't even out of my teens yet but had a school assignment to go through 99 questions from the Summa) when I'll admit my attitudes towards Thomas were negative - or, rather, not his arguments in themselves but how they were used. Many of Thomas's most brilliant philosophical arguments, if they are taken out of the context of the philosophical and turned into pastoral clichés, can be disastrous. Where Thomas may have been defending omniscience (showing it does not conflict with free will), omnipotence, and the like, the clergy, who were also steeped in Aquinas but forgot what they learnt where and why, would come out with horrid statements (let us say, to someone whose little child just died) such as "God's priorities are not our priorities," possibly even adding something (not from the Summa!) such as "God may have taken him so he didn't fall into mortal sin and be damned later..." Of course, the limitations of our vision, and puzzling over "God's priorities," were old struggles by the time of Job, let alone Thomas, but when anyone uses that particular form of ammunition against the devil (i.e., glory in your misfortune, because God did it for your own good in the hereafter), I'd like to kick him square in the arsenal.
Just a few years ago, I had the courage to tackle the exam paper about Thomas (and others) on 'divine simplicity' - one of the most complicated and confusing topics I've ever encountered. (I managed well, somehow - though I don't understand 'divine simplicity' very much, and I really don't think anyone else does either, much as they might not admit this. I'll spare my readers any exposition. But it's always confusing in Thomas that he says what God is not and nothing more - not to be taken for "God is not this and is therefore that.") I suppose I've mellowed with age. But, in my younger days, before I'd learnt to take philosophical arguments for what they are and nothing more, much of Thomas irritated me (at least as it was used in preaching and pastoral settings.) It seemed as if we shouldn't have any hope for anything except heaven - or that God was all powerful but wouldn't grant healing except to prove Jesus' divinity, get saints canonised, or forgive us. (The only healing that was supposed to matter was that of the soul.) I got so sick of preaching about that 'evil is the absence of good' (a fine concept - but not out of context) that I wanted to blurt out "some comfort that was to people being herded into Auschwitz!" I also was turned off by a weird idea that God wasn't what any human would consider loving or even moral (I can't think of a father who'd treat his children, let alone his 'first-born,' the way that "God's priorities" established) - and a weirder picture of this vague metaphysical completeness. God wasn't loving, caring, etc.., in a fashion a single one of his creatures could comprehend, but was perfect in the sense of being fully whatever it meant to be God.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, though I've never won a race I sometimes do reach a finish line. (Of course, in the spiritual life there is no finish line - I'm just having some fun, so don't take this literally.) But it definitely is a tortoise and hare situation, and it took me about forty years to develop into a blend of the East and Thomas. It wasn't until recently that I saw that I'd been highly Thomistic all along.
My favourite Thomas Aquinas story (and don't miss the pun on 'burn') is about when he first became a friar. Italian people, then as now, dwell on fertility and don't want celibate sons, so, as the story goes, Thomas's family sent a sexy, naked woman in to seduce him. God was quite a showman still in the 13th century, so he sheltered Thomas from harm when Thomas jumped into the flames of a nearby fireplace to escape her. Thomas's immortal line then was that he'd rather burn now than later.
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