The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

The Thomist 66 (2002): 9-13 ST. THOMAS AQUINAS: TEACHER1 WILLIAM J. HILL, 0.P. THEMANWEHONOR today, St. Thomas Aquinas, whose spirit we celebrate and strive to make our own, was (and is) many things to many people. But in a particular sense, he was one thing only: he was a teacher-something that should resonate for an audience of university professors and students. He saw himself single-mindedly as a "doctor veritatis"; he knew precisely what he was doing, why he was doing it, and never seriously considered abandoning teaching from the time he began in 1252 at the University of Paris until 1273 in Naples, three months before his death. He was not a parish priest, not an itinerant preacher, not a retreat master, not a foreign missionary, not even an editor. He refused the bishopric, and later when he heard rumors that he would be made cardinal (along with Bonaventure) at the Council of Lyons to which he had been summoned, he prayed that God might let him die first; for, in his own words "this will mean an end to my teaching"-and God took him at his word. He knew something that those of us who teach know intimately-that teaching is simultaneously two things: (1) it is utter joy, and (2) it is constant martyrdom. The first means for some of us that we could never do anything else even if we wished; the second means that doing it fits the paradoxical purposes of God in his mysterious work of human restoration. The true teacher knows what Thomas knew, namely that he brings to the domain of higher learning, in however frail a way, the life's blood, the vital spark that sets in motion and sustains that process of transcending 1 A homily given on the feast ofThomas Aquinas. While the date and place are not known with certainty, it is highly probable that it was given at The Catholic University of America. 9 10 WILLIAM). HILL, O.P. one's own limitations, of human flourishing, without which the world is surely a poorer and darker place. THE CHRISTIAN STORY What then did he teach? Quite simply the Christian story. In the sense that, in the ambiance of the university, he mediated it according to the most rigorous critical standards of the human intelligence, convinced that faith itself was a desire and a need to understand, and that faith and reason, far from contending one against the other, made common cause in the interest of human flourishing. The well-spring of this lay in that he was intoxicated by the transcendent power of a universe touched by God. In Christian iconography, he is represented holding a blazing sun in his hands which flames through him, at once illuminating the mind and inflaming the heart. It is really a double-edged vision of the universe-marked on one side with stability and structure, calling forth the demanding discipline of metaphysics, representing an Archimedean point in reality where the center holds and things do not fall apart, imaging the staying power of a God who is eternal. On the other side, it is a vision open to history and to the sweet contingencies of God's love for us; here life is viewed as adventure where nothing escapes change and everything is on the verge of becoming new, under the guidance of a God who, in Christ, has made our temporal order his own; this is a history given to us by God to be at once our responsibility and our glory. Aquinas was, in short, a man who stood in the very midst of God's creation, which he understood as summoned out of the Void for no other reason than to make the human person-who stands at its apex and gives it voice-the beneficiary of his love; a cosmos on which Aquinas readily discerned God's finger-prints. At the same time, he was a Christian believer who heard that Word, interpretive of the universe, which is derived neither from nature nor from profane history, but is exclusively God's selfutterance and self-communication; a domain of saving history in ST...