Francis' success in this matter and the propaganda of his influence will not be so surprising to Americans of this generation, if they will only recall what is still a precious memory in the minds of men who are yet alive, that efforts to found a community not unlike that of the Franciscans in certain ways, attracted widespread attention even in our own country half a century ago. After all, the men who gathered at Brook Farm had ideas and ideals not so distant from those cherished by St. Francis and the early members of the Franciscan Order. Their main effort was also to get away from worldly cares and have the opportunity to work out their philosophy of life far from the disturbing influence of city life, in the peaceful pursuit of only such agricultural efforts as might be necessary to ensure them simple sustenance, yet at the same time enforce from them such exercise in the open air as would guarantee the preservation of health. The men of Brook Farm were, in the eyes of their generation, quite as far from practical ideas as were the early Franciscans. It must not be forgotten, however, that these men who thus attempted in the Nineteenth Century what St. Francis succeeded in accomplishing in the Thirteenth, in their subsequent careers succeeded in impressing themselves very strongly upon the life of the American people. Much of what is best in our Nineteenth Century life would be lost if the Brook farmers and what they accomplished were to be removed from it. Men of ideals are usually also men of working ideas, as these two experiences in history would seem to show.
ST. ELIZABETH—THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)
ST. LOUIS—THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)
ST. CLARE—THREE FRANCISCANS (GIOTTO)
It was not alone for the men of his generation, however, that Francis was destined to furnish a refuge from worldly care and a place of peace and thoughtful life. We have already said that it was by chance, certainly without any conscious intention on Francis' part that the Franciscan order for men which is usually spoken of as the First Order came into existence. The last thing in the world very probably that would ever have entered into the mind of Francis when he began to lead the simple life of a poor little man of God, was the founding of a religious order for women. We tell elsewhere the story, of St. Clare's interest in St. Francis' mode of life and of the trials that she underwent in order to obtain permission and opportunity to fashion her own life in the same way. The problem was even more serious for women than for men. St. Francis considered that they should not be allowed to follow the Franciscan custom of going out to seek alms and yet required that they should live in absolute poverty, possessing nothing and supporting themselves only by the contributions of the faithful and the work of their hands. St. Clare attempted the apparently impossible and solved the problem of a new career for the women of her time.
It was not very long before St. Clare's example proved as infective as that of St. Francis himself. While in the beginning the members of her family had been the most strenuous objectors against her taking up such an unwonted mode of existence it was not long before she was joined in the monastery of St. Damian where her little community was living, by her sister who was to become almost as famous as herself under the name of St. Agnes, and by her mother and other near relatives, from Assisi and the neighborhood. This Second Order of St. Francis to which only women were admitted proved to have in it the germ of as active life as that of the first order. Before the end of the Thirteenth Century there were women Franciscans in every country in Europe. These convents furnished for women a refuge from the worried, hurried, over-busy life around them that proved quite as attractive as the similar opportunity for the men. For many hundreds of years down even to our own time, women were to find in the quiet obscurity of such Franciscan convents a peaceful, happy life in which they occupied themselves with simple conventual duties, with manual labor in their monastery gardens, with the making of needle work in which they became the most expert in the world, with the illuminating of missals and office books of such artistic beauty that they have become the most precious treasures of our great libraries, and with the long hours of prayer by which they hoped to accomplish as much in making the world better as if they devoted themselves to ardent efforts of reform which, of course, the circumstances of the time would not have permitted.
Finally there was the Third Order of St. Francis, which was to gather to itself so many of the distinguished people of the century whose occupations and obligations would not permit them to live the conventual life, but who yet felt that they must be attached by some bond to this beautiful sanctity that was entering into all the better life of the century. The Third Order was established so as to permit all the world to become Franciscans to whatever degree it considered possible, and to share in the sublime Christianity of the founder whom they all admired so much, even if they were not able to imitate his sublimer virtues. Into this Third Order of St. Francis most of the finer spirits of the time entered with enthusiasm. We need only recall that Louis IX. of France, the greatest Monarch of the century, considered it a special privilege to be a follower of the humble Francis, and that St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the daughter of a king, the wife and mother of a ruling prince, gave another example of the far-reachingness of Francis' work. Dante was another of the great members of the Third Order and was buried in the habit of St. Francis, glorying in the thought of the brotherhood this gave him with the saint he loved so much.
All down the centuries since, other distinguished men in many countries of Europe were proud to claim the same distinction. Modern science is supposed to be unorthodox in its tendencies and electricity is the most recent of the sciences in development. Three of the great founders in electricity, Volta, Galvani and Ampere, were members of the Third Order of St. Francis and at least one of them, Galvani, insisted on being buried in the habit of the order six centuries after the death of his father Francis in order to show how much he appreciated the privilege. There is no man who lived in the Thirteenth Century who influenced the better side of men more in all the succeeding ages down to and including our own time, than the poor little man of God of Assisi. He is just coming into a further precious heritage of uplift for the men of our time, that is surprising for those who are so buried in the merely material that they fail to realize how much the ideal still rules the minds of thinking men, but that seems only natural and inevitable to those who appreciate all the attractiveness there is in a simple life lived without the bootless hurry, the unattaining bustle and the over-strained excitement of the strenuous existence.
What St. Francis and his order accomplished in Italy another great Saint, Dominic, was achieving in the West. The fact that another order similar to that of St. Francis in many respects, yet differing from it in a number of essential particulars, should have arisen almost at the same time shows how profoundly the spirit of organization of effort had penetrated into the minds of these generations of the Thirteenth Century. While poverty was to be the badge of St. Dominic's followers as well as those of St. Francis, learning was to replace the simplicity which St. Francis desired for his sons. The order of preachers began at once to give many eminent scholars to the Church, and for three centuries there was not a single generation that did not see as Dominicans some of the most intellectual men of Europe. Leaders they were in philosophy, in the development of thought, in education, and in every phase of ecclesiastical life. The watch dogs of the Lord, (Domini Canes) they were called, punning on their name because everwhere, they were in the van of defense against the enemies of Christianity. That the Thirteenth Century should have given rise to two such great religious orders stamps it as a wonderfully fruitful period for religion as well as for every other phrase of human development.
In order to understand what these great founders tried to do, the work of these two orders must be considered together. They have never ceased, during all the intervening seven centuries, to be the source of great influence in the religious world. They have proven refuges for many gentle spirits at all times and have been the homes of learning, as well as of piety. While occasionally their privileges have been abused, and men have taken advantage of the opportunities to be idle and luxurious, this has happened much seldomer than the world imagines. Not a single century has failed to show men among them whom the world honors as Saints, and whose lives have been examples of what can be accomplished by human nature at its best. They have been literally schools of unselfishness, and men have learned to think less of themselves and more of their labor by the contemplation of the lives of these begging friars. What they did for England, the Rev. Augustus Jessopp, a non-conformist clergyman in England, has recently told very well, and the more one studies their history, the higher the estimation of them; and the more one knows of them, the less does one talk of their vices. Green in his "History of the English People" has paid them a tribute that it is well to remember:—
"To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of the Thirteenth Century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was aroused at the sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. 'Zeal,' he cried, 'must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth.' His fiery ardor and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all: he flings his very clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God. His passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his brother; he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His last faint cry was a 'Welcome, Sister Death.' Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim was the same, to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, to carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by the entire reversal of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the preacher, the monk for a friar. To force the new 'brethren' into entire dependence on those among whom they labored the vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the 'Begging Friars' were to subsist on the alms of the poor, they might possess neither money nor lands, the very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in a few years around Francis and Dominic, and the begging preachers, clad in their coarse frock of serge, with the girdle of rope around their waist, wandered barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor."
SIDE CAPITAL (LINCOLN)
XVII
AQUINAS THE SCHOLAR
No one of all the sons of the Thirteenth Century, not even Dante himself, so typifies the greatness of the mentality of the period as does Thomas, called from his birthplace Aquinas, or of Aquin, on whom his own and immediately succeeding generations because of what they considered his almost more than human intellectual acumen, bestowed the title of Angelical Doctor, while the Church for the supremely unselfish character of his life, formally conferred the title of Saint. The life of Aquinas is of special interest, because it serves to clarify many questions as to the education of the Thirteenth Century and to correct many false impressions that are only too prevalent with regard to the intellectual life of the period. Though Aquinas came of a noble family which was related to many of the Royal houses of Europe and was the son of the Count of Aquino, then one of the most important of the non-reigning noble houses of Italy, his education was begun in his early years and was continued in the midst of such opportunities as even the modern student might well envy.
It is often said that the nobility at this time, paid very little attention to the things of the intellect and indeed rather prided themselves on their ignorance of even such ordinary attainments as reading and writing. While this was doubtless true for not a few of them, Aquinas's life stands in open contradiction with the impression that any such state of mind was at all general, or that there were not so many exceptions as to nullify any such supposed rule. Evidently those who wished could and did take advantage of educational opportunities quite as in our day. Aquinas's early education was received at the famous monastery of Monte Cassino in Southern Italy, where the Benedictines for more than six centuries had been providing magnificent opportunities for the studious youth of Italy and for serious-minded students from all over Europe. When he was scarcely more than a boy he proceeded to the University of Naples, which at that time, under the patronage of the Emperor Frederick II., was being encouraged not only to take the place so long held by Salernum in the educational world of Europe, but also to rival the renowned Universities of Paris and Bologna. Here he remained until he was seventeen years of age when he resolved to enter the Dominican Order, which had been founded only a short time before by St. Dominic, yet had already begun to make itself felt throughout the religious and educational world of the time.
Just as it is the custom to declare that as a rule, the nobility cared little for education, so it is more or less usual to proclaim that practically only the clergy had any opportunities for the higher education during the Thirteenth Century. Thomas had evidently been given his early educational opportunities, however, without any thought of the possibility of his becoming a clergyman. His mother was very much opposed to his entrance among the Dominicans, and every effort was made to picture to him the pleasures and advantages that would accrue to him because of his noble connections, in a life in the world. Thomas insisted, however, and his firm purpose in the matter finally conquered even the serious obstacles that a noble family can place in the way of a boy of seventeen, as regards the disposition of his life in a way opposed to their wishes.
The Dominicans realized the surpassing intelligence of the youth whom they had received and accordingly he was sent to be trained under the greatest teacher of their order, the famous Albert the Great, who was then lecturing at Cologne. Thomas was not the most brilliant of scholars as a young man and seems even to have been the butt of his more successful fellow-students. They are said to have called him the dumb one, or sometimes because of his bulkiness even as a youth, the dumb ox. Albert himself, however, was not deceived in his estimation of the intellectual capacity of his young student, and according to tradition declared, that the bellowings of this ox would yet be heard throughout all Christendom. After a few years spent at Cologne, Thomas when he was in his early twenties, accompanied Albert who had been called to Paris. It was at Paris that Thomas received his bachelor's degree and also took out his license to teach—the doctor's degree of our time. After this some years further were spent at Cologne and then the greatness of the man began to dawn on his generation. He was called back to Paris and became one of the most popular of the Professors at that great University in the height of her fame, at a time when no greater group of men has perhaps ever been gathered together, than shared with him the honors of the professors' chairs at that institution.
"Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas, form among themselves, so to speak, a complete representation of all the intellectual powers: they are the four doctors who uphold the chair of philosophy in the temple of the Middle Ages. Their mission was truly the reestablishment of the sciences, but not their final consummation. They were not exempt from the ignorances and erroneous opinions of their day, yet they did much to overcome them and succeeded better than is usually acknowledged in introducing the era of modern thought. Often, the majesty, I may even say the grace of their conceptions, disappears under the veil of the expressions in which they are clothed; but these imperfections are amply atoned for by superabundant merits. Those Christian philosophers did not admit within themselves the divorce, since their day become so frequent, between the intellect and the will; their lives were uniformly a laborious application of their doctrines. They realized in its plenitude the practical wisdom so often dreamed of by the ancients—the abstinence of the disciples of Pythagoras, the constancy of the stoics, together with humility and charity, virtues unknown to the antique world. Albert the Great and St. Thomas left the castles of their noble ancestors to seek obscurity in the cloisters of St. Dominic: the former abdicated, and the latter declined, the honors of the Church. It was with the cord of St. Francis that Roger Bacon and St. Bonaventure girded their loins; when the last named was sought that the Roman purple might be placed upon his shoulders, he begged the envoys to wait until he finished washing the dishes of the convent. Thus they did not withdraw themselves within the exclusive mysteries of an esoteric teaching; they opened the doors of their schools to the sons of shepherds and artisans, and, like their Master, Christ, they said: "Come all!" After having broken the bread of the word, they were seen distributing the bread of alms. The poor knew them and blessed their names. Even yet, after the lapse of six hundred years, the dwellers in Paris kneel round the altar of the Angel of the School, and the workmen of Lyons deem it an honor once a year to bear upon their brawny shoulders the triumphant remains of the 'Seraphic Doctor.'"
For most modern students and even scholars educated in secular universities the name of Aquinas is scarcely more than a type, the greatest of them, it is true, of the schoolmen who were so much occupied with distant, impractical and, to say the least, merely theoretic metaphysical problems, in the later Middle Ages. It is true that the renewed interest in Dante in recent years in English speaking countries, has brought about a revival of attention in Aquinas's work because to Dante, the Angelical Doctor, as he was already called, meant so much, and because the Divine Comedy has been declared often and often, by competent critics, to be the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas of Aquin in verse. Even this adventitious literary interest, however, has not served to lift the obscurity in which Aquinas is veiled for the great majority of scholarly people, whose education has been conducted according to modern methods and present-day ideas.
As showing a hopeful tendency to recognize the greatness of these thinkers of the Middle Ages it is interesting to note that about five years ago one of St. Thomas's great works—the Summa Contra Gentiles—was placed on the list of subjects which a candidate may at his option offer in the final honor school of the litterae humaniores at Oxford. There has come a definite appreciation of the fact that this old time philosopher represents a phase of intellectual development that must not be neglected, and that stands for such educational influence as may well be taken advantage of even in our day of information rather than mental discipline. For the purposes of this course Father Rickaby, S. J., has prepared an annotated translation of the great philosophic work under the title, "Of God and His Creatures," which was published by Burns and Oates of London, 1905. This will enable those for whom the Latin of St. Thomas was a stumbling block, to read the thoughts of the great scholastic, in translation at least, and it is to be hoped that we shall hear no more of the trifling judgments which have so disgraced our English philosophical literature.
The fact that Pope Leo XIII., by a famous papal bull, insisted that St. Thomas should be the standard of teaching in philosophy and theology in all the Catholic institutions of learning throughout the world, aroused many thinkers to a realization of the fact that far from being a thing of the dead and distant past, Thomas's voice was still a great living force in the world of thought. To most people Leo XIII. appealed as an intensely practical and thoroughly modern ruler, whose judgment could be depended on even with regard to teaching problems in philosophy and theology. There was about him none of the qualities that would stamp him as a far-away mystic whose thoughts were still limited by medieval barriers. The fact that in making his declaration the Pope was only formulating as a rule, what had spontaneously become the almost constant practice and tradition of Catholic schools and universities, of itself served to show how great and how enduring was St. Thomas's influence.
In the drawing together of Christian sects that has inevitably come as a result of the attacks made upon Christianity by modern materialists, and then later by those who would in their ardor for the higher criticism do away with practically all that is divine in Christianity, there has come a very general realization even on the part of those outside of her fold, that the Roman Catholic Church occupies a position more solidly founded on consistent logical premises and conclusions than any of the denominations. Without her aid Christian apologetics would indeed be in sad case. Pope Leo's declaration only emphasizes the fact, then, that the foundation stone of Christian apologetics was laid by the great work of St. Thomas, and that to him more than any other is due that wonderful coordination of secular and religious knowledge, which appoints for each of these branches of knowledge its proper place, and satisfies the human mind better than any other system of philosophic thought. This is the real panegyric of St. Thomas, and it only adds to the sublimity of it that it should come nearly six centuries and a half after his death. To only a bare handful of men in the history of the human race, is it given thus to influence the minds of subsequent generations for so long and to have laid down the principles of thought that are to satisfy men for so many generations. This is why, in any attempt at even inadequate treatment of the greatness of the Thirteenth Century, Thomas Aquinas, who was its greatest scholar, must have a prominent place. The present generation has had sufficient interest in him aroused, however, amply to justify such a giving of space.
When Leo XIII. made his recommendation of St. Thomas it was not as one who had merely heard of the works of the great medieval thinker, or knew them only by tradition, or had slightly dipped into them as a dilettante, but as one who had been long familiar with them, who had studied the Angelical Doctor in youth, who had pondered his wisdom in middle age, and resorted again and again to him for guidance in the difficulties of doctrine in maturer years, and the difficulties of morals such as presented themselves in his practical life as a churchman. It was out of the depths of his knowledge of him, that the great Pope, whom all the modern world came to honor so reverently before his death, drew his supreme admiration for St. Thomas and his recognition of the fact that no safer guide in the thorny path of modern Christian apologetics could be followed, than this wonderful genius who first systematized human thought as far as the relations of Creator to creature are considered, in the heyday of medieval scholarship and university teaching.
Those who have their knowledge of scholastic philosophy at second hand, from men who proclaim this period of human development as occupied entirely with fruitless discussion of metaphysical theories, will surely think that they could find nothing of interest for them in St. Thomas's writings. It is true the casual reader may not penetrate far enough into his writing to realize its significance and to appreciate its depth of knowledge, but the serious student finds constant details of supreme interest because of their applications to the most up-to-date problems. We venture to quote an example that will show this more or less perfectly according to the special philosophic interest of readers. It is St. Thomas's discussion of the necessity there was for the revelation of the truth of the existence of God. His statement of the reasons why men, occupied with the ordinary affairs of life, would not ordinarily come to this truth unless it were revealed to them, though they actually have the mental capacity to reach it by reason alone, will show how sympathetically the Saint appreciated human conditions as they are.
"If a truth of this nature were left to the sole inquiry of reason, three disadvantages would follow. One is that the knowledge of God would be confined to few. The discovery of truth is the fruit of studious inquiry. From this very many are hindered. Some are hindered by a constitutional unfitness, their natures being ill-disposed to the acquisition of knowledge. They could never arrive by study at the highest grade of human knowledge, which consists in the knowledge of God. Others are hindered by the claims of business and the ties of the management of property. There must be in human society some men devoted to temporal affairs. These could not possibly spend time enough in the learned lessons of speculative inquiry to arrive at the highest point of human inquiry, the knowledge of God. Some again are hindered by sloth. The knowledge of the truths that reason can investigate concerning God presupposes much previous knowledge; indeed almost the entire study of philosophy is directed to the knowledge of God. Hence, of all parts of philosophy that part stands over to be learned last, which consists of metaphysics dealing with (divine things). Thus only with great labour of study is it possible to arrive at the searching out of the aforesaid truth; and this labour few are willing to undergo for sheer love of knowledge.
"Another disadvantage is that such as did arrive at the knowledge or discovery of the aforesaid truth would take a long time over it on account of the profundity of such truth, and the many prerequisites to the study, and also because in youth and early manhood the soul, tossed to and fro on the waves of passion, is not fit for the study of such high truth; only in settled age does the soul become prudent and scientific, as the philosopher says. Thus if the only way open to the knowledge of God were the way of reason, the human race would (remain) in thick darkness of ignorance: as the knowledge of God, the best instrument for making men perfect and good, would accrue only to a few after a considerable lapse of time.
"A third disadvantage is that, owing to the infirmity of our judgment and the perturbing force of imagination, there is some admixture of error in most of the investigations of human reason. This would be a reason to many for continuing to doubt even of the most accurate demonstrations, not perceiving the force of the demonstration, and seeing the divers judgments, of divers persons who have the name of being wise men. Besides, in the midst of much demonstrated truth there is sometimes an element of error, not demonstrated but asserted on the strength of some plausible and sophistic reasoning that is taken for a demonstration. And therefore it was necessary for the real truth concerning divine things to be presented to men with fixed certainty by way of faith. Wholesome, therefore, is the arrangement of divine clemency, whereby things even that reason can investigate are commanded to be held on faith, so that all might be easily partakers of the knowledge of God, and that without doubt and error (Book I. cix)."
A still more striking example of Thomas's eminently sympathetic discussion of a most difficult problem, is to be found in his treatment of the question of the Resurrection of the Body. The doctrine that men will rise again on the last day with the same bodies that they had while here on earth, has been a stumbling block for the faith of a great many persons from the beginning of Christianity. In recent times the discovery of the indestructibility of matter, far from lessening the skeptical elements in this problem as might have been anticipated, has rather emphasized them. While the material of which man's body was composed is never destroyed, it is broken up largely into its original elements and is used over and over again in many natural processes, and even enters into the composition of other men's bodies during the long succeeding generations. Here is a problem upon which it would ordinarily be presumed at once, that a philosophic writer of the Thirteenth Century could throw no possible light. We venture to say, however, that the following passage which we quote from an article on St. Thomas in a recent copy of the Dublin Review, represents the best possible solution of the problem, even in the face of all our modern advance in science.