Bédier had deep sympathy for the star-crossed lovers; he understood them, too. In their hearts the love they felt for each other was the greatest gift the world could give, and if it was accompanied by unrelenting pain, this, as it was for Taillefer, was a price they were willing to pay.
THOMAS AQUINAS
1225–1274
Summa Theologica
Thomas Aquinas was born in 1224 or 1225 in the town of Aquino, south of Rome. His parents possessed a modest feudal domain, and they were ambitious for their son, whom they destined very early for a career in the Church. When still a boy, Thomas was placed in the monastery of Monte Cassino near his home in the hope that he would some day become its abbot.
In 1239 Thomas was required to move to the University of Naples, where he became interested in the teachings of the Dominicans, which order he joined. The Dominican fathers decided to send him to Paris, the center of theological research and speculation at the time. He set out in the spring of 1244 but was abducted on the road by his family, who did not want him to go to Paris and undertake a teaching, instead of a political, career. After a year of captivity he was allowed to leave. He went to Paris to the convent of Saint-Jacques for study under the great teacher Albertus Magnus. He was immediately plunged into a controversy that was rocking the Church.
Three fundamental positions were vying for dominance in the theological thought of the time. First, there was the spiritual Christian Platonism that had been injected into Catholic thought by St. Augustine in the fourth century and that was the traditional conservative view. Second, there was the position of the Arab scholar Averroes, who held that there were two truths, the one of reason and the other of faith. Finally, there was the new position of the Aristotelians, who maintained that there was only one truth and that there was no basic conflict between nature, if rightly interpreted, and religion.
Aristotelianism represented a radical new departure, and Thomas was attracted by the novel doctrine. He was soon involved in the controversy and became known as the leading spokesman of the Aristotelians. He engaged in public disputes with various traditionalists, defeated the Averroists, and lived to see Aristotelianism’s official triumph, although the fundamentalist spirituality of the Augustinians has never died out of Catholic Christianity.
Thomas wrote many works. He was often writing more than one book at a time, which he would dictate to different scribes, sending still other scribes or students to search out and check references and citations. He sometimes employed as many as twenty assistants at a time.
Without their help it seems unlikely that he could have composed the more than fifty volumes of theology that are known to have come from his hand. His greatest work is the Summa Theologica, on which he worked from about 1265 until his death in 1274. It fills some twenty-five volumes in the complete edition translated by the Dominican Fathers.
Despite its enormous size the Summa is, as Thomas makes clear at the beginning, no more than a primer of Catholic theology for the instruction of beginning students. The Summa can therefore be read, or read in, by anyone.
The Summa Theologica is organized in the form of “questions” concerning God and man and their relation, the Angels and their relations to both God and man, virtue and vice, politics and art, knowledge and ignorance, teaching and learning—indeed, almost all of the matters of importance to mankind. One fascinating question deals with the aureoles—the golden circles that surround the heads of saints in medieval paintings. Several questions deal with eschatology, the science of “last things”—the Day of Judgment, the means whereby the dead will rise from their graves, the mode of corporeality that they will enjoy, and the orders of punishments and rewards.
The book has great authority and to read it is very exciting. But only if you know how to do so.
The Summa as a whole is divided into several Parts, these Parts into Questions, and these into Articles. Examination of the opening of the first Part of the first Part, on God, reveals the interior organization of the work.
The first question of all is “Whether God exists.” The Articles are then presented in contradiction to the truth. That is, a wrong answer is stated as a subject and this is then disproved and shown to be false: the opposite is therefore true.
Article I is: “It seems that God does not exist.” Arguments are given to support this contention. The prosecution, as it were, then rests, and the defense takes over. The first rebuttal is always a quotation from Scripture. In this case, the text cited is:
“On the contrary, God says in His own person, I am that I am.” Other arguments, not from Scripture but from reason, follow,
Thomas stating all the major ones. Finally, in his own voice, he says: “I answer that … ” and responds to the false arguments that were listed earlier in support of the false premise of the Article.
Having established in this exquisitely cumbersome way the existence of God, the Summa then moves on to other theological questions. The form is always the same, and the truth always emerges in the same tortured way.
Tortured perhaps, but also dramatic. The form of the Disputation, the major conflicts of will and reason that marked the late Middle Age, is always at work in the Summa Theologica to produce a living, almost throbbing work of literature.
It is not a book to read from beginning to end. That would take years. But the Summa is always interesting, wherever you start to read. Begin with a subject that especially intrigues you. Practice reading the queer, inverted form of the Articles. Learn and enjoy.
Thomas Aquinas was summoned by Pope Gregory X to the second Council of Lyons in 1274, where he probably would have been chastised. But he died on the way, at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova. Several of his theses were thereafter condemned by the masters of Paris, the highest theological jurisdiction of the Church. But the modified realism of Thomas Aquinas was important and valuable, representing as it does the reasonable middle position between excessive spiritualism on the one hand and excessive rationalism on the other. Thomas was canonized a saint in 1323, officially named a doctor of the Church in 1567, and proclaimed as the leading protagonist of orthodoxy during the nineteenth century.
All that need not concern you too much. The important thing about Thomas Aquinas, and particularly about his Summa Theologica, is that the book is a pleasure to read despite the strangeness and unfamiliarity of its form.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
1265–1321
The Divine Comedy
Dante called his masterpiece a “comedy” because it told of the passage of the soul through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven and the vision of God—that is, it ended happily. If the journey had been in the opposite direction and ended badly he might have titled it The Divine Tragedy. Dante’s understanding of these terms was not profound; it depended upon an abbreviated Latin synopsis of the Poetics of Aristotle. Neither Dante nor anyone else in Italy during the thirteenth century could read ancient Greek; there were no original texts of Greek classical authors in the West until after Dante’s death. The word “Divine” in the title was added later, by critics and readers who thought the poem was so good Dante could not have written it without God’s help. They may well have been correct.