Entering the Mystical Cloud with the Angelic Doctor

Dr Carr reviews Peter Kwasniewski's recently released book, Anatomy of Transcendence: Mental Excess and Rapture in the Thought and Life of Thomas Aquinas.

From One Peter Five

By Thomas Carr, TOP, DPhil(Oxon)

Dr. Kwasniewski’s new book from Emmaus Academic, Anatomy of Transcendence: Mental Excess and Rapture in the Thought and Life of Thomas Aquinas, is a creative, original take on the literary corpus of the man the Church calls “the Common Doctor” (“common” because his writings are a universal treasure for the whole Church). The ordering premise of Kwasniewski’s book is an anthropological one: that man is oriented by divine grace to a posture of transcendence (Latin, excessus)—a call which culminates in the heavenly vision of God—and therefore of an intentional surrender of the self to “the one in whose image he is created.”

A sequel of sorts to his earlier work from Emmaus Academic, Ecstasy of Love in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Kwasniewski’s new book is divided into six parts: 

1. a detailed word study of Aquinas’ use of the term, “excessus”;
2. a study of “excessus mentis” in Aquinas’ scriptural commentaries;
3. a study of Aquinas’ analysis of St. Paul’s veiled reference to his ecstatic experience of heaven in 2 Cor. 12;
4. an analysis of the necessary distinctions between saintly forms of excess and the modes of madness and inebriation;
5. a study of the beatific vision and divine union as Aquinas understands them;
6. and a look into Aquinas’ own mystical experience of Christ toward the end of his life.

The first chapter of the book is arguably the most challenging. Here Kwasniewski engages in a close reading of Aquinas’ use of the term “excessus” (going beyond, transcending), a comparative term which, because God cannot be compared to any other thing, makes a full definition of God’s “greatness” problematic. As the author explains, understanding both the potential and limits of the Thomistic view of transcendence—God’s over us, and ours over ourselves as we encounter God—is essential to a full grasp of what the saint means when he speaks of man going beyond himself in order to attain the beatific vision. Readers who follow Kwasniewski’s argument here will be rewarded with an enhanced appreciation for the transcendence of God, and of God’s call to man to rise beyond himself (“excessus”) and up to (“accessus”) the heights of, what Aquinas calls “divine things.”

The author then turns to a study of transcendence in St. Thomas’ commentaries on Sacred Scripture. Having given us a master class on the semantics of “excessus,” here in chapter two Kwasniewski presents, through the eyes of St. Thomas, both New and Old Testament examples of transcendent ecstasy (“excessus mentis”) and rapture (“raptus”). Indeed, the Passion of Christ is treated by St. Thomas, following certain Fathers, as a kind of “extasis caritatis,” a going-beyond Himself for love. So, too, is Peter’s vision in Acts 10 treated as an experience that, by grace, carried the apostle beyond the limits of his own cognition. In the Old Testament, we find in Aquinas’ analysis of David, the great Psalmist, constrained by human brokenness yet able to receive inspiration from heaven to a degree that defies the limits of the intellect, a kind of “excessus mentis.”

Chapter three—the longest and most interesting chapter—begins with a quote from the great German Thomist, Joseph Pieper. We learn from Pieper that St. Thomas sees prophetic inspiration as a kind of suffering (“passio”) experienced when the divine light filters through a mind ill-equipped to handle such intense purity. This leads Kwasniewski, then, into a discussion of 2 Cor. 12: 1-4, the passage where St. Paul describes an experience of “passio” during which he claims to have been “caught up into the third heaven.” Aquinas’ analysis of this text reveals that what St. Paul describes is an experience of “raptus,” where the apostle was, by God’s power, “made to be outside himself;” that is, he suffered a kind of mental levitation whereby his normal cognitive powers were elevated, in an unwilled way, “by the force of a superior nature to that which is above nature.”

Did St. Paul, then, see God as He is in Himself, a gift understood traditionally to be available only to the saints in heaven? Here Kwasniewski guides us through Aquinas’ rather nuanced response: St. Paul did not experience the true “form” of God’s glory in the third heaven (which would have imparted a permanent beatitude and thus made faith and hope irrelevant) but rather he experienced that glory in a fleeting, yet wholly efficacious, manner; efficacious because the glimpse of the divine afforded Paul in his “raptus,” however temporary, was enough to instill in the apostle a perfection of knowledge of divine things, a “cognitio divinorum.” Paul was supernaturally enlightened by the experience, but he was not yet glorified.

Chapter four offers a Thomistic analysis of a problem that has befuddled secular scientists ever since Marx called religion an “opium” and Freud “an obsessional neurosis:” namely, where is the dividing line between the sober sanity of the saint, who can sometimes display what appears to be a kind of madness, and actual, clinical insanity? There are parallels, to be sure, between the inebriation of drink and that of the Spirit of God within one’s soul. Both are a kind of “excessus mentis,” a being beside oneself and not fully in control of one’s faculties. The key difference, as Aquinas points out, is that the former leads one lower, the latter higher; the first bears bad fruit, the latter the fruit of divine union and consequent acts of charity toward others. Martyrs, mystics, and prophets are soberly inebriated and mad in their sanity; unbelievers may mock them as foolish, but their affliction—an “excessus” of love for God and from God—is true wisdom. As Kwasniewski rightly says, “Sanctity is sanity,” and “life beyond reason is the life of reason at its peak.”

In chapter five, Kwasniewski examines Aquinas’ view of the beatific vision, the permanent state of beatitude attained by the saints in heaven, and the hope of every Christian on the way to heaven, which enables one to know and love God as He is in His essence. In St. Thomas’ definition, the beatific vision is “the highest activity [seeing] of the highest power [knowing] of the highest object [God].” While for Aquinas the seeing and the knowing of God as He is in Himself requires a remaking, by grace, of the human intellect, through which the intellect becomes, as it were, divine in its intentions and understanding—only a mind divinely empowered can know the divine—it is not, as per the common critique, merely an intellectual activity. Kwasniewski turns again to Pieper to explain that true “knowing” entails the union of knower and the known; like husband and wife who, in biblical terms, “know” each other, there in an interior union, a deep intimacy, between the soul in beatitude and the God whom it loves. The great Thomist scholar, Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., is also enlisted to explain how the beatific vision requires an immediacy of knowing, “without any idea serving as intermediary;” an intimacy of knower and known of such closeness that one can say that in the vision of God, “the knower becomes… the known and thus possesses it.”

Having thus demonstrated that Aquinas’ eschatology is unstained by the dry calculations of intellectualism, Kwasniewski concludes the chapter by making an important distinction: the union of knower and known in the beatific vision is not an ontological one; what, indeed, is divinized in heaven is not the being of the knower, but rather the capacity and operation of his or her knowing; it is the metaphysics of participation that governs the heavenly vision, not of substances. The creature seeing God remains a creature—only now, one capable by grace of attaining to union with God, for it is God Himself who creates that reality in the knower. In heaven, in other words, all reality will be understood as God sees it, for it is in God, through God, and indeed, as God, that reality will be known.

The sixth and final chapter of Anatomy of Transcendence examines the mystical experience that marked the final year of the saint’s life. In the Chapel of St. Nicholas in Naples, in 1273, Aquinas had a vision of Christ so refulgent, so glorious, that he considered by contrast all he had written as but “straw.” As the story goes, St. Thomas had arisen early prior to saying Mass and was praying in the Chapel. The sacristan, a certain brother Dominic, arrived to prepare for Mass and saw St. Thomas in ecstasy, floating a good meter off the ground. He then heard a voice emanating from the crucifix. “You have written well of me, Thomas,” said the Voice, “what do you desire as a reward?” “Nothing but you, Lord,” replied the saint, “nothing but you.” Thomas wrote little after this experience, leaving his great Summa to others to finish. Indeed, he would die within the year. Here Kwasniewski asks a question many students of Thomas have themselves asked, “What significance should this event… have for us who study his works?” After all, if the great master considered his writings as “straw,” perhaps we should, too. On the contrary, states Kwasniewski emphatically; after exploring several interpretations of Thomas’ humble, self-referential judgment, the author concludes:

The affective knowledge of the lover of God…is not propositional; it is hardly even describable…[b]ut it is no less knowledge for all that; on the contrary, it is human knowing in its highest assimilation to God short of the beatific vision, partaking there of his “inaccessible light” (1 Tim. 6:16).

What, then, will the reader take away from wrestling through these six key studies on the corpus of the “Common Doctor,” whose writings, despite the saint’s self-effacing attribution, have become the standard for Catholic ministerial, philosophical, and theological formation? Anatomy of Transcendence is a challenging read, to be sure, but the benefits of accepting the challenge are numerous. These include: a greater appreciation for the mystical and experiential elements in St. Thomas’ writings; a deeper appreciation for the difficulty in, even impossibility of, attaining full comprehension of divine things; a sharper sensitivity to the very varied expressions of mystical and ecstatic experiences in Sacred Scripture; and a more fervent love for the One about whom Aquinas had “written so well.” Kwasniewski cites Bishop Barron who speculates that the key to understanding the whole of Aquinas’ life and thought is this: “He wanted nothing more than Christ, nothing other than Christ, nothing less than Christ.”