A Blueprint for the Thomism of the Future

"Without an interior life of love, prayer, sacrifice, and repentance, even sound doctrine can't stop the moral collapse and spiritual bankruptcy in the Church."

From Crisis

By David Torkington

Without an interior life of love, prayer, sacrifice, and repentance, even sound doctrine can't stop the moral collapse and spiritual bankruptcy in the Church.

I have just finished reading an excellent symposium written by contemporary Catholic Scholastic Theologians. Each, in their own way, tried to detail what they believe is the greatest threat to the Catholic Faith in the modern world.

However, whenever they referred to what the early Christians knew and experienced as the love of God, or what the Fathers of the Church call the pleroma, they called it grace, or, to be more precise, sacramental grace—because it comes to us through the sacraments. In the words of one of the contributors, “We Catholics depend on supernatural grace, and we have ignored our absolute dependence on it and fail to give it the respect that it deserves.”

Further to this, our all-loving Heavenly Father, whom Jesus told us to call Abba, is reduced to “a supernatural reality” who calls us to proclaim loudly, consistently, and by example that there is a supernatural reality and the Church and the mission of the Church are sustained by it. God, and His unconditional love, is reduced to a thing, an object, albeit a “supernatural” reality.

In this way, God’s love and His loving is depersonalized. It is as if Scholasticism, or pseudo or decadent Scholasticism, has made Catholics, or at least Catholic Theologians, into aloof English Gentlemen who, with their stiff upper lips, find it all but impossible—and all too embarrassing—to speak about love of any sort. It is the embarrassment of non-practitioners who have not experienced the love of God for themselves through deep personal prayer; and so they naturally feel awkward and self-conscious speaking about the love of God or the love of Christ and so prefer to speak of it by using the impersonal language used by the majority of Scholastic Theologians.

I was recently approached by a religious priest who wanted me to take part in Catholic radio programs. When I began to speak about the love of Christ, I could see that he found it rather embarrassing. When I said to him, “I can see that you think that my way of speaking about the love of Christ seems a bit too Protestant for your liking,” the smile on his face confirmed that I had indeed read his mind.

Yet the great Scholastics—like St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Blessed John Duns Scotus, and others—write copiously about how to come to know and love God through coming to know and love His Son, Jesus Christ, through meditation and through the gift of contemplation. 

The first great Scholastics were saints and mystics because although they were busily employed in using Greek philosophical concepts to understand the mysteries of the faith in their minds, they simultaneously entered into those mysteries in, and through, their prayerful and mystical love of Christ in their hearts. That is why they were all holy men and canonized so that we should follow their example. When later Scholastics failed to follow their example, they found themselves lost in intellectual ivory towers that distanced them from the experiential knowledge of the love of God.

Simultaneously, their abstruse intellectualism also distanced them from the faithful who, therefore, no longer looked to them for spiritual inspiration and guidance. Who wants to live in an ivory tower? Their highbred intellectual study sadly provides all too many of them with the perfect displacement activity that prevents them from the pursuit of true wisdom, which is the love of God that inspired St. Thomas to write his momentous works. For St. Thomas, true Catholic teachers and apostles must, he insisted, firstly contemplate and then share the fruits of contemplation with others (Contemplata aliis tradere).

If this is what their theological mentors had taught them to do, then in recent years both theologians, together with priests, religious, and bishops, would have received not just the wisdom to see what was wrong in the Church but the virtues of courage and fortitude to proclaim loud and clear true Catholic dogmatic teaching. Yet what has sadly all too often happened is that, for decades now, madmen have repeatedly sent out spiritual beggars to convert the spiritually bankrupt. Remember the words of Euripides: “Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad!”

If they had listened to St. Thomas Aquinas, they would have long since seen and protested against the deconstruction of true Catholic dogmatic theology, and the construction of a new and erroneous form of Catholic globalism. In this new Marxist Universalism that tries to be all things to all men, its adherents are bribed with a wishy-washy moral teaching that canonizes relativism. Before moving on to say what we must do, I must say that I have no idea what modern seminarians are taught. Who does? It seems to me that virtually anything is taught from Thomism to Communism with liberal doses of the “here today and gone tomorrow” immoral fashions that just happen to be in vogue.

We must return without delay to follow the first great Scholastic Theologians in the way in which they were able to unite together the new philosophical truths that came from Aristotle with the new Christ-centered Catholic Theology and Spirituality that came from St. Bernard of Clairvaux. In his unique history of Christian Spirituality, Pierre Pourrat devotes over one hundred pages to the Christocentric Spirituality that returned and rose up, as pilgrims returned from the Holy Land that was once more open to all after the Crusaders had retaken Jerusalem in 1099.

St. Bernard would have been a teenager when pilgrims returned to inspire Christendom once again with the humanity of Jesus Christ, our Divine Lord, that he would make the heart and soul of his newborn Christ-centered Spirituality, that was partially lost to view in the Dark Ages. It was this spirituality, which would have already inspired and formed the great Scholastic Theologians before their Scholastic studies began, that would determine Catholic spirituality for centuries to come.

Meditation would lead to contemplation. So between St. Bernard and the demise of contemplation after the condemnation of Quietism in 1687, there were more great mystical writers than at any other time before or since. What followed Quietism, however, was the greatest tragedy in the history of the Church. Take love out of any family and what are the consequences? We are only fully reaping these consequences in the family that we call the Church in these tragic apocalyptic times, when our only hope is to pray and pray continually. Maranatha!

What I have said is not to initiate yet another intellectual controversy about Catholic Theology but to call all Catholics from top to bottom back to the practice of the practical, Christ-centered spirituality that was the inspiration of the great Scholastic Theologians, without which we are lost.

I have just written a review of an excellent book titled Anatomy of Transcendence by Peter Kwasniewski, in which he explores the idea of ecstasy in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. What comes over loud and clear is that St. Thomas Aquinas was not only the greatest intellectual genius that the Church has ever produced but that he practiced what he preached. He not only wrote copiously about the spiritual life, and ecstasy in particular, but he continually practiced the profound contemplative prayer from which ecstasy and other supernatural graces arise.

When I studied Thomism before the Second Vatican Council, nobody was taught how to practice the profound contemplative prayer without which the Angelic Doctor could not have produced his Summa Theologica, nor was anyone made aware how much his own personal contemplative life influenced his teaching. Although this was realized in the hundred or so years after the Council of Trent, it was soon to be forgotten in, and after, the condemnation of the pseudo mysticism of Quietism in 1687, when both true and false forms of mystical prayer were equally quashed. They were replaced by a hardheaded rationalism at the Enlightenment, when any form of mystical prayer was dismissed out of hand by the new Catholic Humanists, both clerical and lay.

These rationalists, who still abound today, fail to see that mystical loving is not irrational but superrational—and absolutely essential, therefore, to maintain the moral teaching of the Gospels. That is why the slow, downward trend in maintaining this moral teaching in the Church has continued down to the present day, when instead of seeing the need to return to the only love that will enable us to maintain the teaching of Jesus Christ, something frightening has happened. This moral teaching has not just been called into question but substituted for the immoral practices of a debased, degenerate, and depraved world in which right has become wrong and wrong has become right and vices have become virtues and virtues have become vices.

It is not enough to return to the systematic teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, then, without simultaneously returning to the age-old evangelical spirituality and contemplative prayer that he practiced, which has been quashed thanks to the dual influences of the heresy of Quietism and the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

In the last three or more centuries, Thomism has been taught without the contemplative prayer that will alone enable a person to understand more deeply the teaching of St. Thomas, never mind put it into practice and teach it to others. I remember wondering, as the bishops gathered for the Second Vatican Council, “How are they going to manage without the fruits of the contemplation that had long since been considered, at best, an extraordinary way for a few pious souls?!”

When you study the works of St. Thomas without contemplation, it is rather like studying a stained-glass window from the outside, depicting the great mysteries of our Faith. You can study all the parts perfectly fitted together, just as you can from inside, but everything seems rather dull and uninteresting, one dimensional and, frankly, rather boring. Nor does it do anything to ignite the imagination with the love that leads to action. 

When you see it from the inside, however, with the sun shining through it, then it suddenly comes alive, inspiring, bursting with life and vitality to set the heart on fire. In the same way, contemplation enables a believer to see not just the Summa Theologica but all true theology transformed and transfigured by the love of God.

I do not, therefore, join the chorus of voices that wants to do away with the teaching of Thomism for future priests and religious, but that the contemplative prayer that originally inspired the Angelic Doctor should be taught with it. In short, the true Catholic Spirituality that my generation were never adequately taught, if it was taught at all, should be taught by practitioners.

That this article needs to be written, never mind questioned, is a terrible indictment of the God-given spirituality that was lived and practiced by Our Lord Jesus Christ before it was given to, and practiced by, our first ancestors in apostolic times and then practiced for centuries to come by the faithful, including the great Scholastic saints who strove to put our Faith on a safe and sure rational foundation to fulfill the instructions of St. Peter, the first pope (1 Peter 3:15).

For those who cannot turn to Thomism as part of a personal renewal program, no matter. The Catechism that we do have to hand, that is particularly inspiring in its more recent presentation, is ultimately taken from the teaching of St. Thomas after the Council of Trent, as are the many excellent catechetical courses to which they can turn. Then, in addition to this teaching, and while trying to educate ourselves in this way, we can and above all else, follow the recent teaching of Our Lady. She simply sums up the Spirituality of her Beloved Son with three words: repent, pray, and sacrifice.

In order to do this, then, it is necessary to take the first step, which is to make the daily sacrifices necessary to turn back to God by raising your heart and mind to Him in prayer, to learn how to love Him with your whole mind and heart, with your whole body and soul, and with your whole strength. If you decide to do this and do it regularly and persevere come hell or high water—for the love of God and not for what you hope to get out of Him—then, in time, God will lead you on through meditation and into contemplation.

It is here that you will receive, ever more deeply and more fully, what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation, which were embodied in his life long before they were detailed in his Summa Theologica.

Without these fruits, that used to be detailed in long forgotten books on spiritual theology, you cannot be perfectly made one with Our Lord Jesus Christ who wants you to contemplate the Father in, with, and through Him. Please do not conclude, however, that you have to know all the myriad infused virtues by name—and the other fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit—before they can be embodied in you; this is not true. The lives of the great saints have shown from time immemorial all you need to do is keep trying to   love. Love Christ, and keep loving Him. Then, without you hardly realizing it, as I intend to show, all these things will be given to you.

As Jesus Himself puts it, “First seek God and His love and all these other things will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33). In order to help you on your way, in my next article I want to introduce you to the much-misunderstood Catholic Meditation that has long since been forgotten, at least as practiced by the Early Christian communities and by all the saints and mystics who followed them in subsequent centuries.