"Political ideals"

“POLITICAL ideals will vary according to men’s views on human destiny. Those who are persuaded that the purpose of life is pleasure, or power, or honour, will reckon that State best arranged in which they can live comfortably, or acquire great wealth, or achieve great power and lord it over many. Others who think that the crowning good of virtue is the purpose of our present life will want an arrangement under which men can live virtuously and peaceably together. In short, political judgment will be settled by the sort of life a man expects and proposes to lead by living in a community.”

~St. Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Politics,’ Book II, lect. 1.

Politics by Aristotle, by French MINIATURIST.
14th century, Manuscript (MS RL 11202);
Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels.

Prayer for Wisdom and Knowledge

Lord, give me, the companion of Your throne, that it may ever be with me and labor with me, so that I may know what is acceptable to you, Lord, God. Who is there that can know Your meaning unless You give wisdom and send your Holy Spirit from on high?

Mary, Mother of fair love and fear and knowledge and holy hope, through your faithful intercession, many though otherwise of modest talent, have made marvelous progress in learning and holiness. I choose you as the guardian and patron of my studies. By your heart full of maternal love, and, above all, by that Eternal Wisdom which condescended to take our flesh from you and beyond all the saints made you shine with heavenly light, I humbly ask you to obtain for me, through your intercession, the grace of the Holy Spirit. May it enable me to grasp with my mind, retain in my memory, and express by my words and my life, all that shall give honor to you and your Son and be blessedly conducive to my eternal salvation. Amen.

Merciful God, grant me, I beg of You, ardently to desire, prudently to study, truly to understand, and perfectly to fulfill those things that are pleasing to You, for the praise and glory of Your name. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

~St. Thomas Aquinas 

(Excerpted from Father John Hardon's Catholic Prayer Book: with Meditations.)

"The Sacrament of the altar"

"CHRIST'S true Body, born from the Virgin Mary, is contained in the Sacrament of the altar. To profess to the contrary is heresy, because it detracts from the truth of Scripture, which records our Lord's own words, 'This is My body' (Mt 26, 26)."

─Commentary on the Sentences: 4, 10, 1.

"THE presence of Christ's true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone, which rests upon Divine authority. Hence, on Luke 22:19: "This is My body which shall be delivered up for you," Cyril says: "Doubt not whether this be true; but take rather the Saviour's words with faith; for since He is the Truth, He lieth not.""

─Summa Theologiae: III, q. 75, a.1. 

~St. Thomas Aquinas

The Seven Sacraments II: Eucharist, by Nicolas Poussin.
Oil on canvas, 1647; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Maritain: "Progressive animalization of the human mind"

“ANOTHER form of intellectualism, a modern one, gives up universal values and insists upon the working and experiential functions of intelligence. It seeks the supreme achievements of education in scientific and technical specialization. Now specialization is more and more needed by the technical organization of modern life, yet it should be compensated for by a more vigorous general training, especially during youth. If we remember that the animal is a specialist, and a perfect one, all of its knowing-power being fixed upon a single task to be done, we ought to conclude that an educational program which would only aim at forming specialists ever more perfect in ever more specialized fields, and unable to pass judgment on any matter that goes beyond their specialized competence, would lead indeed to a progressive animalization of the human mind and life.”

~Jacques Maritain: Education at the Crossroads, p. 19.

Aristotle: "The man of universal education"

“EVERY systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgment as to the goodness of badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and even the man of universal education we deem to be such in virtue of his having this ability. It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. For it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge without having it in all.”

~Aristotle: On the Parts of Animals, Book I (639a).

Allegory of Wisdom Fostering the Arts and Sciences, by Gérard de Lairesse.
Oil on canvas, 1670; private collection.

"The Holy Ghost Himself is Love"

* "GREGORY says (Hom. xxx, in Pentecost.): The Holy Ghost Himself is Love.

"...The name Love in God can be taken essentially and personally. If taken personally it is the proper name of the Holy Ghost; as 'Word' is the proper name of the Son."

─S.T. I, Q. 37, A. 1.

* "AUGUSTINE says (De Trin. iv, 20): "As 'to be born' is, for the Son, to be from the Father, so, for the Holy Ghost, 'to be the Gift of God' is to proceed from Father and Son." But the Holy Ghost receives His proper name from the fact that He proceeds from Father and Son. Therefore Gift is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.

"...Gift, taken personally in God, is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.

"In proof of this we must know that a gift is properly an unreturnable giving, as Aristotle says (Topic. iv, 4)─i.e. a thing which is not given with the intention of a return─and it thus contains the idea of a gratuitous donation. Now, the reason of donation being gratuitous is love; since therefore do we give something to anyone gratuitously forasmuch as we wish him well. So what we first give him is the love whereby we wish him well. Hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given. So since the Holy Ghost proceeds as love, as stated above (I:27:4; I:37:1), He proceeds as the first gift. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. xv, 24): By the gift, which is the Holy Ghost, many particular gifts are portioned out to the members of Christ."

─S.T. I, Q. 38, A. 2.

~St. Thomas Aquinas

Pentecost, by Barnaba Da Modena.
Egg tempera on wood,1377; National Gallery, London.

G.K. Chesterton on St. Thomas and Martin Luther

* "IT will not be possible to conceal much longer from anybody the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect. The sectarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were essentially obscurantists, and they guarded an obscurantist legend that the Schoolman was an obscurantist. This was wearing thin even in the nineteenth century; it will be impossible in the twentieth. It has nothing to do with the truth of their theology or his; but only with the truth of historical proportion, which begins to reappear as quarrels begin to die down. Simply as one of the facts that bulk big in history, it is true to say that Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies. It is a fact, like the military strategy of Napoleon, that Aquinas was thus fighting for all that is liberal and enlightened, as compared with his rivals, or for that matter his successors and supplanters. Those who, for other reasons, honestly accept the final effect of the Reformation will none the less face the fact, that it was the Schoolman who was the Reformer; and that the later Reformers were by comparison reactionaries. I use the word not as a reproach from my own stand-point, but as a fact from the ordinary modern progressive standpoint. For instance, they riveted the mind back to the literal sufficiency of the Hebrew Scriptures; when St. Thomas had already spoken of the Spirit giving grace to the Greek philosophies. He insisted on the social duty of works; they only on the spiritual duty of faith. It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy."

* "WE must be just to those huge human figures, who are in fact the hinges of history. However strong, and rightly strong, be our own controversial conviction, it must never mislead us into thinking that something trivial has transformed the world. So it is with that great Augustinian monk, who avenged all the ascetic Augustinians of the Middle Ages; and whose broad and burly figure has been big enough to block out for four centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas. It is not, as the moderns delight to say, a question of theology. The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge-pole. That Protestantism was pessimism; it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell. That Lutheranism is now quite unreal; more modern phases of Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but Luther was not unreal. He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world. To compare those two figures hulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world."

~G.K. Chesterton: St. Thomas Aquinas.