Creating and Redeeming: Aquinas on the Theological Significance of Teaching and Learning

Creating and Redeeming:
Aquinas on the Theological Significance of Teaching and Learning

Talk at the Installation of Fr. Mark Wedig OP, as President of Aquinas Institute of Theology
Saturday 14 September 2019

An Act of Piety

It is an honor to be invited to speak at today’s joyful and significant event, an honor for which I express my sincere gratitude. To acknowledge Saint Thomas Aquinas on this occasion is an obvious but still admirable act of the ancient virtue of pietas, piety, due acknowledgment of those to whom we are indebted for important aspects of our education and formation. Saint Thomas gives his name to the Aquinas Institute, and its work of learning and teaching is carried on under his inspiration and with the assistance of his heavenly patronage. His contribution to the Dominican intellectual tradition is exceptional and his importance for Catholic and Christian theology generally remains alive and active. He is a thinker still seriously engaged within many areas of philosophy such as ethics and law, psychology and politics, anthropology and epistemology.

A Methodology to be Admired and Imitated

The acknowledgment of Aquinas in today’s celebration is not just a matter of piety, however, giving due remembrance to an ancient and venerable ancestor. Aquinas remains a great teacher of how to learn and how to teach, he gives us a methodology for theological research that is still worth imitating. There is little problem in presenting Aquinas in this way, as a model for learners and teachers. It is not, I think, controversial. To go to school with Aquinas is to observe and to learn a method of study, research, and teaching which is inclusive, open, universal and critical. Suffice it to recall the breadth of Aquinas’s sources: not just the Bible and the Christian teachers of earlier centuries, but also Jewish and Islamic religious thinkers as well as the schools of Greek and Roman philosophy, the Stoics, Plato and his school and above all Aristotle, Plato’s brightest student, whose major philosophical writings, being translated into Latin during Aquinas’s lifetime, allowed him to develop a new and in some ways disturbing presentation of Catholic theology.

There is a remarkable openness in Aquinas as well as a remarkable freedom from prejudice. It springs from his understanding of the nature of truth. For him truth is objective, not anybody’s property, something to be sought through trial and error in all the ways in which human beings come to know and understand their world. Two comments of Aquinas, in particular, show this. One is his observation that the truth is strong in itself and will not be defeated by any assault. It gives a strong sense of the objective character of truth which ought then to free us from certain kinds of anxiety and possessiveness in relation to it. The second comment is one he cites often from an earlier Christian teacher, that any truth, no matter by whom it is uttered, is from the Holy Spirit. It is difficult to think of a more open attitude, to be ready to accept the truth revealed anywhere and articulated by anybody. It is not who says something that is important, he says elsewhere, but what is said. These seemingly simple convictions established in him a remarkable humility and courage in the search for truth: the truth is objective and strong in itself, the truth is something which every human being has the right and capacity to pursue, the truth is something to which each of us must, once we see it, be obedient.

Along with this universality and openness, Aquinas’s methodology is also critical by the standards of his day. It is contemplative, based on a sustained and attentive reading of the texts of others. It is argumentative, a methodology for which dialogue or disputatio is an essential tool of learning and teaching. At first sight a page of Plato’s text and a page of Aquinas’s text look quite different: the one a dramatic dialogue, the other a spare, logical argument. But on reflection, you see that Aquinas’s scholastic way of presenting things is actually a formalized dialogue. Many voices are allowed to speak on each question, authoritative voices like the Bible, Saint Augustine, and Aristotle, but also many earlier and contemporary teachers and thinkers when they have something to contribute either as a counter-argument to what Aquinas wants to say or as supporting the position that he thinks is correct. There is nothing dogmatic, in the pejorative sense, about Aquinas’s way of thinking and teaching. A person of clear and humble intellect, he was able not only to summarize in a masterly way the wisdom received from earlier ages but also to argue for new philosophical and theological positions that unsettled established orthodoxies.

But not just a Methodology?

It is not controversial to propose that we continue to go to school with Aquinas in order to learn from his way of studying and teaching. A further step is often taken, perhaps another way of saying the same thing: that we should do theology in our time as he did it in his. Just as he re-thought the traditional ways of understanding things, inherited mainly from Augustine, and did so with the help of Aristotelian philosophy, so in our time we need to rethink the traditional ways of understanding things, to re-think even what we have inherited from Aquinas.

A first difficulty, though, is this: with whose help ought we to do this? Who should be our ‘Aristotle’ in the early decades of the twenty-first century? Should it be Heidegger or Wittgenstein? What about Marx or Freud or Einstein? What should take the place of Aristotelian philosophy in helping us to re-present the Gospel message and theological tradition in ways that will be faithful to what we have received and yet speak effectively to the questions that arise in contemporary experience? Aquinas opted for Aristotle not because he was the latest thing to come on the scene but because he believed his philosophy to be, of all the philosophies he knew about, the one best adapted for presenting the Christian faith intellectually.

The difficulty of answering this question brings out a second difficulty arising from the proposal that we should do today what Aquinas did in his day. A methodology is never simply a neutral, procedural technique. It presupposes certain convictions, philosophical and probably also theological, convictions based on some fundamental options about knowledge and understanding, about human nature and its access to truth, about reality, intelligence and science. Aquinas’s method is admirable and one from which we still have much to learn but what about the metaphysical, moral and theological principles that guided and structured his way of thinking, his way of doing theology, the principles that explain his methodology? Considering the fact that he is a thinker born almost 800 years ago it might seem that there will be little of his fundamental options that could be useful to us today. His scientific knowledge was, in many ways, primitive compared to ours – what about his metaphysical, moral and theological preferences? Do such things develop in the same way as scientific knowledge grows? Is it only the most recent thinkers who have something to contribute now to the discourse on these matters? Or are there thinkers from long ago whose voices should also be heard, who should be called to the table to speak once again, whose questions and arguments remain incisive in any quest for the truth?

A Philosophy (and Theology) of Education

I want to explore this question further by looking at one topic in Aquinas' work. It is a topic of great relevance to today’s celebration because it is his understanding of education, of learning and teaching. When one goes looking for the texts in which Aquinas considers these activities it is quite a surprise to see where he does consider them. One might have thought that it would be in the moral parts of his theological writings, where he speaks about the virtues, actions, and relationships that make up human living from day to day. Although there are many virtues relevant to learning and teaching, it is not there that Aquinas considers the question as such. In his Summa Theologiae it is rather towards the end of the first part that he speaks of these activities. Now the first part is concerned with God, with God’s existence, attributes, and activity. The activity unique to God is, of course, creation. And it is in considering whether there are creatures capable of collaborating with God in the work of creation that Aquinas raises the question as to whether one human being can teach another. So, to be a teacher is to be someone who collaborates with God in the work of creating.

The purpose of creation is to reveal the glory of God, to illustrate the truth, and therefore also the goodness and beauty, that God is. To teach another person means to assist them in coming to know what is true. Aquinas is speaking of all and any teaching, even the most ordinary and banal. Because a knowledge of truth is involved in any and all teaching, to assist a person in this endeavor is to contribute to the work of creation itself which is to make known to creatures the truth that God is. And the truth that God is includes everything that has been made, and that is being brought about, through God’s action. To assist another person in coming to know the truth will mean also assisting them to appreciate the beauty that inevitably accompanies the true, as well as the goodness people are inspired to desire when they know something is true.

Within the unashamedly theological context in which he speaks about teaching, Aquinas’s account is also technical and philosophical, involving a comparison with earlier philosophies of learning. As so often, he positions himself between what he sees as two contrasting opinions, those coming from Plato and those coming from Arab philosophers. He relies heavily on Aristotle as well as Augustine. And he develops an account of learning and teaching which respects, at one and the same time, the fact that the teacher really causes something new to come about within creation and the fact that it is the learner him- or herself who must do the knowing and understanding for him- or herself if we are to say that learning has really happened.

These are ordinary, everyday, human activities but in writing about them Aquinas immediately places them in a theological context that is broad and deep and high. Which can be a bit surprising, even startling. He does so, however, in a way that does not threaten their integrity and coherence as natural human activities, having a meaning and rationale at that natural level. His theological vision respects the distinct modalities of theology and philosophy, of faith and reason, while showing how properly philosophical – or we can say scientific – work is facilitated rather than impeded by this theological contextualization. In fact, Aquinas’s theological contextualization of these activities also illuminates and strengthens a properly philosophical understanding of them. This is what many so highly value in the work of Aquinas: how he integrates philosophy and theology, reason and faith, doing justice to the requirements of both and without distorting or denigrating either.

If teaching is a collaboration in the work of creating we can say that learning is a participation in the work of redemption. It is clear enough at a specifically theological level, where we are talking about revelation and faith, for example, about the preaching of the Gospel and the Spirit’s work in bringing human beings to faith. In that context, it is clear that to teach the Gospel truth is to serve the new life that Jesus brings and for a person to be redeemed is for them to accept the truth of this new life and so begin to live it. John 17:3 summarizes it very well: ‘this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’. To teach this message is to collaborate in the work of creation, to believe this message is to be redeemed.

But it seems that just as Aquinas encourages us to think of all and any teaching as a collaboration in the work of creating, he encourages us also to think of all learning as a participation in the work of redemption. He has a prayer before study in which he asks for God’s help because of two things that militate against success in study, ignorance and sin. Ignorance is obvious and not necessarily something for which we are responsible. It is why we study in the first place, to overcome our ignorance. Sin is more complicated, that self-destructive tendency, undeniable and yet mysterious, which prevents us from persevering in our good intentions, which distorts our vision and understanding, which confuses our desires and imagination. Potentially, then, sin can present serious obstacles to a successful engagement in learning or in teaching. For this we can call on another text in John’s gospel, a well-known reference often quoted: ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; then you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’ (John 8:31-32).

Sadness in the Search for Truth

I have proposed that acknowledging Aquinas today is not just an act of piety but means recognizing once again the value there continues to be in his way of studying, of undertaking research, and of teaching. I have proposed furthermore that to value his methodology obliges us also to appreciate some of the fundamental philosophical and theological options that guided and structured his way of thinking. I have offered a summary account of how he understands the activities of learning and teaching in order to illustrate those fundamental options and how they enabled him to integrate theological and philosophical levels of discourse, illuminating our most ordinary human activities with a remarkable light while at the same time respecting their character as ordinary human activities.

I would like to finish with a final thought from Aquinas. For this I am indebted not just to Aquinas himself but to Donald Nicholl, an English theologian and spiritual writer, and a lay Dominican. Reflecting on what Aquinas says about the beatitude ‘blessed are those who weep now …,’ Nicholl concluded that this is the characteristic beatitude of the intellectual. Aquinas links this beatitude with the Holy Spirit’s gift of knowledge, or scientia. Why this link? Because, says Nicholl, to persevere in the search for truth opens us to the sorrows of the intellectual life. What does it mean? It means that if our search for truth is genuine, and if our engagement in dialogue with others is sincere, then we must be ready to let go of things we have cherished up to now, ways of understanding, preferred positions, our ‘hobby horses’. Prejudices certainly, these we must let go, but also ways of seeing the world and our own place within it that have become dear to us, things that have served to structure our thinking and experience, our appreciation of truth, goodness, and beauty up to now.

This readiness to let go must be there if we are serious when we speak about our knowledge still growing and our understanding still deepening, about remaining open to the truth that is always being discovered. Perhaps what we mean normally when we say these things is that other people’s knowledge still needs to grow, other people’s understanding still needs to deepen, other people really should be more open to the truth that they have yet to discover. It is a crucial question for a time when differences between people seem to be getting stronger and deeper, when dialogue and conversation are becoming ever more difficult and intractable. But for this Thomas Aquinas remains a model and an inspiration, a master of sincere dialogue, a teacher of genuine conversation. Communicatio facit civitatem, he says in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics: communication builds the city, conversation establishes community. To enter into such conversations means being prepared also for the sadness of the quest for truth, the pain there is in letting go of cherished beliefs, the growing pains of greater knowledge and deeper understanding. These are welcome pains because they are for the sake of building communion with others, of strengthening community, and of seeing more clearly together a truth that we are together seeking.

Against severe pressure from his family, Thomas Aquinas insisted on joining the Dominicans, the order of preachers established by Saint Dominic. Although in his authentic writings he never mentions Dominic by name, he refers frequently to the way of life of the preachers. And for what Aquinas tells us about the cost of sincere dialogue we can call in as witness Saint Dominic’s night long dialogue with the innkeeper in Toulouse. The early Dominican sources tell us that at the end of that dialogue the innkeeper was converted, or reconverted, to the Catholic faith. But at the end of that dialogue Dominic Guzman gave up the way of life which he had known up to then, he gave up the likely trajectory of his ecclesiastical career at the cathedral of Osma, and he set out as a poor, mendicant, itinerant, preaching friar calling people to the freedom that comes with the truth of the gospel. Whose life was changed more by that night’s dialogue in the search for truth, the life of the innkeeper or the life of Saint Dominic?