THOMAS AQUINAS AND JOHN BONAVENTURA.
In Southern Italy, about midway between Rome and Naples, the road which
connects these two cities passes near the site of the ancient city of
Aquinum. It was a stronghold of the Volscians, although not mentioned in
the account of their wars with the Romans. As a Roman municipality it
rose to greater importance than the other cities of the district, and
became the birthplace of the satirist Juvenal and other eminent men. But
in the seventh century it was destroyed by the Lombards, and the site
never re-occupied. What were left of its inhabitants found another site,
more capable of defence in those wild days, and built Aquino on a
mountain slope. It runs along the cliff in a single street, like our own
Mauch Chunk, and the remains of its oldest buildings show that its
mediaeval architects drew freely upon still earlier structures for their
materials.
In one of these old structures, still known as the _Casa Reale_ or royal
house, lived the noble family who were the lords of Aquino. Here Thomas
Aquinas was born in the year 1225, being one of the five children of
Count Landulf of Aquino, and his wife, Theodora Caraccioli, Countess of
Teano. The family was not a royal house, but it was connected by
intermarriage with the royal caste of Europe. It is said, but I have not
been able to verify the statement, that Thomas’s grandfather had married
a sister of the Emperor Barbarossa. His mother was descended from the
Tancred of Hauteville, whose sons, Roger and Robert Guiscard, effected
the Norman conquest of the two Sicilies. Sibylla, Queen of the Tancred
who ended the first line of Norman sovereigns, is said to have been a
daughter of the family. But the real importance of the lords of Aquino
was due to their strategic position on the northern frontier of Apulia
and to their military spirit. Richard of Aquino, the grandfather of
Thomas, was the mainstay of Tancred’s cause on the mainland of Italy,
and merited, by his treachery and barbarity, the cruel death the Emperor
Henry VI. inflicted on him after the final conquest of the two Sicilies.
His father, Landulf, seems to have been a man of less warlike character;
but his uncle, Thomas of Aquinas, who succeeded Richard in the countship
of Acerra, was the ablest of the Ghibelline chiefs of Southern Italy,
and one of Frederic the Second’s most trusted captains. That emperor
enlarged the dominions of the family, and gave ample scope to their
fighting propensities in his wars with the popes. And Thomas’s two
brothers, who were older than himself, embraced the opportunity of a
military life. His sisters formed illustrious alliances with the noble
families of Southern Italy. Pope Honorius III. is said to have been his
godfather.
Thomas’s youth seems to have been uneventful, with the exception of the
calamity by which he lost a younger sister, who was killed by lightning
while sleeping by his side. In his fifth year his education began. Less
than five miles away, as the bird flies, lay the Monte Casino, the
greatest and first of the monasteries of the Benedictine order. Here it
was that Benedict of Nursia in 529 laid the foundation of the first
great order of Western Christendom. And although Monte Casino had shared
in the calamity of Aquino at the hands of the Lombards, and had lain
desolate for a hundred and fifty years, it had been rebuilt with new
splendor, and was at this time the grandest ecclesiastical establishment
outside the city of Rome. And here, in 1227, Landulf Sinibald, himself
of the Aquino family, had become abbot, thus attaining one of the
highest dignities open to a Churchman. To his care the young Thomas was
intrusted, and on Monte Casino he spent the next seven years of his
life, undergoing the discipline and receiving the instruction for which
the schools of the Benedictine fathers had always been famous. Probably
it was the hope of the family of Aquino that the young man would enter
the order and rise to the same dignity as his uncle, becoming a prince
of the Church, and thus more powerful and wealthy than any of his uncles
or brothers.
In 1239 the second outbreak of hostilities between the Pope and the
Emperor led to the conversion of Monte Casino into a great fortress, in
which were left but eight monks to carry on the routine of monastic
services. The rest found a home in other Benedictine houses, the schools
were suspended, and Thomas returned home. But the same year he seems to
have proceeded to Naples to study in the university which Frederic had
established in 1224, and amply endowed with wealth and privileges, and
had revived in 1234, after its suspension during his first war with the
papacy. He had forbidden his Italian subjects to leave the kingdom to
attend foreign universities, and he had used every available means to
make them contented with that of Naples, one of these being the
employment of the ablest teachers he could secure in all the sciences
then recognized as belonging to the higher education. We are told that
Thomas pursued his studies two years in Naples, when the influence of
his Dominican teachers led him to form the purpose to become a Dominican
friar,[14] and to put on the garb of a novice. This step was a most
momentous one. Whether his family looked forward to his becoming a
Benedictine monk and abbot, or contemplated his embracing the offers of
promotion in the civil service of the kingdom, which Frederic II. had
held out to the graduates of his pet university, they could not but
regard his adoption of the life of a mendicant friar with indignation
and disgust. To be a Benedictine _Pater_ was to be a gentleman and a
scholar, to have a share in the influence, wealth, and power of the
order, and possibly to rise to the dignity of the _Dux et Princeps
omnium Abbatum et Religiosorum_, the Abbot of Monte Casino. But the
Mendicant orders were affairs of yesterday, with all the rawness if also
the effusive enthusiasm of youth. Francis of Assisi died within a year
of Thomas’s birth; Dominic, five years earlier. And the mendicant mode
of life was most offensive to the proud Italian nobles, who must have
recoiled from the idea that one of their race should carry the beggar’s
wallet in his turn, and live always upon alms. In this respect the
requirements of the orders were far stricter and more humiliating than
in later times, when the practice, if not the rule, was relaxed. Those
who were unaffected by their enthusiasm thought of the Mendicants as the
average man thinks of the Salvation Army, or thought of the Methodists
at the middle of the last century.
No notice was sent to Aquino of the step Thomas had taken. The monks
always had their share of the wisdom of the serpent, and they were to
show it in this case. But some of the vassals of the family had
recognized the young novice under his Dominican garb on the streets of
Naples or in the church; and through them the news reached his family.
Landulf seems to have been dead; I can find no mention of him later than
1229. But the Countess Theodora hastened, with all a man’s energy, to
rescue her son from the career of a mendicant. The friars learned of her
coming and hurried their novice off to Rome, and to Rome his mother
pursued him. To avoid her he was sent forward to France, but he had to
pass the lines of the imperial army then engaged in the war with the
Lombards. The influence of the powerful Ghibelline family roused the
vigilance of the imperial authorities. At Acquapendente, on the
frontiers of Tuscany, Thomas and the friars who escorted him were
arrested, and the young noble was sent back to his family at Aquino.
Every means, foul as well as fair, seems to have been used to break him
from his purpose to join the Dominicans, while he remained a prisoner at
Aquino, or in some of the mountain castles of the family. But Thomas was
assured of his vocation, and he had a fund of obstinacy in his character
which showed to good purpose. It is said that the Pope interfered in his
behalf, but this is hardly probable, as the Pope was waging war at the
time on the Emperor and his vassals, the Lords of Aquino. At last the
countess and her children abandoned the attempt to influence him, and at
least connived at his escape to Naples, where he took the vows of
obedience, celibacy, and poverty, which sealed his connection with the
Dominican order, in 1243.
We have looked at this step through the eyes of his family, and seen its
offensiveness. But if we regard it more impartially, we are impressed
with its wisdom. It was among the Dominicans, not the Benedictines, that
Thomas could serve his day and generation the best. The Benedictines, in
the new age which the era of the Crusades opened to Europe, had fallen
behind the times. It was because of this that that century saw the rise
of the two great orders founded by Dominic and by Francis, and their
rapid growth, until “a handful of corn on the top of the mountains”
shook like the forests which clothe Lebanon. The Dominican order was
still in the blossom of youth; the Benedictine had rather “gone to
seed.” Thomas felt the difference when he met the Dominicans as
professors of theology in the Studium at Naples. Scholarship rather than
thought had been the strong point with the Benedictines. They would be
apt to meet the questions which welled up in the mind of the eager youth
by an inapposite quotation from some Church father, or to repress them
altogether, as tending to vanity. What, indeed, could Abbot Landulf and
his brethren on the hill-top do with a deep-eyed boy, who went from one
to another with the question, “What _is_ God?” But at Naples, and in
contact with the more lively intellectual life of his age, his acute and
alert intellect found a satisfaction and an encouragement which the
Benedictines could not give him. He was encouraged to ask questions
instead of being snubbed. There were opened to him vistas of research
and speculation, which could not but attract a hungry and active mind
like his. The Dominicans were the order which had undertaken to face and
answer the questions of the age, and in Thomas these questions were
craving a solution. What wonder if he fell in love with the preachers,
and they with him! They discovered what capacity lay in the young noble,
and knew that they had better use for him than his hum-drum uncle on the
hills and among the hawks. And any scruples as to his admission to the
novitiate without the consent or against the will of his family were set
aside by the belief that his “vocation” was directly from God, and
therefore set aside all merely human authority.
Having secured their prize, the Dominicans showed that they knew how to
use it. The order was, on one side of it, a great educational
institution to select and train young men to fight the intellectual
battles of the Church. The young Dominican at once put on the yoke of
the “course of study” (_Ordo Studiorum_), which had been prescribed by
the General Chapter, and proceeded as far toward the highest dignities
and responsibilities of learning as his abilities were thought to
warrant. The decision on this point rested with the General of the
Order, who at this time was John of Germany, the fourth in the
succession begun by Dominic. He selected for Thomas as his best teacher,
Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert the Great (Magnus), who was
teaching in the monastic school at Koeln (Cologne), and who had the
reputation of having absorbed all that Aristotle knew, and worked up his
teaching into a harmony of Christian theology with Greek philosophy.
According to his biographers generally, Thomas was sent at once to Koeln
in 1245, and accompanied Albert when he proceeded to Paris in that same
year to take his degree as Doctor of Theology, returning with him in
1248. Dr. Heinrich Denifle, however, assigns 1248 as the year when
Thomas came to Koeln from Italy, and limits their intercourse as master
and scholar to the two years required by the rules of the order. Whether
their relations as such extended over five years or were limited to two,
they were enough for the formation of a life-long friendship based on
mutual respect and admiration. Strangely enough the young Italian from
the garrulous South was noted more for silence than for speech among the
students at Koeln. He had found a teacher whom he thought worth hearing
in silence, and he heard to better purpose than his associates. _Bos
mutus_, a dumb ox, they called him. Albert foretold that “the sound of
his bellowing in doctrine would yet go through the whole world.”
In 1250, the year when Frederic II. died, Thomas proceeded to Paris by
direction of the General of the Order. In that mother university of
Christendom the Dominicans were allowed by their rule to receive the
doctorate—in that and no other. For one year the candidate must hear and
dispute in the Dominican school on St. Jacques Street; for another he
must teach, but without ascending the cathedra, from which authoritative
decisions were expected. But in Thomas’s case these two years of his
Parisian apprenticeship were prolonged to seven. The university
quarrelled with the representatives of the Mendicant orders just as
Thomas was about to take his degree, and in the five years’ struggle
which ensued all ordinary relations and procedures were suspended. For
some time, indeed, the university itself was dissolved, to evade the
bull of excommunication which the Pope aimed at it in the interest of
the Mendicants.
In 1656 William of St. Amour sent the Pope his treatise _Concerning the
Dangers of these Last Times_ (_De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum_), in
which he pleaded the cause of the university against the Mendicants, and
told some home-truths about the greediness, the lawlessness, and the
encroachments of the friars, but in an angry and excited tone, which
harmed his cause. Both the assailed orders put forward their ablest men
to make answer. For the Franciscans spoke John Fidanza, better known as
John Bonaventura, who had come to Paris in the heat of the conflict, and
had been delayed, as Thomas was, in obtaining his degree.
John was older than Thomas by several years, having been born in 1221.
He had been recovered from an apparently mortal illness through the
prayers of Francis of Assisi in his third year, and then received the
name Bonaventura from the good man’s own lips. He entered the order in
his twenty-second year, and studied in Paris under Alexander of Hales
and John of Rochelle. The devout humility of the man, and his purity of
character, produced as deep an impression upon his teachers as Thomas
had produced upon his by the force and keenness of his intellect.
Alexander used to say that “in Brother Bonaventura Adam seems not to
have sinned.” John was probably the most perfect exemplar of the spirit
of Francis of Assisi that was to be seen in the second generation of the
order. Not by intellectual force, but by humble ministry to the
commonest human needs, by the infection of an all-embracing love and the
close imitation of our Lord’s humanity, he would save the world from its
wanderings. Thomas and he were the best possible representatives of
their respective orders, and it speaks well for both men that their
differences only bound them more intimately in friendship. Each
reverenced what was strongest in the other. When Thomas asked to see the
books by whose help John had acquired his Christian erudition, the
Franciscan pointed him to a crucifix, and said that from that he had
learned all that he ever knew.
Their answers to William of St. Amour reflect the character of the men.
Bonaventura defended the mendicant form of the monastic life as an
ideal; but without admitting the truth of the dark picture William had
drawn, he conceded that serious abuses had crept in, and that already
there was need of a reformation unless matters were to be let grow
worse. Thomas makes no concessions whatever. He entitles his book
_Against those who Assail the Worship of God and the Monastic Life_
(_Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem_). William and all who
hold with him are the enemies of God and of His Church. The critics of
the Mendicant rule are standing in the way of the forces which are sent
of God to win the world to Christ. The monk, and especially the
mendicant friar, is the only thorough Christian who keeps to the
“counsels of perfection” our Lord gave His disciples, as well as to the
precepts of obedience obligatory upon all. William uttered false and
damnable doctrine when he tried to limit them to a purely ascetic life.
They have the right to teach as well as to pray and mourn, and the Pope
has power to open to them the doors of every secular college by his
mandate.
The controversy was brought to an end in 1257, when Pope Alexander IV.
at Anagni formally condemned the book of William of St. Amour, and bound
the plenipotentiaries of the university by an oath to admit the
Mendicants to their former footing in the university. And to signalize
the victory of the friars, Thomas and Bonaventura were admitted to the
doctorate on the same day, October 23d, 1257.
From the masters the head of the school in St. Jacques Street was chosen
by the General of the Order, and naturally the choice fell on Thomas.
Usually the place was held for a year only, and its occupant then
transferred to some other field of labor. Thomas held it for four years,
lecturing, preaching at least every Lent in the adjacent church, and
exercising the discipline of the order over its students. The number who
heard his lectures must have been great. The school at Paris, unlike
that at Koeln, being a branch of the university, its lectures were open
to all comers, and the renown of the Italian who had been more than a
match for the ablest of the secular doctors would draw hearers. And
those who came once, if they had any love for the play of pure
intelligence and the fearless handling of great questions, would come
again. Thomas, with all his orthodoxy, was a pretty thorough
rationalist. He had full faith in the capacity of the human
understanding to deal fruitfully and safely with the deepest mysteries.
If his conclusions always are with the Church, it is not because he has
shrunk from attending to, and even suggesting, what might be said
against the doctrine under consideration. It is because he has satisfied
himself that the balance of logical argument, after all objections have
been weighed, is on the side of orthodoxy. In this respect his writings
represent the highest point reached by the rationalistic tendency in the
Middle Ages, just as Abelard represents its initiation. We find Duns
Scotus, his great Franciscan rival, shrinking from his rationalism, and
removing some of the mysteries of theology out of the field of logical
discussion.
Of course, his most devoted hearers were the young men of the order. Of
these some ninety were sent up every year from the schools in the
provinces outside France; and in addition to these picked men, who came
for the master’s degree, Paris had the training of all the students of
Northern France. Some of the former were from Spain, where the order was
engaged in combatting the Mohammedan doctors. Their needs drew Thomas’s
attention to the subject of his first systematic work, the _Summa contra
Gentiles_. Thomas puts himself upon the level of one who has no
Christian convictions, but argues simply from principles of philosophic
truth and of natural religion accepted by both parties. Besides these
and other literary labors he attended the annual General Chapters of his
order at Valenciennes in 1259, where he and Albrecht drew up the new
order of studies for the young Dominicans.
In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, the Greek Emperor of Nicea, conquered
Constantinople, and thus put an end to the Latin Empire established by
the Fourth Crusade. But the wily Greek feared a general movement in
Latin Christendom to recover the city from him, and to gain time by
diplomacy he opened negotiations for the reconciliation of Eastern and
Western Christendom with Urban IV., then newly chosen to the papacy. The
Pope summoned Thomas Aquinas from Paris to Rome, to aid in these
negotiations by his erudition and acuteness. The subject was one into
which his previous studies had not conducted him, but a scholastic
philosopher must be prepared to write on any topic. _De omni scibili_
was his scope. So Thomas wrote his _Treatise against the Errors of the
Greeks_ (_Opusculum contra Errores Graecorum_) by the papal order. In
its preparation he became at once the victim and the instrument of one
of the most memorable forgeries in ecclesiastical literature. The
Dominicans had followed the Latin Empire into the East, but found
themselves at a loss for authorities to prove to the Greeks that the
autocratic papacy was a venerable, much less a primitive institution, of
the Christian Church. One of them conceived the bright thought of
manufacturing a supply. So he sent to Urban IV. a long _catena_ of
quotations from the Greek fathers, especially the two Cyrils and the
Council of Chalcedon, in which the papal authority and infallibility
were set forth with a boldness never used even in the West. The Pope
fully believed in their genuineness and handed them over to Thomas, who
incorporated many of them into his _opusculum_, besides using them in
his greater work. He knew too much about the teachings of the Greek
fathers not to be staggered by the quotations as to the Procession of
the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, and he expressed his doubts
in a letter to Urban. But he was not staggered by the forger’s showing
that the Greeks accepted the universal jurisdiction and infallible
authority of the papacy. In this way the notion of a universal
episcopate and an infallibility in the Bishop of Rome, from being the
audacious whim of a few canonists, passed into the dogmatic theology of
the Church, and came to be made an article of faith in our own time.
(See Acton-Döllinger-Huber’s book, _Janus, or the Pope and the Council_,
chap, iii., section 18.)
Urban IV. having brought Thomas to Italy, Clemens IV. kept him there as
long as he lived, making him a professor in the university established
by Innocent IV. within the Roman Curia, and as such carried him about
from city to city as the Papal Court removed, and had him lecture on
theology wherever the Court was staying. He also set him to the work of
writing commentaries on part of the Scripture: Job, the Psalms,
Canticles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul’s Epistles, besides his _catena_
of comments on the Gospels gathered from the Latin fathers. Most
important of all for our purposes, he asked him to prepare the service
for Corpus Christi Day—a festival established in 1264. It was for this
that Thomas wrote four of the hymns which have given him his place in
the annals of hymnology, and those are his finest. And it is said that
he also began his _Summa_ in these years, but that I doubt. But in 1269
Clemens died, and it was two years before another Pope was elected.
Thomas took the opportunity to escape out of the throng and noise of the
Curia, and made his way back to France and to his old manner of life. He
came back to Paris and lectured in St. Jacques Street, but not as the
head of the school. At Paris he now found critics as well as admirers.
His doctrine that individuality is dependent upon matter was censured as
involving a denial of immortality, and in 1269 he wrote a treatise,
_Contra Averroistas_, to show that this was not a necessary or even a
fair inference. In the same year we find him in London attending a
Chapter General of his order.
In 1271 the vacancy in the papacy ended with the selection of Gregory
X., one of the best of the popes. Thomas was recalled to Italy and
offered the Archbishopric of Naples, doubtless at the suggestion of
Charles of Anjou, whose hands were red with the blood of the young
Conradin. Thomas wisely declined it, and when, in 1272, he agreed to go
to Naples as a teacher of theology, it was with the reservation that
this should not bring him into close relations with the Court. Enough of
his Ghibelline traditions clung to him to make him abhor the murderer of
his kinsman. So in Naples he taught, and wrote at his _Summa_, and
prayed and saw visions—his biographers say—until one day the Pope
summoned him to a General Council at Lyons, with the view of proclaiming
a new crusade. He obeyed the summons, but when he reached the Cistercian
monastery of Fossa Nuova, on the hills above the Pontine Marshes, below
Rome, he fell ill and died, March 7th, 1274. Of course the Italians knew
he was poisoned, and even Dante countenances the report. The Pontine
Marshes in spring are so wholesome that no other hypothesis could
account for his death! His friend Bonaventura reached Lyons, but died
during the sessions of the council. His earlier friend and master,
Albert the Great, although his senior by thirty years, outlived him by
six, dying in 1280.
The position of Thomas Aquinas in history is determined by the fact that
he is the greatest of the scholastic philosophers. What his master and
other earlier thinkers had attempted, he more nearly did than ever has
been done by any one else. He took the two great bodies of knowledge,
secular and sacred, and fused them into a system more nearly consistent
with itself than any other. On the one side was the encylopaedic
philosophy of Aristotle, and the parallel but less perfect tradition of
Platonic speculation; on the other the Scriptures, the dogmatic
decisions of the councils and popes, and the teachings of the recognized
authorities among the ecclesiastical writers, especially as these had
been summarized by Peter Lombard. To blend these into one great system
of theology, to subsidize the weapons of the Greek philosophy in defence
of Christian truth, and to draw the line with accuracy between what
reason can prove and faith accepts without proof—this was what he
undertook in the _Summa_. And never was a more acute intellect employed
on the great task of reconciling faith with reason. If he failed, it is
not because he shrank from anticipating any and every kind of objection
to the truths he was defending; his works are a perfect storehouse of
such objections. If he failed, it was not from any want of confidence in
the powers of the human mind to deal with the highest subjects of
thought. No modern rationalist ever surpassed him in that respect. He
failed because neither then nor now do the materials exist for such a
work, and because his truths lost and his errors gained force by being
worked into a system.
It would take a whole chapter even to describe the _Summa_. Of its three
parts, the first, concerning God, and the second concerning man, were
completed in the four years he gave to the work. In the third, which
treats of the God-Man, he got no farther than the ninetieth question,
and the discussion was completed by extracts from his commentary on
Peter Lombard. But the completed part contains nearly _two million_
Latin words, or with the supplement, two million one hundred thousand.
It is six times as large as Calvin’s _Institutio_, or four times as
large as the Latin Bible! And the _Summa_ fills only two of the
seventeen folios of his works, all written within the space of
twenty-six years by a man actively engaged in teaching, lecturing, and
advising popes and princes.
That so much of the formative period of his life was spent in a
controversy, in which he was the applauded spokesman of a party whose
cause he regarded as the cause of God, could not but affect his
intellectual character. Professor Maurice thinks the delay in obtaining
the master’s degree worked in the same direction. The master in those
days was expected to pronounce decisions; those who had not attained
that rank were occupied in disputations only. “Thus our author was a
trained arguer,” and “the old habits remained with him when his
decisions were most accepted as authorities. From first to last he was
thinking of all that could be said on both sides of the question he was
discussing.” I believe that he was conscious of the narrowing and
dwarfing tendency of this habit of mind, even though he did not detect
the source of the evil. We read of his seeking to prepare himself for
his work by humble devotion. But to the last line of his last work the
controversial habit and attitude of mind clings to him. It is only in
his catechetical expositions, written before he left Koeln for Paris,
that you find a different atmosphere, and escape the heretic-crushing
Aristotelian dialectic of the scholastic disputant.
Even in his few hymns, which constitute his title to rank among the
sacred poets, he is the great scholastic doctor, with his eye on the
heresies which may distract the believer. He writes with the full
panoply under his singing robes. All his hymns are concerned with the
greatest of the Christian sacraments. It was in 1215, a year before the
confirmation of the Dominican Order, and twelve years before Thomas was
born, that the fourth Lateran Council made the transubstantiation of the
elements into the body and blood of Christ an article of faith. But a
Belgian ecstatic, Juliana of Liege, had a vision which called for a
special annual festival in honor of the mystery. Urban IV. complied with
this request in 1261, by requiring that the Thursday next after Trinity
Sunday should be observed as Corpus Christi Day. This involved the
preparation of an additional services for the Missal and Breviary, with
suitable prayers and hymns, and the work was laid upon Thomas. For the
Missal he wrote the sequence
_Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem;_
and for the Breviary the three hymns
_Pange, lingua, gloriosi Corporis mysterium,_
_Sacris solemniis juncta sint gaudia,_
and
_Verbum supernum prodiens, Nec Patris._
The Paris Breviary connects a fifth hymn of his with the same festival,
the
_Adoro Te devote, latens Deitas,_
assigning it for late (_serotinas_) services in the octave of Corpus
Christi. So Newman; but Daniel declares he finds it in none of the
breviaries of modern use, and in the missals only as a part of the
priest’s private preparation for saying Mass. Even this rank has not
been attained by the sixth hymn ascribed to him, the beautiful
_O Esca viatorum,_
which Dr. Ray Palmer has made familiar to American worshippers by his
exquisite version, first published in the _Andover Sabbath Hymn-Book_:
O Bread to pilgrims given.
Moll denies that Thomas wrote this, and says it is by a Jesuit poet,
which is most probable. March calls it “a happy echo” of the undisputed
hymns of Thomas Aquinas. But the echo is softened; the hymn is less
masculine. _Lympha fons_ alone would serve as a note to show that
Aquinas never wrote it.
It has been said by Dr. Neale that the
_Pange, lingua, gloriosi_
“contests the second place among those of the Western Church, with the
_Vexilla Regis_, the _Stabat Mater_, the _Jesu dulcis memoria_, the _Ad
Regias Agni Dapes_, the _Ad Supernam_, and one or two others, leaving
the _Dies Irae_ in its unapproachable glory.” But this judgment is the
prejudiced one of a High Churchman, sufficiently in sympathy with the
Roman doctrine of the sacraments to relish keenly Thomas’s concise and
vigorous statement of that doctrine, and to mistake the relish for
critical appreciation of the poetry. Dr. Neale even praises Thomas’s
treatise _On the Venerable Sacrament of the Altar_ as the finest
devotional treatise of the Middle Ages, finer therefore than the
_Imitation_ itself! A calmer estimate will put the hymn decidedly below
Bernard’s exquisite _Jesu dulcia memoria_, or the _Veni, Creator
Spiritus_ of Rabanus Maurus, or the _Veni, Sancte Spiritus_ of Hermann
Contractus. It is true that it excels all these in its peculiar
qualities, its logical neatness, dogmatic precision, and force of almost
argumentative statement; but these qualities are not poetical. In this
respect it is not altogether unlike Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” a hymn in
which the intellect has cut a channel for the emotions to flow. That was
written as a tail-piece to a controversial article in which Toplady
discussed John Wesley’s doctrines in the matter of faith and works, and
is a terse statement of theological discriminations on that point.
The _Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem_, as it is a much longer hymn, gives more
scope for the exposition of the Roman doctrine. For this reason Martin
Luther abhorred it, probably also because he had no good opinion of
Thomas himself. He accuses him of perverting the Scripture in this hymn,
“as though he were the worst enemy of God, or else an idiot.” But this
harsh judgment did not succeed in expelling the hymn from the use of the
Lutheran churches, and since the Oxford revival it has found its way
into other Protestant churches. But the sixth, seventh and eighth verses
express the doctrine of transubstantiation so distinctly, that one must
have gone as far as Dr. Pusey, who avowed that he held “all Roman
doctrine,” before using their words in any but a non-natural sense. In
the fine version made by Dr. A. R. Thompson, first published in the
_Sunday-School Times_ in 1883, and included in Dr. Robinson’s _Laudes
Domini_, only half the hymn is given, those verses being taken which
deflect least from the general current of Christian thought about the
sacrament. By the author’s kind permission, we give it here with his
latest revision:
“Sion, to thy Saviour singing,
To thy Prince and Shepherd bringing
Sweetest hymns of love and praise,
Thou wilt never reach the measure
Of his worth, by all the treasure
Of thy most ecstatic lays.
“Of all wonders that can thrill thee,
And with adoration fill thee,
What than this can greater be,
That himself to thee he giveth?—
He that eateth, ever liveth—
For the bread of life is he.
“Fill thy lips to overflowing
With sweet praise, his mercy showing,
Who this heavenly table spread.
On this day so glad and holy,
To each longing spirit lowly
Giveth he the living Bread.
“Here the King hath spread his table,
Whereon eyes of faith are able
Christ our Passover to trace.
Shadows of the law are going,
Light and life and truth inflowing,
Night to day is giving place.
* * * * *
“Lo, this angels’ food descending
Heavenly love is hither sending,
Hungry lips on earth to feed!
So the paschal lamb was given,
So the manna came from heaven,
Isaac was his type indeed.
“O good Shepherd, Bread life-giving,
Us, thy grace and life receiving,
Feed and shelter evermore!
Thou on earth our weakness guiding,
We in heaven with thee abiding,
With all saints will thee adore.”
Thomas’s Franciscan friend, John Fidenza, better known by his nickname
of John Bonaventura, was a hymn-writer also, but he did a good many
other things better. To many Protestants his name has been made
offensive through its association with the _Psalter of Our Lady_, a
travesty of the Book of Psalms, with which he had nothing to do, and
which was made in a later century. Indeed, as Martin Chemnitz pointed
out three centuries ago, Bonaventura protested against the excessive
reverence for the Virgin, which had already become common, as likely to
lead to idolatry. That he was called the Seraphic Doctor shows that men
felt in him a warmth of heart and a tenderness of devotion, which they
missed in his greater contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, the Angelical
Doctor. Indeed he was the incarnation of the Franciscan spirit of love
and helpfulness, as Thomas of the Dominican spirit of theological
research and orthodox defence. Yet Bonaventura’s _Breviloquium_ has been
praised by good judges as the best compend of Christian doctrine that
the Middle Ages have left us.
Bonaventura’s Latin poems are rather devout meditations than hymns. They
are not the voice of the Christian congregation in song, but of the monk
meditating before his crucifix. To him is sometimes ascribed the
Christmas hymn,
_Adeste fideles,_
but not on sufficient authority. His best known hymns are the
_Christum Ducem, qui per crucem,_
and
_Recordare sanctae crucis,_
of which latter we have English versions by Dr. Henry Harbaugh, Dr. J.
W. Alexander, and E. C. Benedict. Five other hymns are ascribed to him
in the collections. They all have the Franciscan note; they turn on our
Lord’s human sympathy and sufferings. This explains the ascription to
him of a long hymn on the members of our Lord’s body as affected by the
passion, which is found in Mone (I., 171-74), but which is more
frequently and quite as erroneously ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux. It
is not worthy of either, although Mone thinks the ascription to
Bonaventura “worthy of attention.” The hymn furnishes the point of
contact of the Latin hymnology with that of the later Moravians, the
Franciscans of Protestantism.
So we leave the two great scholars, thinkers, doctors, and poets, each
representing one of the two chief streams of spiritual influence in the
Church of the thirteenth century. “They were lovely and pleasant in
their lives, and in death they were not divided.”