Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”

Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox.”  By G.K. Chesterton, 1933.

 

 

It sounds surprising that a book devoted to one of the great theologians of all time would refer to its subject as “The Dumb Ox,” but that is exactly what G.K. Chesterton did in his reflections on the life and legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas.  St. Thomas’s immense size and his tendency to be silent during his formal education led to him being given that nickname.  Yet his quiet and sometimes awkward demeanor disguised a prodigious memory and razor-sharp analytical skills, and over time St. Thomas would produce some of the classic works of Catholic theology, which would eventually lead to his being declared a Doctor of the Church.  Chesterton’s book is not a biography so much as it is his own reflections and interpretations of Aquinas’s works.  In his introduction, Chesterton writes:

 

“This book makes no pretence to be anything but a popular sketch of a great

historical character who ought to be more popular. Its aim will be achieved, if it

leads those who have hardly even heard of St. Thomas Aquinas to read about

him in better books. But from this necessary limitation certain consequences

follow, which should perhaps be allowed for from the start.”

 

G.K. Chesterton’s wrote two books on saints, the other being St. Francis of Assisi (see the August 2011 review).  St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas were completely different in appearance, and approach to their faith, but both were great saints, and Chesterton observes that there can be very different paths to sainthood.  St. Francis lived his faith in an aesthetic manner, and St. Thomas sought to understand the ways of God through intellectual work and logic.  As Chesterton muses:

 

“St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild

and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of

holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy. St. Francis was so fiery and even fidgety that the ecclesiastics, before whom he appeared quite suddenly, thought he was a madman. St. Thomas was so stolid that the scholars, in the schools which he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce. Indeed, he was the sort of schoolboy, not unknown, who would much rather be thought a dunce than have his own dreams invaded, by more active or animated dunces. This external contrast extends to almost every point in the two personalities. It was the paradox of St. Francis that while he was passionately fond of poems, he was rather distrustful of books. It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read."

 

In an essay on Chesterton’s Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, wrote that, “Evelyn Waugh claimed that G.K. Chesterton never actually read the Summa Theologica. He simply ran his fingers over the binding and absorbed its content.”  The historical accuracy of this anecdote is open to question, but there is another story from Chesterton’s secretary, Dorothy Collins, who claimed that Chesterton composed part of his book on Aquinas, asked her to pick up some library books on the subject, flipped through a single one, and after a quick stroll finished the manuscript. 

 

A major theme in this book is the role of theology in the world, and how the moderns have disconnected themselves from theology, and why people need a strong grasp of theology in order to better understand the world.  In a society where theology is not respected, people are left vulnerable to all manners of trends, fans, and random ideas in general.  Chesterton writes:

 

“In truth, this [debate over theology] vividly illuminates the provincial stupidity of those who object to what they call "creeds and dogmas." It was precisely the creed and dogma that saved the sanity of the world. These people generally propose an alternative religion of intuition and feeling. If, in the really Dark Ages, there had been a religion of feeling, it would have been a religion of black and suicidal feeling. It was the rigid creed that resisted the rush of suicidal feeling. The critics of asceticism are probably right in supposing that many a Western hermit did feel rather like an Eastern fakir. But he could not really think like an Eastern fakir; because he was an orthodox Catholic. And what kept his thought in touch with healthier and more humanistic thought was simply and solely the Dogma. He could not deny that a good God had created the normal and natural world; he could not say that the devil had made the world; because he was not a Manichee. A thousand enthusiasts for celibacy, in the day of the great rush to the desert or the cloister, might have called marriage a sin, if they had only considered their individual ideals, in the modern manner, and their own immediate feelings about marriage. Fortunately, they had to accept the Authority of the Church, which had definitely said that marriage was not a sin. A modern emotional religion might at any moment have turned Catholicism into Manichaeism. But when Religion would have maddened men, Theology kept them sane.”

 

Understanding religion with the power of the mind helps to strengthen believers against attacks, heresies, and misconceptions.  In his closing paragraphs, Chesterton observes how following Aquinas’s life of the mind can make someone a better Christian, because faith and reason are complementary virtues, not antonyms.

 

“To sum up; the reality of things, the mutability of things, the diversity of things,

and all other such things that can be attributed to things, is followed carefully by

the medieval philosopher, without losing touch with the original point of the

reality. There is no space in this book to specify the thousand steps of thought by which he shows that he is right. But the point is that, even apart from being right he is real. He is a realist in a rather curious sense of his own, which is a third thing, distinct from the almost contrary medieval and modern meanings of the word. Even the doubts and difficulties about reality have driven him to believe in more reality rather than less. The deceitfulness of things which has had so sad an effect on so many sages, has almost a contrary effect on this sage. If things deceive us, it is by being more real than they seem. As ends in themselves they always deceive us; but as things tending to a greater end, they are even more real than we think them.”

 

 

–Chris Chan