St. Thomas Aquinas -- again

Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium.

Editing a manuscript on early and medieval theologians the other day, and using the Internet to check some facts, I happened upon some "interesting" claims about why St. Thomas is called the Angelic Doctor.
  A few self-proclaimed "authorities" said that it was because he wrote so much about angels, you know, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Some others recounted the story about how, when one of his brothers brought in a prostitute to tempt him to give up the idea of joining the Dominicans, Thomas chased her out of the room with a burning torch--and then they go on to add that angels visited Thomas to reveal to him that he had been granted the gift of perfect chastity and would never have to struggle with sexual desires.
  I'll spare you my rant about being very careful what you trust on the Internet; we all know that. But Thomas is one of my favorite saints (he's a Dominican, after all) and it appalls me to see this rubbish being propagated about him.
  First we have one of the greatest intellects that ever lived, who wrote not only theological treatises but also some of the most stunning poetry in the Christian tradition, being reduced to some New Age claim that he wrote chiefly about angels--and irrelevant nonsense at that.
  The well-known story about the prostitute may or may not be apocryphal; in any case, if I were making a film about Thomas's life I'd certainly include it, it's great drama. But the pious postscript about the gift of perfect chastity--What good does it do us to believe such a legend? What kind of a role model can such a person be? How do we honor Thomas (or any saint) by lifting him out of the realm of normal human struggles--and victories?
  Thomas was a Mensch.  Not for nothing was he a Dominican when there were so many other choices available. When I taught medieval Christianity to seminary students I had a segment called "What Made Thomas Tick," and I wrote on the board the words from Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne" (in the verse about Jesus), "Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone."  Then I said, "This was not Thomas."
  No, it took others after Thomas to develop virtual caricatures of his theological method. As much as I dearly love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I somehow can't blame the Jesuits for being annoyed that, as theologians went, he favored Scotus over Aquinas.
  Well, March 7 is the anniversary of Thomas's death and thus should properly be his feast. But his feast was moved to January 28.  I doubt if Father Dominic and Jordan of Saxony and especially his teacher Albert the Great would mind if we celebrated the Angelic Doctor--so called because his intellect was so astounding that it seemed as if only a superhuman being could possess it--twice.

Antiphon: Lumen ad revelationem gentium

"...You held in your arms Christ the Lord, the Savior of his people."

The week in which the month turns from January to February holds three of my favorite feasts. First, on January 28 we celebrate that most extraordinary intellect and mystic of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas. Now, many of my Dominican friends rightly clamor for the return of Thomas's feast to its rightful place on March 7, the day on which Thomas died. But at the same time, there's something appropriate about its present position a few days ahead of my other favorite feasts, the Presentation of the Lord (February 2) and St. Blaise (February 3).  Here's why.
    Before there was Thomas, there was St. Anselm of Canterbury, "father of Scholasticism," a ground-breaking theologian who also authored some of the most exquisite prayers. Anselm sought to prove the existence of God, and he did so entirely within the reasoning of his own mind. In other words, his proofs, called the Ontological Argument, take place entirely as an exercise of logic and do not depend on or refer to any external experience. Trust me, explaining Anselm's argument to divinity students, even grad students, is an interesting challenge.
    Then along came Thomas. Thomas also sought to prove God's existence, but to do so he went to the natural world, to the realm of sensory experience. You can infer God's existence from what you see, hear, experience all around you. No wonder that Thomas had fought so hard with his family to be allowed to join the Dominicans, that earthy band of black-and-white-clad religious soldiers whose founder, St. Dominic, believed that God "had not created the world in vain," as it says in Isaiah 45. The earth is good, God meant it to be lived in.
  And indeed, God took a giant leap out of heaven to come to the earth he created, become a human just like the ones he made, and pitch his tent among us. We celebrated that event forty days ago, on Christmas. Now, on the Feast of the Presentation, we recall the baby Jesus being brought to the Temple by his parents to offer the customary sacrifices expected of all good Jews. And there Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, were met by Simeon and Prophetess Anna, the two "senior saints" (see my blog for December 30) who had been anxiously awaiting the coming of the Messiah. Simeon takes the baby into his arms and calls him a "light of revelation to the Gentiles."
   Once again, light.  God is symbolized as light.  Light can be seen. Light helps us to see. When it's being produced by fire, light can be felt, as warmth.
    And so we celebrate the Presentation as a feast of lights.  It used to be called Candlemas Day, the "feast of candles." Even now, there is a solemn form of entrance for the beginning of the Mass in which the participants carry lighted candles and sing about Jesus as light of revelation. The 12th-century abbot Blessed Guerric of Igny has a wonderful sermon for this day on which he compares Christ to a candle and invites his Brothers now to light their own candles for the procession.
  And as February 2 gives way to February 3, candles are still with us--the special candles used to bless throats on the Feast of St. Blaise, venerated as patron of those suffering from throat disorders because he once saved a boy who was choking to death on a fishbone. The proper way to do this blessing is to hold the pair of candles, tied together in the form of an X, against the person's throat and pronounce the prayer of blessing. Alas, this is one of those time-honored, beloved customs that have largely gone by the boards in the last few decades. In the interests of time, or expediency, or some other excuse, the blessing is sometimes pronounced as a general blessing over the people at some point during the Mass--at the Intercessions or as part of the final blessing--and usually on the preceding Sunday, not the day itself.  Time was when you would line up after Mass on February 3 to have your throat individually blessed. One year when I was working in a parish in the NW Adirondacks I had the privilege of being dispatched, with candles and prayer card, to an apartment building that housed elderly and sick people to visit each of them and give them the blessing. 
    It's an event of the senses. Something that reminds us that our God is a God of the tangible--read Francis Thompson's poem "Kingdom of God." Now we've largely lost that. I don't think Thomas Aquinas would approve.