(The theological writers named and quoted in the course of this volume are, for the most part, still unknown to the average American reader. The works of some of them have never been translated into English. Even their strange names resemble one another—for example, Saint John of the Cross, John of Saint Thomas, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Without trying to identify every name mentioned in the book, I can at least give a brief sketch of the principal writers I have followed and show where they belong in the history of Christian thought.)
Saint Gregory of Nyssa
[ASIA MINOR, 4TH CENTURY, A.D.]
Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (in Asia Minor), is at once the most important and the most neglected of the early Christian mystical theologians. He was the brother of Saint Basil the Great, who introduced monasticism into Asia Minor, whence it was to pass to Europe. The two brothers, together with another Gregory, Bishop of Nazianz, formed a powerful triad. They saved the Church in the age of its greatest peril—for theirs was the century of Arianism. And since Arianism denied the Divinity of Christ, its triumph would have meant the extinction of Christian mysticism. For Christian mysticism would be impossible without the Incarnate Word, and without a Trinity of Persons in the unity of Divine Nature. Both these doctrines were denied by the Arians. The consequence of such a denial, in mysticism, reduces contemplation to the level of poetry or, at best, of pantheism.
Gregory of Nyssa was born in Cappadocia (part of modern Turkey) about 335 A.D., when the fervor of the Desert Fathers was at its height. A man of literary tastes, he first married and settled in the world, but later he entered the monastery founded by his brother, Saint Basil, on the banks of the river Iris. There he gave himself to prayer, asceticism, and the contemplative study of theology. In 371 Saint Basil, who had meanwhile become Bishop of Caesarea, consecrated Gregory bishop of a nearby city called Nyssa. Although Gregory did not come up to his brother’s expectations as an administrator, he distinguished himself by his theological writings and by his preaching against the prevalent Arian heresy. His was certainly not an age in which contemplatives were tempted to imagine that questions of dogma were mere matters of speculation and therefore had no essential role to play in an “affective” monastic spirituality. It was, in fact, contemplatives—Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil, the two Gregorys—and the monastic order as a whole who saved Christian theology in the fourth century.
Saint Gregory is the true Father of Christian apophatic mysticism, but this distinction of his has been forgotten since the appearance of a certain Christian Platonist of the fifth century, whose works were falsely ascribed to Denis (Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Saint Paul at Athens in the Apostolic Age1). This Pseudo-Dionysius, as he is called, was a follower of Proclus, the last of the great Neo-Platonists (fifth century, A.D.), but in his reconciliation of Platonic ideas with Christian faith he was also following in the footsteps of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who had died at the end of the fourth century. Since they were supposed to spring from the Apostolic Age, the works of Pseudo-Dionysius acquired such prestige that all subsequent apophatic Christian mysticism has rested on him. In actual fact, Gregory of Nyssa was not only the true fountainhead of this mystical tradition but was also perhaps a greater philosopher and theologian than Pseudo-Dionysius. Two great followers of Saint Gregory of Nyssa share with him the honor of laying the foundations of mystical theology. They were both hermits at Nitria, in the Egyptian Desert. One was Saint Macarius of Alexandria, the other Evagrius Ponticus.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa played such an important part in the Second General Council of Constantinople that communion with him was henceforth a proof of strict orthodoxy. His greatness as a dogmatic theologian has never been forgotten. His mystical and ascetical works have always been well known in the Oriental Church. Only in our own day have they been rediscovered by the West.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
[FRANCE, 12TH CENTURY]
Although he does not belong to the Patristic Age, Saint Bernard is sometimes called the “last of the Church Fathers.” The title is justified by his loyalty to the spirit of Patristic theology in a period of intellectual ferment that preceded the great development of medieval scholasticism. Bernard of Clairvaux is one of the greatest and most characteristic figures of the Middle Ages. The son of a Burgundian nobleman, Bernard entered the newly-founded monastery of Citeaux, near Dijon, in 1112. In doing so, he believed that he was leaving behind everything that attracted the attention of the world. Yet within a few years he covered the face of Europe with Cistercian monasteries. In turning the Order into a world movement, he made his time keenly conscious of the contemplative and penitential character of the monastic vocation.
The vast diffusion of Saint Bernard’s writings—especially of his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles—contributed more than any other single influence to form the mysticism of the Middle Ages. The spirit of Saint Bernard, strongly colored by his own temperament and personality, is one of ardent lyricism combined with seriousness and strength. We do not find in him the tenderness of Saint Francis, and yet he is not quite as tough as some of his descendants make him out to be, since one of the principal traits of his spirituality is his keen awareness of the goodness of God. The mystical writings of Saint Bernard are hymns that celebrate the sweetness of Transforming Union. They have earned him the title of “the mellifluous Doctor.” Yet there is nothing mellifluous about some of the letters Bernard wrote to noblemen and members of the clergy who did not seem to him to be living up to their obligations. Indeed there is in them a certain note of violence; but we must not exaggerate either his sweetness or his strength.
Saint Bernard was a man of contrasts, almost a man of contradictions. He was keenly aware of this himself, since he called himself the “chimera of the age,” burdened as he was by the distress of being the most important public figure in Europe when he wanted to remain hidden in the cloister. Not only did Bernard settle the destinies of nations, heal the wounds of religious dissidence and schism, and send Europe off on a Crusade, but his disciple was Pope Eugene III, who had once stoked the furnace in the warming-room at Clairvaux. Saint Bernard contributed more than inspiration, example, and advice to the society of his time. Although he frequently expressed his contempt for the philosophical speculation of the new schools that were growing up everywhere, he played a crucially important part in the theological developments of his age. In fact, he did theology a service which no other technical theologian was capable of doing when he brought about the condemnation of Abelard and Gilbert de la Porrée. His condemnation prepared the way for the sane intellectualism of the scholastics and it was perhaps partly due to the action of Saint Bernard that a thinker like Saint Thomas Aquinas was able, in the end, to set decadent Patristic theology free from its preoccupation with accidentals. After all, Saint Thomas adopted the same critical approach as Abelard, although he used it in an entirely different spirit and with altogether different results. The condemnation of Abelard also saved true Christian mysticism, and it was indeed the instinct of the contemplative that showed Saint Bernard the dangers inherent in Abelard’s false notion of faith. The same instinct led the Abbot of Clairvaux to point out the error of Gilbert de la Porée’s distinction between “God” and the “Divinity” which would have ended by reducing God to the level of any other being and would have disposed of His transcendence by narrowing it down to the limitations of a philosopher’s concept. The greatest service Saint Bernard did for Christian mysticism, in his detection of singularly dangerous errors, was precisely the work of a technical theologian.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
[ITALY, 13TH CENTURY]
The greatest of all theologians surely needs no introduction. The vast scope of his theological and philosophic synthesis, the logic and serene clarity of his thought, and above all the combination of order, simplicity, and depth which characterize his Summa Theologica are a monument to his genius and to his sanctity. The power of Saint Thomas’s speculative thought should not make us forget that he was also a mystic. His mystical theology fits into the apophatic tradition (for Saint Thomas commented on the works of Pseudo-Dionysius) but is not confined to it. Nor is his mystical doctrine formally separated from his dogma and moral theology. Since for Saint Thomas theology was an organic whole, his mysticism is not merely centered in the questions of the Summa devoted to the contemplative life2 but in all his discussions of the relations of men with their God.
One might imagine, from the dispassionate objectivity of Saint Thomas, that the Summa was composed in years of silent and unruffled tranquillity. Yet Saint Thomas lived and fought in the thick of a tremendous intellectual crisis. The lucid order of the Summa was, in actual fact, not the fruit of cloistered rest but of an intense conflict amid the agitation of the Schools. Few people realize that Saint Thomas’s contemporaries did not all receive his statements with wholehearted approval. Many of his characteristic doctrines were formulated in the hour of battle and defended at the risk of condemnation for heresy.
Born in 1225 in a castle of southern Italy, the young Aquinas was educated by the Benedictines at Monte Cassino. He later passed to the University of Naples, where he made his first acquaintance with the wave of skeptical rationalism which was flooding Christian universities under the influence of the Spanish Moor, Averroes. Thomas, whose ardent faith and love of God were united with a brilliant intelligence, entered the newly founded Order of Friars Preachers in order to lead a life of prayer, study, and defense of the truth. His brothers did not approve of his vocation and threw him in prison. There he spent a profitable year meditating on the Bible and on Aristotle. After recovering his freedom he went to Paris, then to Cologne, studying in both universities under the Dominican Master, Saint Albert the Great, who prepared him for his great work.
The intellectual world of the mid-thirteenth century was divided among three powerful forces. The future of Christian thought and, therefore, of the Christian religion depended on the struggle among these forces. At one extreme was the rationalism of Averroes. At the other was the strong traditionalist group which followed Saint Augustine and the Arab Neo-Platonist Avicenna. In the center were the Christian Aristotelians, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The issues at stake were completely fundamental to Christianity. Averroism demanded the rejection of theology, placed man’s highest happiness in the exercise of reason. The activity of knowing for its own sake completely fulfilled man’s aspirations because, in fact, it was simply the manifestation of a Universal Intelligence working in him. The Augustinians, recognizing the implicit atheism of this philosophy, reacted powerfully against it. In reaffirming the transcendence of God and man’s absolute dependence on Him, they ended by saying that even man’s natural knowledge demanded the direct action of God upon his soul. This led them to deprecate reason in favor of faith and mystical intuition.
The greatest of the Augustinian school was Saint Bonaventure, Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, who was Saint Thomas’s contemporary, opponent, and friend. They died in the same year (1274). Close to Saint Thomas on many fundamental questions, Saint Bonaventure differed from him on others, especially on the relations of faith and reason in our approach to God, on the primacy of the intelligence over the will, on the unity of man’s substantial form, and on the source of man’s knowledge of transcendentals.
Saint Thomas entered the lists with one supremely important ideal: to defend the autonomy of man’s intelligence and of the human personality against the extremists on both sides who threatened to submerge man in God, on the one hand, and in a universal active intellect on the other. The eagerness of the Augustinians to safeguard Christian mysticism and to bring the soul to divine union by the paths of faith and charity had, Saint Thomas thought, actually jeopardized Christian mysticism by an unwise fideism and an unbalanced emphasis on love. Saint Thomas was an intellectualist, but it cannot be too often repeated that his insistence on the primacy of the intelligence was intended as the only safe guarantee of perfect charity and of mystical union. Saint Thomas, like all Christian theologians, knows perfectly well that the consummation of man’s destiny is love and that the way to divine union is the way of the theological virtues, through the night of faith. Hence the paradox that the intellectualism of Thomas Aquinas turns, out, after all, to be the supreme criterion of true mysticism, because there is no such thing as a sanctity that is not intelligent.
Blessed John Ruysbroeck
[BELGIUM, 14TH CENTURY]
One of the greatest of Christian mystics and the author of magnificent books on contemplation, John Ruysbroeck dominated the golden age of German and Flemish mysticism—the age of Tauler, Suso, and Thomas a Kempis. He was born in 1293 in a little village outside Brussels. Educated in the city, he grew up under the shadow of the Cathedral of Saint Gudule, where he became a chaplain after his priestly ordination in 1318. He spent some twenty-five years in the active life, but his preaching was already based on a deep interior life of contemplative prayer. Ruysbroeck devoted most of his gifts and energies to expounding the true nature of contemplation. It was a most important work. In 1308, the greatest theologian of the time, John Duns Scotus, had been sent to Cologne to refute the errors of the Beghards and Brothers of the Free Spirit. But Scotus died before his work was begun. The pantheism of the Beghards held that man was by nature identified with the Divine Essence and that, as soon as the “spiritual man” had acquired the proper techniques of recollection, he could achieve a perfect realization of his essential identity with God. This made him henceforth unable to sin and delivered him from all obedience to Church authority. It also enabled him to enjoy the Beatific Vision even on earth. Although Ruysbroeck sometimes attacked the Beghards with direct refutation, he concentrated above all on the positive statement of true doctrine rather than on the denial of what was false. In any case, Ruysbroeck was first of all a contemplative himself. Finding the busy life of Brussels too much of a distraction and wearied by the manner in which the liturgical offices were chanted by the canons of Saint Gudule, Ruysbroeck retired in 1343 to a forest hermitage at Groenendael, where he subsequently founded a small contemplative community under the Rule of Saint Augustine. Here Ruysbroeck led a simple retired life, frequently withdrawing into the forest to be alone with God. Yet he did not neglect to return to share with others, by writing and by the spoken word, the fruits of his contemplation. Groenendael became a center of Christian spirituality, attracting visitors from all parts of Germany and the Netherlands, so that the influence of Ruysbroeck was as widespread as it was to be lasting. The greatest of his books are The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage and The Sparkling Stone, translated into English but now out of print. His Seven Steps of the Ladder of Love was also translated (London, 1943). The Benedictine monks of Saint Paul de Wisques, who translated Ruysbroeck from his original Flemish into French, assert that “no one has equaled Ruysbroeck in his ability to establish the structure of the contemplative life on firm philosophical foundations.”3
It is quite true that Ruysbroeck’s doctrine rests on firm philosophical and theological foundations, but he certainly does not deserve the unqualified praise which his learned translators have accorded him in this respect. Ruysbroeck’s terminology is often extremely confusing, and it is not difficult to understand why he was bitterly attacked by theologians who, like Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, accused him of falling into the same pantheism which had misled the Beghards. This accusation was false, but the confusion which inspired it flows from the fact that Ruysbroeck’s theology is at the same time eclectic and independent. He sometimes agrees with Saint Thomas Aquinas but most of the time falls within the Augustinian tradition. In any case, writing of mystical experience in poetic terms, he can justly claim the right to a certain independence. Nevertheless, Saint John of the Cross, who was a far greater poet than Ruysbroeck and perhaps a greater mystic as well, is able to fit his mystical doctrine into a simple and powerful theological structure which is greatly superior to anything we find in Ruysbroeck. Saint John of the Cross has not lacked critics either, for severe criticism is the professional hazard of all who write about mystical experience. Nevertheless, the fact that Saint John of the Cross was faithful to a clear, well-established, and universally recognized set of principles, far from obstructing his freedom, only increased the power and the scope of a theology which is characteristically his own. The mystic of Groenendael, long venerated, was never formally beatified, but his cultus was sanctioned by the Holy See. His feast is celebrated locally in the diocese of Mechlin with a proper Mass and Office.
Saint Teresa of Ávila
[SPAIN, 16TH CENTURY]
Since sanctity and contemplation perfect the whole human person, it is not surprising that some of the greatest mystics have been characterized by their warm human tenderness, their vivacious humor, and their simple common sense. All these natural qualities were transfigured by grace in the soul of Teresa de Ahumada to make her one of the most attractive personalities in the annals of the Church. As reformer of the Carmelite nuns she combined with her contemplative life a level-headed talent for administration and seemingly tireless resources of energy. Her story has come down to us in an autobiography which is considered one of the greatest productions of Spanish literature, although her other works are no less wonderful.
Born at Ávila on March 28, 1515, Teresa entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation, in her native city, when she was twenty-one. Far from becoming a saint in her novitiate, she drifted through some twenty years of religious mediocrity, neglecting the graces of interior prayer and living aimlessly from month to month without serious ideals with no one to direct her along the paths of religious perfection.
Only when Teresa was forty did she suddenly wake up to the seriousness of her position. Guided by the light of grace, she applied herself seriously to mental prayer and began to bring order into her life. Her progress was very rapid, especially under the influence of some of the great saints and theologians who providentially entered her life at this time. Her meeting with the Jesuit Saint Francis Borgia, her friendship with the Franciscan reformer Saint Peter of Alcantara, the direction of such men as the Dominican Bañez and the Jesuit Balthasar Alvarez contributed immensely to her spiritual growth.
The chief characteristic of Saint Teresa’s spirituality is her realization of the importance of mental prayer. It was this that inspired her plans for the Carmelite reform. Her whole aim in returning to the original Carmelite Rule was to enable persons like herself to find the solitude and spiritual liberty upon which the contemplative life depends.
Teresa herself had a clearly apostolic notion of the contemplative life. She believed that her nuns, by their lives of prayer and sacrifice, would do much to atone for the religious confusion of sixteenth-century Europe, to save souls, and to preserve the unity of the Catholic Church. It is extremely significant that one of the finest fruits of the Catholic counterreformation should have been an order in which contemplative prayer in the strict sense was not only emphasized but adopted as an end.
When Saint John of the Cross joined Saint Teresa in 1568 and began, in his turn, to lay the foundations for a reform of the Carmelite Friars, a new note was added: the priests of the order would not only practice contemplation, they would also preach the ways of interior prayer and enable souls, by their direction, to arrive at a certain degree of contemplation, not only in convents but even in the world.
After a life of high contemplation, prodigious activity, and unbelievable suffering, Saint Teresa died on October 4, 1582. By that time there was scarcely an important town in Spain that did not have a convent of Discalced Carmelites.
Saint John of the Cross
[SPAIN, 16TH CENTURY]
Juan de Yepes was twenty-six when he first met Saint Teresa in 1568. He had been five years in the Carmelite Order, but because his hopes of a solitary and contemplative life could not be fulfilled under the mitigated rule, he was preparing to pass over to the Carthusians. Saint Teresa persuaded him that God had other plans for him: he was not to join one of the monastic orders for whom contemplation was largely a matter of vocal prayer. He had not done wrong in becoming a Carmelite: all he needed to do was return to the original Carmelite ideal and he would find plenty of opportunity for solitary communion with God, along with the mortification which protects the “purity of heart” without which no man can “see” God.
At first sight, the young Carmelite friar was not the sort of material on which you would expect to build a whole new order. He was only five feet two. He had a shy, silent, sensitive disposition and, far from being talkative, was sometimes so abstracted that he was often unaware that others were talking to him. Nevertheless Saint Teresa soon found that he had profound wisdom born of experience. He was just as level-headed as she was, and what is more, he was something of a theologian. Besides all this, he had her energy and her courage, although he did not share her colorful temperament. Finally, as it turned out, he was a poet, one of the most interesting poets in an age of genius. This, however, did not transpire until later.
The winter of 1568–1569 found the first three Carmelite friars living in a little farmhouse outside a village called Duruelo. They had tiny cells in the attic, and the snow blew in upon them through the cracks in the tiles during their hours of contemplation. In the daytime they preached all over the countryside. Foundations soon began to be made, and the reform grew. But before long it had to stand the test of serious conflict. The inevitable jealousy of the unreformed members of an order undergoing reformation found numerous pretexts for hindering the work of Saint Teresa. As a sequel to a stormy convent election, John of the Cross was imprisoned in Toledo, where he was very badly treated for about nine months. During this time, however, he wrote three of his greatest poems, which contained the doctrine which would later fill three books on mystical prayer.
After an escape from prison which was, to say the least, sensational, Saint John of the Cross rejoined his reform for a short but fruitful period of work and writing, during which he presided over several new foundations. By this time, the reform had become well established. In 1585 a new system of government was adopted by the Discalced Carmelites, and John of the Cross was named as a consultor on the new administrative council. The new system was none of Saint John’s devising. Since the death of Saint Teresa in 1582 a new generation had sprung up and started to run the reform on new lines. The guiding spirit of this new development was a converted Genoese banker, Nicholas Doria. He was simply a man of action. He was a rigid, domineering ascetic with little relish for contemplation, and Saint Teresa had once drily remarked concerning him: “There are some kinds of sanctity that I do not understand.”
Doria had already disposed of one of Saint Teresa’s favorites, Jerome Gracian. The turn of John of the Cross was soon to come. After five years as a consultor, the saint was suddenly deprived of office and ordered to Mexico. He never left Spain, however. His health broke down completely in the summer of 1591. He was hospitalized in a convent, where the Prior disapproved of him and did not fail to remind him daily of the fact. There he died late in the year. He was canonized in 1726 and declared a Doctor of the Church two hundred years later.
Saint John of the Cross has never been a very popular saint, outside his native Spain. His doctrine is considered “difficult,” and he demands of others the same uncompromising austerity which he practiced in his own life. Nevertheless, a close study of his doctrine, such as we have attempted in the present book, should prove that Saint John of the Cross had all the balance and prudence and “discretion” which mark the highest sanctity. He is not a fanatic, bent upon loading his subjects with insupportable burdens which will end by reducing them to moral and physical wrecks. The demands he makes are uncompromising in their essentials but flexible in all their accidental aspects. His only purpose is to bring the whole man, body and soul, under the guidance of the Spirit of God. In actual practice, Saint John of the Cross was relentlessly opposed to the formalism and inhumanity of those whom he compared to “spiritual blacksmiths,” violently hammering the souls of their victims to make them fit some conventional model of ascetic perfection. He well knew that this kind of asceticism was itself one of the most serious of defects, because it was often a manifestation of incorrigible spiritual pride. The clarity and logic of this Spanish Carmelite, added to his unsurpassed experiential knowledge of the things of God, make him by far the greatest as well as the surest of all mystical theologians.
Blaise Pascal
[FRANCE, 17TH CENTURY]
Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont Ferrand, in central France, in 1623. His first “conversion” to Jansenism took place in 1646 and he retired to Port Royal after his vision in 1654. It was then that he began the Lettres Provinciales. He later left Port Royal and died in Paris on August 15, 1662.
Few Catholic writers have been the subject of as much discussion as Pascal. He has found enemies everywhere, inside the Church as well as among the greatest enemies of the Church. He still has friends, Catholic and otherwise. If he has enemies, it is largely his own fault. His brilliant intelligence and his keen observation of human nature still demand our admiration. His tortured life deserves a sympathy which he is often denied. Everything about him has been called in question, from his sanity to his loyalty to the Church. Perhaps he was a neurotic. Certainly he defended some erroneous theological opinions. He could have chosen a more healthy spiritual atmosphere to live in than the Jansenism of Port Royal. Nevertheless, it would be folly to question his fundamental sincerity, and his wisdom is still able to speak for itself. Pascal has never been condemned as a heretic, he never contumaciously resisted Church authority, and he died, as he sincerely believed he had lived, a loyal Catholic. However, the fact remains that he was for a great part of his life associated with the Jansenist heresy, and he defended it by a series of anonymous and surreptitiously printed pamphlets. Yet his defense of Port Royal was not strictly a defense of condemned doctrine. He merely tried to argue that the doctrine that had been condemned had never, in fact, been held by Port Royal.
Nevertheless, it is useless to deny that even in Pascal the odiousness of Jansenism is not mitigated by style, perspicacity, or literary skill. The Lettres Provinciales, as Pascal himself seems to have realized later on, remain a blot on his reputation. These pamphlets are most famous for their bitter excoriation of the Society of Jesus. It is here that Pascal’s theology, as well as his Catholicity, went wrong. His exaggerated and false picture of Jesuit moral theology brought odium upon the whole Church. It was Pascal who, more than any other, made “casuistry” a term of opprobrium in the mouths of the Church’s enemies. He did as much as any “anti-Papist” to popularize the legend that moral theology is fundamentally dishonest and that many Catholic priests and religious are nothing but political opportunists, seeking to dominate the world by means of the confessional! Cardinal Newman wrote his Apologia to defend the Church and himself against this very charge. Yet the accusation remains the principal weapon in the hands of the Church’s enemies today. If Pascal alone had been responsible for its forging, he would indeed have something to answer for. He certainly intended no such harm. When he later realized what might eventually be the consequences of his statements, he seems to have undergone a change of heart. He devoted his later years to a book in defense of the Catholic faith against the rationalism which was already prevalent in his time. The book was never finished. Yet the notes alone form one of the most interesting volumes in all literature. This is the famous book of his “thoughts,” Les Pensées. In the Pensées we see much less of Pascal the Jansenist and much more of the true Catholic that was in him. Here Pascal prepares a brilliant defense for the rationality of Catholic faith and in doing so attacks the pseudo-Catholic philosophizing of thinkers like Descartes who, in their anxiety to meet rationalism halfway, were actually emptying faith of all its content and reducing religion to a matter of form, a superficial accident in a society of mathematicians.
Actually, Pascal was well equipped to undertake such a task because he was himself a scientist. He had grown up in the most advanced circles of mathematical and physical empiricism. Yet at the same time he had been trained in the Catholic faith. The problem of living as a Catholic in a century that was essentially skeptical and mundane involved Pascal in a certain ambivalence which did him no good. His series of “conversions,” his celebrated vision, the “miracle of the thorn,” his association with Port Royal, the ill-balanced moralism reflected in the Lettres Provinciales seem to manifest something of the dark unhappiness of a soul that has not found true spiritual rest. The unfinished book of Pensées remains, then, a true witness to his spirit, as well as a monument to an unsettled genius.
No doubt Pascal would have been scandalized to think that the “probabilism” which seemed to him to be so odious in moral theology would one day be universally adopted, in practice, by theologians. And yet the spiritual life is best developed where souls are allowed freedom of choice in doubtful cases. The strictness of the Jansenists, who believed that a truly “spiritual” man would always, in case of doubt, be prompted by a special interior attraction to choose what was harder and more repugnant to human nature, was in actual fact the kind of thing that hampers the action of the Holy Spirit. It narrows and contracts the soul, confining it to hairsplitting considerations of detail like those which preoccupied the Pharisees in the time of Christ. But what is worse, this asceticism is dangerous because it is explicitly irrational. Pascal, who defended reason in the Pensées, attacked it, in a different context, in the Lettres Provinciales. And it was this, perhaps, that lay at the root of all his errors. This one fact is very important and it must never be overlooked by anyone who wishes to understand the difference between the asceticism of Saint John of the Cross, on the one hand, and the false asceticism of the Jansenists on the other.
John of Saint Thomas
[SPAIN, 17TH CENTURY]
No more striking contrast could be found than that which exists between Pascal and John of Saint Thomas, though these two men were contemporaries, intellectuals, mystics. John of Saint Thomas found his place and his vocation without difficulty and spent long, fruitful years in study, teaching, and writing. But he is very little read. His work is, in many ways, much more significant than Pascal’s, but it has never attracted the interest of any but specialists in theology. John of Saint Thomas is one of those speculative theologians who cannot reach the average educated man except through a mediator who is willing to translate his thought into ordinary terms. The issues which concern such theologians are generally matters of such minute detail that this work of mediation is scarcely ever worth while. The treatise of John of Saint Thomas on the Gifts of the Holy Ghost is an important exception to this general rule.
Although his life was uneventful, John of Saint Thomas has an interesting background. Born at Lisbon in 1589, he was the son of an Austrian diplomat who soon moved, with his family, to the Spanish Netherlands. John received a cosmopolitan education from various universities, including Louvain, Belgium, and Coimbra, Portugal. In 1623, some years after his ordination to the priesthood, he entered the Dominican Order at Madrid. From then on he devoted himself to the special vocation which is reflected in his religious name: all his gifts were consecrated to the study and interpretation of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
In the age following the great Thomist revival of the sixteenth century, it might seem that there was nothing wonderful in such a vocation. No doubt John of Saint Thomas never stopped to ask himself whether what he was doing happened to be remarkable. On the contrary, his most admirable characteristic is the completeness with which he proposed to submerge his own talents and personality in the thought of the Angelic Doctor. And it is here that we find him in such marked contrast to Pascal. For John of Saint Thomas, like Pascal, found himself in controversy with the Jesuits. But what a difference! Here we find no acrimony, no editions confiscated by the police, no bitter accusations of heresy on both sides, no public clamor and disturbance of souls. John of Saint Thomas was the seventeenth-centuty Dominican opponent to the great Suarez. Both commented on Saint Thomas. Both deserve their share of honor in the schools. Suarez was perhaps the greater theological genius of the two. John of Saint Thomas sought only the pure doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which he opposed to the “eclectic” Thomism of those who, though they may have acquired great names for themselves, never rivalled the Angelic Doctor himself. One tract of John of Saint Thomas stands out above all the rest. His study of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost is of capital importance. It contains the solution to some of the problems that have most exercised mystical theologians in our day. The claims of modern writers like Father Garrigou-Lagrange, Father Gardeil, and others who hold that the mystical life is the normal fulfillment of the Christian life of grace, rest almost entirely on the teaching of Saint Thomas about the Gifts of the Holy Ghost as it has been developed by John of Saint Thomas. There can be no question that the seventeenth-century Dominican has given us, with absolute clarity and fidelity, the true doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
After teaching for seventeen years at Alcalá, John of Saint Thomas was named, much against his will, confessor to Philip IV. In 1644, soon after the appointment, he died.