Volume 16 / Part 1 — Review Of Vaughan's Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.114

Review Of Vaughan's Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.114

In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan's Life of S. Thomas of Aquin. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the saint is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan's best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint's personal story.

Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world's course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books [pg 255] of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private aside with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene-painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the moralizing element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint's life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half-century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the Vie de Rancé contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men's thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute [pg 256] the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word revolution, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.

It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography. In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life. Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater, fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay, and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed, the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern love of landscape, and to the general romanesque tendency begun by Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real. Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may “analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well-meaning people, with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of imagination.

The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre-eminently picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it [pg 257] in time and in space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.

Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume, of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at least the principal seat of his family:

“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.

Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S. Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S. Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory, S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint's father “made him a monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close. Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the habit of S. Dominic.

The personal character which is drawn in this work is that of a large-minded, serene man, of powerful natural genius and winning character, who steps forth from the ranks of mediæval nobility, and, turning his back on sword and lance, and giving no heed to the tumult of war and rapine, deliberately consecrated himself wholly to God, and, grace being added to natural gifts, illuminates the world as a doctor and as a saint. It would be interesting to dwell, if we had space, upon the circumstances of S. Thomas joining the Order of S. Dominic. The opposition of his family, the utter unscrupulousness with which they carried out their opposition, the quiet yet fervent persistence of the saint—feudal violence, maternal desperation, and ecclesiastical interference—all this makes up a scene of wonderful reality and deep suggestiveness. But [pg 258] we must pass it over. S. Thomas became a Dominican, and we follow him from Naples to Cologne, from Cologne to Paris. We follow the course of his academical life, his writings, his teaching, his promotion to the grade of bachelor, of licentiate, of doctor. The first chapter of the second volume is entitled “S. Thomas made doctor.” It contains a lively picture of the great University of Paris and its life from day to day; and with it, moreover, the author gives an eloquent summary of the character of his hero, part of which we extract, because it is in some sort a key to the whole story of his life.

“A man with the power possessed by the Angelical could afford to be serene and tranquil. He lived, as it were, behind the veil; he saw through, and valued at its intrinsic worth, this earth's stage, and took the measure of all the actors on it. Like Moses, he came down from the mountain, into the turmoil of the chafing world below, and, enlarged by the greatness of the vision in which he habitually lived, it shrank into insignificance before his eye; and those events or influences which excited the minds of others, and disturbed their peace, were looked upon by him somewhat in the same way as we may imagine some majestic, solitary eagle surveys from his high crag, with half-unconscious eye, the world of woods below him. The Angelical himself had drawn his first lessons from a mountain eyrie. His elastic mind, even as a boy, had expanded, as he looked down from the mighty abbey, on teeming plain and rugged mountain, with the far-distant ranges of the snowy Apennines standing up delicate and crisp against the sky. God, who made all this, had drawn him to himself, and the fingers of a heavenly hand, striking on his large, solitary heart, had sealed him imperially, for all his life to come, as the great master of the heavenly science, and as the gentle prince of peace.... Immense weight of character, surpassing grasp of mind, and keenness of logical discernment, added to a sovereign benignity and patience, and to a gentleness and grace which spoke from his eyes and thrilled in the accents of his voice, made men conscious, when in contact with him, that they were in presence of a man of untold gifts, and yet of one so exquisitely noble as never to display them, save for the benefit of others. Men knew that he had the power to crush them; but since he was so great, they knew also that he never would misuse it; they found him ever self-forgetting and self-restrained. A character with such a capability of asserting itself, and yet ever manifesting such gentle self-repression, must have acted with a singular fascination on any generous mind that came into relation with it.... He was a vast system in himself, and appears to have been specially created for achieving such an end. He was one single, simple man—doubtless. But he was a ‘system,’ or the representation of a system—the highest type of what heroism can do in human heart and mind. Christ, in choosing him, had chosen the most majestic of human creations, converting it into a powerful exponent of the light, peace, and splendor which strike out from the cross. He, if any man, had rested on the bosom of his Lord. He, the great Angelical, with the golden sun flashing from his breast, and the fire of heaven scintillating round his massive brow—he, if any man, had broken the bread of the strong, and had refreshed his lips with the blood of the grape, and had been transfigured by the draught. There is a largeness about him which, whilst it expands the heart, seems almost to take away the breath. We look up at him, and say: ‘How great art thou! how gently courteous, and how tenderly true! Sweet was the power of God, and the grace of Christ, which made thee all thou art. O gentle mighty sun, shine on in thy sweet radiance, spread thy pure invigorating rays amidst the deep sad shadows of the earth!’... Such was his character. And, prescinding from his natural gifts, how did he become so mighty? The cause has been touched on and partially developed already. The reader, adequately to realize it, would do well to study and master, with his heart as well as with his head, the monastic theology of S. Victor's—the Benedictine science of the saints. Grasp the spirit of S. Anselm, S. Bernard, and the Victorines, weigh it as a whole, follow its drift, mark its salient points, learn to recognize [pg 259]the aroma of that sweet mystic life of tough yet tender service and self-forgetfulness, and you will have discovered that spring of living waters which ran into the heart and mind of the great Angelical, and lent to all his faculties—aye, and even to his very person and expression—a warmth and glow which seemed to have come direct from heaven. From the rock, which was Christ, flowed straight and swift into the paradise of his soul four crystal waters: Love—fixing the entire being on the sovereign good, and doing all for him alone; Reverence—that is, self-distrust and self-forgetfulness, produced by the vision of God's high majesty awfully gazed on with the eye of faith; Purity—treading all created things, and self first, under the feet, and, with entire freedom of spirit, basking and feeding in the unseen world; Adoration—love, reverence, and purity, combined in one act of supreme worship, as the creature, with all he has and all he is, bends prone to the earth, and with a feeling of dust and ashes whispers to his soul: ‘The Lord he is God, he made us, and not we ourselves!’ ” (ii. 31-48.)

The mind and heart are both fond of dwelling on the heroic; and the heroic is met with at every step in the life of S. Thomas. We are reminded, as we read, of that Achilles on whose prowess hangs the fate of Troy and of the Greeks,

“Full in the midst, high-towering o'er the rest,”

his limbs encased in an armor that is more divine than that which the father of fire forged for the son of Peleus, the gold upon his breast, the sword of the Spirit by his side, the “broad refulgent shield” of heavenly faith upon his arm, and in his hand the great paternal spear that none but he can wield—not a “whole ash” felled upon Pelion by old Chiron; but the seven gifts of the Christian doctorate wielded by the force of seraphic love. His appearance in the lists of argument, in the contest of the schools, in the field of intellectual strife, has all the quelling power that is ascribed to the greatest heroes of the battle-field; and his place in the records of mental and theological history is that of a discoverer, a conqueror, and a king. Here is a scene which is perhaps more or less familiar, but it is a type of many scenes in this wonderful life. It occurred whilst Thomas was under Albertus Magnus, at Cologne:

“Master Albert had selected a very difficult question from the writings of Denis the Areopagite, and had given it to some of his scholars for solution. Whether in joke or in earnest, they passed on the difficulty to Thomas, and begged him to write his opinion upon it. Thomas took the paper to his cell, and, taking his pen, first stated, with great lucidity, all the objections that could be brought against the question; and then gave their solutions. As he was going out of his cell, this paper accidentally fell near the door. One of the brothers passing picked it up, and carried it at once to Master Albert. Albert was excessively astonished at the splendid talent which now, for the first time, by mere accident, he discovered in that big, silent student. He determined to bring out, in the most public manner, abilities which had been for so long a time so modestly concealed. He desired Thomas to defend a thesis before the assembled school, on the following day. The hour arrived. The hall was filled. There sat Master Albert. Doubtless the majority of those who were to witness the display imagined that they were about to assist at an egregious failure. How could that heavy, silent lad—who could not speak a word in private—defend in public school, against the keenest of opponents, the difficult niceties of theology? But they were soon undeceived, for Thomas spoke with such clearness, established his thesis with such remarkable dialectical skill, saw so far into the coming difficulties of the case, and handled the whole subject in so masterly a manner, that Albert himself was constrained to cry aloud, ‘Tu non videris tenere locum respondentis sed determinantis!’ ‘Master,’ replied Thomas with humility, ‘I know not how to treat the question otherwise.’ Albert then thought to puzzle him, and show him that he was still a disciple. So, one after another, he started objections, created a hundred labyrinths, weaving and interweaving all manner of subtle arguments, [pg 260]but in vain. Thomas, with his calm spirit and keen vision, saw through every complication, had the key to every fallacy, the solution for every enigma, and the art to unravel the most tangled skein—till, finally, Albert, no longer able to withhold the expression of his admiration, cried out to his disciples, who were almost stupefied with astonishment: ‘We call this young man a dumb ox, but so loud will be his bellowing in doctrine that it will resound throughout the whole world’ ” (i. 321, 322).

How exactly this prophecy was fulfilled need not be said. S. Thomas was soon employed in speaking to the world what God had given him to say. He spoke in the class-hall and in the church; he wrote for young and for old; and wherever his voice was heard men wondered as at a portent. The students of Paris, the professors of France and of Italy, his fellow-religious, the intimate friend of his privacy, the rough people round his pulpit, the pope himself as he sat and heard him preach, every one said over again the wondering words that Albert the Great had used in the hall at Cologne. And if we had no record of what men thought, we should still be secure in saying that they were astonished; for we are astonished ourselves. Many men who have made a great noise in their lifetime have left posterity to wonder, not at themselves, but at their reputation. But the writer of the Summa must have been great even in his lifetime. That breadth of view, that keenness of analysis, that comprehensive reach of thought, that enormous memory—we can see it for ourselves, and every story of his prowess we can readily credit from what the imperishable record of his written works attests to our own eye. Prior Vaughan relates interesting anecdotes of his power of discussion, and of his influence over the irreverent world of his scholastic compeers, filling up the outlines of the annalist with no greater exercise of imagination than is fairly permitted to the serious biographer.

But the heroic in the life of the Angel of the Schools would not be perfect unless the giant strength had been joined to the gentleness of the servant of Christ. There is nothing, perhaps, that will so strike a reader of this Life as his mild, equal, and gentle spirit. It does not seem that S. Thomas was naturally of a quick and impetuous nature, like S. Ignatius or S. Francis of Sales. From his youth he had been a contemplative in the cloisters of Monte Cassino; when but a child he had charmed his teachers by asking with childish meditative face, “What was God?” His quiet determination had conquered his mother when she opposed him being a Dominican; his calm courage had converted his sisters and shamed his brothers. And in the schools, his silence and his humility, virtues never more difficult to be practised than in the field of intellectual combat, had soon become the marvel of all who knew him. A great natural gift—the gift of a changeless serenity of heart and temper—was perfected in him by grace, until it became heroic. The contest he once had in the Paris schools with Brother John of Pisa, a Franciscan friar who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, is typical of what always happened when the Angelical discussed:

“John of Pisa, though a keen and a learned man, had no chance with the Angelical. It would have been folly for any one, however skilled—yes, for Bonaventure, or Rochelle, or even Albert the Great himself—to attempt to cross rapiers with Br. Thomas. He was to the manner born. Br. John did all that was in him, used his utmost skill—but it was useless: the Angelical simply upset him time after time. The Minorite grew warm; the Angelical, bent simply on [pg 261]the truth, went on completing, with unmoved serenity, the full discomfiture of the poor Franciscan. John of Pisa at length could stand it no longer. In his heat he forgot his middle term and forgot himself, and turned upon the saint with sarcasm and invective. The Angelical in his own gentle, overpowering way, giving not the slightest heed to these impertinences, went on replying to him with inimitable tenderness and patience; and whilst teaching a lesson which, after so many hundred years, men can still learn, drew on himself, unconsciously, the surprise and admiration of that vast assembly. Such was the way in which the Angelical brought the influence of Benedictine quies and benignitas into the boisterous litigations of the Paris schools. And what is more, Frigerio tells us that the saint taught the great lesson of self-control, not only by the undeviating practice of his life, but also by his writings; that he looked upon it as an ‘ignominy’(ignominia) to soil the mouth with angry words; and contended that ‘quarrels,’ immoderate contentions, vain ostentation of knowledge, and the trick of puzzling an adversary with sophistical arguments—such as is often the practice of dialecticians—should be banished from the schools” (ii. 57-59).

The appearance of such a man as S. Thomas, in the midst of the scholastic agitation of the XIIIth century, partakes of that providential character which the eye of faith sees in the lives of all the great saints. We have already, in a former notice, touched upon the marvellous way in which he turned the current of thought against rationalism, heresy, and impiety. But his personal influence was no less than what we may term his official. At the moment when theology was beginning, with philosophy as her handmaid, to enter on that course of development in which system, on the one hand, advanced in equal steps with discovery on the other, it was the will of God that a saint should show the world in his own person a perfect model of the Catholic scholastic theologian. His powers were undeniable, his genius imperial, his rights undoubted; and he used his privileges and his grand position to enforce upon the noisy spirits of the time, and upon all generations of students yet to be, that the true type of theological discussion was “humilis collatio, pacifica disputatio.”

The theologian was to be no proud dogmatist, laying down the law as if he had discovered all truth, but one who, taking the faith for his standing-point, humbly put forth and peacefully discussed the views that he thought to be true. This was his great lesson; he taught it in the tone of his own lectures and discussions, in the turn of his phrase when he wrote, in the meekness of his answers, and in the moderation of his conclusions. And we may thank the Providence that sent S. Thomas for that calm and judicial serenity which has ever been the prevailing character of Catholic theology. The great Dominican school that he founded carried on the traditions of their master; and (to take an example not far from our own days) the weighty and admirably clear pages of a Billuart are not unworthy, in their broad, searching, yet tranquil argument, of the master whom they follow. A troubled reach of time separates Paris in the XIIIth century from Douay in the XVIIth; yet the spirit of S. Thomas had been living over it all. Not only in his own religious family was his influence strong. The Franciscan Order has its own tradition; but it is a tradition that sprung up side by side with the Dominican. It was the seraphic Bonaventure that sat beside Thomas of Aquin in the hall of the University of Paris on the day when each of them received the insignia of the doctorate. They were friends—more than friends, for each knew the other to be a saint. Each heard the [pg 262] other speak, and the spirit of one was the spirit of both. And in spite of divergences and varieties, such as our Lord permits in order to draw unity from diversity or good from evil, the two Orders have taught in harmonious spirit during all the long centuries they have been before the world. S. Thomas, who reverenced S. Bonaventure, has had the reverence of all S. Bonaventure's children; and we have before us as we write the Cursus Theologiæ of a venerable bearded Capuchin, considerably esteemed in the theological classes of the present day, who stops in his enumeration of fathers and of doctors to add his emphatic tribute of veneration to the Angelic Doctor, who, he reminds us, is, with S. Augustine, “præcipuus theologorum omnium temporum magister”—the great master of theologians of all ages. And what we say of the Franciscan Order we may say of that great school which dates its traditions from that Cardinal Toletus who was the pupil of the Dominican Soto. It is not that the Jesuit theologians, even the many-sided Suarez, have looked up to S. Thomas as to their prince and teacher: this they have done; but even if they had left his teaching, or where they have left his teaching, they have followed his spirit. That spirit we might name the spirit of conciliation. We do not mean the spirit of compromise, or of going only half-way in matters of truth. S. Thomas was as downright as Euclid. But what we refer to is that readiness to admit all the good or the true in an opposite view, the shrinking from forcing a vague word upon an adversary, the impartial dissection of words and phrases which issues from the scholastic and Thomistic method of distinction. The distinguo of the tyro or the sophist is a trick that is easily learned and easily laughed at; but we claim for the scholastic method that its distinguo is the touchstone of truth and of falsehood; it requires acuteness and stored-up learning to make it and sustain it; but it requires, above all, that perfect fairness of mind, that judicial impartiality of view, which calms the promptings of ambitious originality; it requires that patience which seeks only the truth and cares nothing for the victory, and that honesty which is afraid of declamation, and sets its matter out in unadorned and colorless simplicity. This is the true scholastic spirit, and it is pre-eminently the spirit of S. Thomas. If we might personify that grand science which has been so high in this world, and seems now to have sunk so low (yet, with the signs around us, we dare hardly say so now), it would be under the figure of him who is its prince and lawgiver.

“See him, then, our great Angelical, as with calm and princely bearing he advances, a mighty-looking man, built on a larger scale than those who stand around him, and takes the seat just vacated by Bonaventure. His portrait as a boy has been sketched already. Now he has grown into the maturity of a man, and his grand physique has expanded into its perfect symmetry and manly strength, manifesting, even in his frame, as Tocco says, that exquisite combination of force with true proportion which gave so majestic a balance to his mind. His countenance is pale with suffering, and his head is bald from intense and sustained mental application. Still, the placid serenity of his broad, lofty brow, the deep gray light in his meditative eyes, his firm, well-chiselled lips, and fully defined jaw, the whole pose of that large, splendid head—combining the manliness of the Roman with the refinement and delicacy of the Greek—impress the imagination with an indescribable sense of giant energy of intellect, of royal gentleness of heart, and untold tenacity of purpose. That sweet face reflects so exquisite a purity, that noble bust is cast in so imperial [pg 263]a mould, that the sculptor or the painter would be struck and arrested by it in a moment; the one would yearn to throw so classical a type into imperishable marble, and the other to transfer so much grandeur of contour, and such delicacy of expression, so harmonious a fusion of spotlessness with majesty, of southern loveliness with intellectual strength, to the enduring canvas” (ii. 108, 109).

The angelic quality of the Angel of the Schools—his calmness and his power over men—was not bought without a price. Like all the saints, he too had to bear the cross, and like all the saints he was not content with suffering the cross, but he sought it and courted it. We cannot quote much more of Prior Vaughan's narrative, or else we would fain draw attention to the account he gives from authentic sources of Thomas' holy distress of mind, and his midnight prayer the night before he received the doctorate. But the following paragraph must be transcribed:

“Let the carnal man, after looking on the sweet Angelical fascinating the crowded schools, take the trouble to follow him, as silently, after the day's work, he retires to his cell, seemingly to rest; let him watch him bent in prayer; see him take from its hiding-place, when all have gone to sleep, that hard iron chain; see him—as he looks up to heaven and humbles himself to earth—without mercy to his flesh, scourge himself with it, striking blow upon blow, lacerating his body through the greater portion of the sleepless night: let the carnal man look upon this touching sight; let him shrink back in horror if he will—still let him look on it, and he will learn how the saints labored to secure a chaste and spotless life, and how a man can so far annihilate self-seeking as to be gentle with all the world, severe with himself alone. If in human life there is anything mysteriously adorable, it is a man of heroic mould and surpassing gifts showing himself great enough to smite his own body, and to humble his entire being in pretence of his Judge” (ii. 60, 61).

S. Thomas died in the prime of life—when scarcely forty-eight years old. He was called away a little before his great work, the Summa, was completed, as if his Master wished to show the lamenting world that his own claims were paramount to every other thing. But it was that divine Master himself who had rendered it necessary to take away his servant when he did; for S. Thomas could write no more. After that vision and ecstasy which rapt his soul in the chapel of S. Nicholas at Naples, he ceased to write, he ceased to dictate; his pen lay idle, and the Summa stood still in the middle of the questions on penance. It was, as he said to his companion Reginald, Non possum! “I cannot! Everything that I have written appears to me as simply rubbish.” From that day of S. Nicholas he lived in a continual trance: he wrote no more. As the new year (1274) came in, he set out, at the pope's call, to attend the general council at Lyons: but he was never to get so far. He had not journeyed beyond Campania—he was still travelling along the shores of that sunny region which had given him birth, when mortal illness arrested him, and he was taken to the Abbey of Fossa Nuova to die.

“The abbot conducts him through the church into the silent cloister. Then the whole past seems to break in upon him like a burst of overflowing sunlight; the calm and quiet abbey, the meditative corridor, the gentle Benedictine monks; he seems as if he were at Cassino once again, amidst the glorious visions of his boyish days—amidst the tender friendships of his early youth, close on the bones of ancient kings, near the solemn tomb of Blessed Benedict, in the hallowed home of great traditions, and at the very shrine of all that is fair and noble in monastic life. He seemed completely overcome by the memories of the past, and, turning to the monks who surrounded him, exclaimed ‘This is the [pg 264]place where I shall find repose!’ and then ecstatically to Reginald in presence of them all: ‘Hæc est requies mea in sæculum sæculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam—This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen it’ ” (ii. 921).

The whole of this last scene of the great saint's pilgrimage is admirably and most touchingly brought out by the author, and our readers must go to it themselves. As we conclude the story, we are forced to agree with Prior Vaughan when he exclaims, “It is but natural, it is but beautiful, that he who in early boyhood had been stamped with the signet of S. Benedict, should return to S. Benedict to die!”

We are sure that this life of S. Thomas of Aquin will do good. It is a large book, but it deals with a large and a grand life. It is the work of one who evidently has an interest in his subject far beyond that of the mere compiler. The earnestness, the warmth, the very redundancy and fulness of the author's style, leave the impression of one whose heart is strongly impressed by the glorious career which he has been following so minutely, and there is little doubt that his readers will sympathize with him. And there can be just as little doubt of the benefits which a practical study of the life of the great doctor will confer upon students, upon priests, and upon all serious men at the present day. Sanctity taught by example is always an important lesson; but the saintliness of learning and genius is still more important and still more rare. We live in an age when there are numbers of men who are profoundly scientific and splendidly accomplished in the different branches of knowledge which they profess; and there is no one who is more sure of the world's attention and reverence than the man who can show that he knows something which other men do not. The present time, therefore, is one at which we are to look for and to hope for men who in theology and Catholic philosophy shall be as able and as learned as are the leaders of profane science. Hard work and unwearying devotedness are essential to this; and the example of S. Thomas shows us what these things mean. But there is something which is more necessary still; something which is especially necessary in sacred science. “In malevolam animam non intrabit Sapientia, nec habitabit in corpore subdito peccatis.” There is no such thing as the highest wisdom without the highest purity of heart. The perfection of the Christian doctorate is the consequence of the perfect possession and exercise of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the holy fathers who have written on Christian wisdom tell us repeatedly, using almost identical words, that a man might as well try to study the sun with purblind eyes as to be perfect in theology with a heart defiled. There has been no greater example in the range of sanctity of what S. Augustine calls the “mens purgatissima” than that of him who on account of his purity has been called the Angelical. Leaving the world as a child, his heart hardly knew what earthly concupiscence was. With his loins girded by angels' hands, with his body subdued by hard living, with his thought always ranging among high and elevating things, the soul of S. Thomas lived in a region that did not belong to the world. He learnt his wisdom of the crucifix, he found his inspirations at the foot of the altar; and the same lips that dictated the Commentaries on Aristotle were ready to break forth with the Lauda Sion and the Pange Lingua. If he taught in the daytime, he chastised [pg 265] his body during the watches of the night. Born to a gentle life, with powerful friends, with the world and its attractions within his reach, he lived in his narrow cell, cleaving to his desk and to his breviary, walking the streets with a quick step and downcast eye, letting the world go on its way. He wanted only one thing—not as a reward for his labor, because his labor was only a means to a great end—he wanted only that one object which he asked for when the figure spoke to him from the Cross, “Thee, O Lord! and thee alone!”

Prior Vaughan has accomplished a task for which he will receive the thanks of all English-speaking Catholics. His book will be read, and will be treasured; for it is a book with a large purpose, carried out with unwearying labor, presenting the results of wide reading, and offering the student and the general reader a large variety of solid information and of suggestive thought. If the book were less honestly wrought out than it is, we could excuse the author, in consideration of the heart and soul he has thrown into it. S. Thomas of Aquin is evidently a very real, living being with him. His hero is no abstraction of the past, no quintessence of a scholastic that must be looked at as one looks at an Egyptian papyrus in a museum. He is a man to know, not merely to know about; a man who taught in Paris and who reigns in heaven; a man who led an angel's life here below, and who can help us to lead a life more or less angelic from his place above. To have worked with such a spirit is to have worked in the true spirit of the Catholic faith. The saints are our teachers and masters; and, what is more, they are the trumpets that rouse us to battle, the living voices that make our hearts burn to follow them. And therefore a true life of a saint will live, and will do its work. Our wish is that Prior Vaughan's S. Thomas may make its way into the hearts of earnest men, and it is our conviction that it will make its way, and that men will be the better for it.