The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times by Matthew Fox

Author:Matthew Fox [Fox, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532093425
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2020-01-30T23:00:00+00:00

The greatest accomplishment

of the human mind

is to know

that it does not know

who God is.

16. The greatest accomplishment of the human mind is to know that it does not know who God is.16

Aquinas was a great mind, he enjoyed an exceptional exposure to the best thinkers in Western history, and he was voracious in his pursuit of knowledge and truth. For example, he was alive when the Cathedral of Notre Dame was being constructed, and though he obviously admired the talent, intelligence, daring, and engineering skill involved in the architecture and building process (which he often uses as an example of humanity’s brilliance), the story is told that he stood in front of the unfinished masterpiece and said: “I would trade it all for one copy of St. John Chrysostom’s sermons.” A fine example of the hungry intellectual pursuit that drove his soul. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable.

Yet this great seeker after truth and knowledge insists that the human mind’s “greatest achievement [is] to realize that God is far beyond anything we think. This is the ultimate in human knowledge: to know that we do not know God.”

Clearly, though a profound intellectual, Aquinas was not a rationalist. He was an antirationalist, a mystic who knew that not all knowledge is factual knowledge. Some truths are bigger than human concepts and beyond human words or reasoning. They come primarily from experience, not from reasoning. “When the psalmist says, ‘Taste and see the Lord is good,’ he first urges one to experience and he then posits the effect of experience.”

What is this experience? “Experience of divine goodness is called taste.” Thus we are first to taste the divine goodness—the Via Positiva, indeed! Taste comes first. He continues: “In corporeal things there is sight first and then taste; but in spiritual things there is taste first but afterward there is sight, since no one knows who does not taste” (86). In fact, the word wisdom both in Latin (the language in which Aquinas wrote) and in Hebrew comes from the word to taste. Aquinas is hungry for knowledge, but even more hungry for wisdom. And “no one knows who does not taste.”

Aquinas recognizes the vastness of human intelligence when he says that the human mind can “know all things.” But he also acknowledges the limits of human reason and intellect when he insists that the ultimate of our knowing is to know what we don’t know—and especially that we do not know who God is. Aquinas is confronting human arrogance here. In typical Aquinas fashion, he gives us the reason for his observation: “By its immensity the divine essence transcends every form attained by the human intellect.”

Silence matters. “God is worshiped in silence. God is beyond all speech.” But Aquinas also points out that there are several kinds of silence, not all of them of equal value. “There are various kinds of silences: that of dullness; that of security; that of patience; and that of a quiet heart.” Clearly, the “quiet heart” takes precedence.

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