This Magnificat meditation was such a delightful tribute to Aquinas that I couldn’t resist copying it and putting it here. The lady did an excellent job of getting at the heart of the great saint’s work and being that I wanted it frequently available. Aquinas and Saint Augustine are my two favorite saints and heroes. Well, of course there is Saint Francis for other reasons. G. K. Chesterton writes that: Francis was “a most sublime approximation to his Master….a splendid and yet a merciful Mirror of Christ.” Then, as James C. Howell interestingly notes, Chesterton “shrewdly suggested” that “if St. Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis. And my present point is that it is very enlightening to realize that Christ was like St.Francis.” The entire passage is wonderful, as is Chesterton’s entire biography. So is Howell’s essay, for that matter. I would have quoted the entire passage where Chesterton goes on to explain what he means except that my hands will not easily allow it and the entire quote is lengthy. LES
Quoted by Howell, “Christ Was like St. Francis,” in The Art of Reading Scripture, Eerdman’s, 2003, 89-108. From Chesterton’s biography of the great Saint, St. Francis of Assisi, Image, 1957,117-118.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Anne Husted Burleigh
If I were to list my favorite saints, Saint Thomas Aquinas would be close to the top. Why do I, who am not a student of theology, have such affection for this great boulder of a man with the mighty mind to produce the Summa theologiae and the giant heart to write my favorite hymn, Adoro Te, also known as “Godhead Here in Hiding”?
Undeterred by the swirling chaos of a broken world, Saint Thomas looks straight into the order of God’s creation, the reality that sin cannot destroy. So utterly certain is Saint Thomas of the reasonableness of God’s mind that he knows God’s creation is therefore undeniably orderly and intelligible, a creation imprinted through and through with the Creator’s own intellect. Certain that divine reason undergirds the nature of everything, including man, Thomas sets his sights on studying this intelligible creation. With reverence and humility, without a trace of cocksure arrogance, he looks at what IS—at God and all that God has made.
And when Thomas looks at the beauty of this divine intellect and all the order that It has made, he contemplates Being itself, the Logos, the Creating Mind that spoke and came and dwelt among us. And when Thomas looks and contemplates this God who loves him, he himself falls in love. He can but say, Adoro Te.
Who can resist a saint who so resolutely, hugely, unflinchingly unites reason and faith, who studies, looks, contemplates, and loves his Lord so humbly that his study spills over into the most beautiful Eucharistic hymns ever written for the Church?
God: Adoro Te.
Anne Husted Burleigh is a long-time writer for Catholic journals. She and her husband live in Cincinnati near their children and grandchildren. They are members of the Dominican laity.
I only recently discovered that I could document these images! LES
