St. Thomas Aquinas’ 4 Ways to Grow in Wisdom: Part 2

St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the holiest and most brilliant writers in history, gives a simple four-step process for how a man can grow in wisdom: “namely that he should listen willingly, seek diligently, respond prudently, and meditate attentively.” I’m convinced that following these four steps will lead us to be wiser, holier, and smarter. On Friday, I took a deeper look on what it means to listen willingly (a badly-needed skill today). But Aquinas is firm that, as important and necessary as it is, listening isn’t enough. So what else is needed?

2. Seek Diligently

The problem with merely “listening” is that it’s not going far enough. Thomas says that “the perfection of wisdom requires that a man diligently seeks after it, since wisdom is more precious than all things which could be desired.” Aquinas points to two Scriptures for support: Wisdom 7:8 (“I preferred [wisdom] to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her”) and Proverbs 3:15. For context, here’s Proverbs 3:13-15:

Happy is the man who finds wisdom,
and the man who gets understanding,
for the gain from it is better than gain from silver
and its profit better than gold.
She is more precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can compare with her.

This comparison between wisdom and worldly materialism is one found throughout Scripture, and Aquinas draws out the implicit lesson we are to learn from it:

Consider this: those who are in need of a perishable item are not content to merely have it offered to them, but diligently seek after it. In the same way, we also ought to diligently seek after wisdom; hence Solomon says: If you seek her as money, you will find her [Prov. 2:4]. Some people will cross mountains and the sea in order to acquire money; so you too ought to labor on behalf of wisdom.

In other words, we’re to learn two things from this comparison: first, to value wisdom above everything else; and second, that we should be willing to chase it, not merely content to accept it when it falls into our laps. Imagine how differently we would view the world if we understood these two things.

Think about how often we hear (or perhaps have asked) questions like, “Why doesn’t God just show me the right answer?” or “if God wants me to be holy, why doesn’t He make it easier?” Now imagine applying that kind of thinking to worldly success: “Why doesn’t God just show me the secrets to success in business?” or “if God wants me to be successful, why doesn’t He just give me a million dollars?”

There’s a real possibility that the reason we find the spiritual life so hard is that we’re spiritually lazy, and that we expect (and even demand) that the spiritual life be easy, even if we work hard at every other aspect of our lives. After all, even in the eyes of the world, a man who inherits a fortune isn’t a success in the way that a man who creates a fortune is. There’s a real sense that to be successful, you have to really work at it.

And we should be very careful about having an attitude that sanctity needs to be easy, or we aren’t going to bother with it (or that, if sanctity isn’t easy, it must not be something that we are called to). All I can say to that attitude is that it’s a good thing that we don’t take such a self-defeating attitude in other areas of our lives. Imagine if I said that I would only pursue success, or fortune, or health, or fame if it was easy. You might conclude that I didn’t really care about those goals, and certainly that I didn’t deserve them.

Now, of course the spiritual life is different in one important way: none of us truly deserve holiness. But the Catholic view is that the supernatural resembles the natural in some way. It’s why we can’t always tell miracles from natural phenomena. And it follows that if on the natural level, great things generally require us to pursue them with our full mind, heart, and soul (and sometimes in the face of difficulties), then spiritual goods like wisdom, holiness, prayerfulness, and friendship with God likewise require us to pursue them with our full mind, heart, and soul (and sometimes in the face of difficulties).

This certainly seem to be the point that Jesus makes repeatedly. He says that the first and greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). We can easily think of that love in a silly and superficial way (I have generally-fond thoughts towards God), but Jesus’ point is that this is something that is going to take all my strength and a total commitment of my mind.

Jesus even seems to draw the same kind of natural / supernatural comparison that Aquinas and the Proverbs make. One of the most confusing parables in the Bible is that of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-13, pictured in the artwork above). In it, a steward who realizes that he’s about to be fired says to himself, “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg” (Luke 16:3), and resolves to create a sort of “golden parachute” for himself – he cuts cozy (and seemingly unethical and even illegal) deals with his master’s creditors, settling their debts for pennies on the dollar, so that once he’s fired he can get a job with them.

The parable is strange and shocking, because the man is so obviously wicked, but the moral that Jesus draws out for us is that “the sons of this world are wiser in their own generation than the sons of light” (Luke 16:8). In other words, this sleazebag does a better job of striving for job security (just because he’s afraid of begging or carrying a shovel!) than we do in our alleged striving after holiness.

That’s the meaning of Aquinas’ line that “those who are in need of a perishable item are not content to merely have it offered to them, but diligently seek after it.” If you’re dying of thirst, it’s not good enough that you will drink water if someone happens to offer it to you .You’re going to do everything that you can to get the water that you need to live. If we really believe Jesus when He says that He is the “living water” and that “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:10, 14), then we should be doing everything we can to get more wisdom, more holiness, and more Jesus.

All of this can be summed up in one word. When Thomas Aquinas’ sister Theodora asked him how to become a Saint, he replied “Velle,” which means simply “Resolve” or “Will it.” If you want to be a Saint, will it. But will it with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, like it’s the most important thing in the universe.

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Once we value wisdom more than worldly success, and are willing to do what it takes to seek it out, where should we look? Aquinas suggests four places, and he lists them from the most obvious to the most surprising:

• Teachers: Who in your life knows more than you do? They don’t have to know more than you do about everything, but who knows more than you do about something? Who do you look up to? Start there. “Ask your father, and he will show you; your elders, and they will tell you” (Deut. 32:7).

• The Ancients and the Absent: Don’t limit yourself to the people alive in front of you, Aquinas advises, but “ask the ancients and those who are absent.” More specifically, read what they have to say. Aquinas against specifically mentions Ambrose and Augustine as worth reading, and of course, Aquinas himself is worth our reading (which is what this whole four-part series is about). Job’s friend Bildad had a lot of bad advice, but he had at least one wise piece of counsel: “inquire, I pray you, of bygone ages, and consider what the fathers have found; for we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, for our days on earth are a shadow” (Job 8:8-9). Limiting yourself to the “wisdom” of your own time and place is needlessly depriving yourself of some of the wisest voices in the conversation.

• Creation: This is where Aquinas’ list takes a surprising twist. He suggests that we can learn a lot by contemplating God’s handiwork in nature. This is not the stereotype of Aquinas as a sort of bookish monk, unaware of the outside world. But he’s got Scripture on his side: Sirach 1:9 says that “The Lord himself created wisdom; he saw her and apportioned her, he poured her out upon all his works.” If you want to know something about an artist, you should probably contemplate his artwork. So, too, if you want to know something about God, you should spend serious time contemplating his handiwork. (This, after all, is why the Vatican helps runs a gigantic observatory in Arizona). Job spoke of this beautifully when he said (Job 12:7-9):
  • But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
        the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
    or the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
        and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
    Who among all these does not know
       that the hand of the Lord has done this?
• Sharing: The final place that Aquinas suggests is almost counterintuitive. He says that if you want to seek for wisdom, one way to do that is to teach, since “no one advances in knowledge so profitably than by sharing what he knows with others.” Aquinas even suggests that this teaching is “an obligation so that a man might answer another about that which he knows.” Aquinas then connects this back to the finding of Christ in the Temple. We read that Jesus was “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions; and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:46-47). The fact that Jesus had something to say (and apparently, something quite profound!) wasn’t His way of saying that He was done listening, or that He was done growing in wisdom… Luke 2:52 clearly says the opposite. Instead, Aquinas suggests that Jesus is doing what the greatest minds in history have always done: increasing their own mastery of a subject by trying to explain it to others.

There’s a quotation (perhaps spuriously) ascribed to Albert Einstein that says that if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Whoever the author, Aquinas would agree with the substance of that claim. If you think you understand a subject, try to explain it to someone else, and then let them ask questions. You’ll quickly find out just how well you get it, and how much you have to learn!

That’s enough for today. Next time: once we’ve sought wisdom and listened to it, what’s the proper response?