St. Thomas Aquinas’ 4 Ways to Grow in Wisdom: Part 1

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First of all, I’m sorry for my month-long(!!) absence from blogging. I’ve been working on a number of exciting projects, both on my own and with Trent Horn, that I’ll tell you all about in due time. But for now, let me make it up to you by embarking on a four-part series on a topic that I find fascinating: how Aquinas got so smart.

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I’m currently working my way through G.K. Chesteron’s excellent biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, and it’s caused me to realize that I haven’t spent enough time thinking of Aquinas as a former student. What I mean is that by the time we encounter Aquinas in the Summa and elsewhere, he’s already a brilliant teacher with an incredible mastery of theology, as well as Christian, Muslim, and Greek philosophy. Without benefit of internet, he’s able to compile a genuinely astonishing number of quotations from these worlds of theology and philosophy. As Fr. Jean-Pierre Torrell tabulates,

Of the 38,000 citations found in the two Summas [Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles], 8,000 come from Christian authors. We should point out that we find 5,000 citations from pagan authors of which 4,300 are from the Philosopher, namely, Aristotle. [….] If we seek to identify who these sources are, we should of course, expect to find that the vast majority are Latin authors: Ambrose of Milan, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Gregory the Great, Jerome, Hilary of Poitiers, to mention the most cited. But Saint Augustine far outweighs them all. In the Summa theologiae alone, we find 2,000 citations from the Bishop of Hippo.

And this doesn’t include the most obvious source Aquinas cites throughout the Summa: the Bible. Matthew Levering counts roughly 2,198 citations just to St. Paul.

It’s easy to write Aquinas off as a genius or a Saint, a kind of freak of nature or freak of supernature. But while he was an exceptional student, and had a remarkable memory, the coursework that he took as a student seems to have been fairly ordinary. That is, the expectation in the twelfth century was that students preparing for the priesthood were capable of understanding (and expected to understand) these great writers of the past. We get a sense of this from the opening pages of the Summa Theologiae. Aquinas begins one of the greatest theological works in the history of the Church by explaining that he’s trying to write a textbook for beginning theology students:

Because the doctor of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners (according to the Apostle: As unto little ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not meat—1 Corinthians 3:1-2), we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners.

In other words, there’s something that Aquinas and his contemporaries had that we seem to be lacking today. So what is it, and how can we get it back?

I think that part of the answer to that comes in a sermon that Aquinas preached called Puer Iesus, which is Latin for “the Child Jesus,” who is the focal point of Aquinas’ homily. The homily is on Luke 2:40, where we hear that “the child Jesus grew in age and wisdom and favor with God and men.” Aquinas wants to know: What does it mean to say that Jesus grew in wisdom, and how does this work? In answering this, he gives us a glimpse into his own approach to education. He lays out four simple rules: “For a man to grow in wisdom four things are necessary, namely that he should listen willingly, seek diligently, respond prudently, and meditate attentively.” Over the course of the next four posts, I want to unpack each one.

1. Listen Willingly

Aquinas’ mastery of Greek, Muslim, and Christian philosophers and theologians tells us that he was a good listener long before he was a good teacher. This is the first step. He quotes Sirach 6:33, “If you love to listen you will gain knowledge, and if you incline your ear you will become wise.” For Aquinas to ever become the theologian who could freely cite Scripture, Greek philosophy, the Church Fathers, and the rest, he first had to be the student who carefully studied Scripture, Greek philosophy, the Church Fathers, and the rest. Aquinas spent years and years listening to the philosophers and theologians he would later cite, and his studies culminated in a commentary that he wrote on the Sentences of St. Peter Lombard, a commentary that he wrote as a young teacher.

Aquinas’ point about growth in wisdom beginning in careful listening sheds new light on the one story that fans of Aquinas tend to know about him: that, as a student, he had been nicknamed “Dumb Ox” on account of his size, his silence in class, and (probably) the assumption that he was an idiot. As Chesterton describes it:

Among the students thronging into the lecture-rooms there was one student, conspicuous by his tall and bulky figure, and completely failing or refusing to be conspicuous for anything else. He was so dumb in the debates that his fellows began to assume an American significance in the word dumbness; for in that land it is a synonym for dullness. It is clear that, before long, even his imposing stature began to have only the ignominious immensity of the big boy left behind in the lowest form. He was called the Dumb Ox. He was the object, not merely of mockery, but of pity. One good-natured student pitied him so much as to try to help him with his lessons, going over the elements of logic like an alphabet in a horn-book. The dunce thanked him with pathetic politeness; and the philanthropist went on swimmingly, till he came to a passage about which he was himself a little doubtful; about which, in point of fact, he was wrong. Whereupon the dunce, with every appearance of embarrassment and disturbance, pointed out a possible solution which happened to be right. The benevolent student was left staring, as at a monster, at this mysterious lump of ignorance and intelligence; and strange whispers began to run round the schools. [….]

[St. Albert the Great, Aquinas’ teacher] was too good a schoolmaster not to know that the dunce is not always a dunce. He learned with amusement that this dunce had been nicknamed the Dumb Ox by his school-fellows. All that is natural enough; but it does not take away the savour of something rather strange and symbolic, about the extraordinary emphasis with which he spoke at last. For Aquinas was still generally known only as one obscure and obstinately unresponsive pupil, among many more brilliant and promising pupils, when the great Albert broke silence with his famous cry and prophecy; “You call him a Dumb Ox: I tell you this Dumb Ox shall bellow so loud that his bellowings will fill the world.”

Chesterton’s telling is the way that we tend to think of the story: that “Dumb Ox” was just a hilariously inapt nickname. But Aquinas seems to be showing us something else: that unless we’re willing to listen, unless we’re willing to close our mouths and be thought idiots and actually learn, we’ll never have anything worth saying. You can’t become a “bellowing ox” without first spending time as a “dumb ox.”

Here, then, is the first trap to growth in wisdom. We are too quick to speak when we should be listening and learning. Sometimes, we fall into this trap because we think we know it all, and other times because we don’t want to look like we don’t know. But either way, it’s a great example of pride getting in the way.

Aquinas’ contemporaries show that this trap is a perennial one – they were arrogant enough to speak (and to taunt Aquinas for not doing so) when they should have followed him in dumbness. But today, this trap almost seems to be encouraged: we ask students, “What do YOU think the author meant by this?” or even “What do YOU think Jesus meant by this?” as if beginning students have an equal right to opine on the subject as their (ostensible) teachers.

And this trap isn’t just a trap in academic studying, either. It’s a trap all over our lives. Elsewhere, Aquinas describes how good decision-making consists in three steps: deliberation à judgment à execution. You gather the fact, decide the appropriate course of action, and then act. A prejudiced person is one who skips to judging when they should be deliberating. If I say, “you’re a woman, so you must be like X,”  I’m skipping step 1. It’s a sloppy short cut: I should instead be gathering the facts in the first stage. Indeed, it’s even a trap in prayer. How often have I sat down to pray, said a lot of stuff to God, and then got up without actually waiting and listening (only to complain later, of course, that God isn’t saying anything to me in prayer!).

So we need to learn to listen. Aquinas doesn’t make his case by pointing to himself. He points to someone yet greater… Jesus Christ.

Luke 2:41-52 describes the Finding in the Temple, and Joseph and Mary discover Jesus “among the doctors” as later writers will describe it. In our imaginations and our art, we tend to depict Jesus as standing in the middle of the scholars, teaching them. But that’s not actually what St. Luke describes. Instead, he says:

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions; and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.

Aquinas notes an important detail: not only is Jesus listening (rather than just jumping in with the answers), but He seems to have been listening for the better part of the three days. That is, He’s not just listening superficially.

Here, then, is the second trap to avoid. Even when we listen, we don’t listen for long enough. And this is particularly true on the most important topics. Partly, we might be afraid that if we listen, we’ll be persuaded to bad opinions (and Aquinas will address that fear). But other times, we cut the listening process short because we feel the need to pipe in with the right answer.

Jesus doesn’t show any signs of cutting anyone off. Here, as throughout His ministry, He listens patiently, and (as Aquinas puts it) “perseveringly.” Aquinas uses Jesus’ listening in the Temple as a proof of what Proverbs 1:5 says: “the wise man also may hear and increase in learning, and the man of understanding acquire skill.” In other words, school isn’t just for the ignorant. None of us are so wise that we can’t listen and learn, if we just have the patience and humility.

But there’s one more dimension to good listening: listen to several voices. Jesus isn’t just listening to one doctor, just as Aquinas doesn’t just read one Church Father. Instead, Jesus is depicted as in the midst of the doctors, like a judge in a courtroom, hearing the competing testimonies, and judging who is in the right and who is in the wrong. This, Aquinas says, is how we should approach those to whom we listen.

Specifically, he encourages us to listen in a discerning way, even if that means disagreeing with people we like, like friends or teachers. This is great advice in the modern age. Whether in politics or religion or any other subject, there’s a tendency to know just one side of an argument, to trust that side, and to tune out the rest. This, Aquinas would argue, is not wise. And even when there’s not an argument, he thinks that we should still listen to plenty of sources. After all,

no one man is perfect in all things. Blessed Gregory knew morals the best, blessed Augustine solved questions [the best], and blessed Ambrose allegorized the best. What you do not learn from one, you learn from another.

However, Aquinas does have a word of caution here. You don’t want to hand a kid a Richard Dawkins book and say, “what do you think of these arguments for atheism”? This phase of listening (diversifying your sources) doesn’t happen immediately. Rather, we should start on a stable foundation with a teacher that we know that we can trust, but we shouldn’t be content to only listen to that teacher forever:

I am not saying that I believe that it is useful for those who are beginning to first listen to any sort of knowledge for the sake of listening to different people, but they ought to listen to one person until they become well versed, and when they have become well versed, then they should listen to different people so that they might be able to pick flowers from different opinions, in other words, those things which are helpful.

But where should we turn for good teachers, and what should we do with their teachings once we have them? That’s where Aquinas will go in the subsequent steps, so if you want to know, you’ll have to listen perseveringly, and tune in next week for more!