Theology might seem complicated, but it’s really child’s play by PETER KWASNIEWSKI for Life Site News
The final days on earth of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s greatest scholar, were marked by childlike faith.
On December 6, 1273, the feast of St. Nicholas of Myra, St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest intellectual the Catholic Church has ever known, underwent a life-changing mystical experience that left him unable to proceed with his theological projects and, in fact, marked the beginning of the end of his career. He would die three months later in the company of Cistercian monks at Fossanova on March 7, which remains his traditional feast day. Christians who know that every circumstance, great and small, falls within the plan of Divine Providence may reasonably ask: Why did the Angelic Doctor experience the peak moment of his life on the feast of the saint under whose patronage gifts are given to little children each winter?
An answer is implicit in the accounts of Thomas’s last days, which, remarks Fr. John Saward, “are truly moving to read”:
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The big, heavy man, as silent and still as a babe asleep; the scholar at last without his pen. We can see Thomas and Reginald together, the friend anxious but finally accepting, the saint lost in contemplation of the divine beauty. By the “faithful testimony” of Reginald we are told that the last confession of Thomas was like that of a “five-year-old boy,” suggesting not only the purity of infancy but also that childlike trustfulness commended by the Lord, who reveals his mysteries not to the clever but to babies.
In the winter of this life’s pilgrimage, the wintry dark from which the eternal summer of heaven seems impossibly distant, God comes with light and warmth to men and women who are, in their hearts, little children, relying upon Him and trusting in Him no matter what the season’s weather may bring. God pours out the riches of His fatherly love most abundantly on the most childlike, who attract His gaze by their open-eyed wonder, their confident trust, their never-ending flood of questions, their innocent joy.
Fr. Brian Davies writes that St. Thomas
moves from question to question with a breathtaking eagerness. He is always asking “Why?” or “What?” One might even say that Aquinas’s whole system rests on a question. … God, for him, is an answer to puzzlement (admiratio), an answer which leaves us with yet more questions.
