A Tale of Two Wonderworkers: St. Nicholas of Myra in the Writings and Life of St. Thomas Aquinas: A study accompanied by St. Thomas’s sermon for the feast of St. Nicholas (original) (raw)

The theology of St. Thomas is easily distorted," Père Garrigou-Lagrange once wrote, "if we misplace the emphasis on what is secondary and material, thus explaining in a banal manner and without due proportion what is formal and principal in it. By so doing we fail to see the glowing summit that should illumine all the rest." 2 What is this "glowing summit"? As a mountain face or a building's façade can look quite different at different hours of the day, from dawn to noontide to gloaming-an effect brilliantly conveyed in Monet's successive paintings of the façade of Rouen Cathedral-so, too, does the landscape of Aquinas's theology offer many different views of its elevations to those who gaze out over it. To one, the summit that stands out is the metaphysics of esse inspired by the God who declared Ego sum qui sum; to another, it is the primacy of charity or of the common good; to yet another, the mystery of the Incarnation, with its crowning events in the Paschal Triduum and their perpetual presence in the Mystical Body. Speaking of St. Thomas's doctrine, all of these statements have their truth. Speaking of St. Thomas's life, however, surely the glowing summit was the overwhelming vision granted him near the end of his earthly pilgrimage, on the Feast of St. Nicholas in the year 1273, an ineffable "suffering of divine things" that can be taken as the symbol, summit, and completion of his life's labors. 3