Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on ‘God's Love for Things’)

“God's love for things is better than ours. For our will is not the cause of goodness, but responds to goodness. Our liking does not produce the good of the thing we love; it is the other way round—the goodness, real or apparent, of the thing calls forth our love, whether that love be a love which rests content with its object as it finds it or a love which seeks to improve it. But God’s love, which makes things out of nothingness, impregnates all the goodness they have.”— Italian theologian and Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Selected Writings, translated by George N. Shuster and translated by Thomas Gilby (1971)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on Heaven's ‘Happy Society of All the Blessed’)

“In heaven there will be the happy society of all the blessed, and this society will be especially delightful. Since each one will possess all good together with the blessed, and they will love one another as themselves, they will rejoice in the others’ good as their own. It will also happen that, as the pleasure and enjoyment of one increases, so will it be for all: ‘The dwelling in you is as it were of all rejoicing.’” [Ps 86:7 Vulgate].— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) [Angelic] Doctor of the Church, “Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum [The Apostles’ Creed”], translated by Joseph B. Collins (1939)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on Goodness and Beauty)

“The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known. Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, viz. sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the other senses, we do not use the expression ‘beautiful,’ for we do not speak of beautiful tastes, and beautiful odors. Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that ‘good’ means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the ‘beautiful’ is something pleasant to apprehend.”— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) [Angelic] Doctor of the Church, Summa Theologiae (1485)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on Many Cries to the Lord)

“Many cry to the Lord that they may win riches, that they may avoid losses; they cry that their family may be established, they ask for temporal happiness, for worldly dignities; and, lastly, they cry for bodily health, which is the patrimony of the poor. For these and suchlike things many cry to the Lord; hardly one cries for the Lord Himself! How easy it is for a man to desire all manner of things from the Lord and yet not desire the Lord Himself! As though the gift could be sweeter than the Giver!”— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) [Angelic] Doctor of the Church, On Prayer and the Contemplative Life (2012)

Spritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on ‘Love of Our Neighbor’)

“Love of our neighbor includes love of God.”—“Doctor of the Church” St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa theologiae (1265-1274)

Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on Passions and ‘Perfection of Moral Virtue’)

“Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.”— Italian theologian and Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologica, Volume 1, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2007)

Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on What Makes a Leader Happy)

“It is implanted in the minds of all who have the use of reason that the reward of virtue is happiness. The virtue of anything whatsoever is explained to be that which makes its possessor good and renders his deed good. Moreover, everyone strives by working well to attain that which is most deeply implanted in desire, namely, to be happy. This, no one is able not to wish. It is therefore fitting to expect as a reward for virtue that which makes man happy. Now, if to work well is a virtuous deed, and the king’s work is to rule his people well, then that which makes him happy will be the king’s reward….Happiness, we say, is the ultimate end of our desires. Now the movement of desire does not go on to infinity else natural desire would be vain, for infinity cannot be traversed. Since, then, the desire of an intellectual nature is for universal good, that good alone can make it truly happy which, when attained, leaves no further good to be desired. Whence happiness is called the perfect good inasmuch as it comprises in itself all things desirable. But no earthly good is such a good. They who have riches desire to have more, they who enjoy pleasure desire to enjoy more, and the like is clear for the rest: and if they do not seek more, they at least desire that those they have should abide or that others should follow in their stead. For nothing permanent is found in earthly things. Consequently there is nothing earthly which can calm desire. Thus, nothing earthly can make man happy, so that it may be a fitting reward for a king.”—Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), De Regno (“On Kingship”), translated by Gerald B. Phelan, revised by I. Th. Eschmann, O.P. (1949)

Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on ‘The Light of Reason’ and Politics)

“To be sure, the light of reason is placed by nature in every man, to guide him in his acts towards his end. Wherefore, if man were intended to live alone, as many animals do, he would require no other guide to his end. Each man would be a king unto himself, under God, the highest King, inasmuch as he would direct himself in his acts by the light of reason given him from on high. Yet it is natural for man, more than for any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group.”— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), De regnoad. Ad regem Cypri (“On Kingship, to the King of Cyprus”), translated by Gerald B. Phelan, revised by Ignatius Thomas Eschmann, O.P.

Medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas’ optimistic vision of reason-guided human beings who participate in society, including as citizens, is being challenged as perhaps at no other time in our nation’s history. A global recession and a new digital frontier in which falsehoods spread with lightning speed have produced a situation far closer to Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s classic 1799 etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. These trends have fostered a despair and disbelief in experts that have left many citizens to act each as “a king unto himself” and as all-too-credulous believers in strange figures who came out of nowhere to break all social and popular norms.

In her celebrated 1950 analysis, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt points to “the uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and [which] have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.” 

The last few decades have seen this country follow a scenario once restricted to Europe, as institutions in which Americans once fervently believed—e.g., government, churches, the police, the press—have increasingly—daily—been called into question.

Commentators have spoken of the great division in contemporary American society, but I fear even more the possibility of subdivisions within our country, of a populace so distrustful of their neighbors that they are unable to form even two parties, let alone one. That would leave us atomized, capable of being molded into Arendt’s “mass man” who fell prey to the twin forms of totalitarianism, Fascism and Communism, between the First and Second World Wars.

The Western world gave rise to Aristotle, Aquinas and Arendt, believers in the power of thought. But what happens if the West now drifts into the sleep of reason? The nationalism, prejudice and bigotry abroad in the last decade—highlighted in the white noise of Twitter and talk radio here in the U.S. in the last week—pose momentous challenges to the rational vision of natural law formulated by Aquinas. Here on the North American continent, these forces have already produced a country unrecognizable to many of us of a certain age: an America no longer brandishing the standard of freedom for the world, but instead increasingly intolerant of difference.

Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on Faith)

“Faith is a certain foretaste of that knowledge which is to make us happy in the life to come.” —St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Compendium Theologiae (“Compendium of Theology”), translated by Cyril Vollert, S.J. (1947)