St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Catherine of Siena
Taken from The Dominican Life by Ferdinand Donatien Joret 1883-1937
Taken from The Dominican Life by Ferdinand Donatien Joret 1883-1937
On March eigth, 1924, the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius XI, wrote to the Superiors of Regular Orders as follows: " Above all we exhort religious to take as their model their own founder, their fatherly lawgiver, if they wish to have a sure and certain share in the graces which flow from their vocation. Actually when those eminent men created their institutions, what did they do but obey divine inspirations ? Therefore the character which each one strove to impress upon his society must be retained by all its members if it is to remain faithful to its original ideal. As good sons let them devote themselves heart and soul to honour their father and lawgiver, to observe his precepts and to imbibe his spirit."
So we too must be steeped in St. Dominic's spirit as it came to be gradually understood by our Blessed Father himself and as he finally evolved it. Not until the closing years of his life did St. Dominic, formulating his idea at last, arrive at a clear-cut conception of his Order. Until then it had been but an intuition which God had placed in him : persistent and powerful though it was, it remained mysteriously hidden in the depths of the soul of Jane of Aza's son, of the student of Palencia, of the Canon of Osma, and of the King of Spain's ambassador. The conclusion, to which he was led by perfect self-surrender to divine influence, coincided with the idea God had had for him from the beginning.
Like the Father Who expresses Himself in His Eternal Word, Dominic had a son who formulated his thoughts with a precision and a forcefulness which can never be surpassed. I have called St. Thomas Aquinas the word of our Father. We have none of St. Dominic's writings. The witnesses to his life at the process for his canonization mention the notes with which he covered his books, the theses he wrote against heretics, precious letters addressed to his friars to direct them in his precepts. . . . Alas ! they have all of them been lost. However, we have the works of St. Thomas to console us.
The ardent zeal which inspired the Count of Aquino's son, already received into a Benedictine Abbey, to persist in his efforts to enter the Dominican Order which realized his ideal, enabled him afterwards triumphantly to vindicate that ideal when it was attacked by William of St. Amour and other masters of the University, and to live up to it until his death. No one was ever better qualified to express what our spirit ought to be. Take his Summa Theologica and study the moral part, which is later and still more able and finished than the dogmatic part. Everything in it helps to define the character of the Order which St. Dominic conceived, and which is placed by St. Thomas at the head of the hierarchy of religious Orders.
By his theological teaching he has sealed the Dominican spirit with his own permanent seal. The spirituality of the Preachers has been profoundly influenced by " dear St. Thomas, the Master, the shining light, as Bl. Henry Suso called him. From henceforth the Dominican spirit and the Thomist spirit are one and the same for the humblest Tertiary as for the Master in Theology. Read the life of that fourteenth-century Sienese mantellata, " one of the most amazingly simple souls who ever drew nigh to God." " Ignorant though she is, St. Catherine of Siena is steeped in the same spirit " (as St. Thomas) . " In artless speech which recalls the Romaunt of the Rose, she utters pious thoughts which are redolent of the sweet fragrance of the purest Thomism."
After St. Dominic and St. Thomas, she is the greatest figure in our Order. Born into the world at a time when St. Dominic's family, like the rest of Christendom, was experiencing a phase of great religious relaxation, she exercised a powerful influence over a group of Preachers who became the promoters of a reform movement amongst their brethren. After her death in 1380 at the age of thirty-three, her confessor and spiritual son, Raymund of Capua, having been elected Master General, laboured to restore the ancient discipline. Following Raymund of Capua and his collaborators we always call St. Catherine of Siena our mother.
Since we have compared our founder and our great doctor to the Eternal Father and the Word, we may well say that in the Dominican trinity she takes the part of the Holy Spirit. It would have been possible so to abuse Thomist intellectualism as to have been satisfied with a beautiful system, logically constructed, of mere philosophical and theological abstractions. The humble, noble-hearted woman whom the Holy Spirit overwhelms with His mystical favours helps us to preserve in the spirit of our Order the fervour of love which cleaves to reality, even to the reality of God. It is precisely this divine reality that must be born in us; we must consecrate ourselves to it and we must bear witness to it before the world. St. Catherine. gives us no encouragement to relegate to a secondary plane that pursuit of truth which St. Thomas, following St. Dominic, placed first. Like them, she is eminently intellectual and rational.
Many other saints, many other blessed and venerable persons, have defined and have lived the Dominican ideal between the thirteenth century and our own. We shall speak of many in the following pages. But it is more particularly to these three great souls that we must turn to discover the characteristics that should mark our life, the principles and sentiments that must guide our conduct, in short, all that constitutes what we call our spirit.
