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into the details of the past days; the cord from his struggle against being stripped
of his Friar's frock; the thread of fire running through the tapestries of the night,
from the firebrand he had snatched from the fireside. But even in Armadale the
dream was fulfilled mystically as well, and the dream of St. Thomas was fulfilled
very mystically indeed. For he did in fact remain remarkably untroubled on that
side of his human nature after the incident; though it is likely enough that the
incident had caused an upheaval of his normal humanity, which produced a
dream stronger than a nightmare. This is no place to analyse the psychological
fact, which puzzles Non-Catholics so much: of the way in which priests do
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manage to be celibate without ceasing to be virile. Anyhow, it seems probable
that in this matter he was less troubled than most. This has nothing to do with
true virtue, which is of the will; saints as holy as he have rolled themselves in
brambles to distract the pressure of passion; but he never needed much in the
way of a counter-irritant; for the simple reason that in this way, as in most ways,
he was not very often irritated. Much must remain unexplained, as part of the
mysteries of grace; but there is probably some truth in the psychological idea of
"sublimation;" that is the lifting of a lower energy to higher ends; so that appetite
almost faded in the furnace of his intellectual energy. Between supernatural and
natural causes, it is probable that he never knew or suffered greatly on this side
of his mind.
There are moments when the most orthodox reader is tempted to hate the
hagiographer as much as he loves the holy man. The holy man always conceals
his holiness; that is the one invariable rule. And the hagiographer sometimes
seems like a persecutor trying to frustrate the holy man; a spy or eavesdropper
hardly more respectful than an American interviewer. I admit that these
sentiments are fastidious and one-sided, and I will now proceed to prove my
penitence by mentioning one or two of the incidents that could only have come to
common knowledge in this deplorable way.
It seems certain that he did live a sort of secondary and mysterious life; the
divine double of what is called a double life. Somebody seems to have caught a
glimpse of the sort of solitary miracle which modern psychic people call
Levitation; and he must surely have either been a liar or a literal witness, for
there could have been no doubts or degrees about such a prodigy happening to
such a person: it must have been like seeing one of the huge pillars of the church
suspended like a cloud. Nobody knows, I imagine, what spiritual storm of
exaltation or agony produces this convulsion in matter or space; but the thing
does almost certainly occur. Even in the case of ordinary Spiritualist mediums,
for whatever reason, the evidence is very difficult to refute. But probably the most
representative revelation of this side of his life may be found in the celebrated
story of the miracle of the crucifix; when in the stillness of the church of St.
Dominic in Naples, a voice spoke from the carven Christ, and told the kneeling
Friar that he had written rightly, and offered him the choice of a reward among all
the things of the world.
Not all, I think, have appreciated the point of this particular story as applied to this
particular saint. It is an old story, in so far as it is simply the offer made to a
devotee of solitude or simplicity, of the pick of all the prizes of life. The hermit,
true or false, the fakir, the fanatic or the cynic, Stylites on his column or Diogenes
in his tub, can all be pictured as tempted by the powers of the earth, of the air or
of the heavens, with the offer of the best of everything; and replying that they
want nothing. In the Greek cynic or stoic it really meant the mere negative; that
he wanted nothing. In the Oriental mystic or fanatic, it sometimes meant a sort of
positive negative; that he wanted Nothing; that Nothing was really what he
wanted. Sometimes it expressed a noble independence, and the twin virtues of
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antiquity, the love of liberty and the hatred of luxury. Sometimes it only expressed
a self-sufficiency that is the very opposite of sanctity. But even the stories of real
saints, of this sort, do not quite cover the case of St. Thomas. He was not a
person who wanted nothing; and he was a person who was enormously
interested in everything. His answer is not so inevitable or simple as some may
suppose. As compared with many other saints, and many other philosophers, he
was avid in his acceptance of Things; in his hunger and thirst for Things. It was
his special spiritual thesis that there really are things; and not only the Thing; that
the Many existed as well as the One. I do not mean things to eat or drink or wear,
though he never denied to these their place in the noble hierarchy of Being; but
rather things to think about, and especially things to prove, to experience and to
know. Nobody supposes that Thomas Aquinas, when offered by God his choice
among all the gifts of God, would ask for a thousand pounds, or the Crown of
Sicily, or a present of rare Greek wine. But he might have asked for things that
he really wanted: and he was a man who could want things; as he wanted the
lost manuscript of St. Chrysostom. He might have asked for the solution of an old
difficulty; or the secret of a new science; or a flash of the inconceivable intuitive
mind of the angels, or any one of a thousand things that would really have
satisfied his broad and virile appetite for the very vastness and variety of the
universe. The point is that for him, when the voice spoke from between the
outstretched arms of the Crucified, those arms were truly opened wide, and
opening most gloriously the gates of all the worlds; they were arms pointing to
the east and to the west, to the ends of the earth and the very extremes of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]