*blearily pokes her head out of hibernation* I came on-line this morning at work to find that it had been snowing in my in box. Considering the fact that it is officially summer over here the snow flakes were a very pleasant, if somewhat confusing, surprise. So thank you
_inbetween_ and
drvsilla, I shall hold them in my mind's eye when it hits 115F in the hope that they don't melt immediately, even though they be virtual flakes.
Otherwise I have just been, well if not busy all the time, then busily writing posts in my head and not writing them down. I seem to have gotten quite good at that. There was the perfunctory one about the weather, which ranged from whining about the spate of extreme hot weather we have had and praising the amount of rain that has fallen. There was the post bemoaning the state of my legs, bad timings of senseis and hoping against hope that menopause will set in early (very early) so that I can move about like a normal person. Most recently there was the very excited recounting of the Franciscan (OFM) conference I attended. It would have contained excited hand waving over the lovely French plenary, amusing anecdotes about friars, the somewhat obvious but altogether pleasing discovery that being around so much religious belief made me very uncomfortable, and of course wild guinea pigs. Instead I shall subject you to my routinely reappearing rant. Most alliterative, non?
Whilst at this conference that was celebrating the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis's death, one repeated comment was thrown at me by certain people who shall remain nameless. You see, for many years I have had an unaccountable penchant for Thomas Aquinas. Not his theology, his theology bugs the hell out of me with his constant continued repetition of Aristotle (someone else who annoys me), a lack of originality and infinite nit picking of logic to win an argument. In a lot of ways, he is in fact too much like how I debate. No, I have been somewhat obsessed by the depiction of him in his own vita (lives) and the way if you peer very hard at the hard shell of veneer that is his academic writing, you can occasionally get a very tiny glimpse of the person he was. I think ultimately he was not a very good man nor a very bad one. His argumentation style shows a certain amount of arrogance and tendentiousness, not to mention competitiveness. He was rather good at being the 'go to' guy for the pope and for his Order.Through the blandness of his words, sometimes there flashes through heat. Yet he did care greatly about issues of imparting knowledge of God in teaching, so everyone could access it and struggled so very hard to achieve this in the face of all logic that dictated he was unable, and even when he failed in the end. No matter that I would rather read Bonaventure, Roger Bacon or others. Thomas was deeply concerned with education and his vision of the divine (no matter that in the end he sort of went 'fuck it') and seems to have been oddly gentle in a rather distracted manner, if rather too stern about exiting rooms when people stopped talking about God. I think perhaps it is the struggle between what came naturally to him and the wish to mold himself into the perfect man of faith that intrigues me. It also makes me sad, this rigidity in faith and practice, the refusal to have any of what I would call 'fun' and to follow his inclinations. Intriguingly he seems to have been rather talented at poetry, music and composition, but then spent most of his time not doing it and instead writing long winded theology, because he felt it was better put to the service of the Lord. That for me is endlessly sad and ultimately fruitless, because he died feeling he had failed in his task. I know that sort of frustration and it makes me sympathetic. He is possibly one of the very few of the friars I study who I think I can say I actually don't dislike.
In all of this you may notice, the matter of his size does not come up. Except for when I open my mouth about Aquinas, every single time I had to first of all talk about how fat he was before moving on! I came to him without an image of what he looked like, not having seen any pictures or having sat through a lecture on his writings where apparently they regale you with the old tale about him being so gross that they built a special table around him so he could eat. What I read was his vita from the thirteenth century, of which the only physical description of any length is rather more complicated than just someone describing him as they saw him. In fact, you should as a rule of thumb never rely on what someone says in a vitae of a Saint, it is largely to do with portraying the Saint as a Saint and not as how they were. They are made to fit into particular tropes that are designed to convey a lot of information to a very wide audience, so they are all variations on each other and upon existing imagery. Thus you end up with depictions of Christ as mother, of stigmata, of the uses of the hair in Magdalene and in Mary etc. Much of it also needs to be translatable into visual imagery too. So it is inherently unreliable for anything that is as literal as 'what did he look like.' Fabulous for everything else though.
Let me give you an example of what is present in his vitae. This is from Bernard Gui's vita, and he basically rewrites William of Tocco's earlier version.
''He was tall and stout. He held himself erect, as men of an upright character do so. His complexion was healthy, as of one who shunned excess of any kind; and in colour like ripe wheat. He had a large head, with a full development of the organs that minister to reason. He was somewhat bald. His body had the delicately balanced texture that goes with a fine intelligence; yet virile also, robust and prompt to serve the will, and trained never to shrink from any pain or peril by a soul that drew its confidence from God.'
So yes here, we have him being described as tall and stout, which I would argue is about all that can be used of this description in terms of 'what he looked like.' No he was not a tiny man, but what concerns me about this depiction is that his size is being directly linked to his perceived intelligence and his virtue of character. He is of good posture because his character is good, he has a good complexion because he does not live to excess, his head is large because his brain is large, he is of a lovely texture to match this intelligence. He is robust and his body is under his own wills control. Here what is being described in not necessarily what he looked like, but what his spiritual saintly profile looks like. After all, it is not really possible to be enormously fat and shun excess of any kind, nor to be be able to subjugate the body into obedience when it is clearly out of control. Thomas was not a saint because of his asceticism, like Francis, nor is he one who is martyred. He is there for his theology and so everything is geared to make his thoughts seem the most important. In some ways his fatness also reflects how far away from the body that it didn't matter, being all of the mind. Indeed, that rather infamous Catholic historian G.K. Chesterton even says,
'
"St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy."'
In fact, I think Chesterton's description of Aquinas is perhaps only right in terms of him of the magnanimosity of him. He certainly was not shy, although he was certainly deliberating and contemplative. What is clear though is that Thomas's size is important because it is the type of thought he produced, his size and his direct comparison to an ox. This is most important, because he was known during his life as the 'dumb ox.' Whilst the 'dumb' part of the name itself probably directly relates to his lack of German and inability to communicate when he went to study under Albertus Magnus, the description of the ox is once again not just about how he looks. For example:
'He was so big that because of his body's massiveness he was called the Sicilian ox. The mother of Brother Reginald, his socius, recounts that when he was passing, the peasants in the fields left their labours and came near to look at him, full of admiration for a man of such corpulence and beauty.'At first glance it is obvious that he is just large, and it is possible that the peasants were just admiring someone who was well fed, but I would argue that once again his size and body were tied into his potential. This parallel is much more obvious when you look at what Albertus said about why he was called that. Albertus says that though they may call '...him the dumb ox, but he will make resound in his doctrine such a bellowing that it will echo throughout the entire world.' Correspondingly his size expands with his intellectual feats and his holiness. In order to bellow throughout the whole world, one must be large enough to be heard. Thus everyone can therefore describe his theology in terms of this particular image of him as the ox and all the qualities associated with the image from not only Christian times, but the Roman as well. As Gregory the Great says 'For he that blesses outwardly by preaching receives the
fatness of inward enlargement.' For the medieval, the internal was the external.
So where does this leave us? Tocco calls him 'corpus grossum', which although I have seen it translated constantly as 'corpulent', the word grossus does not necessarily indicate fatness but is also about large, great, thick or coarse. An interest comment on his Sicilian heritage actually, because he was always portrayed as very southern Italian. I think perhaps the best we can do is the small description provided in his canonisation documentation where the Cistercian lay brother, Nicholas of Priverno, just says very bluntly that Thomas was, 'a big stout man, with a dark complexion and bald.' I rather like this, because it seems to reflect that fact that Thomas whilst he might not have been a petite lad, he did in fact spend most of his life walking around between Paris and Rome, was bound by the laws of his Order that enforced not only mendicancy but also set food that ways to be served in the refectory. Food that was dominantly vegetarian and grain based. Before anyone tells me that no religious Order stuck to its rules, I would like to point out that this was the early part of the Order of Preachers, and they were only just making their laws and had not had time to break them like in centuries to come. Thomas is not depicted as eating much in any of his vitae, in fact most of the time he forgets to eat because he is so busy writing. Yes, another trope, but there is no other present in his vitae. Nor is the story of him and the table there either.
In fact, the story makes me wonder about something - much of the imager of Aquinas as grotesquely obese comes at the time of the reformation, a fact that is of importance because what is the traditional depiction of a friar as portrayed by anti mendicant literature? Fat. Even before the reformation you had Chaucer and his fat friars being farted and it is an image that is taken up and run with - Friar Tuck anyone? It is after all the direct opposite of what they are supposed to be about - poverty and mendicancy. I would not be remotely surprised if the image of Aquinas a great big intellectual (a long tradition in and of itself - Luther tends to get larger and larger...) gets tied up in the anti mendicant stuff coming out of the reformation. The story of the friar who is so fat he needs part of the table cut out to fit him, sounds to me much more like propaganda that has been taken on board than anything else. Much like the description I just found of him when googling as 'with dropsy and a hideous deformed eye.' What? I mean, what? Yes he died of something that could have been dropsy, or a stroke, but that was late in life when he had basically exhausted himself. So there seems to also be a large amount of 'you aren't perfect, but look, neither was this saint!'. I personally, will just stick with Nicholas of Priverno, who had no point to make other than that yes he had met him, and he had heard him preach and teach and meditate. Thomas Aquinas was not morbidly obese, just rather tall and solid. Anyone who wants to damn well argue the point can go and read the evidence themselves and come up with some valid points, because I am sick to the back teeth of having to wade through refuting what is patently a 700 year old construction just so I can talk about the man. It is also indicative of what it is like trying to talk about his writing - 700 years of theologians not paying attention to him, but their own agenda.
On a final note, here is one of Thomas's better known hymns, the
Pange Lingua Gloriosi Mysterium. It is sung to Gregorian chant during the procession of the Eucharist before transubstantiation at the feast of Corpus Christi, and is thus written to be a solemn meditation on this act. Yes it is deeply religious and rightly so considering who wrote it so I apologise for those who aren't going to like that, be it just Catholicism or religion in general. No I am not going to provide the translation because it is better in Latin and I think perhaps it is a better way of approaching Thomas than through other much more pretentious high theological methods. Just imagine it in performed in Notre Dame, in solemn procession with simple, plain chat sung by a choir of monks, to a melody that imitates the old troop rythymn of Caesar's army. Smell the incense, the intensity of the moment in the elevation and transubstantiation of the host (the last two versus), and in that instant where his faith and art reach the pinnacle of expression I think you will find Thomas.
- Pange, lingua, gloriosi
- Corporis mysterium,
- Sanguinisque pretiosi,
- quem in mundi pretium
- fructus ventris generosi
- Rex effudit Gentium.
- Nobis datus, nobis natus
- ex intacta Virgine,
- et in mundo conversatus,
- sparso verbi semine,
- sui moras incolatus
- miro clausit ordine.
- In supremae nocte coenae
- recumbens cum fratribus
- observata lege plene
- cibis in legalibus,
- cibum turbae duodenae
- se dat suis manibus.
- Verbum caro, panem verum
- verbo carnem efficit:
- fitque sanguis Christi merum,
- et si sensus deficit,
- ad firmandum cor sincerum
- sola fides sufficit.
- Tantum ergo Sacramentum
- veneremur cernui:
- et antiquum documentum
- novo cedat ritui:
- praestet fides supplementum
- sensuum defectui.
- Genitori, Genitoque
- laus et jubilatio,
- salus, honor, virtus quoque
- sit et benedictio:
- Procedenti ab utroque
- compar sit laudatio.
- Amen. Alleluja.
P.S. I have been given a one year stipend scholarship for my doctorate. It is a consolation-encouragement prize for missing out on the big three year scholarships, and it entails instructions to try again for next years rounds. Not what I wanted, but it is better than nothing I suppose.
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