Knowing & Communion

Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest, Doctor

I wonder sometimes what the “Angelic Doctor” would be able to teach us today with the discoveries of an ever-expanding universe, of string theory, of quarks and nano-everything.  Where does logic and precision fit-in to the bewilderingly beautiful and terrifyingly complex cosmos?  I am awed by both the logic and precision and the utter mystery! 

I was reading this morning for my History and Preaching class and came upon a sermon of Meister Eckhart (1320).  He, too had spent years in more traditional intellectual pursuits at university in Paris and Cologne.  But later in his life all these efforts to “know” or even imagine God gave way to the mysticism of “unknowing.”

This progression appears to mirror that of Thomas fifty years earlier (sans excommunication;) when on the 6^th of December 1273, Thomas had a mystical experience that caused him to proclaim, “all my writing is as straw compared to the vision of God’s glory.”  And he wrote no more.

The knowing is a good and holy pursuit.  A necessary one that flows from human curiosity and wonder at our own mystery.  But it is the comparison with divine encounter that relativizes and gives perspective.

KNOWING.  YES!

COMMUNION.  YES, YES, YES!!!

There is something for me in all this...

From the Dominican Life web page:

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we do not share. They've both labored in the search for Truth and both have helped us in finding it.

-Thomas Aquinas