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Religious in the Local Churches: Pointers from Aquinas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The saint we are honouring today would have found the theme of this lecture all too familiar. St Thomas Aquinas was personally involved in the lively, indeed fierce, medieval debates that surrounded the first appearance of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in the life of the Church. Then, as before and since, religious did not always fit in immediately or obviously into the established patterns of diocese and parish. At the time of St Thomas some argued that all the attributes of the antichrist and his ministers were to be found in the new Mendicant Orders. In Cambridge there survives a medieval manuscript with an illumination showing Archbishop FitzRalph, its author and a critic of the friars, faced by Mendicant friars mingled with devils. At about the time St Thomas was writing his first polemical work, soldiers had to be sent to protect the Paris Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from riots and demonstrations. Troops had to patrol his inaugural lecture, and on Palm Sunday 1259, as he preached, St Thomas was heckled by someone trying to get a hearing for the seculars’ case. No wonder that he went into the matter of when and by what means religious can defend themselves.
St Thomas’s own experience as a Dominican friar was gained in different dioceses, indeed in different countries. He dealt repeatedly with the position of religious in the Church, especially in three polemical works, in Quodlibetal disputations and in the Summa Theologiae, going well beyond the controversy over the organisation of university teaching in Paris. To guide our own exploration, we might do well to start with how St Thomas approached the task. Some problems have a way of recurring. In particular, he had to fight against two errors, the kind of mistakes still made today.
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- Copyright © 1994 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 This is the text of the Aquinas Lecture, established by the Glasgow Dominicans, delivered at Strathclyde University Chaplaincy, Glasgow on 22 January 1994.
2 The background to the debates between seculars and Mendicants, as they affected St Thomas, is sketched in Weisheipl, J., Friar Thomas d Aquino (Washington, 1983)Google Scholar. The three main polemical works by St ‘Thomas can be dated to 1256 for the Contra Impugnantes’, 1269–1270 for the De Perfectione, and 1271 for the Contra Retrahenses. The texts are in the Leonine edition Opuscula II: Opera Omnia XLI (Rome 1970). See also Boyle, L.E., ‘The Quodlibets of St. Thomas and Pastoral Care’The Thomist (1974) 232–256CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially p.251.
3 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 180, fol. 1r. Interestingly, in all three of his polemical works St Thomas attributes part of the difficulties to the devil's interference.
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5 Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum el Religionem XV; St Thomas refers 10 Acts 23:17f in saying that religious, like the the Apostle Paul, can be protected by armed troops. Also Quaestiones Quodlibetales (Marietti ed. Turin 1949) V q.13 a.l.
6 Contra Impugnantes IV, 6.
7 Summa Theologiae II–II q.188 a.4 ad 5: Cf De Perfectione Spiritualis Vitae XIII, Contra Impugnantes IV.
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