“Faithful to the Tradition of Aquinas Himself”

By Mother M. Assumpta Long, O.P.
Prioress General
Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist

Note: On August 11, 2016, Mother M. Assumpta Long, O.P., spoke at a gathering of the Thomas Aquinas College Orange County Board of Regents. Below is a transcript of that address.

As you know, the topic of Catholic education is very important to me. My community is devoted to Catholic education. Forming young people through teaching is a real and valid way of carrying out the Dominican tradition of preaching Christ. At Thomas Aquinas College, you also share in our Dominican tradition.

I don’t just mean because of your name, Thomas Aquinas College. You do a real service to the Church through promoting the study and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Your school is also outstanding in the formation of thought which you give to your students. Faithful to the tradition of Aquinas himself, you know that the human mind is capable of coming to the truth, and you recognize that the great minds of the Western tradition are important dialogue partners in the search for the encounter with the truth that must be at the heart of every human life. When I look around the world today, so many elements of the mission of Thomas Aquinas College seem necessary — and missing in today’s culture. We have to really take this seriously; they are missing in today’s culture.

The Curriculum

Let me start with what I have already mentioned, your curriculum. The very fact that you consider the writings of Aquinas as a sort of keystone to your curriculum testifies to a belief that it is possible for the human mind to know the truth. Aquinas, following Aristotle, is famous for the realism of his philosophy. There is a world outside of our minds. We come in contact with it through our senses. Our minds are able to illuminate the images conveyed through our senses and come to a real (though not absolutely complete) knowledge of reality. We can really know the natures of the things we come into contact with in this world. We come to know what human nature is, and what is good for the human person and what is not. We can come to know what it means to be a human person, what it means to be a man or a woman.

We are confused today about what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to be human, what human life is, what is truly good for the human person; these are questions being debated in our country and fought in our courtrooms today. They will continue to be contentious in the years to come. We need men and women able to answer these questions with charity and great conviction and clarity.

Your curriculum shows your students that the claim that the mind can know the truth is nothing stifling. It is not a claim that imprisons within some sort of narrow box of definitions. On the contrary, the recognition that we can come to know truth frees us from enslavement to our own limited plans, imaginations, or ideas. When there is a real good to be sought after, life has nobility and high purpose, and the ultimate joy of obtaining both the imperfect but real goods of this world — peace, moral virtue, friendship, knowledge — and the highest good of communion with God. Following Augustine, Aquinas talks about the light of the intellect, which illumines the world around us, revealing the wise order of creation, which itself is caused by the mind of God. This means that we can approach the world as a beautiful but complex and challenging reality, not merely a limited projection of our imagination.

A second aspect of your curriculum draws from Aquinas the recognition that the natural is open to the supernatural. This is so important today. They are trying to take God out of everything; our culture says, “just get rid of God.” Thomas Aquinas is famous for his insistence that the truth known by reason and the truth known by faith do not contradict each other. Radical Islam, which poses a threat to the peace of many countries today, rejects many of the claims of reason and is an exaggerated fideism. The tendency in Western culture is, in turn, to reject the supernatural as something which endangers our natural desire for life and happiness, or which is at least irrelevant to it.

The fathers of the Second Vatican Council rightly recognized that the created order can only be properly appreciated in the light of the supernatural. In Gaudium et Spes they declare, “Without the creator, the creature vanishes.” Because all human persons are created with a supernatural destiny and call, to deny and ignore this dimension of human life radically flattens and distorts what it means to be human. When only the natural, even only the material, matters, people can fall prey to consumerism and materialism, which leads to lives of boredom, addiction, and anxiety.

How many suicides do we have even of young people today? Our country needs young men and women who can counter this banality, both with the witness of their lives and with articulate words. Thomas Aquinas College forms such men and women.

A further element of value in your curriculum is the way in which your students learn. You engage the great thinkers of the past. Ignoring the past can be a dangerous temptation today, particularly in our country of America, which has only a few hundred years of written history. It is true that in the area of technology, today’s thought surpasses that of yesterday. Yet in areas such as insight into human nature, what makes a life good, and other questions necessary for actually applying technology well, we need to learn from the past. In his encyclical letter Spes Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI warns us, “If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth, then it is not progress at all but a threat for man and for the world.”

In a notice on your website you list quite a few alumni who now practice in the fields of medicine and business. The world needs men and women formed in ethical thought to enter into these very necessary and practical vocations. Your curriculum is implemented through the method of Socratic seminar. It is not a stretch to say that this style of learning is eminently Thomistic. Every article of the Summa is itself preserved in the form of a mini classroom debate. This type of learning is important for the way it engages the person. In our increasingly technological culture, people seem more and more to be an audience passively sitting before a screen, absorbing what is poured into them. Active, lively debate is an effective antidote to the boredom and flabbiness of a mind that passive entertainment can cause. You notice how people are always on iPhones or something; they are just taking in information.

The Discussion Method

I also particularly want to highlight another facet in your discussion-based method. I want to highlight it particularly because superficiality and ad hominem attacks so proliferate in the media, blogs, and discussions, which are, to put it bluntly, shameful. Rather than trying to move others by clearly reasoned arguments, based on an honest attempt to understand the merits as well as the weakness of a rival position, we too often rely on anger and name-calling. I am not sure exactly what has caused all this, but there is no such thing as just a debate these days. There is no debate. It is just name-calling.

One element is probably the short attention span provided by the soundbite, the desire for a quick, short answer that does not cost us any work. News articles, more and more, word their titles to be extreme and exaggerated in order to catch the attention of a more and more jaded public. This is the phenomenon of “clickbait” — provocative or extreme titles worded to draw a person to click on them, largely to increase the traffic on the website, which then generates more revenue from advertisers.

Another element in our culture seems to be a lack of respect for other persons. We see this at times on the Internet, where people fall prey to label others and write abusive comments, about anybody, even something about Mother Teresa. No one has ever been converted by a thoughtless, angry diatribe.

Above all, these trends show a loss of the belief that the truth has a persuasive force. Truth is beautiful, and it is attractive when people hear it and know it. I think that terrorist violence is an extreme example of this. Making a statement with a bomb, rather than with a pen, shows an extreme loss of faith in truth and intelligence. At Thomas Aquinas College, you affirm that discussion is a human way to come to discover the truth. It is an appropriate way to share the truth with another and to improve one’s own understanding.

Real civil discourse is a tradition which our democracy cannot afford to lose if it is going to endure. Needless to say, Aquinas’ Summa is not a soundbite. It is not even a blog post, although there are numerous blogs devoted to discussing it. In the Summa, every objection gets a thoughtful, respectful reply. Aquinas does not dismiss his interlocutors as evil or stupid, even though he fundamentally disagrees with most of them. In fact, some of the objections in the Summa actually come from the Church fathers. Rather than following the principle of loud denunciation for the sake of analogous 13^th century clickbait, Aquinas often prefers to gently point out the sense in which the Church father, with whom he disagrees, is right, and how the Church father’s saying can be interpreted in the most charitable way. He treats even the more blatantly mistaken objectors as potential fellow seekers of the truth, whose objections make his own thought deeper and his discourse richer.

At the other end of the spectrum is the phenomenon of “snowflake students,” which you have probably seen in the media this year. These are people who cannot deal with encountering viewpoints contrary to their own. (I am, of course, not including those who are suffering from after-effects of real psychological trauma.) One that stands out is a Harvard student, a woman, who insisted that simply knowing that someone in the same room with her disagreed with her views, would be so disturbing that she would be unable to concentrate in class. Would someone, secure in her own identity and in her own ability to think and express her own views, be so frightened? Should not someone who really wants the truth be willing, perhaps eager, to at least hear rival viewpoints? At Thomas Aquinas, students are prepared by the style of their classes to be able to hold their own in a pluralistic society, with poise and confidence.

A Community of Faith

A final aspect of Thomas Aquinas that makes it truly remarkable is the sense of community here. Your curriculum is purposely limited, so that all the students of the same year study the same material. Your student body is likewise small, capped at around 350 students. The deliberate choices about size and course-offering mean that a very close community is formed among the student body at Thomas Aquinas College. Each student is known by his peers and professors. It is impossible for anyone to disappear, to be anonymous in the crowd. This makes for a profoundly human experience.

As Thomas Aquinas affirmed, echoing Aristotle, man is a social animal. We need to live with others to be fully human. Our formation and virtue take place best within friendships; we need to know others and be known by others. Paradoxically, the instant, and therefore often superficial, communication of today’s culture often has the effect of isolating individuals from one another. Too many universities are places where people can live the least human years of their lives, keeping crazy hours, eating unhealthily, engaging in promiscuous relationships, becoming lonely and alienated. (I am not saying that all of those in secular colleges do this; many do not, but they have to fight against the prevalent culture in many cases.)

Thomas Aquinas College is not a permanent sanctuary. Studying here is, of course, a four-year experience, but it will regularly be training in being human, in being capable of living a human life in a human manner. And those who leave here will help to build up human society within our country as a whole. On this topic John Paul II repeatedly affirmed that we need others in order to be whole. He never tired of repeating the words of Gaudium et Spes, “Man cannot fully find himself but through a sincere gift of himself.” This gift must be to others and to God … which leads us to the vibrantly Catholic identity of Thomas Aquinas College.

This school is Catholic: In its course of studies, in its schedule of studies, I noticed that your academic calendar includes several feast days such as the Immaculate Conception; you have a beautiful chapel on campus; the sacraments are offered regularly, and regularly desired by your students; the faculty witness to an adherence to the magisterium of the Church. And it works. The Faith grows and thrives here. Perhaps one of the most remarkable facts about this College is that 10 percent of your alumni pursue a religious vocation. This is a very high number. (We have two of those vocations.) It attests to the strength of the Faith in your school. It also attests to the great souls of your students. You clearly form men and women with high ideals and the energy to pursue them.

I just want to end with one thing. I really cannot express to you my desire to see the College promoted and be successful. I hope I got across the message that Thomas Aquinas students can think. I cannot tell you how important that is, to think. That truth can be obtained — and you will only be free by the truth — we have got to form young people who can think, and not just what the media tells them to think. God bless you. I hope we have a group here that is going to go out and promote the College.