When I was an undergraduate in Philadelphia and experimenting with all manner of different things, I came to the heady conclusion that all the written wisdom of the world was as nothing - that it did not advance anyone anywhere. For me, to say that I was young and foolish was a decided redundancy, for I had lots to learn about everything, but this I did understand: the last steps to knowledge is a lonely journey, one that must be taken apart from all things "man."
This was well understood by the ancients as well as the primitives, and much is made of it in otherwise incomprehensible mythology: the dragon to be slain was not a corporeal thing, but the false reality of life itself, the Real veiled behind every fear and fantasy imaginable.
And so we find Fr. Thomas Aquinas in his last months of life in the last pages of the novel, "The Quiet Light" by Louis de Wohl. Failing not in health, but in a certain quality of vitality, his caretakers become worried and try to do everything they can to keep him on this earthly plane. But Brother Dominic, the sacristan of the Dominican convent in Naples, will have none of it, convinced that Aquinas should be treated like everyone else, according to the rule. It was with this attitude that he caught Aquinas in rapture, standing before the altar alone, captured in an odd light, his face contorted in pain and longing. He watched him for some time until he saw Aquinas, with all his massive bulk, rise fully three feet from the floor, and then heard a voice: "Thomas, what is it that you wish most from me?" And Thomas's reply, "Only you, my Lord." Brother Dominic, needless to say, mended his ways.
But it was what happened next that caught my attention, for the levitation is hard for us to believe nowadays, although they claimed it happened fairly regularly in the Medieval period (blinded, perhaps, by their own myth?) Says his caretaker after Thomas has returned to a fair normalcy, "You will get well and finish the Summa [Theologica] and then..." to which Thomas replied, "I shall never write again, Reginald. Everything I have written is like straw...in comparison to...what I have seen."
And so, I believe,it is, for what any of us write. To experience God, as Mosses was warned, is to be consumed by fire - it cannot be done without a death one way or the other. But for those of us with feet of clay, we are sometimes allowed the smallest of glimpses, or hints, really, of the nature of the fire, and it was from those glimpses that I learned decades ago that all our ordinary efforts are like straw. That, as the mystics say, time and space and everything in it are as nothing, and to convey this reality, this glimpse of timeless reality, is hopeless. It can only be done through the dragon, or the martyred saint, or in the myriad ways in which religions and myths are laid out for us, as Thomas came to know.
But we, the confused, must (I think) continue to read and write of such things, as small tufts of straw that all of it may be, for the writing of other things is so strong, so conclusive, so convincing. Who would believe in the power of the spirit dragon after one has seen an atomic explosion? Might we believe, then, that our factual knowledge is the locus of power and all else the straw?
As such, we are often thrown little bits of spiritual straw ourselves, that we might add to the voices of those who sometimes understand, however slightly. It was thought that the gods of Olympus evaporated from neglect, and so it might be that Reality, too, could disappear from our sight due to neglect.
Although I doubt it - what fool does not realize from time to time that he is a fool, and that a real drama is passing before him even as he jests? But still, writing has its purpose, just as a sign has a purpose; it is not the territory itself, but a warning or a heads-up for those going on the same road. FK
This was well understood by the ancients as well as the primitives, and much is made of it in otherwise incomprehensible mythology: the dragon to be slain was not a corporeal thing, but the false reality of life itself, the Real veiled behind every fear and fantasy imaginable.
And so we find Fr. Thomas Aquinas in his last months of life in the last pages of the novel, "The Quiet Light" by Louis de Wohl. Failing not in health, but in a certain quality of vitality, his caretakers become worried and try to do everything they can to keep him on this earthly plane. But Brother Dominic, the sacristan of the Dominican convent in Naples, will have none of it, convinced that Aquinas should be treated like everyone else, according to the rule. It was with this attitude that he caught Aquinas in rapture, standing before the altar alone, captured in an odd light, his face contorted in pain and longing. He watched him for some time until he saw Aquinas, with all his massive bulk, rise fully three feet from the floor, and then heard a voice: "Thomas, what is it that you wish most from me?" And Thomas's reply, "Only you, my Lord." Brother Dominic, needless to say, mended his ways.
But it was what happened next that caught my attention, for the levitation is hard for us to believe nowadays, although they claimed it happened fairly regularly in the Medieval period (blinded, perhaps, by their own myth?) Says his caretaker after Thomas has returned to a fair normalcy, "You will get well and finish the Summa [Theologica] and then..." to which Thomas replied, "I shall never write again, Reginald. Everything I have written is like straw...in comparison to...what I have seen."
And so, I believe,it is, for what any of us write. To experience God, as Mosses was warned, is to be consumed by fire - it cannot be done without a death one way or the other. But for those of us with feet of clay, we are sometimes allowed the smallest of glimpses, or hints, really, of the nature of the fire, and it was from those glimpses that I learned decades ago that all our ordinary efforts are like straw. That, as the mystics say, time and space and everything in it are as nothing, and to convey this reality, this glimpse of timeless reality, is hopeless. It can only be done through the dragon, or the martyred saint, or in the myriad ways in which religions and myths are laid out for us, as Thomas came to know.
But we, the confused, must (I think) continue to read and write of such things, as small tufts of straw that all of it may be, for the writing of other things is so strong, so conclusive, so convincing. Who would believe in the power of the spirit dragon after one has seen an atomic explosion? Might we believe, then, that our factual knowledge is the locus of power and all else the straw?
As such, we are often thrown little bits of spiritual straw ourselves, that we might add to the voices of those who sometimes understand, however slightly. It was thought that the gods of Olympus evaporated from neglect, and so it might be that Reality, too, could disappear from our sight due to neglect.
Although I doubt it - what fool does not realize from time to time that he is a fool, and that a real drama is passing before him even as he jests? But still, writing has its purpose, just as a sign has a purpose; it is not the territory itself, but a warning or a heads-up for those going on the same road. FK
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