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THREE

Grammars of Assent

A COMEBACK IN CHRISTENDOM

Anselm couldn’t sit still. Rising before the sun, even on the coldest winter mornings, he and the other monks would gather in the church to chant psalms. They all wore the same habit, and their voices all sang the same tones, whose echoes cascaded through the stale air and against the stone walls. But Anselm was distracted. The prayers on his lips couldn’t compete with his thoughts, and his thoughts were stuck. “I hoped for gladness,” he wrote, “and, lo, my sighs come thick and fast!”¹

The Benedictine abbey at Bec, in what is now northern France, was less than a century old in 1077, but it had already become famous thanks to its celebrity abbot, Lanfranc of Pavia. Anselm—whom history calls Anselm of Canterbury—came from the Italian Alps. Back home, he and his father differed in every way but their stubbornness, and living together turned unbearable. After his mother’s death when he was in his early twenties, he set off northward. He traveled through all of France, past the universities at Chartres and Paris, arriving at Bec in 1060. Becoming a monk wasn’t his plan at first, but word of Lanfranc’s school there captured Anselm’s imagination. He entered Bec as a novice, and under Lanfranc he mastered the medieval curriculum’s catalog of doctrines, categories, and distinctions, held together by church authority and the daily ritual of liturgy. Anselm became a teacher in his own right. But his own assent to faith didn’t fill him as he thought it should. It didn’t saturate his mind and will the way a living God deserves.

He wrote a book called An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith, which begins with an Augustine-style proof from the degrees of perfection. Some things in the world are more perfect than others; a horse’s nature is better than a tree’s, in one example Anselm gave, but human nature is better than a horse’s. These degrees make sense only if at the top of the scale there is a most perfect God. Adducing other familiar proofs, he further reasoned that this God is uncaused and the source of every other thing’s existence. But these didn’t satisfy him—too worldly and piecemeal, unequal to what he believed must be the simplicity and elegance of the supreme being. “I began to wonder,” he recalled, “if perhaps it might be possible to find one single argument that for its proof required no other save itself.”² The problem nagged at him and wouldn’t let go. He lost the desire to eat, to drink, and to sleep. Worst of all, as he would piously tell his biographer Eadmer, it distracted his attention from prayers.

Yet it was during Matins, while the monks’ voices mingled with darkness, that Anselm’s rupture of insight finally came. Recounted Eadmer, “The grace of God shone on his heart, the whole matter became clear to his mind, and a great joy and jubilation filled his inmost being.”³ This grace may have been in the form of a proof, but it entered into his world like a trance.

His idea, and his way of explaining it, would blow through the schools where monks studied and debated over their hand-copied texts. There had been arguments for the existence of God circulating before, but this was something new. It was simple and puzzling and ecstatic. If Anselm was right, no longer would proof be an affront to humility or a substitute for faith; it would be their fulfillment.

Anselm proceeded to record his discovery in a short treatise. He called it Fides Quaerens Intellectum—Faith in Search of Understanding. It was a phrase found in Christian literature since antiquity. But for Anselm, the words aren’t quite right. More than searching for it, he craved understanding. He pined for it.

After this second work was completed in 1078, however, he changed the names of both his books. The first he called Monologion, meaning “monologue” or “soliloquy.” The second became the Proslogion, meaning “discourse” or “discussion.” It was not just Anselm speaking now; God had entered the conversation.

∴

The house I grew up in had a monastic character. In a neighborhood full of ramblers, it was the lone modernist cube. My mother loves that kind of architecture, so it’s what she got: yellow-brick walls inside and out, enormous panes of south-facing glass, and a leaky flat roof, full of skylights. The interior, though, was more my father’s doing: antiques, as many medieval ones as he could afford. Most of the furniture was made of dark wood, standing against the light walls of the house. There were a few uncomfortable black thrones. In one corner, on a tall, columned base, stood an old statue of Christ victorious, with the paint long gone, arms missing, and wounds in the feet. Basically, I spent my childhood in a museum. When I go back home now and step through that door, I whisper to myself the name I’ve given it: the House of Great Silence.

Frank Lloyd Wright, my mother’s architectural hero, used to design clothes for the people—the women, at least—who lived in his houses. In a house so carefully and consciously made, you’re not just living there. You’re part of a work of art that serves the higher purpose of the whole.

The house was big enough that we could all be there and not really notice one another’s presence. This happened a lot—one person per floor, each going about what we were doing, more or less quietly. In the back was a woods, with a little stream that led to a bigger one, which led to the Potomac River. We were right under a flight path, but when you grow up with the sound of airplanes, you learn to tune it out.

The house became especially quiet, and especially monastic, when my father moved out, taking many of his antiques with him. Thus stripped, it was my mother’s ship, the vessel of her salvation. Like Anselm, she would wake up early in the morning to meditate. The peace and order and abundant light of the house was what she wanted. And it was there and then, in the House of Great Silence, that the urges in me began calling for a decision, for my own assent.

That’s a heavy word, assent. It’s a bit like “belief” but thicker, more demanding. It’s social, and it’s volitional. Assent is what belief looks like in the flesh—the intertwining of person and proposition, when the two become inseparable. Decisions shape beliefs and beliefs make decisions.

The idea of going to an actual monastery came to me during the last months of high school. My mother had recently been on a retreat at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, at the suggestion of the wife of my father’s business partner. Though anything but a Catholic herself, Mom enjoyed the silence of the place and hinted that maybe I should go sometime too. The idea didn’t make much sense to me until some weeks later—I think it was in the shower—when it suddenly, momentously, did. For the past year or so I had been reading my way around religion without clear reasons how or why, and here was an opportunity to test that curiosity on experience. I think it is an interesting place to put myself, I wrote in my journal, an interesting context to throw myself into and see what happens. The timing worked out well. In the last months of senior year, my school gave us the chance to do an independent study project, and I decided to do mine at Holy Cross.

The monastic life isn’t for everyone, least of all an unbaptized teenager. You can’t just slip in. I called up the abbot, Father Robert, told him about my idea, and he allowed me to come for a meeting. In all, I had to make the hour-and-a-half drive west three times for interviews with different monks. Each questioned me about my reasons and my motives. One steely old monk in particular thought that it was a terrible idea, and he made sure I knew it—I didn’t have the maturity, and I didn’t know what I was getting into. But finally they agreed to even more than I had hoped for: a two-week stay, and not even in the guest house but in a cloistered cell, living, working, and praying as they do. By that time, I had fallen permanently in love with the place, set on hilly green pastures, studded with jagged outcroppings. The Shenandoah River runs along one side of the property, and the Blue Ridge Mountains stand just beyond.

Back home, waiting for the project to begin, my reading and thinking intensified. I wrote, still sorting out the meanings of the words, I want to know who I am with respect to the monastery, to the discipline, and perhaps to God. I read The Seven Storey Mountain, the early memoir of Thomas Merton. He was a Catholic convert, monk, artist, and activist—and an extraordinary writer. Later in life, when he discovered sixties radical politics and Eastern mysticism, and fell in love with a woman, that book made him cringe. It does a little for me now. How could anyone think that the monastery would wipe away one’s doubts and passions, once and for all? How could I? But at the time, his certainty and self-denial had me in a thrall. Merton became my patron saint.

I enlisted everything around me in my preparation, which became ever more haphazard and frantic. I summoned the resources of calculus, seemingly the closest among my classes in school to the transcendent: God is the conception of the infinite in things, I mused a few days before leaving for the abbey, imagining some exalted integral of integrals. I alternated between reading my mother’s books on Eastern meditation and whatever I could find from the Western mystics. It was a relief to discover how much they had in common. The Eastern practices of self-emptying and self-discovery my mother had been exploring had counterparts in the West too, forgotten in most ordinary synagogues and churches but remembered in the monasteries, where my father’s antiques would have fit in nicely. It helped that in Catholicism divorce doesn’t exist.

∴

Holy Cross belongs to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance—the Trappists. It follows much the same code of life as Anselm did at Bec, set out in the sixth century by Benedict of Nursia. The monks live in an eternal return of manual labor and study, punctuated every few hours by prayer together, beginning at 3:30 in the morning, and ending, in midsummer, a little before sunset.

When I first arrived, the sound of monks chanting psalms in unadorned unison terrified me. Their words—calling on God with praise and for help and for deliverance from enemies—only brought into relief what these monks believed and I did not. The men clothed in white habit and black scapular, nearly all gray-haired and wrinkled, loomed over me in the dark choir like shadows, like ghosts, until one showed me a passing, understanding smile. I felt that I needed to know what they knew, which meant learning to believe what they believed.

At Holy Cross, the cottage industry is a fruitcake factory. On a given day I would decorate cakes with red and green cherries, or sift through the yellow raisins for seeds, or spray brandy on top. (The monks cracked up when they gave me the brandy job, since I was still under drinking age.) Afterward we would mop. With the young Merton in mind, I chased opportunities to exercise my humility and obedience, to give myself over to the work, to the community, and through it to the will of their God. I sat in the church on my own for hours waiting for an invisible presence to arrive through the body on the crucifix, curled in literal anguish, hanging in front of a rough-hewn stone sculpture of the Virgin Mother presenting her child. But mainly what I noticed was the ticking clock over the door. I spent too much time reading, consuming book after spiritual book, hoping one or the next would finally tell me what I was doing there. Each lit me up somehow but usually at cross-purposes with the others.

Monasteries are not places for lofty philosophy; in their extraordinary way, they’re built for ordinary life. Monastic thought and literature dwell in the practical matters of prayer, liturgy, community, and sanity, in tune with the silence and monotony. Anselm was unusual among monastic authors for his metaphysical speculation, which was usually the work of scholastics in the cities. Still, his ideas came ensconced in the routine of psalms and contemplation. They were tailored for that life. And that life, in itself, is a living proof; nothing makes sense in the monastery if God doesn’t exist.

One of the monks assumed watch over me while I was there, Brother Benedict.⁴ Before taking his vows, Benedict had lived a busy life in the world, having worked on a Mississippi riverboat, as an archivist at the New York Public Library, and as editor for the collected works of George Balanchine. He knew great writers and artists, and he had been married. Each day, he would leave a stack of books for me outside the door of my room with a kind note, but he never seemed to be trying to persuade me of anything in particular. I knew I could come to him with my questions. He had been through plenty of his own, though his slight, collected bearing belied it. As I talked and talked half-aimlessly, his eyes followed me through the oversized bifocals that hung above his white beard. I tried to tell him about my fears and doubts and worries there, and how confused I’d been feeling. That’s when something he said changed everything.

“Well, of course, Nathan,” Benedict told me. “We all doubt. We question.”

It was that simple: the idea that their faith is a process, not a possession. A way of living. The monastery, says St. Benedict’s Rule, is to be “a school for the Lord’s service”—for “beginners,” it says, not saints. “As we progress in this way of life and in faith,” it promises, “we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”⁵ A path. A faith that you don’t take for granted. You mold yourself for it, patiently, with hope and love. The barrier between the monks and me began to dissolve. Their prayers, anyway, had already been finding their way into my sleep after Compline.

The monks sang not just out of certainty, but out of desire. They were living out a relationship, with Jesus among them as a brother, God their father, and Mary the mother of all. It was a family I could belong to, to strengthen me for my family at home. I continued torturing myself with books and unanswered prayers, but I wasn’t alone in it now. Chanting in the choir or working in the bakery, we were building our proofs together. There are moments when I really believe I could love this God, I wrote.

Another week passed, and it was time to get in my car and go home. I was ready. All the thinking and reading had taken a toll. I wanted to drive back fast and see my friends, so I put Bob Dylan’s Desire in the CD player, and that’s what I did. The image that sticks with me, though, is of looking in the rearview mirror at the long road through the abbey’s fields, back to the buildings in the distance that were already blending in with the mountains. No matter what other songs might play over them, those prayers would keep ringing in my head.

∴

Anselm originally sketched his beloved proof in only a few short pages. He begins with a psalm, the verse that opens Psalm 14: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” (It’s also in Psalm 54, and Augustine used it in his proof as well.) So what is it that makes this fool, as the Bible says, a fool? Everyone can agree, Anselm explains, that “God” means “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.”⁶ People disagree only about whether the God they’re talking about actually exists.

This difference, says Anselm, makes all the difference: the unbelieving fool’s concept of God has a problem. A God who exists out there in reality, and not just in the mind, is greater than one who is just a concept. An existing God has to be better than a nonexisting one, Anselm thinks. To claim that God doesn’t exist, therefore, contradicts the very concept of God we’re talking about—again, the “being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Nothing is better than this God, as a rule, and that’s why the fool is a fool. His God is a contradiction. The moment you really grasp the idea of God in your mind, you have proof that God is real.

This simple idea did for Anselm exactly what he hoped it would. In a single stroke, it declared that the God of his faith and hope, the sum of all perfection, has to exist. Knowing what God is, then, becomes the same as knowing that God is. God’s nature and existence are the same. There could be no more fitting proof for the one, true God whose self-disclosure to Moses was in the words “I AM THAT I AM.”⁷

Usually, when I describe this to people for the first time, they give me a sour look, like I’ve got to be kidding. There were those in Anselm’s time, too, who weren’t buying it. Soon after copies of the Proslogion began circulating, a fellow monk named Gaunilo composed an objection.

Twice his age, and with a soberer cast of mind, Gaunilo believed in God no less than Anselm did; what he didn’t like was Anselm’s reasoning. Their exchange was a considerate one, between two monks with a common cause and a common faith. Gaunilo chose a playful title for his essay: “On Behalf of the Fool”—the same fool of Psalm 14.

The essence of the critique is simple: just because something seems like it should exist doesn’t mean that it actually does, out there in the world. He gives an example to illustrate. Say we’re told of an island—another island!—out in the ocean, so far away that it can’t be reached. That’s a shame, because there’s no island more perfect than this one. It has bounty and wealth undisturbed by people. Gaunilo then claims that, according to Anselm’s logic, this island really exists. It must, right? If it didn’t, we could think of an island just as excellent that did exist, and it would be better. But nobody is going to claim that such an island, or what-have-you, is really out there. How, then, could the same kind of reasoning be a trustworthy proof for God’s existence? Thus Gaunilo builds a reductio ad absurdum—the whole thing collapses in absurdity.

Nothing Gaunilo wrote could make Anselm back down or lose confidence in his first flash of insight at Matins. He was so confident, in fact, that he circulated the critique together with his own reply. The reply clarifies a subtler part of the proof in the Proslogion, which Gaunilo, and others since him, overlooked.⁸ See if this helps.

God, Anselm explains, is not in the same class as an enchanted island. The single thing “than which nothing greater can be conceived” must be always and everywhere, with no possibility of not existing. Everything depends on it. As the height of perfection, it’s the measure against which we judge the good in all else. As things in the world come and go, it’s the steady ground beneath them. It’s not simply, as Gaunilo wrote, something “greater than all other beings,” much less other islands; an island may be paradise, but it is still only an island, and greater things than that can be conceived. God, on the other hand, is uniquely unsurpassable. No other thing could qualify. “You alone, then,” he prays, “of all things most truly exist and therefore of all things possess existence to the highest degree.”⁹ Gaunilo was out of his depth.

Anselm didn’t know it, but he had precursors in this kind of thinking. Recall, for instance, that Ibn Sina wrote of that which exists necessarily, by virtue of itself. Abu Nasr al-Farabi, a tenth-century Turk, came especially close to Anselm’s phrasing when he described “a perfect being nothing more perfect than which can exist.” “It is not possible to conceive,” al-Farabi added elsewhere, “a being more complete than his being; a reality greater than his reality; or a unity greater than his unity.”¹⁰

Anselm had no access to the writings of his Muslim counterparts. Their only common denominator was the Greek heritage, but even the Greeks were still largely missing from Anselm’s world. There may have been a copy of the Timaeus at Bec, though little else even of Plato. It was from Augustine, mainly, that Anselm got the Platonic themes that show up in his proof. Against the advice of Lanfranc and the convention of the time, however, he refused to pepper his treatises with quotations from earlier authors. Like so many others who work in the genre of proof, he felt the anxiety of influence. How can one claim to speak for pure reason while relying on the authority of those who came before?

What’s striking about Anselm’s proof, even more than the motions of its logic, is how he describes it. Doing justice to what he had discovered by the grace of God meant inventing a literary device. The Proslogion mixes treatise and devotion, reason and emotion. It takes the form of a prayer—or a letter, as if to a friend. Thinking and feeling meet, the basic ingredients of assent.

In Anselm’s world, letter writing bridged distances and soothed absences. An informal postal system of couriers carried letters, inscribed on rolls of parchment, between the monasteries.¹¹ When a new batch arrived, someone would read what was in it out loud to the whole community. Letters, whether bearing a greeting or a matter of contention, were public documents in private form. The more intimate one sounded, the better the show.

Until he eventually succeeded Lanfranc as archbishop of Canterbury in Britain, monastic discipline kept Anselm at Bec. Letters were his contact with the outside world. Most of the early works we have from him are letters and prayers, written for the far-flung monks and noblewomen who asked for his advice or blessing.¹² Even while expounding on theological ideas, these are drenched with feeling and imagery, anticipating the worldly, romantic passions of the troubadour poets who were then coming on the scene. They were widely copied and circulated.

Anselm thought, as Plato did, that friendship could be an ecstatic, salvific undertaking. His passion in letters to friends is so palpable, and so unusual for its time, that modern interpreters have wondered whether his relations with other monks were actually celibate.¹³ Take, for instance, this passage from a letter to another monk named Gundulf.

When I sit down to write to you, oh soul most dear to my soul, when I sit down to write to you, I am uncertain how best to begin what I have to say. Everything I feel about you is sweet and pleasant to my heart; whatever I desire for you is the best that my mind can conceive.¹⁴

There it is: a variant of the central formula of his proof—“the best that my mind can conceive”—appearing, years earlier, as a token of affection. In turn, the kind of language he uses in friendship turns up in prayers and treatises. Anselm felt his God, like his friends, more as absence than presence. Addressed to the silence of the mind, his proof answers much the same longing as the letters; it insists that all along, though unseen, God is with him. In the first chapter of the Proslogion he writes, “Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to find You. Lord, if You are not present here, where, since You are absent, shall I look for you?” And with the proof, he says in the book’s last chapter, “I have discovered a joy that is complete and more than complete”—from absence to presence, from longing to consummation.

Anselm’s proof “is mysterious,” wrote the French Jewish-and-almost-Catholic mystic Simone Weil, “because it doesn’t address itself to the intelligence, but to love.”¹⁵ Like love, you’ve got to sit with it, and also struggle.

Even in his worst despair, Anselm gives no indication that he ever actually doubted the existence of his God. It was God’s silence, not nonexistence, that troubled him. “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe,” he writes, “but I believe so that I may understand.”¹⁶ The proof was that understanding. He saw a glimpse of God, more clearly than he ever had before. It was a taste of the eschaton, the final condition that souls striving for blessedness will one day reach. Proof meant certainty, assurance, and ammunition for persuading others, sure. But before those, Anselm was simply grasping at his God, and that grasping led him to joy.

∴

The difference between what I had come to know in the monastery and the Catholicism I found going to churches afterward was a shock. At the monastery there had been quiet, study, and simple work. In the churches, though, I found the remnants of an organization built to shepherd certain immigrant communities into the American middle class. There were Knights of Columbus in faux-military uniforms, sermons that dealt more with football than with the gospel, and pews filled with people who could barely leave their busyness at the door. If nothing made sense without God at the monastery, outside, God seemed superfluous. Or worse.

In my first semester of college that fall, in one of our many long, wrenching conversations late at night in a dorm lounge, a friend tried to tell me that my interest in Catholicism was an insult to him, as a Jew. He was also gay, and he thought maybe I was trying to repress the fact that I was too. I wondered whether he could be right—though the agonizing records I kept on various efforts to manage and temper my desires suggested otherwise. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe’s revelations of sexual abuse by priests had started an ever-worsening chain reaction around the country. None of this had been a problem at the monastery. I was dealing with all the anxieties and hang-ups basically common to eighteen-year-olds, all of a sudden amplified by the ancient anxieties and hang-ups of an ascetic, legalistic religion.

Sexuality is always somewhere in the background with proofs but always in a way that belies exactly how. Proofs never mention it. They don’t need to; that’s the point. The proofs supposedly begin where extrarational forces and urges end. The proof claims, I’m more than that, I’m better than that. I’m more sensible than the sensual. It’s a claim to a certain dignity over undignified flesh, the promise of some clarity, at last, beyond fleshy confusion.

In those days, the whole color of life could turn from one shade to another in a matter of hours; I went to sleep each night hoping—and, increasingly, praying—that I wouldn’t wake up depressed. College freshmen usually have some sorting out to do about who and what they are, but the urge for reinvention was especially strong in me. Alongside my course in Islam that first semester, and my visits to every religious service I could find, I was taking formal logic in the philosophy department, multivariable calculus in math, and introductory fiction writing. It amounted to a lot of ways of thinking at once. At night, as I tried to sleep, stories blended with doctrines, then morphed into theorems.

Though I remember that period like forever, I wasn’t on campus very long before some clarity began to arrive. An ad in the school paper led me, on the last Sunday night in September, to a small meeting in an upper room, above an arch. With me were a few others interested in making their way into the Catholic Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, or RCIA. (I had been legally an adult for only a month.) The grandfather clock in the corner of the room was stuck at the eleventh hour, and that seemed a mighty sign. I think I might do it, I might actually do it, I scribbled that night after getting back to my room.

Father Bodah, the Catholic chaplain, led the discussion. As he often did at these meetings, he was probably wearing his black clerical shirt and collar with a dull blue fleece half buttoned up over it. His goatee was dark, though speckled with gray, on a slim, pensive face beneath a pair of glasses. While he spoke, with a voice as possessed of its doctrine as of old novels and dry ecclesial jokes, I wished he would never stop. There was none of the condescending enthusiasm one might expect from a campus chaplain; the very grammar of his sentences declared their seriousness, as did his melancholy. In that room, with each story and each Latin motto that his terrific memory produced, the whole universe settled into itself, and so too did the assent I was moving toward.

Brother Benedict would help me phrase my questions, but Father Bodah could answer them. He would quote Cardinal Newman: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” We marched through the difficulties, one at a time, to solutions that were elegant, intricate, and satisfying. With him I first encountered the Catholic systematic imagination that is the legacy of Thomas Aquinas.

∴

Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, the enormous treatise he labored over for the last decade of his life, is composed entirely of short articles, arranged like bricks. Each makes only a single point, building on the points of articles preceding it, always following the same structure:

1 A question is stated.

2 Several possible answers follow, which Aquinas doesn’t accept; they might be arguments made by his contemporaries or misunderstandings of scripture.

3 He gives his answer and arguments to support it.

4 One by one comes a reply to each of the objections stated in (2)—then on to the next article.

Together, these bricks make an imposing wall. One at a time, every question Aquinas could think of finds an answer, and each answer has a spot in the system—exhaustive, exhausting, mesmerizing.

Two hundred years had passed since Anselm. The thirteenth century was a momentous time for trying to figure out the universe; ancient wisdom was back. Through crusades in the Holy Land and Muslim neighbors in Spain, Christian Europe discovered the Greek learning preserved by Islamic and Byzantine libraries, especially the works of Aristotle. Latin translations from Arabic, and then from the original Greek, began in the previous century. With the ancient texts, too, came translations of the Arabic commentaries by Muslims and Jews. The commentators’ Latinized names—Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and Maimonides among them—were bywords for authority and controversy alongside that of “the Philosopher,” Aristotle. He was, as Dante would soon put it, “the master of those who know.”¹⁷ A revolution was under way, and Thomas Aquinas, a young student from Sicily who was newly professed in the Dominican order, couldn’t have been better poised to take part.

Aquinas’s world didn’t welcome the revolution with open arms. In 1215 Aristotle’s speculative works had been banned for fear of a threat to orthodox theology. Theories from Muslim Aristotelians about the eternity of the universe and the oneness of all minds circulated among scholars and students, showing Europe’s bishops how real the threat could be. But the spread of Aristotle’s books was impossible to stop; by midcentury they were everywhere. In order to control the Aristotelian tide, new professorships were created for scholars from the Dominican and Franciscan orders, which Rome felt could be trusted to sift through the material with allegiance to right belief. Aquinas’s work was always under suspicion of heresy during his lifetime. Studying Aristotle meant playing with fire.

Together with his teacher, Albert the Great, Aquinas argued hard against those who would dismiss the new ideas entirely. They adjured their church and their society not to fear the advance of knowledge, that God had made this universe a reasonable one. But they weren’t afraid to correct Aristotle when he appeared to be in error.

Aquinas was said to live perpetually in intense thought. At a royal banquet in 1269, he was so lost in contemplation that he didn’t notice when the king was speaking to him. He could dictate to his secretaries even while sleeping. Meanwhile, he ascended to the heights of magical mysticism. Tears streamed down his face as he said morning mass. While thinking through difficult problems, he prayed to talking crucifixes and levitated off the floor. He poured all these energies, mental and mystical, into amassing the fullest synthesis of Christian doctrine and philosophy ever created. But following a stroke near the end of his life he saw a vision so powerful that he stopped working and went around telling people, “All that I have written seems like straw.”¹⁸ Few found this convincing, of course; rarely has an author been taken quite so seriously as Aquinas.