Apophatic wonder ... or why I want to share a beer with Aquinas

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven … and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Corinthians 12:1, 4)

‘The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’

These words—and their source—should make me stop in my tracks, shut down my computer and never write another word. They were uttered nearly 750 years ago by Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest mind of his or almost any age.

He had written commentaries on Scripture, Aristotle and other philosophers, produced his own philosophical works, addressed a host of disputed theological subjects and was deep in the process of producing his Summa Theologiae, his great work of systematic theology, writing at a furious pace.

But he never finished it. He stopped, December 6, 1273, put his pens in a drawer and never took them out again.

And why? Because at mass he had seen or felt or experienced something so great, so transcendent that he looked upon the 100 or so works he’d produced and judged them as so much straw, worthy of being cast in the fire, even though his works influence Christian theological thought in significant ways to this day.

I have no idea what … exactly … he saw, nor do I understand most of what he wrote. He is beyond me. But I do not for a moment imagine that his experience is different in kind, only in degree, from the apophatic wonder that graces the souls of millions who have known the immensity of a great love filling them with the Wonder who transcends all thought, language and human capacity for understanding.

Apophatic wonder is a knowing that goes beyond all thought and sensation, beyond light and limits, beyond darkness and brilliance, beyond sight and seeing, yet as real as the tears in your eyes and the fullness of Being within your own being.

I had not thought about Aquinas in years until this past week while viewing Facebook videos sent to me from several sources. I watched what I could stomach from several well-known speakers, men who have sold millions of books to Christians around the country and the world.

But I soon stopped because I was struck by the nauseating marriage of arrogance and self-congratulatory narcissism that characterized the speakers, so terribly pleased with themselves as they blithely dismissed the ‘benighted’ positions of other Christians whose understandings differed from their own. It was the kind of preening display that makes those outside the church rightly recoil in disgust.

Entirely missing was any shred of humility about themselves and the human incapacity to grasp divine mystery. I could discern nothing of the grace that touched Aquinas on that December day, to say nothing of poorer souls and weaker minds like mine, who have seen and felt and known the Wonder whom language cannot capture and before whom all thought falters and falls silent into a truer worship.

St. Paul said he considered everything else in his life as crap (I am cleaning up Paul’s actual word), compared to knowing Christ. His accomplishments, his reputation, his learning—all of this was mere waste, he wrote, compared with deep, mystical knowledge of God in Christ.

He had no words for what happened to him when he was caught up in the ‘third heaven.’ All he really knew was that he had known God revealed in the depth of his own being. After that, nothing else much mattered except knowing this One, this Wonder, this Love who strips away all our pride and presumption and fills us with gratitude for life and love and every good gift of God’s own giving that graces our existence.

And lest you imagine this is all beyond you, really, who has not been knocked out of their apathy by the beauty of creation, the wonder of loving and being loved, the grace and gift of waking up alive in this world and wondering, how is it that I am, that I am alive, here and now? Who has not had the experience of feeling thankful, not for any particular reason but … just because?

Apophatic wonder, a holy gift, a knowing beyond all knowing of the Love who is beyond everything we can imagine, yet right here and now, making every word of mine feel like ‘so much straw.’

But I take joy in my failed attempts to name the Unnameable and look forward to sharing a beer with Aquinas. We have things to talk about.

David L. Miller