A Reply to Michèle Mulchahey Regarding My Book on the Sermons of Aquinas
/By Randall B. Smith, University of St. Thomas, Texas
It is always flattering to think that someone might have actually read your book. Whether the person liked it or not, he or she at least did you the honor of actually reading the book. And when the person who read the book is a scholar one admires highly and from whose work one has benefitted immensely, it is even more humbling.
As I was searching for something else the other day on a university library search engine, I happened upon an entry to a review of my book Reading the Sermons of Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Emmaus, 2016) in The Thomist. At first, I had that confusion that sometimes accompanies searches on library web sites: I thought it was my book. But then I noticed it was an article. Was that my article on Thomas’s sermons in The Thomist? Wait, no. It says the author is Michèle Mulchahey. Oh, it’s a review of my book that appeared in the 2019 edition of The Thomist. How did I miss this? Since the editors of The Thomist, --- superb fellows in their own right, by the way --- do not publish replies to reviews (and I understand the principle as a general rule), I have decided to print a reply on-line in a place where Thomists might be able to find it, the invaluable Thomistica.net.
Michèle Mulchahey’s 1998 book “First the bow is bent in study”: Dominican education before 1350 published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies remains an absolutely invaluable guide, is one of those scholars whose work is of the highest quality; there is no question. Which is why it pains me to have to write to disagree in certain respects with her review of my book. She says some nice things about the book, and for this, I am grateful. It may seem churlish and ungrateful to disagree with the criticisms she mounts. “Shall we accept good from reviewers and not trouble?” The book is far from perfect. It has its faults and in many respects shares the oddities, limitations, and idiosyncrasies of its author. And yet, one can be well aware of the faults of one’s child (or book) and still wish to defend him or her against criticisms one considers unfitting or unfair. “Okay, he may not be great at math, but he’s not stupid!”
So what are the problems in the book? Well, I have my own ideas (see below), but let’s set them aside for the moment. Right now, I am concerned with Prof. Mulchahey’s criticisms about the scholarship of the book. If I were to summarize those criticisms, they seem to boil down to these six. First, the book suffers because I keep importing my own “preconceptions” about what a sermon should be into the discussion of Thomas’s sermons. Second, there are numerous problems in my use of Thomas’s Latin texts. Third, I misunderstand what a collatio is. Fourth, I am wrong to make the claim that Thomas “ran short on time” when he cut off the last point in a sermon because this could be explained by the manuscript being cut short. Fifth, I say that Thomas didn’t use exempla, but Prof. Mulchahey says that’s foolish because he did use some stories about St. Martin of Tours once. And sixth, Prof. Mulchahey thinks my comment that Thomas was engaging in a bit of humor when he compared the chair of the Magister (the university teacher) with the cross of Christ is foolish and yet another example of shoddy scholarship. Allow me to say something about each of these in turn.
The First Criticism
As to the first, the criticism that “the author has a tendency throughout to try to defend Aquinas with respect to his own preconceptions and preaching preferences, which he assumes his readers share,” when “the book would have been much better if Aquinas’s sermon texts had simply been presented and described … rather than the repeated refrain of how Aquinas confounds the expectations of someone who is used to more modern, more 'biblical' preaching" --- this is strange. They aren’t exactly just my preconceptions. I take it that anyone who has read a sermo modernus-style sermon for the first time finds the style more than a little odd. Using the opening biblical verse as a mnemonic device with which to structure the parts of the sermon is not exactly a common practice, nor has it been a common practice for over four hundred years. It’s not my “preconceptions and preaching preferences” I was worried about. It was preconceptions I knew most of my readers would bring, especially any who might be Protestant. One of the anonymous reviewers of the book had a similar complaint. “Why all this concern about whether Thomas is making an appropriate use of the Bible?” I don’t know whether that reviewer has many Protestant friends, but I do, and I know what a dim view they would be likely to take of the way Thomas used the Bible in these sermons.
But then again, I didn’t have to guess about the Protestant reaction, because I have an entire chapter devoted to the criticisms of the sermo modernus-style by Anglican scholar Charles Smyth who makes exactly these criticisms of the medieval preacher’s use of the Bible. Here is how I begin chapter 5, “Evaluating the Sermo Modernus Style” in a sub-section titled “The Sermo Modernus: Decadent, Pedantic, Mechanical, Ugly, and Misuse of the Bible?”
The sermo modernus style — the style Thomas adopts as his own — is likely to seem strange to many modern readers. Indeed, it may even strike some as not only alien, but perhaps a bit pedantic and more than a little questionable in the way it incorporates Scripture into the sermon. So, for example, we find the Anglican scholar Charles Smyth in his exhaustive survey of the history of preaching entitled The Art of Preaching at first suggesting about the sermo modernus that “upon the very face of it this elaborate pedantry of form bears the ugly stamp of decadence.”… Some years earlier, moreover, we find the Sorbonne medievalist Charles Victor Langlois concluding his study of “sacred eloquence in the Middle Ages” claiming that, with the elaborate rules for sermon-making that arose in the thirteenth century with the sermo modernus, “the era of artistic composition” was supplanted by one “of industrial manufacture.” Indeed, even the famous French medievalist Thomas-Marie Charland, author of the monumental (and in many ways still unsurpassed) study of medieval preaching, Artes praedicandi : Contribution à l'histoire de la rhétorique au moyen age, warns his readers that: “We have to arm ourselves with patience to get to the end of this exposé of the rules of university preaching in the Middle Ages... The reader will not have arrived to the end before concluding: il fallait savoir prodigieusement pour prêcher si mal” (it was necessary to know a lot to preach so badly). Judgments such as these are likely to be shared by any number of contemporary readers as well.
In the next paragraph, I wrote this:
Let me admit up front that in composing this chapter, I had forefront in my mind a particular set of criticisms about Thomas’s use of the Bible. “Ah yes,” I could hear my Protestant friends say, “your book merely confirms my suspicion that medieval theologians such as Aquinas didn’t really theologize biblically, and what’s worse, they didn’t really preach the Bible.” I wanted to defend Aquinas against that potential (and what I saw as very likely) accusation. It’s one I’ve heard not only from my Protestant friends, but from some Catholics as well.
Indeed, the first question I always get when I give a talk on Aquinas’s sermons is the same one posed to me several years ago by the auxiliary bishop of the Netherlands — the nicest guy in the world, by the way — who said he was delighted by my talk but wondered whether there was anything in Thomas’s sermons that could benefit modern Catholic preachers. I got the question so often I decided to write an article about it.[1] It might not be a question that interests Prof. Mulchahey, but it interests a lot of other people.
Indeed, I have been gratified by the response of the Aquinas scholars in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America who have embraced this scholarship precisely because they are interested in showing people how and why Thomas should be considered a “biblical theologian.” In this regard, may I recommend the essays in Towards a Biblical Thomism: Thomas Aquinas and the Renewal of Biblical Theology, ed. P. Roszak and J. Vijgen (Navarre, Spain: Eunsa, 2018) and Thomas Aquinas, Biblical Theologian, ed. Roger Nutt and Michael Dauphinais (Emmaus Academic, 2021). Both are invaluable volumes. So let’s be clear about these “preconceptions”: I didn’t “assume” my readers shared them, I had bountiful evidence.
And as for my “preaching preferences,” I wrote an entire book on Thomas’s sermons, defending them against every criticism. I’ve published articles in several places on them. I’ve lectured repeatedly on them in an attempt to get people to appreciate and enjoy the style. In my second book, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture of Medieval Paris (Cambridge, 2021), I spend even more time describing the importance of understanding the sermo modernus style with extended attention to the preaching of Aquinas and Bonaventure. I am now finishing another book for Cambridge University Press on Bonaventure’s use of the sermo modernus-style in the Itinerarium. My translation of Bonaventure’s sermo modernus inception address at the University of Paris will appear in the next issue of Franciscan Studies. Of all the things that might be said about me, the charge that my “preaching preferences” don’t include sermo modernus-style preaching would have seemed to me the last thing a person would say. More likely it would be: “That guy is kind of fanatic about those weird sermons.”
Second Criticism
As to the second criticism, “the author’s handling of the Latin” — an “issue that looms large” and “very much” goes “to the quality of the scholarship” — this is a tricky issue. I determined at the beginning to use the very capable English translations of the sermons by Fr. Mark-Robin Hoogland available through Catholic University of America Press. Why? Because I wanted people to read them! As I wrote in my Introduction to the book, I wanted people to buy that translation (I was not going to try to publish my own with some other press) and have the translation of the sermons open next to my book.
The goal of my book was simple: Get people to go read Thomas’s sermons! I told readers in the Introduction of the book that, once they had gotten the resources to read the sermons, drop my book and go read them. For many people, that might mean reading only chapter 1. Once readers get a sense of how the opening thema structures the entire sermon, then they can pretty much sally forth on their own, perhaps referring to the Appendix at the back of the book where I provide outlines of every sermon in order to see which ones they might like to start with. For those who want to know more about the nuts-and-bolts of how these sermons are made, I provide several more chapters describing all that and one whole chapter defending Thomas as a “biblical theologian” (for which I am not disposed to apologize).
Okay, but you have to get the Latin right, that’s certainly true. And I couldn’t agree more. But I remain puzzled. “The first challenge for anyone who would write a guide for English-speaking beginners,” writes Prof. Mulchahey, “is to decide how to make the Latin texts accessible.” Yes, absolutely. I struggled with that question throughout. “Simply translating the sermons (as others have discovered) is not the solution,” writes Mulchahey, “as much of the textual and exegetical process, if not to say prowess, of the sermo modernus is based on an exposition of a Latin line from Scripture in which wordplay within the Latin figures prominently, whether in the form of additional texts, biblical or otherwise, that are adduced because they concord verbally with a key Latin word; or in the form of puns that work only in the Latin and layers of meaning that simply will not translate.” Yes, I make that point repeatedly. So the problem is?
Smith has opted for a hybrid solution, relying for the most part on Mark-Robin Hoogland’s English translations of the sermons, but preserving the Latin of the themata, principal divisions, and concorded texts, which are then rendered macaronically[2] in English for the reader’s benefit. A first difficulty this decision creates is evident immediately when the author in his Introduction confronts some of the basic divergences between what we now have in the critical Latin edition produced by the Leonine Commission and Hoogland’s translations.
So, I noted that there were differences between the two (for those who go in for that sort of thing), and I went on. Is the problem that I noted the differences or that I used Hoogland’s translation? If the latter, then the problem would be Hoogland’s handling of the Latin, not mine. But I am not about to throw Hoogland under the bus. I checked his Latin for every sermon, and I found his translations to be excellent. There are always differences about how translations should be done — more “literal” or more “dynamic” — but Hoogland’s were the best I found. So, if I may, let me plug his book again. If you haven’t already, get a copy today of Mark-Robin Hoogland, The Academic Sermons, The Fathers of the Church, Mediaeval Continuation, vol. 11 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010). There should be a dog-eared copy on every shelf.
Although Hoogland’s translation did not line up exactly with the Leonine edition in its final version, Fr. Hoogland had early copies of Fr. Bataillon’s work, because Bataillon was very generous and spread his edition around liberally. I myself had an early copy ten or twelve years before the Leonine edition came out, but I was under strict orders not to publish anything on it until the official Leonine version appeared. Fr. Hoogland obviously decided not to wait — thank God. When I saw his translation, I decided not to wait either.
Now, it’s true, once you’re decided to use a certain translation, you are for the most part locked into it, and it both helps and restrains what you can do. There are also issues that can come up with the Latin text of the Vulgate — which version was the author using? — and with considerations of whether the author was quoting from memory (which medieval authors did quite frequently) or copying out the text from the Bible the way many of us in the modern world do. My way of dealing with this problem was to supply, “macaronically” (great word), as often as I thought the publisher would tolerate, the Latin text with the English translation, so that readers who know the Latin could read it for themselves. Did that always work perfectly? No. Did I always figure out the best way to rectify differences in translations, manuscripts, and modern editions? Who could say yes to that? Certainly not me.
My answer to these problems would be: Just read Thomas’s sermons. If you know Latin well enough, read the original Latin (if you can get your hands on a copy of the Bataillon Leonine edition, which is not easy). If you don’t read Latin or can’t afford one of those extremely expensive, limited copies of the Leonine edition, Hoogland’s translation is reliable and I for one am grateful we have it.
So much for Hoogland. If anyone thinks he or she can do better, he or she is welcome to try. “More troubling,” though, writes Prof. Mulchahey ominously, “are the author’s own numerous misrenderings and mis-readings of the Latin texts, both from Aquinas and from others.” Ouch. “Examples of gaffes large and small when dealing with the originalia could be multiplied, each one only serving to undermine further the reader’s confidence in the author’s proficiency with languages.” Well, I for one have very little, almost no confidence in the author’s proficiency with languages. And I would suggest others should be equally distrustful. Which is why I supplied the Latin text. Seeing as how I too “lack confidence in the author’s proficiency with languages” — by which I take it she meant Latin, but who knows? maybe she didn’t like my translations from French or maybe she found my English prose not up to snuff, all possibilities — but whichever she meant, when I read the comment, I thought, “Oh boy, what did I do now?”
“A typical example” (of my “numerous misrenderings and misreadings of the Latin text), writes Prof. Mulchahey, “surfaces during the author’s extended commentary on what he considers to be an odd division of a thema (Ps 83:6-7) on Aquinas’s part, which seems to fly in the face of the way Smith is used to seeing the passage construed (96-99).” I’m not exactly sure how I am supposed to have been “used to seeing the passage construed.” It’s flattering, but I don’t actually read a lot of modern Psalm commentaries. Be that as it may, here is Prof. Mulchahey’s description of the “typical example” that should serve to “undermine” the reader’s confidence in my proficiency with Latin.
The problem Smith thinks he sees is that Aquinas has ignored the parallelism between “the vale of tears” and “the place in which the blessed man is set,” and has read the passage creatively in order to make a divisio that will allow him to build a sermon around the conceit of a motion with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But that apparent problem would have evaporated if Smith had read the Latin in front of him rather than allowing himself to be swayed by the modern edition of the Vulgate (which has “in valle lacrimarum, in *loco* quem posuit”). That is to say, if he had recognized the difference between the ablative of location (in valle lacrimarum) and the accusative of motion (in locum quem posuit) in the line as Aquinas is actually quoting it, the problem ceases to exist: the first clause refers to the location in which the blessed man has made his decision to place his heart on higher things, namely, while living in this vale of tears, while the second clause refers to the destination towards which he now intends to ascend, into the place God has prepared for him, heaven. Aquinas is not reading the passage creatively; he is reading it correctly.
Though I’m sure readers are scandalized to hear that I mistook an ablative of location for an accusative of motion — how dare he? what kind of idiot would do that? — in fact, I didn’t.
Let me see whether I can summarize this quickly. Here is the thema verse for Sermon 21 as one finds it in Fr. Hoogland’s translation: “Happy is the man whose help is from you; he has set his heart on ascending while in the valley of tears, in the place which he has built.” Thomas makes a threefold division of it this way:
Happy is the man whose help” is from you /
he has set his heart on ascending while in the valley of tears /
in the place which he has built.
This is a pretty obvious threefold division. The question now is what sort of order he will decide to set up between or among the three in order to begin his dilation of each them. He opts for an order of progression. Here is his “declaration of the parts”:
On this day, St. Martin is promoted [it was a sermon on his feast day] is promoted to the highest dignity and the highest place, namely, the kingdom of the heavens. Therefore, Mother Church commemorates his happiness. Concerning this happiness, three things must be considered based on the words proclaimed [the thema verse from the Psalm]: First, we can consider the beginning of his happiness; second, the progress; and third, its endpoint.
Very literally, we have here a beginning (principium), progress, and end (finis).
What I say about the third clause is that “the ‘endpoint of his [St. Martin’s] happiness consists in gaining eternal happiness, which Thomas is able to associate with the words ‘in the place which he [namely God] has built.’” I note in the following paragraph that Thomas’s Latin text differs from the version in modern critical editions of the Vulgate, which it does. What I do then is to point out, for purposes of comparison, to give readers a sense of how flexible the sermo modernus-style can be, that, if the Psalm verse had been different, Thomas could have crafted a similar sermon for St. Martin’s feast day.
“Say, for example,” I write, “the Psalms verse had been this: ‘The man in the valley of tears who set his heart on ascending will receive help from you — a dwelling place which he has built.’ How would Thomas had divided and dilated that verse?” Well, Thomas could have set up a different order:
beginning, perhaps with a discussion of the nature of the “valley of tears,” followed by how we “set our hearts on ascending,” perhaps with a discussion of the need to turn our hearts from worldly things to heavenly things and develop the virtues, especially temperance. He might have discussed the “help” we receive from God next, and then finally the heavenly home God has in store.
After pointing all this out, I write: “I mention this as a logical possibility” — if the text of the Psalm had been different, but it wasn’t!
Then I go on to talk about the original Greek version of the Psalm as it actually appeared in the Septuagint, which had nothing to do with the alternative version that I proposed just to show how Thomas could have dilated a different version of the Psalm verse. The discussion of the Greek original in the Septuagint was to show that Thomas’s Latin version was more faithful to it than modern Vulgate editions.
So, all this business about “the problem Smith thinks he sees” the various Latin versions and the ablative of location and the accusative of motion (or was it the reverse?) is simply irrelevant. It has nothing to do with what I wrote. I don’t see a problem. I was merely trying to explain how dilation is done.
If this is a “typical” example of my shoddy scholarship, I’m feeling better. But look, don’t trust me. I would be the first to warn you about the quality of my Latin. Read the original!
Third Criticism
Okay, now to the third point, the matter of my “misunderstanding” of the collatio. Here is the claim.
The author’s discussion of the difference between sermons and collations is a case in point. While Smith does outline one meaning of the term “collatio” as an evening-time sermon delivered at the University of Paris, he does not come to grips with the real nature of the exercise or its other incarnations outside the university. It might have been worth noting, for example, that it was Aquinas’s own Dominican order that was responsible for introducing this practice at the University of Paris, and that Jordan of Saxony made the case for vespertine preaching at Paris precisely so that his friars, who were in class when the usual morning sermons were scheduled at the university, would not miss hearing the Word of God. Parisian collations were therefore conceived explicitly as a repetition of the morning’s preaching; there was a statutory requirement that whoever preached the evening collation must treat the same thema that had been preached on in the morning. Thus, for Smith to argue that Aquinas’s re-use in a companion collation of the same thema he had previously treated in a sermon is somehow evidence that Aquinas was uniquely sensitive to his audience and uniquely attuned to the possibilities of the collatio genre is problematical, when this reduplication was, in fact, something he was required to do. And all this still begs the question[3] [sic] of the other more catechetical forms of preaching that were also known as “collationes” none of which Smith ever acknowledges.
Now, I know we’re all busy, but you’re really supposed to read the book before you review it. In the section titled “Distinguishing ‘Sermons” and ‘Sermon Conferences” (xxvii-xxix), I say that one should not mistake what are called Thomas’s “collationes” on the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Hail Mary with what Fr. Hoogland calls (rightly) the collatio of the sermon. The first kind of collatio seems to have been a stand-alone presentation. The second kind of collatio was the continuation of the sermon that was begun at the morning’s mass. This, as Prof. Mulchahey rightly points out, was required by university statutes: not only that the preacher who preached the morning Mass should also preach at the evening’s Vespers service, but also that he should use the same thema verse that he used at morning Mass. Thus, the collationes on the Hail Mary, for example, are not a continuation and do not use an opening thema verse. Each of the sermons Thomas delivered at the University of Paris as official “university sermons” have a “continuation” — a collatio — delivered later in the day at Vespers that used the same thema verse. One can see that very clearly in Fr. Hoogland’s translation. I make this point repeatedly in the book. So let’s move on.
Fourth Criticism
As to the fourth point, the issue of whether Thomas may have cut himself short while he was dilating or “expanding upon” the last point in his sermon because he had run out of time, it is possible that there is some other reason. My point was that preachers were not supposed to do this. They were supposed to give equal treatment to all the points set out in their original division of the thema. Thomas almost never cuts himself short. Bonaventure, in the sermons he put together as a teaching manual of “Sunday sermons” for his fellow Franciscan brothers, never does. (See the fine translation by Timonthy J. Johnson in The Sunday Sermons of St. Bonaventure published by The Franciscan Institute, 2008.)
As for Prof. Mulchahey’s suggestion that these abrupt breaks could be explained by “manuscript problems,” it’s a stretch, but I suppose it’s possible. And yet, I assume that if the manuscript evidence had suggested such a thing, Fr. Bataillon would have noted it. Instead, we get the usual concluding material. So, for example, in my discussion of Sermon 21, I say that “Thomas seems to have run out of time at the end of the collatio … and so was not able to finish all of what he had intended to say about the endpoint of St. Martin’s happiness…. So he concluded very simply with one sentence: “So, because the saint we celebrate today has well prepared his ascent in the progress of happiness, he has arrived at the endpoint of happiness, which is eternal glory, to which may we be led by him who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, et cetera.” This was the usual way of bringing a sermon to a close. The “etc.” meant the preacher was supposed to fill in with a final prayer.
So, is it possible that there are manuscript issues? It is always possible that there are manuscript issues when it comes to medieval texts. Personally, I think not. But I wouldn’t call Prof. Mulchahey a shoddy scholar for coming to a different conclusion. She is not a shoddy scholar. She is a superb scholar. But I still don’t agree with her suggestion about why Thomas’s sermon was “cut short.”
Fifth Criticism
My fifth error, I take it, is that I say Thomas doesn’t use exempla, but Prof. Mulchahey says he did in his sermon on Martin of Tours and “it was a common practice.” Yes, it was a common practice — very common — which is why it is so odd that we find so few — I argue, none — in the sermons of either Aquinas or Bonaventure.
“While they are admittedly rare in the corpus of his sermons,” writes Prof. Mulchahey, “they do appear, as in the sermon for the feast-day of St. Martin of Tours, Beatus vir, where Aquinas does not shy away from narrating hagiographic episodes, leaving one to conclude that he was no stranger to the genre.” (Beatus vir, by the way, is Sermon 21 again, which seems to have garnered a great deal of Prof. Mulchahey’s attention.) But wait, “they” appear? Sermon 21 contains one possible example. When someone who never shows up at my house, shows up once, and I say, “Don’t be a stranger,” I don’t expect him to say, “I’m not a stranger, I showed up once.”
But does it show up even once? When Thomas dilates the first of the three divisions of his thema verse — “Happy is the man whose help is from the Lord” — he makes a threefold sub-division, each member of which has its own threefold sub-sub-division. “The Lord grants us a triple help,” says Thomas. First, He chides mankind, and this in three ways: by inspiring fear; by forgiving him his sins; and by drawing him away from sins. Second, the Lord teaches mankind, and this in three stages: He enlightens the intellect through faith; he raises up the mind through hope; and He changes the affection through love. And third, the Lord takes us up, something suggested by the next phrase in the Psalm, “he has set his heart on ascending,” with which Thomas will begin his collatio “later that evening at vespers” (a note that I append to every single collatio in my outlines of each sermon in the Appendix, making it hard to miss, one would have thought). Under the heading “the Lord takes us up,” Thomas says that God magnified St. Martin in three steps: through the holiness of his works; because of the greatness of his miracles; and in the spreading of his fame over all the earth.
What were St. Martin’s miracles? He raised up three dead people; his garments and letters cured those who were ill; and he put great fear in his enemies, so they sent negotiators to make peace. Did Thomas get these three bits of information from one of those big collections of exempla? It’s possible, I suppose. But it’s also possible that these were just common bits of knowledge about St. Martin.
But even so, even if this sermon used a story found in some compilation of exempla, I would still have to conclude — based, admittedly, on the small selection of Thomas’s sermons that have remained extant — that with twenty-one (or so) without exempla, on the one hand, and perhaps one possible minor use of a pious story from a collection of exempla, on the other, it’s not exactly an overwhelming score.
And then there is the evidence I recount of the comment Thomas makes in a series of response to Gerard, the conventual lector of Bescançon that “it is not proper for the preacher of truth to be diverted to unverifiable fables.” And I can’t help but agree with Jean-Pierre Torrell’s judgment: “Thomas believes orators need an art that can move feelings, but he refuses to reduce that art to the wisdom of this world. That is why we scarcely find in him those little stories (exempla) so valued by so many preachers. He warns us, on the contrary, against what he calls ‘frivolities’ (frivolitates).” I can’t help but agree with Torrell, because it’s Jean-Pierre Torrell! He not only knows Thomas’s life and works better than anyone alive, he also knows the sermons better than anyone alive. With all that mountain of evidence against exempla, why was I going to disagree?
Sixth Criticism
And finally, there’s the matter of the “joke.” I thought Thomas might have been teasing his students with a bit of a wink and a nod when he compared the magister’s chair to the cross of Christ. Prof. Mulchahey disagrees:
Smith opines that this must have been [I think I said “perhaps”] “intended somewhat humorously,” a joke about the suffering a professor endures at the hands of his students being analogous to Christ’s suffering on the cross. Far from implying he was being crucified anew by ungrateful students, Aquinas is assuming that his listeners would have known that the Latin word for the professor’s chair is the same as that used to describe the bishop’s chair, “cathedra,” and in both instances it is the exalted wisdom seat from which teaching emanates and in both instances in imitation of Christ’s own teaching, even unto the cross.
I’m not sure Aquinas would have assumed that his listeners would make the association with the magister’s chair and the bishop’s chair. It’s possible. But I’m not sure associating the cross with the bishop’s chair makes it any less of a potential wink-and-a-nod sort of joke, perhaps more so — as if to say: “Look at this exalted position; some of you may want to sit here some day; but would you want to sit here and ‘drink of the cup from which He drinks’ if you knew that it meant crucifixion? Sitting here is like having the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head; only it’s not a sword, it’s the cross. Still interested in sitting here?”
But the truth is, I don’t know whether Thomas’s audience would have associated the professor’s chair with the bishop’s chair, nor does Prof. Mulchahey. It’s an interesting thought. I like it myself. (Bishops should be ready for crucifixion. If you’re not, don’t take the job.) But that’s beyond what can be proven by the text. Either way, I think it’s a sly bit of humor.
But then again, humor is pretty subjective, so if you don’t think it’s funny, that’s fine. I am one of those people who thinks that when Thomas says at the beginning of the Summa that “arguments from authority are the weakest kind, as Boethius says,” he knows that was an ironic statement. I also think that when one of Thomas’s companions (Brother Reginald or Bartholomew of Capua) was looking down over Paris and exclaimed, “Isn’t it wonderful Brother Thomas?” and Thomas replied “I would give it all for Chrysostom’s lost commentary on the Gospel of Matthew,” he was joking then too. But then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he was as humorless and grim as some people seem to think. But I still think that a guy his friends used to call “the dumb ox” must have had a sense of humor. You don’t call someone “the dumb ox” unless you either want a fight or think he will find it funny, especially since he was clearly the smartest guy the room.
The Book Has Its Problems
So look, the book has its problems. It’s probably too long (like this essay). It definitely needed an index, especially an index of which sermons were treated on which pages. I had never done an index, and I didn’t want to take the time. For my next book, Aquinas, Bonaventure and the Scholastic Culture of Medieval Paris (Cambridge, 2021), I paid a professional editor to do it, and she did a superb job. It was well worth the money. Live and learn.
I certainly belabor points. I’ve heard and read several times over the years that “repetition is the essence of education,” and I guess I’ve just taken it to heart — sometimes with a vengeance. I also like to look at the same thing from several different angles, that’s true. It’s just the way my mind works.
There are, moreover, pros and cons to reducing the various methods of the sermo modernus-style to the eight I include in the book. Things are obviously a lot more complicated, but my goal was to give people just enough information to help them appreciate the sermons, not to produce a monograph on medieval sermons. But I also didn’t want to give people a false sense of things.
As I worked through the material, I kept fretting over whether it was “just enough” or “too much” or “too little.” I came to the conclusion that it would be too much for a lot of people (to whom I advised, just skip around in the book) and too little for scholars of medieval sermons (to whom I would advise, just read one of the books I cite in the notes instead of mine). For me, it was, just … what? Just time to get the book out because you can’t please everybody. I’m not sure I really ever got the balance between Latin and English right. Again, the question is, what’s too little and what’s too much? It depends on the reader, I suppose.
And then there’s the difficult question of whether many listeners in the Middle Ages could have really understood these sermons in Latin. Some people I’ve talked to think it’s unlikely or impossible. But most of the major scholars in the area seem convinced plenty of people could and did understand them. All Thomas’s and Bonaventure’s sermons are in Latin, and both of them were renowned as good preachers. All the manuals of preaching contain examples in Latin.
But I can’t help but suspect that this is an area that needs more scholarly exploration. I’m not really sure. It’s something I essentially just gloss over in the book by citing the conclusions of several major scholars because I haven’t done the digging myself. So, the truth is, I just don’t know, and it’s a question that to my mind hasn’t been adequately resolved. I could have said something more about that — perhaps in a long footnote.
But by the same token, the first thing a friend of mind noticed about the book when he opened it was: “Randy, you have a two-page footnote!” Yes, I’m afraid I do. It took me two pages to describe the complex manuscript history behind the text of the Ars concionandi and explain why it probably wasn’t written by Bonaventure. Was that silly? Should the editor have had me cut it? Maybe. The editors at Cambridge University Press probably would have. They had me cut 22,000 words out of my manuscript for Aquinas, Bonaventure and the Scholastic Culture of Medieval Paris. I have no doubt some reviewer will complain about that book: “Smith didn’t cover … Smith didn’t talk about … Smith hasn’t included a reference to the scholarship of ….” I will sigh and say to myself: “Yup, had to cut all that.” It’s always the struggle with “too much” and “too little” and how to make the text clear (or clear enough) to readers who are non-specialists. There is, as I have learned, no satisfying specialists.
Be that as it may, I am extremely grateful for Prof. Mulchahey’s ultimate conclusion: namely that the book “provides an important service to those interested in Aquinas for whom the Scholastic structure of his sermons may have been an impediment to understanding his work as a preacher and exegete.” (Thank you, that was the goal.) And I find I cannot disagree with the other half of that sentence: “Smith will, however, struggle to keep the interest of those who have done work on medieval preaching in this period.” Since I didn’t write it to be of interest to specialists on medieval preaching in this period, that doesn’t surprise me or especially bother me.
“In sum,” concludes Prof. Mulchahey, the book “had the potential to be a valuable handbook in its own right, illustrating how Thomas Aquinas applied the techniques summarized in the medieval handbooks intended for preachers in his day.” Wait, it had the potential to illustrate “how Thomas applied the techniques summarized in the medieval handbooks intended for preachers in his day”? I think the book did that — indeed, in what some might take to be exhaustive (and exhausting) detail.
So, I take it that the problem is that the book “had the potential to be a valuable book but did “not quite live up to that potential.” Although I would not argue that the book “lived up to its potential” (since I’m not sure what that means), I guess I would question how Prof. Mulchahey defines “valuable.” She writes that, although the book “does not quite live up to that potential,” it can, she grants (perhaps too generously) “pique the interest of readers who wish to understand more about Aquinas and his sermons and, hopefully[4] [sic], will encourage them to explore the world of medieval preaching and exegesis further.” She and I share that hope. Thus, from the point-of-view of the author, if the book, with all its faults, does succeed in piquing that sort of interest in the sermons of Aquinas, which I bid the reader at the beginning of the book to have open next to my book at all times, then this author would judge that he had done the “valuable” thing he set out to do.
Final Reflections: Why Do We Do What We Do?
But all this is really secondary. It’s one minor book; who really cares? (Well, the author — a little bit.) To my mind, the whole discussion raises deeper questions about what such books are for, what ends scholarship is meant to serve, and why we do what we do. I’m not sure the guild of scholars is quite clear on that anymore. This isn’t just a question among medievalists; it’s a question facing all those who work in the humanities.
We should be devoted to excellence in our scholarship; this is certainly true. But excellence and accuracy or “current relevance” in scholarship is merely a means to an end. We sometimes lose our sense of what scholarship is meant to serve. And when that happens, one is left with pedantic arguments over the details or the method used or the “relevance” of the work, either to modern concerns or to “advancing the scholarship in this area.”
How many of us have gotten articles or book manuscripts back from peer reviewers with comments on details that have little or nothing to do with the main discussion of the work or demanded to see references to their favorite secondary sources and authorities? “Should be a chapter on … I don’t see any references to …” How often have reviewers demanded to see more footnotes, more references to secondary literature, and more treatment of secondary topics. while at the same time, the message from the acquisitions editor is fewer footnotes, fewer pages, and no space wasted on the secondary literature?
And then there are the questions of “audience” and “relevance”? In some quarters — usually among administrators at institutions that style themselves as more “elite” — the question is whether the book will be cited often (we’re checking on Google scholar), reviewed in The New York Review of Books (O heaven!), or become the center of a social movement that gets mentioned in the pages of The New York Times. Among the gatekeepers of some journals, the question is whether a book or article will “advance the scholarly literature”. Neither group seem as interested as many of our forebears seem to have been in getting people to understand and enjoy great works because they are a tremendous benefit to our lives and powerful expressions of truth, goodness, and beauty.
I fear that the works of people like Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, and Romano Guardini would not get published now. I know for a fact that the works of Maritain and Pieper that used to grace the pages of The Review of Politics would never get published in “serious” academic journals in philosophy or politics today. Alasdair MacIntyre once suggested to me that he doesn’t think he could get After Virtue published today. I wonder whether Romano Guardini’s wonderful The End of the Modern World would find a publisher.
I don’t mean to paint a rosy picture of the recent past either. Why is it that before the birth of Ignatius Press, it was the Protestant Eerdman’s Press that was willing to publish Ratzinger’s In the Beginning? Why in the early 70s was it Herder and Herder that published Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity? Why wasn’t that book published by a major university press — a major Catholic university press? And if it hadn’t been for Fr. Fessio and Ignatius Press, we probably wouldn’t have any of those wonderful volumes we have now of the works of von Balthasar and de Lubac and Pieper and … the list goes on. What in heaven’s name were the Catholic universities publishing all that time?
We should learn from other scholars first, and only then critique their faults, if it can benefit them for future projects. What is the point of reading books just to disagree with them or destroy them in print? This seems to be the common pastime of many book reviewers. Writing ten hyper-critical book reviews does not reveal expertise in a subject area. It is easy to tear down, harder to create. Forget ten crappy book reviews; write one decent book. Or read five good books and share their insights with people who actually care, like your students or the lay faithful. I love Augustine, and I value all first-rate scholarship on him. But I hope people won’t be too horribly scandalized if I say I don’t really care all that much about the neo-Platonic influences on some sentence in the Soliloquies. Tell me something that helps me appreciate Augustine’s genius. Or show me again why I should be reading Irenaeus because he’s just unbelievably good. Or help me appreciate the beauty and wisdom of Newman’s sermons.
I am currently finishing revisions on a book on how understanding the thirteenth century sermo modernus style can help people read and understand Bonaventure’s Itinerarium more fully and with greater appreciation of its intricate artistry. I have no doubt that some reviewer will say “Smith doesn’t know that much of this material in Bonaventure’s text can be found in untranslated and obscure sections of the Summa Halensis.” First, I’ve checked, it can’t, so please don’t say that. But second, it’s not ultimately important to me. I really just want people to read and benefit from the Itinerarium. Make no mistake; it bothers me no end if I don’t get a citation right or if I don’t translate a Latin phrase correctly. But I’d be happy if a reader said, “Smith’s sort of an idiot, not much of a scholar, but reading his book did make me want to go read the Itinerarium. And that stuff he said did actually help me understand it better.” I would sing a Te Deum, if I could sing, which I can’t, and if I knew the words, which I don’t.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t demand the highest standards of excellence in the craft. Nor is the issue one, somewhat critical book review. I mean, the review I mention above had some really nice things to say about my book, probably more than it deserved. Granted, I obviously had my disagreements with certain critiques of the book — I mean, if I have an entire section on a topic, you can’t say I never treat it anywhere — but the bigger question has to do with an entire culture of hyper-criticism. Hang around a scholarly journal for a while, as I have, and you’ll find that nobody likes anything. We put a huge amount of time and effort into publishing things that no one reads. And again, from my experience with academic editing, the few people who do read these articles, don’t like them. People write and write; is anyone reading and learning? And not only “learning,” but learning things that are valuable for their faith and for their lives? It happens — sometimes. A few beautiful and really profound doves struggle to fly through the flak and actually survive. But not as many as should.
When writers and publishers and university administrators thought of themselves as in service to the Church and the great Catholic intellectual tradition; when writers were allowed and encouraged to ask “big questions” about meaning and mankind’s common challenges; when scholars thought it was important to write books and articles that could be read by and would be valuable to plain persons and not merely a few “experts” in their narrow field of specialization, then the humanities had a voice in society. So perhaps we should consider whether it’s not so much that we’re being silenced by the secular authorities, but that we’ve been strangling ourselves silent.
Let’s take our hands away from our throats. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing and expect different results. Our teaching and our scholarship should be “from the heart of the Church” and “at the service of the Church.” Not just in service to the ideological group of scholars I happen to favor, but the Church. And we should see ourselves as developing talent, rather than shooting them down, developing young scholars who will be able to devote themselves faithfully to that service in the future.
Final Recommendations
But for now, allow, if I may, let me sum up this overly long disquisition this way. Here are my present recommendations (for what they’re worth). Go get Fr. Hoogland’s translation of Thomas’s sermons from Catholic University of America Press. Read them. They will probably strike you as odd, but trust me, they’re great. If you get used to them, go get The Sunday Sermons of St. Bonaventure translated by Timothy J. Johnson. They’re even better. Thomas got pretty good at this sort of preaching after a few years of training, but Bonaventure was brilliant. For a comparison between the two, see my book Aquinas, Bonaventure and the Scholastic Culture of Medieval Paris (Cambridge, 2021). But for heaven’s sake, prioritize reading the sermons. My book is merely ancillary (at best). And if the sermon style confuses you, you can read the chapter on medieval sermons in that book or read the first chapter of my book, Reading the Sermons of Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Emmaus, 2016).
And in addition to all that, if you want to read a really good book that will give you some excellent background material, one that’s clearly written and really well done, get Michèle Mulchahey’s First the Bow is Best in Study: Dominican education before 1350 published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (1998). It really is an invaluable guide to the period. Seriously. I likely would have produced better books if I had spent more time with it. But as to that, I can do little more than echo the poet’s complaint: “If there were but world enough, and time….” But there isn’t.
[1] “What Lessons Do Thomas Aquinas’s Sermons Hold for Modern Preachers?” Homiletic and Pastoral Review (June, 2017).
[2] This was a new word for me; it means a mixture of two or more languages, as in mixing the English with Latin, and yes, it comes from the same root as “macaroni.” This is one of my new favorite words. How we got from macaroni to mixing Latin and English in a sentence is something I will need to investigate.
[3] I take it the author does not mean “begs the question” as in when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. That would not make sense of the sentence.
[4] I have a colleague who is a Toronto Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Ph.D. with whom I team-taught courses for many years who repeatedly insisted this isn’t a word, and I simply could not convince him otherwise.