There and Back Again: A Thomist’s Tale

One of the most disparaging things Catholics can say about St. Thomas Aquinas and his philosophy/theology is that it is dry and lacking narrative flourish (what story doesn’t have multiple pages distinguishing essence, existence and quiddity?).

While I can understand this assessment if you were to isolate one aspect of Aquinas’s writings, this claim holds no water if you view his theology through a wider, more catholic, lens.

I would argue that Aquinas’s theology, including his philosophy and spirituality, taken as a whole (catholic), actually reflects the structure of storytelling and imitates the story that is present within the nature and operation of God, the history of Jesus, and the life of the Christian infused with the Holy Spirit. It begins by first recognizing that all little human stories reflect what C.S. Lewis calls the “Great Story” when beautifully wrapping up his Narnia series.

On the surface this too has a directly religious connotation in the Gospel, of course, but even Lewis would have recognized something deeper here. Just as the Pevensie children experienced a smaller story so that they would be better prepared to recognize the “Great Story,” so too had all of humanity been given little stories by God, implanted into the very nature of rational humanity, in order to recognize how Jesus fit in to their stories when he came.

I say Jesus’s story fits in with theirs simply because they precede his chronologically. As the eternal Son his “story” has always been and is the basis for all of our human stories, but we digress. 

Drawing first upon one of the essential features of Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” or Hero’s Journey, one can find its fulfillment in the work of God in general, but distilled in the Gospels specifically. What Campbell recognized in this journey were elements that have been repeated and embellished in virtually every mythology of human history.

The Hero’s Journey

In this monomyth there must be a Departure, whereupon the hero answers the “call to adventure,” the Initiation, which tests and grows our hero, preparing him/her for atonement and apotheosis, and finally, the hero must Return having been changed by the experience, the “Master” of the “Two Worlds” he/she now inhabits.

These three main characteristics can be subdivided further into more specific elements, but for the purposes of this post we will just focus on the departure, initiation and return. Not only did Campbell recognize these elements in the pagan, pre-Christian myths, but he saw them presented in the Gospels.

While some have taken this to imply that the Gospels should be seen as nothing more than mere myths, this misunderstands the Gospels themselves as well as myths in general. Forget the modern assumption that equates myth with fiction. This imposes a view onto ancient cultures that would not have shared that assumption.

By writing the Gospels in a way that shared elements of mythology, not to mention the clear details indicative of ancient historical biographies, the authors were not trivializing them but sacralizing them.

This is why C.S. Lewis ironically inverts this assumption by calling Christianity the “true myth” in Surprised by Joy. It isn’t that the Evangelists copied this format in writing the Gospel, but that this format is present in all storytellers because it reflects the story that is present within God.

How do the Gospels, and Jesus specifically, reflect this monomyth that Joseph Campbell recognized? Where is our hero’s departure?

One can find numerous times Jesus making reference to being “sent” (Mat 10:40; Mk 9:37; Lk 9:48) and references that it was the “Father” who did (Jn 5:23, 37; 8:16).

Further significance here is that the hero also receives supernatural aid in this quest and experiences a “self-annihilation,” reminiscent of the self-emptying that St. Paul refers to Jesus experiencing. Jesus, our hero, then completes his initiation, which includes a “road of trials,” an “atonement with the Father,” and an “apotheosis,” where the hero is confronted with the ultimate task and raised up in order to achieve it (*cough, cough*).

To list and explicate all the significance of the lifting up moments in Jesus’s ministry from the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, to the Crucifixion on the hill of Calvary, and then the raising up from Sheol in the Resurrection would exhaust the rest of this post’s space. Now, where it really gets interesting is in the Return, which Campbell includes as a final necessary step.

The hero must cross the threshold from whence he came as a “Master” of the world he initially departed as well as the world he just conquered. He now inhabits both spaces. Jesus says to his apostles that he must leave them so that the Holy Spirit will come (Jn 16:7).

At his Ascension he does return to heaven, but only to make his presence even greater and wider in his Church (Jn 14:12), which begins at Pentecost and spreads and disseminates throughout the whole world now in the many bodies of every baptized Christian. 

The Summa as the Journey

At the risk of getting too theological in just the final paragraph, and I did promise to bring it back to Aquinas, this is exactly the narrative upon which his Summa Theologiae is built. If you look at the original intent of the structure of his Summa, it was meant to be broken into three parts.

The first focuses primarily on God, that from which all being flows, or departs, and Creation, that which has emanated from the Source. This in theology is called the exitus.

Part two focuses on humanity and its actions, which is how every man or woman realizes who he or she is: a sort of initiation. Finally, part three is focused on Jesus himself, which is “the Way” by which humanity returns back to God. In theology this is called the reditus.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in part three Aquinas includes his treatises on the Sacraments. This is because Aquinas saw no distinction between Jesus and the Sacraments. They are extensions of him and to deny the Sacraments is simply to deny Jesus. Also, because the Sacraments are extensions of Jesus, they too are the means by which we return with Jesus to the Father in Heaven. Sounds like a pretty good story to me.