God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
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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.
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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.
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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