Beauty in the Prayer of Aquinas

Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 95/2 (2019) 235-252. doi: 10.2143/ETL.95.2.3286474 © 2019 by Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. All rights reserved. Beauty in the Prayer of Aquinas Paul MURRAY Almost no theme attracted the attention of Thomas Aquinas so much as that of prayer. It is a subject to which he returned in his writings over and over again. So, it is probably not by accident that the longest question in the Summa Theologiae is devoted to the subject of prayer. Throughout his life Thomas, with a clarity that seems at times almost exaggerated, delighted in noting down some of the many characteristics of authentic prayer. In his commentary on Colossians (4,1), for example, he declares that prayer should be three things: “assiduous, grateful and vigilant”1. And in his commentary on Ephesians (6,18-19) he speaks of not three but seven necessary characteristics. Prayer, he notes, should be “complete […] humble […] continual […] devout […] vigilant […] insistent […] [and] loving”2. Nowhere, to my knowledge does Thomas explicitly say that prayer should be beautiful. And that’s a point worth noting here because the title of the present contribution is ‘Beauty in the Prayer in Aquinas’. In what sense is it helpful to speak of beauty in this context? Prayers are not poems, generally speaking, and in themselves they are not works of art. They are most often written in prose not verse, and the prose of Thomas has been found wanting by more than a few readers. Bryan Magee, in his book Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers, remarks: Some of the great philosophers have been also great writers in the sense of great literary artists – I suppose the outstanding examples are Plato, St. Augustine, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche […] Yet there have been great philosophers who were bad writers, two of the very greatest – Kant and Aristotle – being two of the worst. Others were just pedestripartan – one thinks of Aquinas3. With that negative assessment of Aquinas’s writing – his prose writing – I feel I must disagree. Aquinas’s Latin, though it certainly lacks 1. Super epistolam ad Colossenses lectura, ch. 4, lect. 1, 183, in Super Epistolas S. Pauli lectura, vol. 2, ed. R. CAI, Roma – Torino, Marietti, 1953, p. 159. 2. Super epistolam ad Ephesios lectura, ch. 6, lect. 5, 369, in Super Epistolas (n. 1), vol. 2, p. 86. 3. B. MAGEE, Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 230. 236 P. MURRAY ornament and color has its own distinctiveness, its own quality of claritas. Not beauty in the strict sense, therefore, but what might be called a beauty of plainness. Here, there is nothing whatever esoteric or mandarin. And yet, that very plainness is the explanation of its appeal and of its useful- ness. I am reminded here of a line from a prose passage by the English poet-laureate Ted Hughes: “Not the plainness of a white marble floor, but of deep, clear water, open and immediate”4. This statement or observation I have lifted from a passage which has nothing whatever to do with St. Thomas. But I cannot think of a better statement to describe the distinc- tive quality and character of Aquinas’s prose: Not the plainness of a white marble floor, but of deep, clear water, open and immediate. Before we pursue further the question of beauty, it will be necessary to establish first what credible information exists, if any, regarding the actual prayers of the saint. The Piae preces, the prayers traditionally attributed to Aquinas, have received relatively little attention over the years5. One reason for the neglect is that, in the Latin editions of Thomas’s Opera omnia, the prayers have almost always found themselves listed under the rubric Opuscula alia dubia – doubtful works6. As readers we know for certain that Aquinas wrote the Summas, but what certainty do we have that he wrote the Piae preces? Are these Latin prayers really the work of Aquinas or could they perhaps have been composed by some anonymous medieval scholastic? None of the surviving manuscripts which attribute the preces to Thomas are earlier than the 14th century. When, however, the prayers appear in manuscript form they are attributed to Aquinas, never to any other author. This fact is not in itself, of course, a definite proof of authenticity. Inevi- tably, doubts of one kind or another will persist in the minds of scholars with regard to the question of authorship. But, over the last one hundred years, an impressive number of theologians and commentators have had no difficulty whatever in acknowledging Aquinas as the author or probable author of the Piae preces. Otto Hermann Pesch, for example, commenting on the Piae preces in 1998, remarked: “The texts are worthy of being studied in order to see how all the theology of Thomas is reflected in a lived piety”7. Many years earlier, the Dominican scholar A.-D. Sertillanges published in French a translation of the Piae preces and, when introducing 4. T. HUGhES (ed.), A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, London, Faber and Faber, 1971, p. 202. Hughes is describing here one of the sonnets of Shakespeare. 5. The prayers can be found in both the Busa and Marietti editions of Aquinas’s work: S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera omnia. Vol. 6: Reportationes, ed. R. BUSA, Stuttgart – Ban Cannstatt, Frommann-Holzboog, 1980, pp. 584-585; Opuscula theologica. Vol. 2: De re spirituali, Torino, Marietti, 1954, pp. 283-289. 6. See, for example, the Parma edition (1869) of the Opera omnia of Aquinas, Vol. XXIV. 7. O.H. PESch, Thomas von Aquin: Grenze und Größe mittelalterlicher Theologie, Mainz, Matthias Grünewald, 1988, pp. 105-106. BEAUTY IN THE PRAYER OF AQUINAS 237 the work, made clear his conviction that the preces deserved to be grouped “under the high signature” of Aquinas. He wrote: “The depth and structure of these writings correspond so well with the doctrine, style, and natural movement of thomistic thought that those readers, most familiar with the works of Aquinas, are those least able to doubt the mark of Aquinas”8. In more recent years, the Piae preces have attracted the attention of the German scholar Lydia Maidl9. Maidl is not entirely closed to the possibility that Aquinas might indeed be the author of at least some of the preces, but her overall assessment is negative. What has impressed readers of Aquinas over the years is the consonance of thought and expres- sion, of image and idea, which seems to exist between the prayers attributed to Aquinas and the theological vision expressed in his other works. Even Maidl, at one point, acknowledges the fact that the themes expressed in the prayer, Concede michi (The Prayer for Wise Ordering), are themes “dear to Thomas’s heart”10. But in the end Maidl decides that Aquinas is probably not the author of Concede michi, and nor in her opinion is he the likely author of any of the other prayers attributed to him. Two years after Maidl’s book was published, in 1996, new and vital information came to light concerning the two prayers, Concede michi and Adoro te devote. This information was revealed by the Canadian scholar Claire Le Brun-Gouanvic in a fresh, critical edition of the Life of Aquinas by William of Tocco11. Prior to Le Brun’s edition, the most authoritative edition available of the Life was that published by Dominique Prümmer in 1912. But Prümmer had somehow overlooked two key manuscripts in which Aquinas is acknowledged as the author of both prayers. Needless to say, the discovery of these forgotten manuscripts by Le Brun is of enormous importance. That Tocco, a Dominican contemporary of Aquinas, thought fit to include both of these prayers in his Life of the saint, 8. See A.-D. SERTILLANGES, Prières de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, Louis, 1920, p. 8. Another Dominican, Pierre Mandonnet, writing around the same time, expressed an equal confidence with regard to the question of Aquinas’s authorship: “Les Piae preces, ou collection de diverses prières attribuées au Docteur angélique […] se présentent dans des conditions d’authenticité très acceptables”. See P. MANDONNET – J. DESTREZ, Bibliographie thomiste, Kain, Le Saulchoir, 1921, p. xviii. 9. L. MAIDL, Thomas von Aquin, Freiburg i.Br., Herder, 1994. This collection of texts from Aquinas, with commentary by Maidl, was introduced by Otto Hermann Pesch. 10. Ibid., pp. 106-107. 11. Claire Le Brun-Gouanvic’s edition began life as a doctorate thesis presented at the University of Montreal in 1987. See C. LE BRUN-GOUANVIc, Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino de Guillaume de Tocco (1323) (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts, 127), Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996, p. 156. The two original manuscripts which include the prayer with the attribution to Aquinas are located in Germany. They are listed by Le Brun on pages 61-63. For information concerning other manuscripts of Concede michi, see A.I. DOYLE, A Prayer Attributed to Aquinas, in Dominican Studies 1 (1948) 229-238. LE BRUN-GOUANVIc, Ystoria, p. 71. 238 P. MURRAY confidently naming Thomas as author of both of them has greatly encour- aged the attribution to Aquinas. Jean-Pierre Torrell describes the new texts uncovered by Le Brun as “trustworthy documents”12. Tocco had, apparently, worked on the Life of Thomas right up to the time of Aquinas’s canonization. In all there were four versions of the Life, but until Le Brun’s discovery was made public, Tocco’s fourth and final redaction had been overlooked. This fourth version, Torrell notes, “carries numerous additions that have remained unpublished until the present”.

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