Yesterday I heard a story about Thomas Aquinas that was new to me. Actually, I heard it twice from two different people. It’s quite possible that I had heard it before and forgotten, but the fact that two different people, who do not know each other, used it on the same day is kind of freaky. The story is this:
For the better part of 30 years, Thomas Aquinas wrote theology. In a lot of ways, Thomas Aquinas framed the theological discussions we are having to this day. He picked up on the work of his teacher, Albertus Magnus, and integrated classical philosophy into western theology. Two great tastes that taste great together.
Then, on the Feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Thomas had a mystical spiritual experience. Afterward he stopped writing all together. When asked why he would not pick up his pen, Thomas reputedly replied, “All that I have written seems like straw to me.” He died six months later. His magnum opus remains unfinished.
The second person who related this story to me did so in the context of a conversation about how we know God. He and I both have had that kind of experience where a well-meaning Evangelical Christian invites you to “give your life to Jesus without any doubts or reservations.” For better or worse, both of us have minds that can’t help but harbor doubts, especially when asked to accept something as a fact on par with the wetness of water without empirical evidence.
My current shtick on that question is that we are given the capacity to experience the presence of the divine in a way that is a whole different category of how we know things than observing with our senses that water is wet. That doesn’t make God’s existence or the fact that God loves us any less true. If anything, I imagine it makes those things more real than real, but that way of knowing does not come with language that computes in a world that has refused to rise above empiricism since the Eighteenth Century. Doing so breaks a set of parameters that even the modern Evangelical has internalized. We are led to believe that breaking the parameters would be undignified.
There are fourteen books in the Wizard of Oz series. The classic movie is based on the first one. Neither “Oz the Great and Powerful” nor “Wicked” are canonical. My grandfather had a set of them, and when my child was young, my father read them to him (and me, because I could operate Skype and turn the pages). The seventh book introduces a character called Scraps, aka The Patchwork Girl of Oz. She was brought to life by the magic of Dr. Pipt so that his wife would have help with household chores, but neither of them noticed that Ojo (the Unlucky) had slipped extra cleverness into her brains.
Being thus rendered unfit for domestic service, and having to find a way to reverse the spell that turned Dr. Pipt’s wife into stone, Scraps sets out on a set of adventures with Ojo and a cast of characters. Somewhere along the way, she adopts the motto “I hate dignity.” I don’t think she is dismissing the doctrine of inherent human dignity with the phrase. In fact, I think she is affirming that a person’s dignity is not dependent on abiding by the social mores of society. She is known to dance, sing, and rhyme at inappropriate moments, but she also see a way through that no one else can perceive.
By the end of the story, the Patchwork Girl marries the Scarecrow. You’ll remember from the movie how the Scarecrow (aka Socrates Strawman) was not given brains by the Wizard but instead got a degree. To be precise, the degree he was awarded is a Th.D., which the Wizard explains is a Doctor of Thinkology. The first person who related the Aquinas story to me also has a Th.D. In his case, it is a Doctor of Theology.
The question my doctorated friend posed was something to the effect of “what kind of word can we speak into a moment like the one we are currently experiencing?” Or in the words of one current social media star, “I just want to know what the hell do I do?” Is there anything we can say that will not come out with the same rustling dryness that Thomas Aquinas tasted in the aftermath of his spiritual experience?
I hope there is an answer to this question, and I believe it lies not in rejecting the Scarecrow for the Patchwork Girl but lives in the marriage between Scraps and Socrates Strawman. The latter has his purpose, after all. Being the smartest, most scholarly person in the land, the Scarecrow has taken up a position as the drafter of laws for the Kingdom of Oz. He brings justice, and the Patchwork Girl brings an encounter with joy.
But we seem to be all Strawman and no Scraps. We only accept the data of empirical evidence and that data is notoriously mailable and unreliable. It still does great things for us, like make our cars go fast and our screens light up. But, as another Thomas has pointed out, we need something more if we are going to remain human. We a “direct and pure experience of reality in its ultimate root.”1 We need the Patchwork Girl to lovingly embrace the Scarecrow, to put his Thinkology into a greater context, and to bind him up with a wisdom that we have all but abandoned. We need her to dance at inappropriate moments and break the undignified parameters of mere empiricism. We need to know, as she knows, that true dignity is a gift that no one can take away.
- Thomas Merton, Preface to the Japanese edition of New Seeds of Contemplation ↩︎