Christ and Spirituality in St. Thomas Aquinas

4. The Interpreter of Desire: Prayer According to St. Thomas Aquinas

65 4 The Interpreter of Desire Prayer According to St.Thomas Aquinas As with any Christian—and probably more so than for most—for St. Thomas prayer was something very familiar. He chanted the Divine Office in choir each day with his Dominican confreres; and, like Brother Dominic, the holy founder of his order, he also prayed during his many voyages as he traveled on foot with his companions . We also have numerous witnesses who tell us that he prayed alone, in the secret of the night, before the altar or the crucifix. But he also had an opportunity not enjoyed by every Christian: to speak about prayer in his capacity as a theologian and—if one may say so—to elucidate a “theory of the practice of prayer.” An Omnipresent Reality As a teacher, Brother Thomas encountered the subject of prayer from the very outset of his work: in the Sentences of Peter Lombard, upon which he had to comment, just as every young theologian of his day did. Following the exigencies of this manual, he discusses it in three separate locations. In an initial passage, at the heart of his Christology, he ponders how the prayer of Christ exemplifies the way in which we ourselves ought to pray, because, according to a 66 The Interpreter of Desire formula cherished by Thomas, “Every action of Christ is a veritable teaching for us.” He returns to the subject of prayer a second time when discussing the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which he correlates with the seven petitions of the Our Father. It is there, after the manner of St. Augustine, from whom he learned this approach, that he formulates what one might consider the “golden rule” of Christian prayer: the norm of Christian prayer is the prayer of Christ. Following Peter Lombard, Thomas returns again at length to prayer in the context of an exposition on the sacrament of reconciliation . He there describes prayer as the expression of a penitent’s profound affections, under the same heading in which we find fasting and almsgiving. This is certainly not insignificant. In these three cases, actions and words reveal an understanding of the human being—in technical terms, a religious anthropology—according to which interior affections require exterior manifestation to acquire their full form. More sporadically yet significantly, Thomas also returned to prayer in the course of his daily teaching as a master of theology. This is a part of his occupation that needs to be better known: contrary to the bachelor in theology, who was bound to comment on the manual of Peter Lombard in his teaching, the master of theology had to lecture upon the foundational book, the Bible. Among his Old Testament commentaries is that on the Psalms, which offers a prologue in which he explains that this book contains a summary of the entire work of God recounted in scripture. Adopting a definition from the first centuries of Christianity, he presents prayer as “a raising of the soul to God,” and this under four aspects: the elevation of faith through the admiration of God’s grandeur, the elevation of hope by straining toward beatitude, the elevation of charity through intimate union with God and his holiness, and the elevation of justice by imitating God’s justice in our own actions. This raising of the soul to God and its various aspects are themes that reappear often in this context, and, even if they are not explicitly mentioned, they are no less established on that account. In his commentaries on the New Testament, Thomas again finds The Interpreter of Desire 67 numerous occasions to speak about prayer, notably in commentary on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, where he lingers on the passage in which Christ teaches the Our Father to instruct his disciples how to pray (Mt 6: 9–13). Seeing that this first brief approach was insufficient, Thomas actually made the Our Father the object of an entire series of sermons, in the course of which he gave himself over to a more advanced and spiritual commentary. One sees in the Our Father “the most perfect of prayers,” because it not only teaches us everything that one may ask from God, but also teaches us to ask for it in the very order in which we ought to desire it: the hallowing of God’s name and the fulfillment of his will obviously...