Love and Labor: Early Lay Franciscans and the Work of Theology Today

“Early lay Franciscans.” 

The speaker was Katherine Wrisley Shelby, formidable theological scholar of St. Bonaventure and all things early Franciscan (see her impressive study Spiraling into God: Bonaventure on Grace, Hierarchy, and Holiness), as we caught up on theology and life over coffee.

I’ve still been steeping in the infusions of inspiration from my August trip to New England for the Re-thinking Early Scholasticism Conference and the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology.  And I’ve been steeping in that phrase, “Early lay Franciscans.”

Steeping in the fact, with oat milk and honey, that St. Francis (of course not then known as “Saint”) called followers who were themselves laypeople who heard the call of God to follow a little poor man who abandoned himself to God’s compassion.

This was one of the things that impressed St. Bonaventure (not then known as “Saint”) about the roots of Franciscanism: their similitude the roots of the Christian Church itself. Jesus Christ (not then widely recognized as Christ) calls followers from the lowest classes of common working folk. Yet within a short span of generations, Christians are producing a mix of significant bishop-theologians and even world class intellectuals like Origen of Alexandria, a communion spanning social classes and including writers and preachers who are still widely read as thought partners for theologians and Christian intellectuals today. Similarly, within 20 years of St. Francis’ death, there are Franciscan friars shaping the theological curriculum of the early University of Paris as Alexander of Hales receives the theological legacy of the Abbey of St. Victor and marries it with his Franciscanism in both the substance of his teaching and the institution of Peter Lombard’s highly-Victorine-influenced Sentences as core curriculum. 

But before even then. Back at the earliest roots.

Franciscanism wasn’t an institution, not even a religious order. 

Not at first. 

It was personal encounters with a penitent who personally communicated the love of Jesus Christ, and lived for that Gospel way of love with a primitive single-mindedness that communicated Christ beyond the ossifications of social expectation. 

It was the ethos of those who gathered with and around Francis to pray and fast and do works of mercy and share the Gospel way of life they saw attested in the New Testament.

And there was manual labor.

Manual labor?

I had forgotten the manual labor, and yet it is one of the most relevant details for us to understand for those living the Franciscan option today. It has particular and multivalent relevance for practicing theologians.

But it is not the first thing we’re accustomed to remember about the early Franciscans. Franciscan ethos has become associated with men in brown (or grey) habits who are willing to beg. And St. Francis was certainly willing to beg. He showed us a spirituality in which, fully embracing the words of St. Paul, the self is absolutely poor and claims to own nothing for itself, nothing private, no privation, and hence everything is a gift, and one enjoys the fulness of God’s largesse in each thing and everything, the gift-enjoyment of all things in Christ (1 Cor 3:22-3). 

We think very readily of Franciscans as contented, joyful beggars. 

But we need to think also of manual laborers, day laborers.

Augustine Thompson’s biography of Francis, which I’ve been re-perusing since my conversation with Shelby, reminded me of this.

After Francis has begun to attract followers, and after they have visited Rome and been initially commissioned by Pope Innocent to preach penance, Francis begins to develop a biblical form of life, a forma vivendi, for his community. Thompson narrates (bolding mine):

Francis made the decision to take up a more ordered and structured way of life after little or no planning, but he did it. About two miles outside Assisi, he and his companions came upon and occupied an abandoned shed near the bend in the crooked stream known as Rivo Torto. It was the fraternity’s first locus, their first place of residence. The stay in this deserted and miserable place, later highly romanticized and idealized, lasted about three months, until the end of 1209. Having no rule of life but his own experiences of the Gospel that God had revealed to him, Francis first of all set the example of manual labor. Rivo Torto was close to the leprosarium of San Lazzaro, where the brothers had probably earlier worked and lodged. Subordination of himself to those who were the most despised and outcast of society had been Francis’s first penance, and he continued to practice it.

The stay in the humble shed has been subsequently idealized. The service to lepers has been subsequently idealized. But I don’t recall having encountered much idealization of early Franciscan manual labor, beyond that of the most allegorical interpretation of the “rebuild my church” San Damiano variety. “Francis is so literal!” we exclaim.

Yes indeed.

Thompson continues:

Those who were unwilling to do this, Francis said, had no claim to membership in the brotherhood; there were to be no exceptions. His followers were to work at whatever craft or skill they had in order to obtain food and necessities. Later stories of this period idealize begging as the true expression of the brothers’ poverty and even speak of Francis having to send the brothers to beg alone, because of the band’s small size. When he looked back, Francis mentioned begging only as an alternative to manual labor, or when those who had hired the brothers refused them payment. There is little reason to believe it [begging] played a major role at Rivo Torto. They lived by day labor. (Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, 29).

It is only then, or shortly later, that they start to normalize their form of dress: a modified peasant smock made to look vaguely cross-like, like a T, with no mention of specific color. 

Francis himself wore the tonsure…. But there is no evidence that laymen who later joined his group were tonsured in order to become clerics. They remained laymen, “lay brothers” (Thompson, 30). 

So the Franciscans, at this stage, are a small group of tonsured clerics, none of whom are priests, with a group of lay brothers gathering around them. Day labor is how they all make their living, in order to pursue their God-given vocation: preaching penance, serving the poor, living the New Testament rule.

The early Franciscans use “whatever craft or skill” they possess in order to “obtain food and necessities.”

This has been percolating in my soul as a moment ripe for retrieval. It has relevance for many kinds of Christian existence doubtless, yet specifically for those who find vocational resonance with St. Francis’ own life and witness, and specifically as well by those called to the vocation of theology.

As is well known, theology enjoys less and less institutional support. The queen of the sciences is increasingly evicted from her university premises. 

The complicated advent of AI will only speed this predicament, the predicament of financial viability faced by many university departments.

Yet, Theology’s difference is that it primarily serves neither the university-qua-secular-advancement-engine nor the secular state nor the market economy, but the Church. Theology is the intellectual discipline ordered to the faithfulness of the people called Church.

The Church has to think of creative ways of supporting her theologians, outside the modern university. Some can serve as pastors. That seems right, but is far from a total solution. Boyd Taylor Coolman advocates that it is dioceses who need to take responsibility for hiring theologians to teach. That seems right. But in the interim, our time requires of many theologians that they will discern innovative kinds of vocation.  For many that will mean that Theology is an unpaid or minimally paid part-time vocation. 

And here’s where early Franciscan manual labor comes in. 

As the Benedictines have long known, with their ora et labora motto, many kinds of manual labor can be done not only with devotion to the Lord, but offer the possibility that the inner space of one’s mind may be occupied with thinking. And time to think plus requisite skills is the sine-qua-non requirement for theological work to happen.  So many forms of manual labor can be fruitful fields of both devotion and theological thinking.

I hasten to insist that manual labor is not any kind of ideal fix for all the Church’s quandaries about supporting theologians. There are two very direct tensions. First, even when engaging in a kind of manual labor that offers the freedom to think, doing manual labor precludes writing at the times in which one is laboring. Second, manual labor is tiring, and the mental work of theology itself takes energy.  In my own mix of paid work and mostly unpaid theological thinking, I feel both of these tensions.

Nevertheless, labor may be symbiotic with theological work, provided one and one’s family/community can afford one a mix of both. 

Dorothy Day called Peter Maurin “a new St. Francis for modern times”, and the integration of day labor and begging to serve gospel goals is indeed one more area in which Catholic Worker movement is remixing and engaging in traditioned innovation relative to the early Franciscan tradition. Hear Peter Maurin’s easy essay, “The Green Revolution”.

Modern society

calls the beggar

undesirable.

The Catholic Worker

calls him

our brother.

Modern society 

calls manual labor

drudgery.

The Catholic Worker

calls it a joy.

Modern society

produces waste.

The Catholic Worker

produces food.

On Re-Thinking Scholasticism: Scrips for a Conversation with Monroe, Rahner, Coolman, Anatolios, Hugh & Bonaventure

This last week I was blessed to attend two excellent theological conferences in Boston: the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology, and the Re-Thinking Scholasticism Conference. As often enough happens in the intensive information bath of an academic conference, a number of conversations and quotations began to cross-pollinate in my psyche in the best of ways, allowing a glimpse of something I hadn’t quite seen before. In this post I’ll bring quotations from Rahner, Anatolios, and Coolman together into a kind of florilegium-with-gloss. And I’ll attend to some wisdom we might retrieve from early scholasticism for Christian thinking and teaching and theology in the present.

In a conversation with Ty Monroe, the late great Karl Rahner SJ came up. We discussed, among other things, the fruitfulness, espoused by a group of younger scholars, of reading Rahner in a “Neo-Chalcedonian” (i.e. person-logically-prior-to-natures-centric, Christology-and-hermeneutics-forward) way. The conversation prompted me to look again at the first pages of my copy of Foundations of Christian Faith into which, in Rahner’s unforgettable Introduction, he deftly inscribes the writer’s (and reader’s) always-prior involvement in the theological existence which gives shape to the substance of the volume. Rahner, note, intends this volume as “an introduction to the idea of Christianity” (1) and yet he will immediately resist the thought that this is some merely objective, merely outside-of-us reality in which our existence is not always already implicated: “for one who is Christian and wants to be a Christian, we are dealing with the totality of his own existence.” (1) He writes:

For a Christian, his Christian existence is ultimately the totality of his existence. This totality opens out into the dark abysses of the wilderness which we call God. When one undertakes something like this, he stands before the great thinkers, the saints, and finally Jesus Christ. The abyss of existence opens up in front of him. He knows that he has not thought enough, has not loved enough, and has not suffered enough (2).

Our existence, for Rahner, invites a personal exploration in which we discover that we’ve already been exploring the mystery of the God with whom, all the while being always beyond the limits of our horizons, nevertheless we’ve all along been involved. As Rahner will pray in a famous prayer:

I should like to speak with You, my God, and yet what else can I speak of but You? Indeed, could anything at all exist which had not been present with You from all eternity, which didn’t have its true home and most intimate explanation in Your mind and heart? [Eriugena and Bonaventure and Maximus are cheering here! -Ed.] Isn’t everything I ever say really a statement about You? (Thoughts in Solitude, 3).

Into the wilderness of divinity!

Rahner, back in Foundations, notes that others — Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure in his Breviloquium (and to this work we will at length return) — have attempted to summarize the essentials of the faith in a short, “single whole”. But as we explore the wilderness of endless love, explorers are summoned to this task anew:

But there must always be new attempts at such reflection upon the single whole of Christianity…

There’s a single whole of Christianity because there’s a single person Jesus Christ, by whose divine-human natures the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Chalcedon, Col. 2:9).

… there must always be new attempts at such a reflection upon the single whole of Christianity. They are always conditioned, since it is obvious that reflection in general, and all the more so scientific theological reflection, does not capture and cannot capture the whole of this reality which we realize in faith, hope, love, and prayer. It is precisely this permanent and insurmountable difference between the original Christian actualization of existence and reflection upon it which will occupy us throughout… (2).

The ways we personally engage with God in faith, hope, love, and prayer in the arena of our existence always exceed our finite articulations of the God we encounter. And yet, with St. Augustine, Rahner might prompt us to doxologically cry, woe betide the one who fails to speak, who fails to confess the God we encounter within and at the horizons of our existence, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing. (Love to Maria Boulding for her stylish Confessions translation echoed here.)

Thinking on Rahner quickly brought back some words of my teacher Khaled Anatolios (who, alas, departed this life at Boston College to go teach at Notre Dame), in which, though I had forgotten this, Anatolios credits Rahner by name. Describing a style of theologizing some have come to call “comprehensive trinitarianism,” Anatolios writes,

Trinitarian doctrine emerged not from some isolated insight into the being of God, such that its meaning might be grasped from a retrieval of that particular insight, or from some creaturely analogue that somehow approximates that insight. Rather, orthodox trinitarian doctrine emerged as a kind of meta-doctrine that involved a global interpretation of Christian life and faith and indeed evoked a global interpretation of reality. Its historical development thus presents a dramatic demonstration of Karl Rahner’s characterization of trinitarian doctrine as the summary of Christian faith. To appreciate the meaning of trinitarian doctrine today, one must learn from the systematic thrust of its development how the entirety of Christian faith and life means the Trinity. Put differently, the suggestion is that we may perform the meaning of trinitarian doctrine by learning to refer to the trinitarian being of God through the entirety of Christian existence (Retrieving Nicaea, 8).

The Trinity is not one doctrine among others. It is, for Anatolios (and Rahner) meta-doctrine, the limitless sea of all our personal existing and reflecting and praying and loving and confessing. Anatolios is clear on this:

the Nicene development of trinitarian doctrine does allow for the use of various analogies, psychological, social, and otherwise…. But it never makes an isolated analogy, or even a network of analogies, the main locus of trinitarian meaning. That locus is always, at least implicitly, the entire field of Christian existence (Retrieving Nicaea, 10).

The metaphor has switched — God has gone from being a sea or abyss to a field — but there are levels at which the meaning has not. I note in passing that thinking with Rahner probably deserves more weight in understanding Anatolios than I’ve previously given it. I’ve thought about this passage of Anatolios a lot since Retrieving Nicaea was published. It just seemed right. It even felt right. It was one of my guiding lights in thinking about how to read the patristic writers in preparation for my comprehensive exams, in which I tried to develop a way of thinking about patristic theology as evincing (in my own rich mouthful of a phrase) a “biblical trinitarian divine union project.” It has been in the background of articles I’ve published on Augustine and Jean-Louis Chretien. Point being, this passage of Anatolios is anything but new to me. But it still hits a bit different just by being contextualized under Rahner’s Foundations. The florilegium is a powerful scholarly tool. It fecundates memory and fertilizes intellect. This makes me remember that once when I was a beginning graduate student I went to speak with Anatolios about a trinitarian apologetics project I was thinking of in relation to Augustine’s De Trinitate. Anatolios’ first book recommendation to help me get a handle on high level contemporary apologetics: none other than Karl Rahner. “You have to read Foundations of Christian Faith,” he said. His second recommendation, by the way, was Walter Kasper’s The God of Jesus Christ.

In light of these contextualizations with Rahner and Anatolios, I’m thinking of my doctoral advisor Boyd Taylor Coolman’s recent and ongoing work, which has been in the foreground of my thinking in recent weeks in preparation for my time in Boston. Coolman has been working lately on 13th century scholasticism’s Victorine roots in relation to Mark Clark’s publications which convincingly situate Peter Lombard very intimately with the Abbey of St. Victor, its intellectual culture, and its library. In light of Clark, Coolman is rethinking the 13th century Franciscan and Dominican scholasticism of the University of Paris as decisively shaped by the Victorine legacy and practice. One benefit of this Victorine-heavy rereading that is certainly germane to this blog is that it will accentuate the way in which the Franciscans are at least as much the “main story” of early scholasticism as the Dominicans, a fact which is only obscured recently by the disproportionate ecclesial and academic focus on the not-truly-so-isolated genius of the great Thomas Aquinas. While attending to the ways in which the Abbey of St. Victor is the source of the intellectual culture of the University of Paris, Coolman is consequently articulating and proposing scholasticism as directed toward generating an intellectus fidei that is neither simply scientia (“science”) nor simply sapientia (“wisdom”). Coolman:

It is precisely their [medieval scholastics’] attempts to discern this nexus among the central dogmatic mysteries of Catholic faith that prompted the medieval doctors, from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth centuries, to compose summae of theology. They were keen, not only to come to grips, for example, with the doctrine of the Trinity or Christology or grace, discretely… but also in properly interrelating them with one another and in light of ultimate human beatitude. At least part of the project of fully appreciating (“re-thinking”) medieval scholasticism should be to approach it from this Glaubensverstandnis perspective. In a very basic sense, medieval scholasticism is the relentless pursuit of deep insight into the nature of God that emerges from a careful consideration of how all the mysteries of faith fit together.

One of Coolman’s points was that it is Hugh of St. Victor’s structures (described in Didascalicon and performed in De Sacramentis) that set the order of topics of for subsequent summae, including Peter Lombard’s Sentences which in many ways give a revised Victorine and Hugonian structure and practice, which Lombard has further focused and sharpened by the introduction of Abelardian dialectic.

Note Coolman’s description of a twin aspiration of the intellectus fidei sought by scholastic theology: to articulate the relation of the mysteries of faith to one another, and to us (“ultimate human beatitude”). Lonergan, of course, is attentive to the distinction between seeing things as they relate to us, and seeing them as they interrelate to each other (which is the way in which it is true in one way to say that “the sun rises" in the East” and in another to say that the Earth circles the sun), and Coolman suggests that we might interpret intellectus fidei as similar to “insight.” What is pursued by the scholastics, on Coolman’s telling, is a discipline that can work with both of these relational realities. We might say, following Hugh’s giving theological weight to the biblical “works of restoration” which re-form creation (so, divine soteriological action), that the personal engagement and activity of the God who saves us (“for us and for our salvation”) is the ultimately relational nexus in which the interrelation of the mysteries among themselves is discerned.

And this brings us back to Rahner and Anatolios. A Victorine re-situation of early scholasticism ultimately cuts against the grain of the tendency to think that scholastics are involved in something impersonal and abstract (in the negative sense) when they formulate their questions and their objections and their solutions: the goal, as careful readers of scholastic summae know, isn’t just the individual questions, but the structures that exist in the whole. The whole of theology matters because Christianity is a single whole, the revelation in and of the single whole Christ. That’s to say, the structure of the whole is Trinity, the first item on Hugh’s list, and also (per Anatolios) the meta-doctrine in light of which all the other doctrines treated in order (which for Hugh and subsequent early scholastics will flow in similar ways according to biblical-ecclesial salvation history). Hugh of St. Victor’s focus of theology on the “works of restoration” serves exactly to root theological reflection in the trinitarian meta-doctrine as God transformatively shows forth God in salvation history: for roots scholasticism as much as for Rahner, the focus in on the triune God with whom we’re always already involved.

The scholastic summary or summa doesn’t just relish excessive detail: rather, it relishes equally the elegance of economic fullness. It is to be taken into the mind, its questions lifted upon the lips, reflected upon and argued, as a whole — and by fragmented persons being reformed into a whole (individually and communally), that the whole might be lifted, a gift into a host, into union with God.

To say that the scholastics aren’t seeking to give excessive detail has another worth in the present is also to illuminate an area in which we have something to learn from them today. Rahner, in Foundations, is himself seeking to give the right amount of detail. Our age, as is well known, favors hyper-specialization. And surely there is a place for such detailed and focused study. But that is a different project than the project that teaches or seeks to effectively communicate the whole of a subject. In our age of hyper specialization, the give of economically and elegantly communicating a brief summa, a breviloquium if you will, is one that ought be retrieved and honed. And in it, per Coolman’s point, the interrelation shown among the parts of a whole matters as much as what is shown about each of them.

Surely, in these respect and others, St. Bonaventure’s own Breviloquium still has much to teach us. With its dense “concentration of word and phrase” (Jacques Guy Bougerol), Bonaventure’s style in the Breviloquium is “simultaneously compact and highly complex; his sentences are long and stately, with rhythmically balanced phrases” (Paula Jean Miller). The craft of Bonaventure’s communication marries form and content in a way that, as the 16th century theologian Jean Gerson found, elicits frutfulness in repeated meditation. And in our age it was none other than Henri de Lubac who lauded, “The Breviloquium of St. Bonaventure, in its harmonious density, manifests a power of total synthesis, perhaps never equaled.”

After Artificial Intelligence, St. Francis: Fadi Chehadé and the Spirit of Prayer and Devotion

We are waiting, not for Godot, but for a new, and doubtless very different, St. Antony of Padua.

+++

Fadi Chehadé: AI and Peacebuilding

I was glad to be present this last weekend when Fadi Chehadé gave his keynote address at the Focolare Movement’s Hearth for the Human Family which was hosted by Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. Chehadé’s topic was “Peacebuilding in the Age of Rapid Digital Advancement: Can We Keep Up?”

Without trying to summarize the immense worth of Chehadé’s talk, I’d like to touch on a couple key moments in it. Considered through the lens of St. Francis of Assisi’s famous letter to Antony of Padua, these touchstones bring out certain aspects of a wise educational and Christian formational paradigm for moving into the future in our lately AI-transformed context. While this view’s Franciscan and Chiara Lubich/Focolare accents ring audibly, this is yet one which this author thinks has some universal value (as audacious as that is to say) despite, or because of, its humble simplicity and provinciality.

First touchstone: Chehadé at one moment presented a picture of the hierarchical supervention of newer computer capacities over older ones: decades ago the buzzword was “data,” then it was “information.” The access to information through search engines is predicated on the availability of data, but it is a higher and supervening operation. Chehade thinks that AI and the algorithms are now giving us something more like knowledge, with capacities akin to logical and reasoning capacities. This capacity supervenes over the information capacities in something like the way those information capacities supervene over the earlier foundational data capacities. 

My own brief gloss on this would be to say that: AI prosthetically extends human logical and discursive reasoning capacity in something like the way physical books, physical libraries, and the Google search engine prosthetically extend human capacity for memory.

Yet, and here we come to the second touchstone I’d like to use from Chehadé’s talk: these reasoning, logical, knowledge capacities Chehadé identifies in AI do not equate to or pass over into wisdom. Interacting heavily with AI in his work, Chehadé is decidedly not among those who believe that these machines are sentient or that they can cross over into the space of wisdom. His call was for humans – who do have the capacity for agency, genuine wisdom, and spiritual maturity – to accept and use these new tools, which are so disruptive in so many ways (and in particular ways for education), with good motivations, and wisdom, and for the common good.

Chehadé shared a powerful anecdote that vividly brings out the import of this second touchstone. Chehadé’s company arranged for him to eat dinner with an AI-generated Nelson Mandela. Visually and in terms of knowledge, the AI Mandela was extraordinarily impressive. It looked and spoke like Mandela, and deftly engaged in conversation with an expert deployment of Nelson’s thought, speaking, writing, and the history in which he was involved. Not only that: AI Mandela knew about and could apply its way of thinking to current events as well: Chehadé asked it about prospects for peace in Gaza today, and it knew all about Gaza. 

Yet, when Chehadé was asked about the impact of AI Mandela, and the worth of the tool for peace in Gaza today, Chehadé’s response was clear and unequivocal. AI Mandela was not the personal presence of Nelson Mandela. Chehadé had not had dinner or conversed with the man who so powerfully worked for peace in South Africa. The great president and witness was not at dinner. AI Mandela lacked wisdom.


After AI: St. Francis and the Spirit of Prayer and Devotion

Let’s bring into our reflections St. Francis’s oft-cited, or fated, letter to St. Antony of Padua, an early Franciscan of considerable theological gifting. 

I, Brother Francis, send greetings to you, Brother Anthony, my theological superior. I am pleased that you are now teaching sacred theology to our brothers providing one thing: As it says in our Rule, please see that you do not squelch the spirit of prayer and devotion in them as they undertake studies of this kind.*

This rule might be called “fated” because it warrants theological study, which accelerates difficult-to-bear tensions within the Franciscan order. And yet, St. Francis’ note seems to mean, just as surely, that theological study is not anathema for true followers of St. Francis – so long as “the spirit of prayer and devotion” is not squelched in those engaging such study.

St. Francis is surely not wrong to worry. St. Francis is concerned that the access to certain forms of textual power (as we can say post Foucault, without being blind to the limits of such a rendering**) might diminish the imperative to pray and do good. The worldliness and privilege of education and books have their allure, early and late – as does the promise of power and prestige to be garnered by harnessing AI in our own day. When books are a higher priority than lepers, knowledge and abstract essences displace persons and particulars as the existential path of discipleship. 

Hugh of St. Victor had worried similarly in the previous century. In his Didascalicon, a text written to teach Hugh’s way of reading in all the arts and disciplines as a way of transformation in divine Wisdom, Hugh writes:

It is necessary that the student beginning to advance along this road [to the heavenly homeland] learn in the books he reads not only to be inspired by the outward appearance of their literary expression but also by the imitation of their virtues, so that he might take pleasure not so much in the dignity or arrangement of words as in the beauty of truth. Such a student should also know that it is not conducive to his object that, seized and carried away by an inane desire for knowledge, he should carefully inquire into obscure and profound writings in which his mind is more preoccupied than edified, lest reading alone hold him in such bondage that he is entirely prevented for performing good works (Didascalicon 5.7).

Much like St. Francis will warn that certain kinds of study can squelch the spirit of prayer and devotion, so Hugh here warns against two dangers of study: that one’s mind be caught up merely in the external aesthetics of stylish writing and fail to imitate the virtues depicted; and that one might become preoccupied in speculative mental games and so cease doing good works. Hugh notably associates “the beauty of truth” with the actual performance of good works, active love, kindness in a rich and thick sense. 

For Hugh as for other Victorine & Franciscan luminaries, authentic wisdom, whether in God or in creatures, is fully realized only when and because (as is always the case in God) it inclines to the doing of good. 

This Victorine-Franciscan sensibility with a pedigree including both Hugh of St. Victor and St. Francis comes into play in the early Franciscans’ definition of theology itself. According to the Summa Halensis, the foundational summa for Parisian and especially Franciscan theological culture composed in Paris mainly from the mid 1230s to the mid 1240s, theology “perfects the soul by way of affection, moving it toward the good through the principles of fear and love” and is hence appropriately called “wisdom.”*** St. Bonaventure and others will continue to defend this Victorine and Franciscan view that the study of theology, which itself should flow from and be imbued with a spirit of prayer and devotion, grows the soul in wisdom and leads one to the actual doing of good, and to becoming good.

The Victorine-Franciscan tradition’s ways of understanding the spiritual and affective dimensions of theological study offer us apt insight in our present moment, in which Fadi Chehadé argues that AI can bear good fruit when employed wisely, for good ends. How much then should AI be embraced and employed by those formed by ongoing immersion in the spirit of prayer and devotion? St. Francis’ exhortation to St. Antony rings in our time more loudly than ever, for the tool of AI is more powerful than the alluring textual tools of Francis’ time.  

What about the use of AI in the discipline of theology itself? Theology, as the early Franciscans saw it, is wisdom properly speaking, in a way other disciplines may not be. Will the use of AI tools subvert or thwart the theologians’ becoming good and wise? It need not, it seems to me, if the wisdom of Hugh and St. Francis is seriously heeded. I am not suggesting that theologians neglect learning to speak and write and reason for themselves, as undergraduates may be tempted to do. Yet various of the scholarly functions in which theologians engage may be aided by the power of a reasoning assistant. AI is a prosthetic extension of one’s intellectual agency, but the wisdom must be supplied by the theologian – as must the actual good works which are the goal of discursive study in the first place.

Might we think of AI as a reasoning assistant – a handmaid, if you will, in something like the way the medieval Christian scholastics in the 13th century spoke of philosophy being theology’s handmaid? I have to say that I am not in love with this idea, but it bears meditation. The way in which philosophy was hashed out and commonly defined as theology’s “handmaid” was in vogue at the same time in which scholastics in Paris were grappling with and assimilating the fuller collection of Aristotle’s works, which are nothing if not tools for increasing one’s reasoning capacity. Perhaps the thought that AI tools may function in a somehow analogous way is not too wide of the mark. But the understanding of AI as a prosthetic extension of the intellect’s reasoning capacities seems to me both more accurate and more necessary to say. 

In closing, St. Francis’ emphasis on prayer and devotion as the imbuing principle of theology, and Hugh and the Summa Halensis’ understandings of theology as the cultivation of divine wisdom teleologically ordered to the doing of good, should be underscored as we think of our work with AI. There will be a greater temptation than ever to merely exult in logical virtuosity and hyperproduction of content (at which AI will dominate). Theologians need to embrace the charge given by St. Antony of Padua and the wise guidance of Hugh of St. Victor in order to cultivate themselves and others as persons of heroic moral worth and courage. It requires personal presence and decisive action governed by wisdom for Nelson Mandela to be a person of peace in South Africa, and for St. Francis to sigh for ecstatic peace and preach the gospel to the Sultan.  

It is only such a person, and no machine, who is able in the words of Chiara Lubich to “be the first to love.”



* Jon M. Sweeney, The Complete St. Francis: His Life, The Complete Writings, and the Little Flowers, 236. 

** As has been well noted, the limits of Foucault’s genealogical power analyses are identical to their glory in their limited sphere: it studies power, more and less indiscreetly. Victorine-Franciscan thinkers will recognize that power is only the first transcendental in a triad which culminates in the kindness (benignitas) or goodness (bonitas) or love (caritas) toward which power is, when rightly ordered, always ordered, e.g., the Victorine power-wisdom-kindness or Bonaventure’s power-wisdom-goodness triads. And this all entails at least two things: First, that the truest, deepest and most enduring power is active existing goodness: the sacrificial kindness that is love-in-act, the work of the resurrection in our lives. Second, a power analysis can always be refined – integrated within Wisdom – even as it is itself differentiated on the basis of kindness-love and re-ordered toward the same.

*** A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis, 57.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White on Thomism and Victorine-Franciscan Theological Revival

“[W]e could be helped by some revival of the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, to be sure.”

That’s the viewpoint of the noted Thomistic theologian and philosopher, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. White says it would be good for the Church for there to be, not just further Thomistic revival (though he is certainly in favor of that), but revival of the Victorine-Franciscan theological and spiritual tradition.

White’s welcome Victorine & Franciscan theological advocacy comes in an interview in First Things by Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., on the occasion of the publication of White’s Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 2: On the Rational Credibility of Christianity.

I’ve long been grateful for, and instructed by, Fr. White’s work, and I’d like to offer a few comments by way of concord and response. The context in which Fr. White makes this remark is adequately communicated by two questions of the interview:

Sam Zeno Conedera: Your writings are firmly grounded in Thomism while simultaneously engaging with a wide variety of religious traditions and philosophical trends. In what way does your work contribute to the progress of the Thomistic tradition of inquiry?

Thomas Joseph White: Thomism is grounded in a set of principles—those found in St. Thomas himself, many of which he draws from the Scriptures and Fathers, as well as classical philosophers such as Aristotle. Aquinas’s articulation and coordination of these principles leads to great insights about the nature of reality, both natural and supernatural, human and divine. There are many things he does not consider, but insights from more recent philosophy, theology, modern science, and natural history can be understood or placed in relation to the principles of this thought in ways that are convergent and mutually beneficial to each other. The aim in the end is not to follow any particular thinker but to understand the nature of reality, and Aquinas, doctor communis, is very helpful for this, though by no means alone in the project. No one is alone in the search for truth, and solitary projects always fail in the end.

SZC: Other great theological schools of thought (Bonaventurian, Scotist, Suarezian, etc.), which in the past have been partners in theological dialogue, have not experienced the revival that Thomism has undergone in recent decades. What advantages and disadvantages does this present for Thomists?

TJW: I think there are three things to note here: First, the re-discovery of Aquinas in our own time has also led to new interest in other scholastics, such as those you mention, as well as more recent figures, such as Matthias Scheeben and Charles Journet. So renewed interest in St. Thomas is probably beneficial for the recovery of other traditions.

Second, those who study Aquinas or promote some form of “Thomism” inevitably benefit from learned interlocutors and loyal critics of other traditions and schools of thought. There is a lot of convergence between Aquinas and Bonaventure, not quite as much between Aquinas and Scotus, though some. But in either case, the comparisons are illuminating and challenge us to think again about what we believe to be true about reality. That is precious and needed in the Church, so we could be helped by some revival of the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, to be sure.

Third, and cutting back a little against the grain of the last remark, there is something in the intellectual life akin to biological life. The healthier variants tend to preserve life and persevere over time. Better scientific theories gain traction because they afford a better window into the truth about material reality. St. Thomas has staying power and his principles exhibit vital growth (what Newman called “chronic vigor”) because his work is rife with insight, at once philosophical, theological, and mystical. This fruitfulness is something we can take forward into new conversations, with other major religious traditions, with contemporary naturalists, with alternative philosophical claims about human nature. That is something I try to undertake in this book.

First, I’d like to concur and underscore how absolutely true it is that Thomism hasn’t existed in a vacuum. It has had dialogue partners since the beginning, and they were early and late often conspicuously Franciscan, or even Victorine-Franciscan (if one accepts the argument of the title of this website). The very order and structure of Thomas’ Summa shows that he is thinking about the order and structure of the earlier Franciscan Summa of Theology, the Summa Halensis, and he’s making critical decisions about what to put where, what to include and not include, in addition to directly substantive decisions about his own positions in dialogue with the Franciscan ones.

And, when it comes to Summas, the Summa Halensis has it all! To study it and reflect on it as a (Franciscan) scholastic pedagogy (as Justin Coyle sagely regards it) is also to come to appreciate the breadth of the conversations happening among Friars at Paris. It gives a more fully orbed picture than one is able to have from studying, say, Aquinas’ Summa in isolation. Thomas is also, of course, thinking about and responding to positions found in Bonaventure’s Sentences commentaries.

And to take this point further, the key thing isn’t just to understand how Thomas himself is indebted to theological dialogue with Franciscans. This is just as clearly the case in subsequent Thomistic tradition. Thomists and Bonaventurians and Scotists (and Bonaventurian Scotists!) are always dialoguing with each other. Of course, Blessed John Duns Scotus was able to respond to Thomas’ concerns and positions in his own writings, since he wrote a bit later, and so he’s taking into account the moves of Thomas and other intervening figures. But the Thomists learn from Scotus and Scotists, and develop Thomism more fully and precisely on the basis of it, and in dialogue and disputation with it. One anecdote will suffice: when I first started studying Scotus on natural theology, I realized that I had already run into some of his argumentative forms and moves — in latter day Thomistic authors! So to grapple with and learn to think with even the Thomistic tradition, one must learn to appreciate what the Franciscans have been up to.

Second, Fr. White makes a valuable point in the sentence leading up to his commendation of the Victorines & Franciscans. He says that “the comparisons are illuminating and challenge us to think again about what we believe to be true about reality. That is precious and needed in the Church, so we could be helped by some revival of the Victorine and Franciscan traditions, to be sure.”

Amen.

When many people start to get into Catholic theology and philosophy, they gravitate (and sometimes gravitate very hard indeed) toward St. Thomas. And the reasons for this are obvious and not bad at all: he’s called “common doctor,” and there are many gifted expositors of his thought and extenders of his perspective. Fr. White is excellent in both those ways. These and many others are good reasons to take Aquinas seriously. It is great to be, not a nihilist, but a hillbilly Thomist! Yet to think about God and reality in conversation with, say, both Aquinas and Bonaventure, here another level of richness is possible, as we think about the different ways in which often shared principles and received patristic views are held, applied, and used. Or for another example, it is often noticed that the way intellect and will relate feels to most interpreters quite different in Aquinas and Scotus. There are manifold subtleties in how one brings that out and appraises it. But the differences in perspective that seem to arise as a result are not shallow: they’re stunning. Each side has polemical takes on the other’s way of seeing it. But it is excellent to be able to see that both of these ways of seeing it have been embraced by very many thinkers — not just Aquinas and Scotus but those after each of them. Both paths result in, profoundly different, utterly Christian & Catholic ways of seeing. (Or at least apparently and arguably so — until or unless the disagreement is clarified by the magisterium, the eschaton, or an online apologist who finds the difference intolerable.)

But instead of advocating for a Thomism-in-an-echo-chamber, White affirms the value in such deep probing and considered reflection on fundamental philosophical questions and perspectives: such is “precious and needed in the Church”: such makes for better, deeper, more considered Thomists, and better, deeper, more considered Scotists.

Three cheers for that.

Third, I’d like to reflect a bit on Fr. White’s third point, which he says is “cutting back a little against the grain” of his second remark, which he’s just concluded by advocating for Victorine & Franciscan revival.

He says, “The healthier variants tend to preserve life and persevere over time. Better scientific theories gain traction because they afford a better window into the truth about material reality. St. Thomas has staying power and his principles exhibit vital growth (what Newman called “chronic vigor”) because his work is rife with insight, at once philosophical, theological, and mystical. This fruitfulness is something we can take forward into new conversations….”

It is certainly the case that St. Thomas’ work has staying power, and the kinds of insight that Fr. White says. And to an extent the import of this remark is that Thomism, just as it isn’t healthy when locked into its own echo chamber, also shouldn’t be locked into an echo chamber in which only Victorines & Franciscans & Thomists are present: it should engage present, current, new interlocutors outside its old dialogue partners and haunts. Agreed. But is Fr. White also contrasting Thomism to the Victorine-Franciscan tradition in this remark? I don’t know. [Update: Dear Reader, please see the added footnote * below, which clarifies that Fr. White is not aiming at the Franciscans.] But I’ll proceed a bit further on the supposition that some Thomist somewhere might do so: some imagined Thomistic partisan might take the vigor of, say, the Eastern Province Dominicans and the Thomistic ressourcement underway in recent decades as positive sign that Thomism has a kind of Newmanian chronic vigor, in contrast to (let us say) Franciscan approaches, because of the evolutionary advantage (as it were) of its truthfulness: Dominicans bury their opponents (while saying the funeral prayers of course, pace Darwin).

In response to such an interlocutor, it is worth noting that Thomism and the Franciscan schools have both suffered their intellectual collapses now and again. There are times in the memory of the old folks when there wasn’t an avid Thomistic ressourcement underway, and when such an imagined Thomistic partisan’s remark wouldn’t have had much purchase on the appearance of truth. And, gosh, let us just say: the times of Franciscan missionary and theological excellence are not small times in history. And if a Thomistic partisan might complain that the wrong kind of Franciscan theology sometimes gains sway in Franciscan circles, well, too, there have been times when the wrong kind of Thomism held sway (and once a patristic ressourcement resulted in response, and got control of an ecumenical council).

For my part, I am grateful for the Thomistic ressourcement underway through theologians like Fr. White and Dr. Levering and my own first Aquinas seminar teacher, Dr. Reinhard Huetter: what a robust and beautiful clarity of thought one gains from learning to think with the common doctor, to catch glimpses of what he saw.

And it is worth recalling that one of the properly intellectual and scholastic reasons for the ongoing worth of reading Thomas Aquinas — and as a Victorine-Franciscan thinker I share Fr. White’s gratitude to not be in a single-tradition-echo-chamber — is that Thomas’ Summa is a marvelous teaching text. Even non-Thomistic theologians need to begin to gain the skills of scholastic rigor from someone, and who better. Aquinas’ Summa is much more streamlined in organization and argument than the overflowing and overgrowing fecundity of the Franciscan Summa Halensis: but the Church and the world need the seeds of growth from the Summa Halensis too (and I suspect now more than ever)! And Aquinas’ Summa operates at an easier level of argument than, say, Scotus’ Ordinatio, and I’m very glad to have encountered Aquinas first. But I’m also very glad to have encountered Scotus eventually! — and I’m quite confident the Church is poorer where Scotus’ perspective doesn’t exist.

In closing, I’d like to encourage those who study theology — and in particular those who are drawn to the conversations around Aquinas — to both enrich themselves by getting their heads around the Victorine-Franciscan theological tradition, and to consider it as a theological school of spiritual and vocational worth in its own right.

You can read the good interview with Fr. White in its entirety here.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/04/recovering-our-christian-intellectual-tradition

In the meantime, just remember, that a leading Thomistic theologian just called for a Victorine & Franciscan theological revival.

* Fr. Thomas Joseph White, in kind correspondence, confirms that he’s not aiming at the Franciscans in his third point, and underscores that he wishes Alexander of Hales and St. Bonaventure were more central in contemporary theology, and expresses admiration for Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity in particular. Thanks Fr. White!