Off the Shelves 1

Our first stop in the collection is works on philosophy and psychology. This extract comes from Fr. Aegidius Doolan's Philosophy for the Layman (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1954) and is taken from the introduction, an essay on St. Thomas Aquinas. It is particularly appropriate since it points to the end of all knowledge, which is God.

St. Thomas insists that there is an order - and consequently a law - founded on nature itself, which no power on earth can alter or affect. Such is the relationship between effects and their cause - for instance between the world and God, or between children and their parents; or again between means and ends, between body and soul, between functions and their objects, between property and human life. Over and above, but not dissociated from, this natural order or these natural relationships there is the order of grace, the mysterious relationship established between men and God, so intimate that they may call Him "Father" and may look on one another as his children. The union established by this relationship between all men - however different from one another in race or colour or social station - St. Thomas conceived to be the very bond of peace in what Our Lord called the "kingdom of the children" - because those who belong to it are born again, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of men but of God.

It is at this point that for St. Thomas as for St. John the Evangelist "the last heaven opened" and he discerned what he so gloriously sung in his hymn Verbum Supernum, of which the conclusion O Salutaris is familiar to all Catholics. He saw the Supernal Word of Truth coming into this world, yet never ceasing to be at His Father's side. He saw Him hanging on the Cross. He saw Him in the triumph of the first Easter morning. And he saw Him again during the whole course of ages, and from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, offering Himself as a victim of that Love of Truth which is His very Life, poured forth in the chalice of His Blood.

It is St. Thomas' realization of all this that is expressed throughout his writings. Everything spoke to him of the glory of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, which is the very end and meaning of all creation, and especially of human life. "Every creature," he writes, "as it is a created substance represents the cause and principle, and shows forth the Father. As it has form and species it represents the Word .. According as it bears the relation of order, it represents the Holy Ghost inasmuch as He is love."