The Runaway Abbot

G. K. CHESTERSTON

Some miles from the monastery of Monte Cassino stood a great crag
or cliff, standing up like a pillar of the Apennines.  It was crowned
with a castle that bore the name of The Dry Rock, and was the eyrie
in which the eaglets of the Aquino branch of the Imperial family
were nursed to fly.  Here lived Count Landulf of Aquino, who was
the father of Thomas Aquinas and some seven other sons.  In military
affairs he doubtless rode with his family, in the feudal manner;
and apparently had something to do with the destruction of the monastery.
But it was typical of the tangle of the time, that Count Landulf
seems afterwards to have thought that it would be a tactful and
delicate act to put in his son Thomas as Abbot of the monastery.
This would be of the nature of a graceful apology to the Church,
and also, it would appear, the solution of a family difficulty.

For it had been long apparent to Count Landulf that nothing could be done
with his seventh son Thomas, except to make him an Abbot or something
of that kind.  Born in 1226, he had from childhood a mysterious
objection to becoming a predatory eagle, or even to taking an ordinary
interest in falconry or tilting or any other gentlemanly pursuits.
He was a large and heavy and quiet boy, and phenomenally silent,
scarcely opening his mouth except to say suddenly to his schoolmaster
in an explosive manner, "What is God?"  The answer is not recorded but it
is probable that the asker went on worrying out answers for himself.
The only place for a person of this kind was the Church and presumably the
cloister; and so far as that went, there was no particular difficulty.
It was easy enough for a man in Count Landulf's position to arrange
with some monastery for his son to be received there; and in this
particular case he thought it would be a good idea if he were received
in some official capacity, that would be worthy of his worldly rank.
So everything was smoothly arranged for Thomas Aquinas becoming a monk,
which would seem to be what he himself wanted; and sooner or later
becoming Abbot of Monte Cassino.  And then the curious thing happened.

In so far as we may follow rather dim and disputed events,
it would seem that the young Thomas Aquinas walked into his father's
castle one day and calmly announced that he had become one of the
Begging Friars, of the new order founded by Dominic the Spaniard;
much as the eldest son of the squire might go home and airily inform
the family that he had married a gypsy; or the heir of a Tory Duke
state that he was walking tomorrow with the Hunger Marchers organised
by alleged Communists.  By this, as has been noted already, we may
pretty well measure the abyss between the old monasticism and the new,
and the earthquake of the Dominican and Franciscan revolution.
Thomas had appeared to wish to be a Monk; and the gates were silently
opened to him and the long avenues of the abbey, the very carpet,
so to speak, laid for him up to the throne of the mitred abbot.
He said he wished to be a Friar, and his family flew at him
like wild beasts; his brothers pursued him along the public roads,
half-rent his friar's frock from his back and finally locked him
up in a tower like a lunatic.

It is not very easy to trace the course of this furious family quarrel,
and how it eventually spent itself against the tenacity
of the young Friar; according to some stories, his mother's
disapproval was short-lived and she went over to his side;
but it was not only his relatives that were embroiled.
We might say that the central governing class of Europe,
which partly consisted of his family, were in a turmoil over the
deplorable youth; even the Pope was asked for tactful intervention,
and it was at one time proposed that Thomas should be allowed
to wear the Dominican habit while acting as Abbot in the
Benedictine Abbey.  To many this would seem a tactful compromise;
but it did not commend itself to the narrow medieval mind
of Thomas Aquinas.  He indicated sharply that he wished to be
a Dominican in the Dominican Order, and not at a fancy-dress ball;
and the diplomatic proposal appears to have been dropped.

Thomas of Aquino wanted to be a Friar.  It was a staggering
fact to his contemporaries; and it is rather an intriguing fact
even to us; for this desire, limited literally and strictly
to this statement, was the one practical thing to which his
will was clamped with adamantine obstinacy till his death.
He would not be an Abbot; he would not be a Monk; he would not
even be a Prior or ruler in his own fraternity; he would not be
a prominent or important Friar; he would be a Friar.  It is as if
Napoleon had insisted on remaining a private soldier all his life.
Something in this heavy, quiet, cultivated, rather academic
gentleman would not be satisfied till he was, by fixed authoritative
proclamation and official pronouncement, established and appointed
to be a Beggar.  It is all the more interesting because, while he did
more than his duty a thousand times over, he was not at all like
a Beggar; nor at all likely to be a good Beggar.  He had nothing
of the native vagabond about him, as had his great precursors;
he was not born with something of the wondering minstrel,
like St. Francis; or something of the tramping missionary,
like St. Dominic.  But he insisted upon putting himself under
military orders, to do these things at the will of another,
if required.  He may be compared with some of the more magnanimous
aristocrats who have enrolled themselves in revolutionary armies;
or some of the best of the poets and scholars who volunteered
as private soldiers in the Great War.  Something in the courage
and consistency of Dominic and Francis had challenged his deep
sense of justice; and while remaining a very reasonable person,
and even a diplomatic one, he never let anything shake the iron
immobility of this one decision of his youth; nor was he to be turned
from his tall and towering ambition to take the lowest place.

The first effect of his decision, as we have seen, was much more
stimulating and even startling.  The General of the Dominicans, under whom
Thomas had enrolled himself, was probably well aware of the diplomatic
attempts to dislodge him and the worldly difficulties of resisting them.
His expedient was to take his young follower out of Italy altogether;
bidding him proceed with a few other friars to Paris.  There was
something prophetic even about this first progress of the travelling
teacher of the nations; for Paris was indeed destined to be in
some sense the goal of his spiritual journey; since it was there
that he was to deliver both his great defence of the Friars and his
great defiance to the antagonists of Aristotle.  But this his first
journey to Paris was destined to be broken off very short indeed.
The friars had reached a turn of the road by a wayside fountain,
a little way north of Rome, when they were overtaken by a wild
cavalcade of captors, who seized on Thomas like brigands,
but who were in fact only rather needlessly agitated brothers.
He had a large number of brothers:  perhaps only two were here involved.
Indeed he was the seventh; and friends of Birth Control may lament
that this philosopher was needlessly added to the noble line
of ruffians who kidnapped him.  It was an odd affair altogether.
There is something quaint and picturesque in the idea of kidnapping
a begging friar, who might in a sense be called a runaway abbot.
There is a comic and tragic tangle in the motives and purposes of such
a trio of strange kinsmen.  There is a sort of Christian cross-purposes
in the contrast between the feverish illusion of the importance
of things, always marking men who are called practical; and the much
more practical pertinacity of the man who is called theoretical.

Thus at least did those three strange brethren stagger or trail
along their tragic road, tied together, as it were, like criminal
and constable; only that the criminals were making the arrest.
So their figures are seen for an instant against the horizon of history;
brothers as sinister as any since Cain and Abel.  For this queer outrage
in the great family of Aquino does really stand out symbolically,
as representing something that will forever make the Middle Ages a mystery
and a bewilderment; capable of sharply contrasted interpretations
like darkness and light.  For in two of those men there raged,
we might say screamed, a savage pride of blood and blazonry of arms,
though they were princes of the most refined world of their time,
which would seem more suitable to a tribe dancing round a totem.
For the moment they had forgotten everything except the name of a family,
that is narrower than a tribe, and far narrower than a nation.
And the third figure of that trio, born of the same mother
and perhaps visibly one with the others in face or form,
had a conception of brotherhood broader than most modern democracy,
for it was not national but international; a faith in mercy and modesty
far deeper than any mere mildness of manners in the modern world;
and a drastic oath of poverty, which would now be counted quite
a mad exaggeration of the revolt against plutocracy and pride.
Out of the same Italian castle came two savages and one sage;
or one saint more pacific than most modern sages.
That is the double aspect confusing a hundred controversies.
That is what makes the riddle of the medieval age; that it was
not one age but two ages.  We look into the moods of some men,
and it might be the Stone Age; we look into the minds of other men,
and they might be living in the Golden Age; in the most modern sort
of Utopia.  There were always good men and bad men; but in this
time good men who were subtle lived with bad men who were simple.
They lived in the same family; they were brought up in the same nursery;
and they came out to struggle, as the brothers of Aquino struggled
by the wayside, when they dragged the new friar along the road
and shut him up in the castle on the hill.

When his relations tried to despoil him of his friar's frock he seems
to have laid about them in the fighting manner of his fathers,
and it would seem successfully, since this attempt was abandoned.
He accepted the imprisonment itself with his customary composure,
and probably did not mind very much whether he was left to philosophise
in a dungeon or in a cell.  Indeed there is something in the way the whole
tale is told, which suggests that through a great part of that strange
abduction, he had been carried about like a lumbering stone statue.
Only one tale told of his captivity shows him merely in anger;
and that shows him angrier than he ever was before or after.
It struck the imagination of his own time for more important reasons;
but it has an interest that is psychological as well as moral.
For once in his life, for the first time and the last, Thomas of
Aquino was really hors de lui; riding a storm outside that tower
of intellect and contemplation in which he commonly lived.
And that was when his brothers introduced into his room some specially
gorgeous and painted courtesan, with the idea of surprising him
by a sudden temptation, or at least involving him in a scandal.
His anger was justified, even by less strict moral standards than his own;
for the meanness was even worse than the foulness of the expedient.
Even on the lowest grounds, he knew his brothers knew, and they
knew that he knew, that it was an insult to him as a gentleman
to suppose that he would break his pledge upon so base a provocation;
and he had behind him a far more terrible sensibility; all that huge
ambition of humility which was to him the voice of God out of heaven.
In this one flash alone we see that huge unwieldy figure in an attitude
of activity, or even animation; and he was very animated indeed.
He sprang from his seat and snatched a brand out of the fire,
and stood brandishing it like a flaming sword.  The woman not
unnaturally shrieked and fled, which was all that he wanted;
but it is quaint to think of what she must have thought of that madman
of monstrous stature juggling with flames and apparently threatening
to burn down the house.  All he did, however, was to stride after her
to the door and bang and bar it behind her; and then, with a sort
of impulse of violent ritual, he rammed the burning brand into the door,
blackening and blistering it with one big black sign of the cross.
Then he returned, and dropped it again into the fire; and sat down
on that seat of sedentary scholarship, that chair of philosophy,
that secret throne of contemplation, from which he never rose again....

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