Very Rev. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P., Prior of the Dominican House of Studies
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Great Upper Church
Feb. 4, 2021
“Consecrate them in the truth.” (John 17:17)
On the night before he died, Jesus prayed. He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Many of us can recall what Jesus prayed. He prayed for himself, as a man facing death might do: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”
This is not the only prayer that Jesus prayed that evening. Today’s Gospel reminds us that, before praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed also in the Upper Room. There, he prayed not for himself, but instead for the men gathered around him, the Apostles. Before he died, Jesus prayed for the Apostles with special attention and love. He prayed for them in order to consecrate them, to set them apart. Jesus had chosen them, and now he was offering them to the Father, for a specific work. After Jesus’ ascension, these men would continue his ministry. They would preach and sanctify, not simply in the name of Jesus but in his very person. In order that the Apostles might accomplish this holy work—the work of priests—Jesus prayed for them. In his prayer to the Father, Jesus willed the Apostles many graces, but he willed them—above all—truth. “Consecrate them in the truth,” Jesus prayed. “Your word is truth . . . I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” As I am true, Jesus prayed, make them true—with the same truth.
As a priest, St. Thomas Aquinas pondered Jesus’s prayer in the Upper Room. As a preacher, he shared the fruits of his meditation. In his Commentary on St. John’s Gospel, for example, St. Thomas notes that the Apostles, while being the primary focus of Jesus’ Priestly Prayer, were not the only focus of his prayer. According to Aquinas, Jesus prayed in the Upper Room not just for the Apostles but for every disciple. He did so, not because he makes each disciple a priest, like the Apostles, but because he consecrates each disciple in truth. Aquinas explains that as Christ sends every disciple out into the world, Christ consecrates every disciple in himself, in his Word, in truth. If every disciple is to witness to Christ, then every disciple is given the truth that is Christ.
The Christian’s consecration in truth is one of the many lenses through which St. Thomas studies and appreciates the human person. Man is capable of many things, but what fascinated Aquinas about man is that he is capable especially of truth. For Aquinas, man’s capacity for truth has special implications for understanding both the life of nature and the life of grace. As grace builds on nature, Aquinas understood that man can be consecrated in truth because he is first capable of truth.
What does it mean to be capable of truth? St. Thomas spent his life examining this question, and he never ceased to marvel at how the human creature comes to real intellectual knowledge of the realities around him. Man lives and moves and has his being in the world not only by perceiving it through his senses, or by feeling it through his passions, but also by knowing it through his intellect. Of all material creatures, only the human creature achieves intellectual knowledge. Whatever a man holds, he also beholds. That is to say, man’s possession of a thing is always two-fold. That which man holds in his hand, for example, he also holds in his intellect. In fact, this is how man holds anything in his hand, by holding it also intellectually in his soul. What makes man to be man is that man knows what he holds, or if he doesn’t know what he holds he strives to know it. And the intellectual holding of what man holds is real; it is not imagined or contrived. Through his intellect, man is really adequated to the world; man brings the world within himself intellectually, such that he can possess the whole universe within himself, even as he occupies only one small part of it. “Insofar as something is known by a knower it exists in a certain manner within the knower,” Aquinas writes. In man, “the perfection of the whole universe [can] exist in one thing.”1 Here, Aquinas draws on the wisdom of Aristotle to describe what we all do by nature: to know the world, and ourselves in it.
For Aquinas, the fascination with truth does not end here. The human intellect can acquire truth not only of material realities but also of immaterial realities, and by grace the intellect can be elevated to acquire truth even of supernatural realties. By grace, man through his created intellect can adequate himself to the uncreated realm, insofar as God makes this realm known to him, which God does in revelation. Here, we see Aquinas’s fascination with truth reach its peak. In an act of supernatural faith, man comes to possess God, not holding God in his hand, of course, but in his intellect, however darkly and tenuously, as St. Paul describes faith’s sure grasp of truth. So strongly is intellect’s orientation to truth, with the aid of grace it can come to possess First Truth. “The rational creature alone can possess a divine person,” Aquinas affirms in the Summa.2 Again, Aquinas relies on Aristotle, and specifically on his realist epistemology, to account for what the New Testament reveals. On the night before he died, in his same discourse the Upper Room, Jesus revealed: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn 14:23). As the means to this holy indwelling, Jesus consecrates every disciple in truth.
God has made every man and woman in his image. This means that God has made each of us to know, and he wants to elevate each of us to know him. He makes man and woman for truth in order to consecrate them in truth. God does this not only that man and woman might know, but also that man and woman might love, and eventually love God. This truth has implications for education. Every school, every university responds to this truth, either by embracing it or neglecting it. As a community of teachers and students, a school is most itself when it marvels at the human capacity for truth, and at this capacity’s ability to be consecrated by God.
Which is why our schools—The Catholic University of America and the Dominican House of Studies—celebrate annually this Mass in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas. Of all the Doctors of the Church, St. Thomas remains the greatest apostle of truth. He recognized and taught that the pursuit of every truth is perfected in its consecration to Christ’s truth. “Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius,” Aquinas professed.3 “I believe whatever the Son of God has said.” St. Thomas is our friend and intercessor in the work of truth, and on his prayers we rely as we strive daily to ensure that, in the words of the Book of Wisdom, “we and our words are in God’s hand” (Wis 7:16).
1 De Veritate, q. 2, art. 2.
2 ST.I.38.1.
3 A line from the second stanza of Aquinas’s Adoro Te Devote.