Creation, Mystery and Intelligibility.

I am deeply drawn to mystery in my own spiritual life. I have frequently become frustrated with theologians who seemed to think that they had everything figured out and fitted into a system. Aquinas has been accused of being just such a systematician, a person who always has an answer to every question asked, and who leaves no place for wonder in the world. Fortunately, Josef Pieper corrected my misunderstanding of the Angelic Doctor. While Thomas Aquinas was incredibly methodical in his thought, he did not set out to create a system of theology which would answer every question and resolve every doubt. In his marvelous little book The Silence of St. Thomas, Pieper argues that mystery properly understood is vital to Aquinas's thought.
For St. Thomas, all real beings are potentially knowable by the human mind, because they are created things. That is, all things come from the mind of God - they are knowable because they are known by God.
On the other hand, Pieper argues that it is equally true to say that “the very element which makes [things] capable of being known, must necessarily be at the same time the reason why things are unfathomable” (Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 66) There remains in all things, even the simplest, something unknown to us, which prevents us from ever claiming a totally exhaustive knowledge of the world. The cause of this is the same as the cause of the knowability of the things.
To know a thing completely requires that we know a thing in its relation to the mind of the creator, a knowledge which is inaccessible to us in this life. Because things are created they are knowable, but because they are created there is in them a depth which the human mind cannot fathom. “Because things come forth from God... they partake wholly of the nature of the Logos, that is , they are lucid and limpid to their very depths... Because of their origin in the Logos they mirror an infinite light, and therefore cannot be comprehended” (99). Even in the world to come, in the very vision of God, God will not be fully comprehended, because God is infinite, and our minds are finite. Perhaps, as Gregory of Nyssa speculated in his Life of Moses, we can progress continually to a deeper and deeper vision of God, but we can never reach a point where we exhaust what there is to be known about God.
The doctrine of creation excludes the extremes of skepticism and of a rationalism which claims to have grasped everything. St. Thomas never finished the Summa Theologiae, and this is perhaps not so surprising. “Its fragmentary character belongs to the total implication of the Summa Theologica” (92) Aquinas did not fail in never completing the Summa; the Summa could not be finished, because there will always be more to know, and Aquinas knew that.
All this amounts to saying that for Thomas Aquinas, God and creation are profoundly mysterious.
I value this sense of mystery in Aquinas; what I love most about it is that it is a mystery that is not anti - rational. For Aquinas, things are mysterious not because they are unknowable and illogical, but because there is simply more to know about things than we could ever exhaust. We could never say all there is to say about a single mote of dust because that would finally be to say everything about the creator of that dust mote. Mystery lies in the fullness of reality, not in its emptiness or incoherence. Mystery never excuses us from trying to understand the world or from understanding God - rather mystery always calls us to seek for a deeper understanding.
Mystery does not just stop us in our tracks, but it draws us on in wonder, ever further in and closer to the very mind and heart of the creator.
To him be glory, for ever and ever
Amen.