Sermon for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas
Fr. David Curry delivered this homily at King’s College Chapel, Thursday, March 6th, 2025.
“Charity never faileth”
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains…
With such a summary of natural philosophy – measuring the heights of mountains, fathoming the depths of seas, of ethical and political philosophy – the measuring and fathoming “of states, and kings,” of metaphysics or natural theology – “walking with a staffe to heav’n and tracing fountains,” the causes of things, Herbert begins his poem, The Agonie. Then by way of complete contrast to such a summa of philosophical thought, he immediately adds an important ‘but.’ But what? “But there are,” he says, “two vast, spacious things,/ the which to measure it doth more behove”, things that are more significant and more necessary for us to ponder, “yet few there are that sound them.” And what are those “two vast, spacious things?” They are “Sinne and Love.”
We meet just after Ash Wednesday to commemorate this evening, Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet, as the Prayer Book calendar puts it, and the martyrs St. Perpetua and her Companions. Aquinas is one of the great theologians of the western church, one who, I think it is fair to say, has taken much care to sound out, meaning to inquire into and make known, sin and love in his theological writings and commentaries. But what might such a 13th century giant of medieval thought have to do with Anglican thinking and devotion? Rather a lot and as testimony to our essential catholicism. It would be hard to make sense of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity or John Pearson’s On the Creed, to name but two of many, without an understanding and appreciation of the works of Thomas Aquinas. It was Pearson who, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford just after the English Civil War, argued for using Thomas’ Summa Theologiae for teaching systematic theology to those entering the church rather than the Sentences of Peter Lombard.
The structure and images of Herbert’s poem are profoundly Thomistic. The poem references the philosophical sciences as derived from Aristotle and as taken up by Thomas: in short, physics, ethics, and metaphysics. Like Thomas, he argues for the necessity of another science, what Thomas calls sacra doctrina, namely, what is revealed through the Scriptures. As Herbert suggests, Scripture teaches most clearly about what we most need to know, sin and love.
