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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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]