The theologian knows perfectly that, according to St. Thomas, angels are
corporeal with relation to God; that the soul receives its being in the
body; and that man has a vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual soul;
that the soul is all in all, and all in every part; that it is the
efficient and formal cause of the body; that it is the greatest in
nobleness of form; that the appetite is a passive power; that archangels
are the medium between angels and principalities; that baptism
regenerates of itself and by chance; that the catechism is not a
sacrament, but sacramental; that certainty springs from the cause and
subject; that concupiscence is the appetite of sensitive delectation;
that conscience is an act and not a power.
The angel of the schools has written about four thousand fine pages in
this style, and a shaven-crowned young man passes three years in filling
his brain with this sublime knowledge; after which he receives the
bonnet of a doctor of the Sorbonne, instead of going to Bedlam. If he is
a man of quality, or the son of a rich man, or intriguing and fortunate,
he becomes bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and pope.
If he is poor and without credit, he becomes the chaplain of one of
these people; it is he who preaches for them, who reads St. Thomas and
Scotus for them, who makes commandments for them, and who in a council
decides for them.
The title of theologian is so great that the fathers of the Council of
Trent give it to their cooks, "_cuoco celeste, gran theologo_." Their
science is the first of sciences, their condition the first of
conditions, and themselves the first of men; such the empire of true
doctrine; so much does reason govern mankind!
When a theologian has become--thanks to his arguments--either prince of
the holy Roman Empire, archbishop of Toledo, or one of the seventy
princes clothed in red, successors of the humble apostles, then the
successors of Galen and Hippocrates are at his service. They were his
equals when they studied in the same university; they had the same
degrees, and received the same furred bonnet. Fortune changes all; and
those who discovered the circulation of the blood, the lacteal veins,
and the thoracic canal, are the servants of those who have learned what
concomitant grace is, and have forgotten it.
SECTION II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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