So Much Straw

It is customary for bloggers to introduce themselves in their first post and/or provide a sort of thematic overview for their writings.  Of course, there's also a fancy biography of me to look at if you want to know more of my story, so I won't go too in depth.  In fact, I'd prefer to reveal bits and pieces of myself as we go along.  It's more fun that way after all, right?

As a point of reference, though, I'd like to explain the difficulty I have in writing.  See, I've always regarded writing as a temptation to thoughts of grandeur.  In other words, if I write, and write well, I might think I have done anything of my own accord, rather than directing the appropriate credit heavenward.

So I start with a quotation from Socrates oft referenced and paraphrased (most famously, for me at least, in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), "I know that I know nothing."  As with a lot of well-known aphirsms, though, we find that Socrates did not exactly say these words or, at least, that the manuscript where these words exist verbatim are no longer with us.  In addition, it is worth noting that Socrates did not write down any of his teachings, but some of his followers wrote down what can believed to be similar, if not the same, words attributable to Socrates.

Perhaps the closest we come to Socrates uttering these famous words is during Plato's account of Socrates' trial in the Apology.  Socrates tells the jurors that he has spent his life trying to find a man wiser than him, after the Oracle at Delphi had proclaimed him the wisest man alive.  He says of meeting a man considered wise,

"I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."

What's the point of this Greek detour?  Well, that takes me back to the title of this article, which derives from a story from the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican friar and Aristotelean philosopher (not to mention Doctor of the Church).  The story goes that, near the end of his life, St. Thomas experienced a vision on heaven while celebrating Mass.  Afterwards, according to Butler's Lives of the Saints, St. Thomas said "The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me."

These two men, centuries apart, latched on to a principle that I always try to keep firmly in front of me as I write, and that all of us should keep in front of us as we live our lives--humility.  Socrates, in many ways, founded Western philosophy and laid the groundwork for the philosophical conversion of the Greeks to Christianity, no small feat.  Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas is the gold standard of Catholic theology and philosophy, especially his monumental Summa Theologica (yes, that title translates to The Sum of Theology).  These two men did not do what they did to amass great personal honors (in fact, we could say Socrates dug his own grave with his blunt judgments of others).  Rather, they sought Truth above all else.  Yet, in that quest, they knew they would never know everything. 

We must recall this fact when entering into the fields of theology and philosophy.  We can write many words, but, in the end, they pale in comparison to the In a similar way, I preface all of my future posts with the acknowledgement that my words are just bits of straw compared to the massive wealth of human knowledge.  And, most importantly, they are less than bits of straw compared to the beauty and splendor of Truth, that Truth (to paraphrase St. Thomas) which we call God.