So Much Straw

Panis angelicus, fit panis hominum
-St. Thomas Aquinas

If you are Catholic, perhaps at this moment the tune of that great hymn from the Angelic Doctor is wafting gently through your mind right now. I rather hope that it is; it is one of the most beautiful tunes I know, one of the few with that genuine ethereal standing which makes many of us fall victim to what C. S. Lewis calls that 'inconsolable longing'. It is like, for myself anyway, Beethoven's Ode to Joy or Schubert's Ave Maria.

And yet it is only so much straw.

How can that be? How can such wondrous and glorious tunes be nothing more than cattle feed? Yet we have it on the word of St. Thomas himself that that is precisely the case. For he said, after a Beatific vision, a view of Christ and Heaven which he was granted about six months before he died, "All my works seem like straw after what I have seen". The greatest mind in all of human history, the man, the philosopher, the theologian beyond measure, and what he did is meaningless compared to what is really real.

Only so much straw.

Can we feel anything but humility at such a fantastic attitude? Can we even actually grasp the meaning of what Aquinas says? Nothing here, not the most important things we can say, things we can see, things we might touch and hear and smell, is worth the time of day when set next to the greatest things.

Only so much straw.

There is a lesson in that.