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Not All Ills Can Be Cured Philip V. Brennan In his masterwork "Summa Theologica," St. Thomas Aquinas sought to summarize everything that was knowable about God. Described as having been "constructed idea upon idea like a magnificent gothic cathedral," and as "a brilliant synthesis of medieval Christian thought," the Summa consists of 38 tracts, 631 questions, nearly 3,000 articles, and 10,000 objections with answers. It represented what has been called "the full flowering of scholastic theology." In a moment of divinely inspired clarity, Aquinas contemplated this incredible work of his soaring intellect and years of arduous study and declared humbly that the Summa was in the end "ut palea " Said St. Thomas "mihi videtur ut palea." (It seems to me as so much straw.)
In this, Aquinas had recognized that no matter how much mankind can know about God, in the end, God is unknowable. He recognized that his massive work dedicated to explaining God, therefor, barely scratched the surface. His admission of the futility of trying to reach the unreachable, could almost be compared to a lesser admission by an aging William Shakespeare that all his works were amateurish, uninspired, badly written equivalents to a pile of dime novels. Story Continues Below
Much the same conclusion might be drawn by those who labor in the tangled foliage in the political vineyards were they experience a moment of clarity similar to that which occurred to St. Thomas. There is not a single practitioner of the political arts who could look back on his lifetime's efforts to impose his version of order and stability upon his times, and reach any other conclusion than that when all is said and done, it was ut palea.
Listen to the rhetoric of today's politics and you'll inevitably hear thundering declarations about abolishing poverty, for example. They've been at it for decades, but all that's ever accomplished is the verification of the truth uttered 2000 years ago by Jesus: "The poor you will always have with you." And so we have, despite countless "wars on poverty" that tend only to enhance the political fortunes of those who pretend to fight them and keep the poor in their place, which are the polling places where they are expected to cast their votes for their alleged benefactors despite the fact that they continue to promise much and deliver almost nothing.
Until we recognize that it is not government, and certainly not the politicians, who are responsible for following Christ's admonition to Peter to "feed my lambs, feed my sheep" and take upon ourselves the obligation to do so, we'll always have the poor amongst us. Obviously we can't all go out and seek the poor and offer them succor, but we can do our part through our churches and through organized charities who do a much better job of fighting poverty than the political class and the government ever have. And at far less cost. Christ did not address his demands to the rulers, but to the ruled. He was talking to you and me, and not to Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy or Mrs. Pelosi in their official capacities as a dispensers of the largess of taxpayer dollars entrusted to their care. The cause of poverty in the world is most often the result of the tendency of those who govern the most poverty-stricken areas to be both corrupt and tyrannical. The starving poor in Darfur — an agriculturally rich area capable of feeding its inhabitant abundantly, is solely the result of the murderous policies of the government in Khartuom. To speak of eliminating poverty there, or anywhere else so cursed by unfeeling or just plain stupid governments, is ut palea. So too is our own use of the poor as political weapons. To eliminate poverty by taking the shackles off our incredible free enterprise system is to rob the demagogues of a potent political weapon. To them it is important that the poor, and their votes, be always with us. One of the more convincing examples of human arrogance somewhat akin to King Canute's standing on the seashore and ordering the tides to cease and desist their endless movements, is the current mania that holds that if Mother Nature is monkeying around with the climate, puny mankind must take her on and stop her from warming or cooling the planet or whatever it is she's doing that we don't like. After all, just who does she think she is, daring to impose various inconveniences upon mighty mankind? Playing our century's version of King Canute is Mr. Albert Gore who couldn't defeat George Bush, but believes himself properly equipped to take on mighty Mother Nature and vanquish her. He stands resolute before the mighty forces of Mother Nature, fighting her alleged efforts to barbecue mankind with his arsenal of weapons including documentary films, personal appearances, and an army of fanatic devotees filled with all manner of ways and means to frustrate Mother Nature by such ingenious devices as restricting ourselves to the use of a single sheet of toilet paper when answering one of those calls of Mother Nature that even Al Gore cannot deny. The time may well come, when Mr. Gore and his adherents, in a moment of clarity in their later years, look about their planet, recognize that the seas have not swallowed New York City after all, and mutter to themselves the equivalent of ut palea. There are all manner of examples of mankind's impudence that represent challenges to things as they are and have always been and will always be despite our arrogant assumptions that mankind and not mankind's creator are fully in charge during our all too brief sojourns here on planet Earth. This in spite of the fact that every once in a while it takes a good whack on the head from above to disabuse us of that notion. Those are the times when the more introspective among us tend to look around our various works and pomps and see nothing but piles of dry straw strewn all around. Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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