Any Question Whatsoever

In March 2023, my husband and I were invited to a brunch where about 30 graduate students in theology brought the questions they wanted to discuss in a seminar. John noted down the questions, which ranged from the Beatific Vision, to the definition of beauty, to a reconciliation between Aristotle’s physics and modern physics, to questions about Catholic parenting. Over the course of the next two hours we grappled with all these questions and more in discussion with the sharp and lively students of the ITI.

Looking at St. Thomas’s Quodlibetal Questions, available for pre-order today, shows that students have not changed in the 700 years since St. Thomas was fielding questions at the University of Paris. And not just students, but all thoughtful people are still asking the same wide-ranging questions.

During Advent and Lent, the masters at the University of Paris would host debates on what are known as questions “quodlibetales”—on any topic “whatsoever”. St. Thomas’s answers to these wide-ranging questions, noted down by his students, are no less fascinating than the questions themselves. Loosely grouped under headings such as “God, Angels, and Man,” they are a delightful collection of those questions that we’ve all wondered about, as well as plenty that we’ve never thought to ask.

Alongside the most speculative theological queries into God’s essence and presence, and the procession of the Persons in the Trinity, are dozens of other questions dealing with the whole created and uncreated universe.

Some questions are purely theological, asking about God’s nature or whether any single suffering of Christ’s would have sufficed to redeem us.

Others are practical, but with a theological impact: Can a person go to confession in writing, or must he confess by a spoken word? When a priest says, “May all the good you do work toward the remission of your sins . . .” does it count as your penance in the sacrament?

Other questions are practically important: Must a seller inform a buyer about a fault in the item he is selling?

My favorite is whether the rainbow can still be considered a sign of God’s promise never to destroy the earth by flood, or is it just an effect of sunlight through vapor.

Just reading through the Table of Contents of the Quodlibetal Questions is a whole lot of fun. Once you start you won’t want to stop.

Woven through these widely roving inquiries of the human mind is St. Thomas’s gift for ordering. Indeed, it shines here more than ever, as the minds of students bounce all over, his distinctions and divisions never fail to direct us back to the one thing necessary.

Of special interest are his numerous delicate rankings of spiritual and practical concerns. He tackles the question of whether studying theology is worthwhile, compared to the active work of saving souls. He answers whether everyone is bound to do some kind of “manual labor” (where the term includes academic jobs). He advises religious whose parents have fallen on hard times on whether they should leave the monastery to help their parents. He advises married couples who are facing a long separation for the sake of the husband’s undertaking a crusade.

Aquinas’s deft ordering of practical concerns with spiritual questions in the Quodlibetals is especially timely today, when we celebrate the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, beginning the octave that ends with the feast of St. Martha. In the last hundred years, scholars have endeavored to separate Mary Magdalene from Mary of Bethany. The fact that the two feasts frame one octave stands as a reminder that for centuries saints and scholars saw in Mary Magdalene the sister of Martha who left her household chores to choose the better part in sitting with Jesus. In recent years a number of articles have called for a re-consideration of Mary Magdalene’s identity with Mary of Bethany, who anointed Jesus’s feet.

Whether or not she was the Mary who sat listening at Jesus’s feet in Bethany, Mary Magdalene remained at his feet when he hung on the Cross. When she was given the singular privilege of being the first to encounter him after the Resurrection, she greeted him as her “Teacher.” Her unwavering focus on the person of Truth reminds us of the point of every question “whatsoever.”