It is an outstanding
achievement of remarkable virtue to go beyond the limitations of one's
nature and to transform oneself into something better through one's effort
and application.
Thomas of Villanova, Sermon on St. Dorothy, 3
(translated by Rev. Karl Gersbach, OSA)
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
for the Convocation
Each fall Villanova begins the academic year with a
celebration held on the feast day of St. Thomas of
Villanova, the 16th century Augustinian bishop of Valencia, Spain, and
patron of our university. St. Thomas of Villanova Day includes a
liturgy in the grotto at 1:30 p.m., an
academic convocation at 2:45 p.m. in the
Pavilion, followed by a parade and a wonderful
festival of food and entertainment.
Your Core Humanities teacher will ask you to attend the academic
convocation. The convocation will be focused on the theme of Transformation,
dealing with experiences that can change us, often in ways we do not
expect.
Before you attend the
convocation, you should review this website. There are two passages that
you should read, and a picture that you should review. We have also
included some questions that you might think about. Your Core Humanities
teacher may also ask you to do a written assignment on one or more of
these questions or on some other assignment related to the talk.
Reading to Do Before Attending
the St. Thomas Day Convocation
Trans-for-ma-tion: A profound change or alteration
in the function, appearance or form of something, as an example, the
transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
From
St. Augustine
(354-430), Confessions
Many Villanova students read St. Augustine's
Confessions in their Core Humanities. Much of it describes Augustine’s
own experiences during the time when he was a student. He struggled with
many of the same issues that college students deal with today, both about
who they are and what they should believe and also with issues involving
choices about sex, love, and friendship. These were not always very happy
years for the young Augustine. Writing about this period of his life a
number of years later (after he had converted to Catholicism and become a
Bishop), Augustine put it this way:
So I arrived at Carthage, where the din of
scandalous love-affairs raged cauldron-like around me. I was not yet in
love, but I was enamored with the idea of love, and so deep within me
was my need that I hated myself for the sluggishness of my desires. In
love with loving, I was casting about for something to love; the
security of a way of life free from pitfalls seemed abhorrent to me,
because I was inwardly starved of that food which is yourself, O my God.
Yet this inner famine created no pangs of hunger in me. I had no desire
for the food that does not perish, not because I had my fill of it, but
because the more empty I was, the more I turned from it in revulsion.
Confessions III, 1, 1
At that time of his life, Augustine was studying
public speaking and rhetoric (if he were at Villanova today he would have
been majoring in Communication or Marketing). But while he was studying
something happened to him which changed his life:
Still young and immature, I began . . to study
treatises on eloquence. This was a discipline in which I longed to
excel, although my motive was the damnably proud desire to gratify my
human vanity. In the customary course of study I had discovered a book
by an author called Cicero, whose language is almost universally
admired, though not its inner spring. This book of his is called the
Hortensius and contains an exhortation to philosophy. The book
changed my way of feeling and the character of my prayers to you, O
Lord, for under its influence my petitions and desires altered. All my
hollow hopes suddenly seemed worthless, and with unbelievable intensity
my heart burned with longing for the immortality that wisdom seemed to
promise. I began to rise up, in order to return to you. My interest in
the book was not aroused by its useful in the honing of my verbal skills
(which was supposed to be the object of the studies I was now pursing, in
my nineteenth year, at my mother’s expense, since my father had died two
years earlier); no, it was not merely as an instrument for sharpening my
tongue that I used that book, for it had won me over not by its style
but by what it had to say. How ardently I longed, O my God, how ardently
I longed to fly to you away from earthly things. Confessions
III, 4, 7 (From, St. Augustine,
Confessions. Trans. Maria Boulding. Hyde Park, New York: New City
Press, 1997.
Reading the book by Cicero was, for the young
Augustine, a transforming experience. St. Augustine's text, of course, is written from the
perspective of someone who is a deeply religious Catholic. When you read
the passage, however, try to relate it to your own experience and ways of
thinking. If you do not share Augustine’s religious perspective, ask
yourself if there are other ways that you can respond to what he is
saying.
Here is a description of very different experience.
Jose de Acosta (1540-1600) was a Jesuit priest who wrote a history of his
travel in the New World during the sixteenth century. In his time, Acosta, like many
educated people in the West, felt that the most reliable source of truth
was the texts of ancient authors such as Aristotle. Acosta describes his
experience when his ship crossed the equator.
I will describe what happened to me when I passed
to the Indies. Having read what poets and philosophers write of the
Torrid Zone, I persuaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would
not be able to endure the violent heat, but it turned out otherwise. For
when I passed [the Equator], which was when the sun was at its zenith
there . . . I felt so cold that I was forced to go into the sun to warm
myself. What could I do then but laugh at Aristotle's Meteorology and
his philosophy? For in that place and that season, where everything, by
his rules, should have been scorched by the heat, I and my companions
were cold. From Acosta, J. De, The
Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans E Grimston. Quoted in
Anthony Grafton, April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient
Text: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery,
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992, p1.
Below find a link to a picture by Caravaggio.
He is a famous Italian artist and this is one of his most famous
pictures. The actual subject of the picture is an appearance of
Christ to the disciples after the Resurrection. But the artist
also deals with a more universal subject, as we catch the disciples in a
moment of transformation. You might enjoy printing the picture out
and putting it on your bulletin board (You can send it as a postcard
too.) We think that if you study it for a while, you will begin to
see why it is so famous.
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