Aquinas and the Silence Beyond Knowing
by Paul Nyssen
Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest architect of medieval Christian thought, spent a lifetime weaving logic and faith into a single cloth. His Summa Theologica sought to reconcile divine revelation with reason — an immense work of order, clarity, and precision. Yet, one winter morning in 1273, after celebrating Mass, he laid down his pen. To his faithful secretary, Reginald of Piperno, he simply said:
“All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me.”
He never wrote another word. The Summa was left unfinished.
To the historian, this moment is puzzling. To the mystic, it is luminous. Aquinas had devoted his life to constructing a rational bridge to the divine — and then, at the end, saw that the bridge itself was unnecessary. What he encountered, perhaps, was not the God of syllogisms, but the same Void that Musashi described: that place where “it is” and “it is not” coincide.
In Zen thought, enlightenment (satori) occurs not through knowledge but through the collapse of knowing. D. T. Suzuki wrote that “to know nothing is to enter into everything,” echoing Meister Eckhart’s own insight that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Aquinas, the theologian of order, may have glimpsed that same paradox — a revelation so overwhelming that words, those tools of affirmation and distinction, were suddenly useless.
The Jesuit scholar who once remarked that “all theology is speculative” and that “we only have human words, which are entirely insufficient,” was speaking in the same tradition. Language, for all its beauty, is a fence built around infinity. The mystic’s silence is not the failure of theology, but its fulfilment.
And perhaps that silence speaks to the “street boy” as well. After all, his journey — through negation, loss, and the violent collision of good and evil — is also a pilgrimage toward the Void. He, too, lived through the collapse of one self and the uncertain birth of another. His redemption, if that word still holds meaning, lies not in returning to an earlier purity, but in accepting that both the darkness and the light are his teachers.
In this way, Aquinas’s silence and the street boy’s survival share the same origin: the recognition that truth is not merely understood — it is lived, and often suffered. When the intellect and the ego have exhausted their strength, what remains is something simpler and more essential: being itself, standing before the unfathomable, neither affirming nor denying, only seeing.
In that moment, theology meets Zen, and the greatest of Christian philosophers joins hands with the warrior of the Void. Both would say, in their own way, that the divine is not something to be spoken, but something to be become.