St. Thomas Aquinas and ships

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

Attr. St. Thomas Aquinas.

A friend pointed this out to me, having encountered it in a tweet from the USCCB. He asked if I would check its authenticity.

• A Google search turned up the usual “quote” aggregation sites. It also turned up one site that called it a paraphrase.
• I searched Google Books in particular, and after sorting through the chaff of careless quoters, I did find several books (here’s one) that (spoiler alert) gave what I believe to be the correct answer. It’s a very free paraphrase of ST I-II Q2 a5 resp: “Hence a captain does not intend as a last end, the preservation of the ship entrusted to him, since a ship is ordained to something else as its end, viz. to navigation.” This was especially helpful because I could get the original Latin for use in further searches.
• There’s a handy website with the complete works of St. Thomas, and it has a good search engine that can search for inflected forms of words. The word translated as “captain” is gubernator, and “ship” is navis. So I searched for these two words (in any inflected form), separated by no more than 20 other words. I got sixty hits, including the one in the previous bullet (thus proving that my search worked), but not including the original alleged quote.

So this is indeed a paraphrase (at best). In the course of doing this research, I discovered that Trent Horn had already reached the same conclusion in his book What the Saints Didn’t Say.

I kept looking and found what I believe to be the original source of the paraphrase. Google Books has become steadily less helpful over time, but archive.org is stepping up. In The Morality of Law, L.L. Fuller (2nd ed., 1964; I don’t have ready access to a first edition) on page 185, I found this: “As Thomas Aquinas remarked long ago, if the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.” This is the exact quote, and since they believed in footnotes in 1964, it’s footnoted, giving the exact text from the Summa cited above. One might quibble as to the accuracy of the paraphrase, but this has to be the source of the misquote.

Thoreau on Christmas?

The way you spend Christmas is far more important than how much.

attr. Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau was indeed an advocate of simplicity. He was also a Transcendentalist, and therefore not terribly likely to have celebrated Christmas at all. He died in 1862, which is before Christmas became the overwhelming monument to consumerism that it tends to be these days.

All of which leads me to ask: Did he say or write this?

The website Walden.org is dedicated to Thoreau and his works, and it has a handy searchable library. Searching for the alleged quote turned up nothing. Searching for the word “Christmas” turned up a few unrelated references.

Google Books, in a desire to be helpful, now returns books that don’t contain the search terms at all. Thanks, Google. The related books it founded were the usual motley assembly of “quote” compilations. I tried archive.org, with similar results.

Verdict: No, Thoreau did not say or write this. As always, if you can give me a primary source showing otherwise, I’d be happy to change my mind.

St. Maria Goretti on the Eucharist

The Holy Eucharist is the perfect expression of the love of Jesus Christ for man.

attr. St. Maria Goretti

It’s just not realistically possible that she said this. She was martyred at the age of 12, and this is not the phrasing of a twelve-year-old non-theologian. Nevertheless, I went looking for a source, and of course there isn’t a good one. The earliest attribution I found was from Quotable Saints, by Ronda Chervin. She gives a much longer form of the saying:

He loves, He hopes, He waits. If He came down on our altars on certain days only, some sinner, on being moved to repentance, might have to look for Him, and not finding Him have to wait. Our Lord prefers to wait Himself for years rather than keep him waiting an instant.

The Holy Eucharist is the perfect expression of the love of Jesus Christ for man, since it is the quintessence of all the mysteries of His life.

I can no longer live without Jesus. How soon shall I receive Him again?

It is, I guess, not impossible that she said the last sentence, but the rest? It strains credibility beyond any reasonable limit to think that she was responsible for it. But if she didn’t say it, who did?

The saying is very widely attributed to St. Peter Julian Eymard, and that’s much more credible on the face of it. The saint was a great promoter of Eucharistic devotion. I therefore went forth in search of a source.

St. Peter Julian’s works are available on the Internet here. Alas, they are complete only in French, but I carried on as best as I could. The word “quintessence” looked like a good search term, and it did crop up in his works, but none of them appeared to be this statement. (I don’t know French, but I know Latin and a little Spanish, and I’m confident that I’d have recognized it if it were there.)

Searching for any of the rest of it involves terms that are so common in the saint’s writings that it would take hours to survey them all.

Summary: I am convinced that this is not from St. Maria Goretti, and I would be surprised to learn that it’s not St. Peter Julian Eymard, but I can’t find it.

St. Augustine: Repentance and Procrastination

God has promised forgiveness to your repentance; He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.

Attr. to St. Augustine.

I Googled, and of course found the usual “quote” sites. I checked Google Books, and this shows up in Fr. Paul Scalia’s That Nothing May be Lost. The preview even showed a citation! How exciting! And then I checked … and it cites a secondary source.

Google Books did turn up Flowers of Christian Wisdom from 1873, which gives it … without citation.

So I went to the handy Everything St. Augustine site (my name for it) and searched for promisit, which is Latin for “has promised.” It returned 298 hits. None of them was this saying.

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But wait! A reader intervened! See his comment below. It appears that someone took ideas from one or more of St. Augustine’s homilies and condensed them into this saying. Thank you, O reader!

As I’ve said before, it is a brave man who will claim to be sure that something is nowhere in the voluminous works of St. Augustine, and I’m not that brave. But I’m very skeptical.

Verdict: Unproven and unlikely. Heavily paraphrased and summarized.

St. Augustine: No Son without suffering

God had one Son on earth without sin, but none without suffering.

Attr. St. Augustine

• It doesn’t sound to me like him, but I’ve been wrong before.
• A general search on the web returns all the usual suspect sites that carry unverified quotes without citations.
• Wikiquote has it on the discussion page as unsourced.
• Google Books: a trip through time:
  • It’s on a list of copyrighted works from 1953 (I think someone made a card with that on it and copyrighted the card).
  • It’s in the Kindergarten-primary Magazine from 1920 (vol. 32, p. 224). At this point I can conclude that if it is faux, it is at least long-standing faux.
  • It’s in the 1892 edition of (I’m not making this up) The International Good Templar (vol. 5, p. 324). No citation, of course.
  • The Christian Week, Dec. 31, 1879. This was the oldest hit I got from Google Books (I didn’t list them all), and it doesn’t give a source, which suggests that it was a well-known saying at the time.
• Searching CCEL for the phrase turned up nothing.
• As a last desperate attempt, I tried searching the complete Latin works of St. Augustine, available here. I guessed that “without suffering” would either be sine patienta or sine dolore. I got nearly 300 results for each search, but none of those results was the alleged quotation

Conclusion: If it’s faux, it’s old-school faux, but I think that faux it is indeed.

Pope Francis on ways to fast

Fast from hurting words and say kind words. Fast from sadness and be filled with gratitude. Fast from anger and be filled with patience. Fast from pessimism and be filled with love. Fast from worries and have trust in God. Fast from complaints and contemplate simplicity. Fast from pressure and be prayerful. Fast from bitterness and fill your hearts with joy. Fast from selfishness and be compassionate to others. Fast from grudges and be reconciled. Fast from words and be silent as you listen.

Attributed to Pope Francis

Some places (including the USCCB website) say that this is from Pope Francis. Others, more cautiously, say it’s attributed to him. Is he in fact responsible for it?

1. It is All. Over. The. Internet. attributed to him. I looked at the first few pages of Google hits. None of them said when or where he said or wrote this. The earliest sighting was written 2016; I also found a site that claimed it was from Pope Francis’ 2020 Lenten message, which it obviously can’t be.
2. A search on the Vatican website shows nothing.
3. I started searching for key words: sadness gratitude anger patience pessimism love worries trust complaints simplicity. At this point I discovered that there’s a variant form that has “hope” in place of “love.” I looked at the first eight pages of Google hits. None gave a source.

I am fairly confident that, if this were legitimately said or written by Pope Francis, I wouldn’t have to wade through nine pages of Google search results to find it, and that it would be on the Vatican website. I would be happier if I could find an earlier identifiable source, but since no one can say when the pope said it, I’m going to say that he didn’t. If I’m wrong, give me a primary source.

St. Thomas on the prayerless soul

The prayerless soul makes no progress whatever.

Attr. St. Thomas Aquinas

After a little poking around, I found this:

Some of the Angelic Doctor’s neat sayings caught in familiar conversation have been preserved. “The poverty of a discontented religious is a useless expense.” “The prayerless soul makes no progress whatever.” “A religious without prayer resembles a soldier fighting without weapons.” “Idleness is the devil’s hook, on which any bait is tempting.” “I cannot understand how anyone conscious of mortal sin can laugh or be merry.” When asked how to detect a spiritual-minded man, he gave this reply: “He who is constantly chattering about frivolous things, who fears being despised, who is weary of life, whatever marvels he may work, I do not look on him as a perfect man, since all he does is without foundation, and he who cannot suffer is ready for a fall”. To his sister Theodora, inquiring how to become a saint, he replied with a single word, “Velle,” or “Resolve”.

The source is a 1911 biography of St. Thomas, but that’s good enough for me to regard this as probably an authentic tradition.

And this is the reason I almost always ask people in Confession if they’re praying daily….

St. Thomas Aquinas: Love them both

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.

Attr. St. Thomas Aquinas

This seems to be the quote du jour for the feast of St. Thomas this year (e.g., in eye-wrenching typography from Word on Fire). But is it authentic?

Yes and no and sort of. After poking around for a bit, I found a good treatment of the question.

TL;DR: It’s attributed to “a commentary on Aristotle” all over the Internet, but St. Thomas wrote a lot of those. I managed to track it down (via the above link) to Sententia super Metaphysicam 12.9.14 (2566). It turns out the the saint is quoting Aristotle, who said this:

And if anyone in treating this subject should be found to form a different opinion from the one stated here, we must respect both views but accept the more certain

Alternative translation: and if those who apply themselves to these matters come to some conclusion which clashes with what we have just stated, we must appreciate both views, but follow the more accurate.

It seems to me that the more accurate view is that Aristotle and St. Thomas are referring to opinions rather than directly to people.

So (a) it’s a statement which St. Thomas is endorsing rather than something that he came up with on his own; (b) it refers to opinions and not to people (IMHO).

St. John Paul II: Anger and Tears

It’s better to cry than to be angry; because anger hurts others, while tears flow silently through the soul and cleanse the heart.

Attr. St. John Paul II

A lot of people who have shared this struggle with the word “cleanse.” I’ve seen it as “cleans” and as “cleanses,” both of which are obviously wrong.

1. It fails the ear test, though admittedly I am highly suspicious. It just doesn’t sound like St. JP II to me.
2. I went through 10 pages of Google search results, finding all the usual suspects (“quote” aggregator sites, Facebook, Pinterest, et al.), none of which gave a citation. There were lots more results, but I figured if there wasn’t a citation on the first 10 pages, there wasn’t likely to be one later. The earliest dated sighting of this attributed to St. JP II (or, for that matter, to anyone at all) is from 2012.
3. I searched the Vatican web site. No dice.
4. I searched the EWTN web site, hoping at least to discover a source for the original erroneous attribution. (Love you, EWTN, but you’ve done this to me before.) No dice.
5. Google Books turned up no citations either.

I would be happier if I could run the original saying to ground, but as it is, I’m going to call this one “unlikely.”

Edit to add: A comment below suggests (I think) that the author is actually Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński.

St. Francis: hands, head, heart

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

Attr. St. Francis of Assisi

I’m not sure why this is attributed to St. Francis, since it has little to do with anything he was interested in. Wikiquote says: “This quote was actually composed by Louis Nizer, and published in his book, Between You and Me (1948).” I did some checking and I can’t verify this citation directly (Google Books won’t do a full book search), but I did find it attributed to him elsewhere. But I can also find it given as “an old saying” in a 1944 publication. I certainly didn’t find any place giving an actual citation to St. Francis (as in, saying where it came from).

Verdict: Not St. Francis.