St. Thomas Aquinas, a Jacobin in Paris

On Saturday we wanted to retrace the steps of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1275), who lived in Paris at three different times in his life, each time in the Dominican priory of St. Jacques in the Latin quarter. Since nothing at all remains of the medieval priory or its church, we thought the best we could do was to walk down its street, the Rue St. Jacques, lamenting the passage of time, admiring the present-day Sorbonne, and passing under the sky that Aquinas passed under. So that's what we decided to do.

Although sun shone through our window just as we left, once we made it down to the street we had been joined by our faithful travel companion in Paris, the rain. It came and went, lightly, throughout the day, but by nightfall it had frozen into hail. Why didn't we go back for our umbrella?

One thing we didn't expect to find around St. Jacques were comic book stores, but it was full of them. In fact comic books and nerdy paraphernalia were about all there was there, aside from the backs and fronts of imposing school buildings, like this one with an old observatory affixed to the top:

Since we thought there wouldn't be anything else to do for this little pilgrimage, we had decided that once we reached the point on St. Jacques where the Dominican priory once stood, we would turn and visit a nearby church, St. Etienne du Mont, recommended by a friend. To get there we had to pass the Pantheon (this monstrosity) and a library and reading room of the University of Paris, apparently so popular that students were literally queued up outside waiting for space to free up within (wonder of wonders!). When we arrived at the church a bride and groom had just stepped out the front door:

Wild facade, huh? The inside is even wilder:

As we started making our way around the church, we couldn't believe what we found:

It's a memorial to the Dominicans of St. Jacques! "To the memory of the Saints and Blesseds of the Order of Friars Preachers [i.e. Dominicans], called Jacobins, who resided in Paris at the convent established in 1218 on the Rue St. Jacques." St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans, is first on the list, and as you make your way down you'll see, of course, St. Thomas Aquinas ("S. Thomas d'Aquin"), Doctor of the Church. Now you're probably wondering about the weird "Jacobins" bit. I'll get to that in a second. But first, Aquinas.

Aquinas has been at the center of my intellectual life since I started studying philosophy ten years ago at a college named after him, in a department that also houses the only graduate program in the world dedicated exclusively to his thought. I'm writing my dissertation on one of his arguments for God's existence, found in a little work called De ente et essentia ("On being and essence"), which Aquinas composed at the request of some of his Dominican brothers, sometime between 1252 and 1256, while living at St. Jacques in Paris. He was between twenty seven and thirty at the time - my age. By then he had already been in school forever, like me, and he had only been teaching for a couple years, also like me, although as a theologian he started out teaching the Bible. And, again like me, he was in Paris at the time writing the medieval equivalent of a doctoral dissertation, although as a theologian his dissertation took the form of a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (which, by the way, even Martin Luther had to do). The conclusion to be drawn from all of this: it's super cool to be me right now.

Now the "Jacobins" bit. The Rue St. Jacques is named after a medieval church run by Hospitalers, who aided pilgrims at the Parisian starting point of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. St. Jacques in French is St. James in English, St. Iago in Spanish, and St. Jacobus in Latin. Since the first Dominicans took up residence on the Rue St. Jacques, they were called Jacobins by medieval Parisians, and the name stuck well after the Dominicans had moved to other parts of Paris. The Jacobins you're probably thinking of, i.e. the crazy people from the French Revolution, got the name first as a term of insult, but eventually adopted it as their own, since they first met in Paris at a rented space in the Dominican (Jacobin) priory on the Rue St. Honore. Funny, eh?

Speaking of crazy French revolutionaries: we had been told that the body of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, was to be found in St. Etienne du Mont, but it isn't. In the 1790s revolutionaries broke into the church and ransacked her tomb, melting down her reliquary for other purposes. They dragged her bones to the banks of the Seine where they publicly burned them before throwing her ashes in the river, i.e. the sewer. The current shrine to St. Genevieve, at which we prayed together, houses the stone sarcophagus that contained her bones in the very early middle ages (6th century), and a very small relic that survived the revolution.

Pope John Paul II prayed here at the shrine and celebrated mass in the church during his visit to Paris for World Youth Day in 1997. The shrine's stained glass windows tell the story of St. Genevieve's life:

Interestingly, Blaise Pascal(!) is also buried in the church. His Pensees are definitely on my French reading list. As we left we encountered a group of rioting protesters on the steps of the Pantheon. The French are still French, I guess. Fortunately, they didn't have their sights on St. Etienne. And anyway, we had the riot police to protect us. Thank you, France!