“Study,” says St. Thomas, “implies the vehement application of the mind to something” (ST II-II, 166, 1). Nothing easy about study apparently; no curling up in an easy chair with a cup of coffee simply taking it in.

Moreover, this Doctor of the Church says, although study itself is good, incidentally it easily leads to sin, as:

• when “one takes pride in knowing the truth,” or
• “when a man desires to know the truth about creatures, without referring his knowledge to its due end, namely, knowledge of God,” or
• “when a man studies to know the truth above the capacity of his own intelligence, since by doing so men easily fall into error.” (167, 1).

This last sin is a kind of recklessness – by not knowing your own limits, you place yourself in situations where you can’t but formulate false views, liable to lead others astray also.

A striking corollary of these assertions is that, simply by the nature of the case, atheists can hardly avoid at least material sin when they study.  Also, for a Christian there is a burden of proof against studying under non-Christians. Also, how could a Christian practically speaking avoid sin except by enclosing his study within prayer?

We should expect St. Thomas Aquinas’s own Oratio ante Studium, “Prayer before study,” to be a kind of antidote to these and other sins.  And indeed, it is.  Since all the translations I see on the internet are inaccurate, a good service may be done to readers of this site simply by publishing a good translation.

Here is the best I know, from a recent dissertation at my university on the prayers of St. Thomas, by a young theologian at St. John Vianney Seminary, Joshua Revelle:

          Invocation

Ineffable Creator, who from the treasury of Thy wisdom didst appoint three hierarchies of Angels and set them in wondrous order over the highest heavens, and who didst distribute the parts of the universe most elegantly:

Petitions

1. Do Thou, who art rightly called the fountain of light and wisdom and supereminent principle, deign to pour a ray of Thy brightness upon the darkness of my intellect, removing from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, namely, sin and ignorance.
2. Thou, who makest eloquent the tongues of infants, instruct my tongue, and pour onto my lips the grace of Thy blessing.
3. Give me sharpness of understanding, capacity for remembering, method and ease in learning, subtlety of interpreting, and copious grace of speaking.
4. Prepare the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the ending.

Conclusion

Thou who art truly God and Man, who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen

I have distinguished the parts of the prayer, adding headings and numbers for clarity.

Right from the start, St. Thomas’s words express humility. Although the prayer keeps in mind that study is meant to lead to fruitfulness and therefore speech that helps others find the truth, God is addressed as “ineffable,” which means beyond our capacity to express in words.  The highest realities, the most interesting and precious truths, must ultimately remain mysterious for any creature.

Furthermore, he situates himself at the lowest rung of a vast hierarchy of intelligences.  You are doubtless familiar with astronomers who aim to inculcate humility among us by drawing attention to the unimaginable size of the universe.  More simply, someone might go outside and, like a child, simply gaze up at the blue vault of the sky, to place his own anxieties in perspective.  But mere extension in space, in the end, means nothing to an intelligence.

Consider how by changing the scale in a map we can make an inch stand for a thousand yards or a billion light years at will.  Why doesn’t the astronomer’s reference to “billions of billions” rather imply his cleverness for knowing about these multitudes?  He can take pride in not being proud the way simple people are.

Far more “humiliating,” then, is to posit a scale of perhaps millions of intelligences, each one higher than the other (according to St. Thomas’s angelology) precisely on account of its greater powers of comprehension.  Yes, the entire corpus of St. Thomas most probably could be intuited by the lowest angel in an instant.

Prayers typically fall into two parts.  After St. Thomas places himself in the presence of the Creator he is addressing, he presents a series of four petitions.  These petitions are logically ordered.

First, like blind Bartimaeus – “Lord, that I might see” – he asks that he be healed of a deficiency.

Second, he asks for a power, which he analogizes to the natural development of the power of speech in beings who are born being unable to speak.  (An “in-fant” in Latin means literally a “non-speaking” human – so strange did babies appear to a culture which took speech to be the characteristically human activity.).  God can do supernaturally and in response to prayer whatever he does naturally and spontaneously: so, please God, do the same in me now.

The sequence is Christian and Aristotelian: ask that wounded nature be healed; then, that it develop a power; and then, third, that that power be perfected by virtues, which are as if components of the virtue of studiousness.

It is noteworthy but not surprising that St. Thomas mentions memory.  Memory, he teaches, is a fundamental component of prudence – we cannot be wise, if we do not learn from experience, and we cannot learn without memory.  Memory can be cultivated and become better.

The sequence concludes with a prayer for help “in the facts and circumstances” (as a lawyer would say).  Here is the saint’s most immediately practical advice. Experiencing writer’s block? Can’t shift from taking a break to getting back to work?  Find it hard to put down this essay and start studying?

Simply ask God to help you start, and you will have started.