Yesterday we celebrated the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola. Tomorrow is the feast day of St. Peter Faber, one of Ignatius’s first companions. In his honor, enjoy this excerpt from The Quiet Companion by Mary Purcell.
His first five years in the Ste-Barbe were devoted to the Arts course which comprised grammar, dialectic, geometry, cosmology, literature and philosophy. “This should have given him an almost encyclopedic intellectual baggage, ranging from Hebrew vocabulary to astral influences. It also called for incessant mental gymnastics, argumentations of all kinds, attacks and defences.” For the remainder of his University career (1530-1536) he studied theology. His studies, however, do not seem to have been well ordered or continuous…How then, we may ask, did he come to be regarded as an outstanding theologian?
Faber may not have been a professional theologian. He had no diploma. He had no taste for theology. But “theologian” in the sense used (by Peter Canisius and Kalckbrenner) does not mean the rigorous science dealing with the truths of faith, but that perception of mysteries which experience yields, the wisdom imprinted by piety and matured by discernment, reflection of a particular type born of personal encounters with Jesus Christ and the moral attitudes these encounters engender.