The Thomist of Newfoundland

In the constellation of anglophone Catholic intellectual historians of eastern Canada no star shines brighter than Matthew Julius Thimpick, MA.

In the constellation of anglophone Catholic intellectual historians of eastern Canada no star shines brighter than Matthew Julius Thimpick, MA, who devotes the third volume of his seven-volume Drovers: The History of 20th Century Thomism (unpublished, c. 1983) to Beatrice Fizzard and the Newfoundland School.

You don’t hear Fizzard’s name mentioned in the halls of the Department anymore, but there was a time when Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson and the boys would travel to her cottage to work out difficult problems. She was the best Latinist of the evil century, and she and her students, that small circle of devoted Newfie women, were the only Thomists since St. Gregory Palamas to take seriously Thomas’ final warning: “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw (mihi videtur ut palea) after the things that have been revealed to me.”¹

Fizzard lived her whole life in St. Bride’s. She was the daughter of a fisherman and a housewife. Her mother taught her Latin when she was young, and she took to the language “like cod to a hook”. Her father’s devotion to St. Peter Crisci of Foligno could be, at times, apocalyptic, and he perished at sea when she was 19 years old. After her mother died a decade later, Fizzard stayed in the family cottage and made a modest living tutoring Latin to local girls and mending shirts. Some of the Latin learners became her students.

The reputation of Miss Beatrice (as her students call her) rests primarily on three articles, which she published privately under the pseudonym Puella. The first is a study of nature and metaphors of nature in Summa Theologiae; the second, a technical analysis of the development of Latin in the commentaries of João Poinsot and other Portuguese Thomists in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Her third article purports to be an investigation of the rhetorical and metaphysical differences between Compendium theologiae ad fratrem Reginaldum socium suum carissimum and the full Summa Theologiae, but a careful reading reveals it to be a meditation on death and Aquinas’ “mihi videtur ut palea”. Her correspondence² awaits its age of legibility. It makes for difficult reading: dense, voluminous, and conducted almost³ entirely in Latin. But she wrote also an approachable catechetical pamphlet in English called “The Final Fidelity of St. Azélie-Marie Guérin”, which is still read in parishes of the Archdiocese of St. John's, Newfoundland.

I recall Thimpick’s first visit to the Department to deliver a lecture on the contemporary work of Fizzard’s students, who continue, after the death of their teacher, to live in the old cottage in St. Bride’s. He arrived just moments before his lecture was scheduled to begin and took the lectern without introduction or greeting, then lectured for five hours about the Fizzardian’s work: a vast Greek-Latin lexicon organized according to Miss Beatrice’s “Principles of Historical Language and Orthographical Development”, which Thimpick expects will be completed sometime in the next century. The lecture cataloged the minute details of the work (organization and layout of note cards, size of filing cabinets, pencil and pencil sharpener types, etc) and the rule of life that makes the work possible (time of rising and sleeping, diet, reading aloud at meals, corporate and individual prayer, etc), and, at the end of the lecture, in a quiet, exhausted voice (and, I must admit, with fear in his eyes) he whispered that the women in the cottage create this lexicon only as a precursor to the real project: the reconstruction of Aristotle’s dialogues and “freeing St. Thomas from the pagan shackles.” He did not stay for questions or conversation.

When I traveled to the cottage last summer, the Fizzardian women received me with patience, but I could tell at once that I shouldn’t have come. My arrival was an intrusion and a distraction from their work. As quickly as I could, I found a polite way to leave. The full account of the visit I deposited in the Department archive.

1. cf. Dicit enim Gregorius, quod qui caeteras virtutes sine humilitate congregat, quasi paleas in ventum portat, PS. Q. 61. Art. 3 ob. 2; ut Augustinus dicit, aurum rutilat, et palea fumat, PTS. Q. 15. Art. 2 ad 2; unde dicitur Luc. 3, 17: cuius ventilabrum in manu eius, et purgabit aream suam, et congregabit triticum suum, id est, electos, in horreum suum; paleas autem, id est, reprobos, comburet igne inextinguibili, PTS. Q. 74. Art. 9 c. Cf. PT. Q. 74. Art. 3 (bis).

2. If you want to consult the fraction of the letters available in an archive, visit the Dominican nuns in the Garibaldi Highlands of British Columbia. The influence of the letters is evident in the work of Sr. Marie de L'Assomption (Émilie d’Arvieu).

3. She corresponded with Georges Bernanos in French. If a brave enough editor is born to collect and publish them, these letters will receive their due as an unparalleled work of moral and political theology. This correspondence is the uncited but crucial source for von Balthasar’s Gelebte Kirche: Bernanos.