Thomas Aquinas was once dismissed by his peers as a silent ox, a quiet man whose lack of speech suggested a lack of intellect, yet his teacher Albertus Magnus prophesied that this same ox would one day produce a bellowing so loud it would be heard throughout the world. Born in the family castle of Roccasecca near Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily, Thomas entered a world of high nobility where his father, Landulf VI, was a knight in the service of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and his mother, Theodora Galluccio, belonged to the powerful Caracciolo family. The family intended for the youngest son to follow his uncle Sinibald into the abbacy of Monte Cassino, a normal career path for a younger son of Southern Italian nobility, but at the age of nineteen, Thomas resolved to join the Dominican Order, a decision that triggered a family crisis of epic proportions. His mother and brothers, desperate to prevent him from assuming the Dominican habit, seized him as he was drinking from a spring and imprisoned him for almost one year in the family castles at Monte San Giovanni Campano and Roccasecca. The family became so desperate to dissuade Thomas that they hired a prostitute to seduce him, hoping that sexual temptation would break his resolve for a life of celibacy. Thomas drove her away wielding a burning log, inscribing a cross onto the wall, and fell into a mystical ecstasy where two angels appeared to him to gird him with a celestial girdle of chastity that he wore until the end of his life. This girdle was later given to the ancient monastery of Vercelli in Piedmont and now resides at Chieri near Turin, serving as a physical testament to the struggle that defined his early years. By 1244, seeing that all her attempts to dissuade Thomas had failed, Theodora arranged for him to escape at night through a window, sending him first to Naples and then to Rome to meet Johannes von Wildeshausen, the Master General of the Dominican Order, setting him on a path that would lead him to become the most influential thinker of the medieval period.
The Synthesis of Faith and Reason
In 1245, Thomas was sent to study at the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Paris, where he most likely met the Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus, who would become his mentor and the catalyst for his intellectual revolution. When Albertus was sent to teach at the new studium generale at Cologne in 1248, Thomas followed him, declining Pope Innocent IV's offer to appoint him abbot of Monte Cassino as a Dominican, and Albertus appointed the reluctant Thomas magister studentium. During his time in Paris and Cologne, Thomas wrote numerous works including the Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, a massive commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, and De ente et essentia, On Being and Essence, which laid the groundwork for his unique theological synthesis. He embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle, attempting to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity, arguing that God is the source of the light of natural reason and the light of faith. This approach was controversial, as many in the ecclesiastical community feared that the introduction of Aristotelianism and the more extreme Averroism might contaminate the purity of the Christian faith. Thomas wrote two works to distinguish his positions from these perceived errors, including De unitate intellectus, contra Averroistas, in which he reprimands Averroism as incompatible with Christian doctrine. He also wrote De aeternitate mundi, contra murmurantes, which dealt with the controversial Averroist and Aristotelian beginninglessness of the world, and conducted a series of disputations between 1270 and 1272 to counteract the growing fear of Aristotelian thought. His philosophy influenced modern virtue ethics, aesthetics, and cognitive theory, and he has been described as the most influential thinker of the medieval period, though he was also criticized by Bertrand Russell for seeking to justify conclusions already dictated by faith rather than follow reason independently.
In 1273, while celebrating mass at the Dominican convent of Naples in the chapel of Saint Nicholas, Thomas experienced an unusually long ecstasy that changed the course of his life and the history of Western philosophy. After this event, he abandoned his routine and refused to dictate to his socius Reginald of Piperno, telling Reginald that all that he had written seemed like straw to him compared to what he had seen. This mystical experience led to the abandonment of his greatest work, the Summa Theologica, which remained unfinished, a decision that has puzzled historians and theologians for centuries. Thomas had been preaching to the people of Naples every day in Lent of 1273, delivering sermons on the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary, which were very popular, yet the weight of his spiritual experience rendered his previous intellectual labor insignificant in his eyes. He had been traditionally ascribed with the ability to levitate and to have various mystical experiences, including one where the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, comforting him with the welcome news that he would never be a Bishop. On the 6th of December 1273, another mystical experience reportedly took place, and because of what he saw, he abandoned his routine, leaving the Summa Theologica incomplete and his final years marked by a profound silence that spoke louder than any of his written words. This silence was not a retreat from the world but a deepening of his engagement with the divine, a moment where the philosopher became the mystic, and the teacher became the student of the infinite.
The Council, The Donkey, and The Final Journey
In 1274, Pope Gregory X summoned Thomas to attend the Second Council of Lyon, which was to open on the 1st of May 1274, and it was Gregory's attempt to try to heal the Great Schism of 1054, which had divided the Catholic Church in the West from the Eastern Orthodox Church. On his way to the council, riding on a donkey along the Appian Way, Thomas struck his head on the branch of a fallen tree and became seriously ill, an injury that would ultimately lead to his death. He was quickly escorted to Monte Cassino to convalesce, and after resting for a while, he set out again but stopped at the Cistercian Fossanova Abbey after again falling ill. The monks nursed him for several days, and as he received his last rites, he prayed that he had written and taught much about the holy Body of Christ and the other sacraments in the faith of Christ, and about the Holy Roman Church, to whose correction he exposed and submitted everything he had written. Thomas died on the 7th of March 1274 while giving commentary on the Song of Songs, and it is proposed that he died from the effects of a chronic subdural hematoma occasioned by his blow to the head several weeks before his death. His final journey, marked by physical injury and spiritual clarity, brought him to the end of a life dedicated to the service of God and the Church, leaving behind a legacy that would shape the course of Western thought for centuries to come.
The Condemnation and The Canonization
In 1277, Étienne Tempier, the same bishop of Paris who had issued the condemnation of 1270, issued another, more extensive, condemnation that contained a list of 219 propositions, including twenty Thomistic propositions, that the bishop had determined to violate the omnipotence of God. The inclusion of the Thomistic propositions badly damaged Thomas's reputation for many years, yet by the 1300s, his theology had begun its rise to prestige, and Dante Alighieri saw the glorified soul of Thomas in the Heaven of the Sun with the other great exemplars of religious wisdom in the Divine Comedy. Dante asserted that Thomas died by poisoning, on the order of Charles of Anjou, a belief cited by Giovanni Villani and the Anonimo Fiorentino, though the historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori reproduces the account made by one of Thomas's friends, which gives no hint of foul play. Fifty years after Thomas's death, on the 18th of July 1323, Pope John XXII, seated in Avignon, pronounced Thomas a saint, and his remains were translated from Fossanova to the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, France, on the 28th of January 1369. Between 1789 and 1974, his remains were held in the Basilica of Saint-Sernin, and in 1974, they were returned to the Church of the Jacobins, where they have remained ever since. When he was canonized, his feast day was inserted in the General Roman Calendar for celebration on the 7th of March, the day of his death, and since this date commonly falls within Lent, the 1969 revision of the calendar moved his memorial to the 28th of January, the date of the translation of his relics to the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse.
The Doctor of the Church and The Modern Revival
Pope Pius V proclaimed St. Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church on the 15th of April 1567 with the Papal bull Mirabilis Deus, and ranked his feast with those of the four great Latin fathers: Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, and Pope Gregory I. At the Council of Trent, Thomas had the honour of having his Summa Theologiae placed on the altar alongside the Bible and the Decretals, a testament to the enduring power of his thought. During the 19th century, a movement that came to be known as neo-scholasticism revived Catholic scholarly interest in scholasticism generally and Thomas in particular, as well as the work of the Thomists of second scholasticism. The systematic work of Thomas was valued in part as a foundation for arguing against early modern philosophers and modernist theologians, and this movement was given papal support in Aeterni Patris, the 1879 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII stating that Thomas's theology was a definitive exposition of Catholic doctrine. Leo XIII directed the clergy to take the teachings of Thomas as the basis of their theological positions, and he decreed that all Catholic seminaries and universities must teach Thomas's doctrines, and where Thomas did not speak on a topic, the teachers were urged to teach conclusions that were reconcilable with his thinking. In 1880, Thomas was declared the patron saint of all Catholic educational establishments, and in 1879, Leo XIII instituted the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, putting into practice Aeterni Patris recommendations. On the 1st of September 1910, Pius X addressed the letter Sacrorum Antistitum to all bishops and teachers of religious orders, by which he decreed that the Scholastic philosophy of Thomas was to be established as the foundation of sacred studies for young clerics, and in 1914, Pius X's decree Postquam sanctissimus gave further Vatican endorsement to 24 specific neo-scholastic theses of Official Catholic Philosophy understood to be rooted in Thomism.
The Aesthetics of the Angelic Doctor
Thomas Aquinas's aesthetic theories, especially the concept of claritas, deeply influenced the literary practice of modernist writer James Joyce, who used to extol Thomas as being second only to Aristotle among Western philosophers. Joyce refers to Thomas's doctrines in Elementa philosophiae ad mentem D. Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici of Girolamo Maria Mancini, professor of theology at the Collegium Divi Thomae de Urbe, and this work is referred to in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The influence of Thomas's aesthetics can also be found in the works of the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, who wrote an essay on aesthetic ideas in Thomas, published in 1956 and republished in 1988 in a revised edition. Henry Adams's Mont Saint Michel and Chartres ends with a culminating chapter on Thomas, in which Adams calls Thomas an artist and constructs an extensive analogy between the design of Thomas's Church Intellectual and that of the gothic cathedrals of that period. Erwin Panofsky later would echo these views in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, published in 1951, and modern ethicists within the Catholic Church, notably Alasdair MacIntyre, and outside it, notably Philippa Foot, have recently commented on the possible use of Thomas's virtue ethics as a way of avoiding utilitarianism or Kantian sense of duty. The cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman has proposed that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics, and Thomas's influence extends far beyond theology into the realms of art, literature, and modern philosophy.
The Five Ways and The Nature of God
In the Summa Theologica, Thomas considered in great detail five arguments for the existence of God, widely known as the quinque viae, or Five Ways, which take some of Aristotle's assertions concerning the principles of being. The first way, Motion, argues that since some things undoubtedly move, though cannot cause their own motion, and since there can be no infinite chain of causes of motion, there must be a First Mover not moved by anything else, and this is what everyone understands by God. The second way, Causation, asserts that as in the case of motion, nothing can cause itself, and an infinite chain of causation is impossible, so there must be a First Cause, called God. The third way, Existence of necessary and the unnecessary, argues that since our experience includes things certainly existing but apparently unnecessary, and not everything can be unnecessary, for then once there was nothing and there would still be nothing, we are compelled to suppose something that exists necessarily, having this necessity only from itself, in fact itself the cause for other things to exist. The fourth way, Gradation, posits that if we can notice a gradation in things in the sense that some things are more hot, good, etc., there must be a superlative that is the truest and noblest thing, and so most fully existing, and this then, we call God. The fifth way, Ordered tendencies of nature, argues that a direction of actions to an end is noticed in all bodies following natural laws, and anything without awareness tends to a goal under the guidance of one who is aware, and this we call God. These arguments, rooted in the observation of the natural world, demonstrate Thomas's belief that the existence of God can be demonstrated through reason, and that the essence of God is to exist, or in the words of Thomas, I am the pure Act of Being, a statement that has been described as the key to understanding Thomism.