Thomas Aquinas

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Aquinas was the youngest of nine children, and his family had a plan for him. His brothers would be soldiers. He would follow his uncle Sinibald, abbot of Monte Cassino, into the oldest Benedictine monastery in Christendom. That was the expected path for a younger son of Southern Italian nobility, born around 1225 in the castle of Roccasecca. At nineteen, Thomas chose differently. He resolved to join the Dominican Order, a band of preachers, and his family did not take it well. They seized him at a spring, held him prisoner in the family castles for nearly a year, and at one point sent a prostitute into his room to break his resolve. He drove her away with a burning log. How does a captive young friar become the man one scholar called the most influential thinker of the medieval period? How did a teacher his classmates mocked as a dumb ox come to have his Summa Theologiae laid on an altar beside the Bible? And what did he see during a single mass that made him fall silent and call all his writing straw?

• 2. The Dumb Ox

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  Quiet and slow to speak, Thomas was mocked by fellow students who thought he was simply dull. His teacher Albertus Magnus, who held the Chair of Theology at the College of St. James in Paris, knew better. He told them, "You call him the dumb ox, but in his teaching he will one day produce such a bellowing that it will be heard throughout the world." Albertus Magnus shaped the young friar's path more than anyone. When Albertus was sent to teach at the new studium generale at Cologne in 1248, Thomas followed him, turning down Pope Innocent IV's offer to make him abbot of Monte Cassino. In Cologne he served as an apprentice professor, instructing students on the Old Testament and writing literal commentaries on Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations. The intellectual diet of his youth came earlier, at the studium generale in Naples. There a teacher named Petrus de Ibernia drilled him in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Peter of Ireland was teaching the recently translated works of Aristotle as commented on by the Andalusian philosopher Averroes. Through these lessons Thomas was introduced to Aristotle, Averroes, and Maimonides, three names that would press on his thinking for the rest of his life. It was also in Naples that a Dominican preacher named John of St. Julian drew him toward the Order of Preachers, a recruiting effort that set the whole collision with his family in motion.

• 3. Grace Perfects Nature

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  Faith and reason, in Thomas's view, do not contradict each other. They give different views of the same truth. He treated theology, which he called the sacred doctrine, as a science, a field where humanity could learn more by its own effort rather than waiting for revelation to be planted in the mind. The central thought he kept returning to was "gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit," grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. Natural revelation, in his scheme, is the truth available to all people through reason and human nature. By reason alone one could deduce the existence of God and divine attributes such as Unity, Truth, and Goodness. Supernatural revelation has a different source, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, transmitted through prophets, Scripture, and the Magisterium. Some truths, like the Trinity and the Incarnation, can only be revealed, never deduced. When the two seem to clash, Thomas blamed the gap on human error. A discrepancy between faith and reason, he held, arises from a shortcoming of either natural science or scriptural interpretation. Faith can reveal a divine mystery that eludes scientific observation, while science can show where fallible humans mistook a scriptural metaphor for literal fact. He blended Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine by insisting that studying nature was itself a way of studying God, since God reveals himself through nature.

• 4. The Five Ways

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  Some things undoubtedly move, yet cannot cause their own motion. From that plain observation Thomas built the first of his five arguments for the existence of God, the quinque viae, considered briefly in the Summa Theologiae and at length in the Summa contra Gentiles. Because he believed there can be no infinite chain of causes of motion, he reasoned there must be a First Mover not moved by anything else, and this is what everyone understands by God. The other ways follow the same shape. Nothing can cause itself, so there must be a First Cause. Things exist that seem unnecessary, so something must exist necessarily, holding that necessity from itself alone. We notice gradations of hot and good, so there must be a superlative that is truest and noblest. Bodies without awareness still tend toward goals, so there must be one who is aware guiding them. Thomas held that the proposition "God exists" is self-evident in itself but not to us, because we do not know the essence of God. He took the text of Exodus and pushed past essential theology, reading "I Am Who I Am" not as an enigma but as a statement of the divine essence. The essence of God is to exist. In his own words, "I am the pure Act of Being," a line that has been described as the key to understanding Thomism.

• 5. The Problem Of Evil

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  Diseases disappear without being transported anywhere else, and Thomas treated that as proof of something. It showed that diseases were never substances, only deficiencies of a substance, the healthy body. He systematised an Augustinian inheritance through sixteen disputed questions on evil, the Quaestiones disputatae de malo, written in Paris between 1269 and 1272. Evil, he argued, is neither a being nor a principle but a privation, the absence of a good that ought to be present. From this followed the convertibility of being and goodness, bonum et ens convertuntur. Every being, insofar as it exists, is good, so evil can signify only a damaging absence. What a wrongdoer actually seeks is never evil itself but the pleasure or power believed to be found there, an apparent good. The sharpest distinction in the De malo separates two kinds of evil. The evil of punishment, malum poenae, is suffered, a physical or psychological pain that strikes the creature from without. The evil of fault, malum culpae, is caused, and responsibility for it falls on the agent alone. This second category let Thomas clear God of blame for moral evil. As Jean-Yves Lacoste notes, Thomas held that God judged it better to draw good from evil than to allow no evil to exist, and that to clear God of the malum culpae, man would be granted the privilege of being the first cause.

• 6. All My Writing Seems Like Straw

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  On the 6th of December 1273, while celebrating mass, Thomas is said to have experienced an unusually long ecstasy. After it, he abandoned his routine and refused to dictate to his secretary, Reginald of Piperno. When Reginald begged him to return to work, Thomas answered, "Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me." The Summa Theologica would stay unfinished. Mystical experiences trailed him through these final years. Tradition holds that in 1273, in the chapel of Saint Nicholas at the Dominican convent of Naples, the sacristan Domenic of Caserta saw Thomas levitating in prayer before an icon of the crucified Christ. Christ reportedly asked what reward he wanted for his labor, and Thomas replied, "Nothing but you, Lord." In 1274, Pope Gregory X summoned him to the Second Council of Lyon, called to heal the Great Schism of 1054 that had split the Western Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Riding a donkey along the Appian Way, Thomas struck his head on the branch of a fallen tree and fell seriously ill. He stopped to convalesce at Monte Cassino, set out again, then halted at the Cistercian Fossanova Abbey, where monks nursed him for several days. He died there on the 7th of March 1274 while giving commentary on the Song of Songs. Some propose he died from a chronic subdural hematoma caused by the blow to his head.

• 7. From Condemnation To Sainthood

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  In 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, issued a sweeping condemnation listing 219 propositions, twenty of them Thomistic, that he judged to violate the omnipotence of God. The inclusion of those Thomistic propositions damaged Thomas's reputation for years. The recovery was slow but total. By the early 1300s his theology was rising in prestige, and in the Divine Comedy, completed around 1321, Dante Alighieri placed the glorified soul of Thomas in the Heaven of the Sun among the great exemplars of religious wisdom. When the devil's advocate at his canonization complained there were no miracles, a cardinal answered, "Tot miraculis, quot articulis," there are as many miracles as there are articles in his Summa Theologiae. Fifty years after his death, on the 18th of July 1323, Pope John XXII, seated in Avignon, pronounced Thomas a saint. His remains traveled too. They were moved from Fossanova to the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse on the 28th of January 1369, held in the Basilica of Saint-Sernin between 1789 and 1974, then returned to the Church of the Jacobins. Pope Pius V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church on the 15th of April 1567, ranking his feast with those of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory I. At the Council of Trent, his Summa Theologiae was placed on the altar alongside the Bible and the Decretals.

• 8. The Long Reach

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  Aeterni Patris, the 1879 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, declared Thomas's theology a definitive exposition of Catholic doctrine and directed clergy to build their positions on his teaching. Leo went further, decreeing that every Catholic seminary and university must teach Thomas's doctrines, and where Thomas was silent, teachers were urged toward conclusions reconcilable with his thinking. In 1880 Thomas was declared the patron saint of all Catholic educational establishments. His pull was not confined to the Church. Modern ethicists inside it, like Alasdair MacIntyre, and outside it, like Philippa Foot, have looked to his virtue ethics as an escape from utilitarianism and Kantian duty. Through Elizabeth Anscombe, especially her book Intention, his principle of double effect became influential. The cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman proposed that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition most compatible with neurodynamics. His aesthetic theory, especially the concept of claritas, shaped the modernist writer James Joyce, who used to extol Thomas as second only to Aristotle among Western philosophers. Joyce refers to Thomas's doctrines in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not everyone admired him. Bertrand Russell criticized Thomas's defense of the indissolubility of marriage, noting that the real grounds of belief are not those which are alleged. Thomas had foreseen his own submission. On the 20th of November 1974, Pope Paul VI invited the Dominicans to return to the source and rediscover the true doctrine of Thomas, and in the 1997 Catechism of the Catholic Church he is cited some 70 times, one of its most quoted authors.