St. Thomas Aquinas

The Dominican friar and Doctor of the Church whose Summa Theologiae remains the towering synthesis of faith and reason.

St. Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth-century Dominican friar and priest whose writings became the most influential theological and philosophical synthesis in the Western Church.

Life

Born around 1225 in the castle of Roccasecca, near Naples, Thomas was the son of a noble family who placed him as a boy in the great Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, hoping he would one day be its abbot. Instead, as a student in Naples, he met the new Order of Preachers and resolved to become a Dominican friar. His family was so opposed that his brothers seized him on the road and held him captive at home for about a year; he spent the time praying, studying, and teaching his sisters, and in the end was allowed to return to the Order.

He studied under St. Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne. Large and quiet, he was nicknamed the dumb ox by his classmates, to which Albert is said to have replied that one day the bellowing of this ox would be heard throughout the world. Thomas went on to teach at the University of Paris and across Italy, writing at an astonishing pace while preaching, praying, and serving his brothers. On December 6, 1273, after an experience at Mass, he stopped writing altogether, leaving the Summa Theologiae unfinished. He died on March 7, 1274, at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova while on his way to the Second Council of Lyon, and was canonized in 1323.

What he taught

Thomas's great conviction was that faith and reason cannot truly contradict each other, because the same God is the author of both. Reason can reach real truths about God on its own: that he exists, that he is one, that he is the first cause of all things. Faith receives what reason could never discover unaided, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, and yet it never asks us to believe what is contrary to reason. He set out five ways by which the mind can rise from the world around us to its Creator (Summa Theologiae I, Q. 2, A. 3).

His Summa Theologiae, written as a guide for beginners in theology, gathers the whole of the faith into a single ordered vision: God in himself; the movement of every creature, above all the human person, back toward God; and Christ, who is our way to God, with the sacraments by which we share his life. Its method is itself a lesson in charity: each article states the strongest objections to Thomas's own position fairly before answering them. Alongside it stand the Summa contra Gentiles, commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle, and the hymns he composed for the feast of Corpus Christi, including the Pange Lingua, the Tantum Ergo, and Adoro Te Devote, still sung before the Blessed Sacrament today.

Why he matters today

Thomas shows that a person need not choose between thinking hard and praying deeply. He studied on his knees, often resolving a difficult question at prayer before the tabernacle, and he held that every truth, wherever it is found, comes from the Holy Spirit. In an age that often assumes faith is blind and reason is cold, he shows that the more clearly we understand God, the more we come to love him.

His holiness also kept his brilliance in perspective. Near the end of his life, it is said, Christ spoke to him from the crucifix and asked what reward he desired for all he had written. Thomas answered:

"Non nisi te, Domine."

"Nothing but you, Lord."

After his final experience at Mass he told his companion, Reginald, that all he had written seemed to him like straw compared with what he had seen. Named a Doctor of the Church in 1567 and called the Angelic Doctor, he is the patron of students, schools, and universities, and the Church continues to commend him as a sure guide for the study of theology and philosophy.

A prayer

Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you.

Amen.