Confessor Thomas of Aquino

Thomas of Aquino, known to later ages as Thomas Aquinas, was born in the early thirteenth century at the family castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily, into a branch of the noble house of Aquino. His father Landulf was a knight of standing in the region, and his mother Theodora belonged to a Neapolitan noble family. As a boy he was placed as an oblate at the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, a customary path for a younger son of the local aristocracy and one that his relatives hoped might lead to the abbacy. In the late 1230s he was sent to study at the studium in Naples, where he encountered both the Aristotelian corpus then entering the Latin West and the recently founded Order of Preachers. Against the determined opposition of his family, who detained him for a time at Roccasecca in an effort to turn him from the mendicant life, he received the Dominican habit around 1244 and was sent north to continue his formation.

He studied under Albertus Magnus, first at Paris and then at Cologne, and was made a bachelor and later a master of theology at the University of Paris in the 1250s. His academic career unfolded between Paris and various Italian centers, including Orvieto, Rome, and Naples. In these years he produced the body of work for which he is remembered: extensive commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle, disputed questions, the Summa contra Gentiles, and the unfinished Summa theologiae, a systematic presentation of Catholic doctrine that sought to set Christian teaching in relation to the newly recovered philosophy of Aristotle. He also composed liturgical texts, including the office for the feast of Corpus Christi, and numerous shorter treatises on contested questions of his day. He remained a friar of the Order of Preachers rather than a bishop, and his public life was that of a university master and a teacher within his order.

In 1274 he was summoned by Pope Gregory X to the Second Council of Lyon. He fell ill on the journey and was taken to the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova in the Papal States, where he died on 7 March 1274. He was canonized by Pope John XXII on 18 July 1323. In 1567 Pope Pius V declared him a Doctor of the Church. His remains, first buried at Fossanova, were translated in 1369 to the Dominican church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, where the principal relics remain. The Roman Catholic Church keeps his feast on 28 January, the date associated with that translation; older calendars observed 7 March, the day of his death. He is commonly styled the Angelic Doctor.

Thomas’s thought, later called Thomism, became a central reference for Catholic theology, especially after the revival associated with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879. His synthesis of Christian doctrine with Aristotelian metaphysics shaped scholastic method for centuries, though it was not without contemporary critics, including some within his own order and among the Franciscans. The historical Thomas is known above all from his writings and from the documentary record of his teaching appointments; details of his inner life rest largely on early Dominican hagiography, which must be used with caution. What can be verified is a career of teaching and writing that left an unusually large and coherent corpus, and a posthumous cult that spread rapidly in the later Middle Ages and made him one of the most widely invoked confessors and doctors of the Western church.