Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas was born circa 1225 at the castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily, into a family of the lesser nobility. His father Landulf was a knight and local lord associated with the counts of Aquino; his mother Theodora belonged to a Neapolitan noble house. Around the age of five he was sent as an oblate to the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, where a kinsman served as abbot and where his family hoped he might eventually succeed to that dignity. Political conflict between the emperor Frederick II and the papacy disrupted the monastery, and the boy was transferred to the University of Naples. There he encountered both the newly recovered writings of Aristotle and the Dominican friars. Against the strong opposition of his relatives, who regarded the mendicant orders as socially unsuitable, he took the Dominican habit about 1244. His brothers intercepted him on the road north, confined him for roughly a year, and, according to later tradition, attempted to shake his vocation by introducing a woman into his room; he is said to have driven her out with a burning brand. Once released, he continued to Paris and Cologne.

In those cities he studied under Albertus Magnus, who recognized his gifts and defended him against classmates who nicknamed him the Dumb Ox. Aquinas lectured as bachelor and then as master of theology at the University of Paris in the 1250s, taking part in the disputes between the mendicant orders and the secular masters. Recalled to Italy, he taught at Anagni, Orvieto, Rome, and Viterbo, often in proximity to the papal court. During the 1260s he composed the Summa contra Gentiles, a reasoned exposition of Christian doctrine intended in part for use among Muslims and Jews, and began the Summa theologiae as a systematic textbook for students. A second Parisian regency, from about 1268 to 1272, produced major commentaries on Aristotle and polemical works against Latin Averroists and against theologians who rejected Aristotelian methods. In 1272 he was assigned to Naples to found a Dominican house of studies.

Aquinas sought to show that Christian revelation and Aristotelian philosophy, though distinct, are harmonious: faith and reason cannot ultimately contradict each other, grace perfects nature, and certain truths about God are accessible to natural reason. His Five Ways offered arguments for the existence of God from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and teleology. He wrote extensive biblical commentaries, a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, disputed questions, and numerous shorter treatises; together they constitute one of the largest corpora of medieval scholastic thought. In December 1273, after a profound experience while celebrating Mass, he stopped writing, telling his socius Reginald of Piperno that all he had written seemed as straw in comparison with what he had seen. Summoned by Pope Gregory X to the Second Council of Lyon, he fell ill on the journey and died on 7 March 1274 at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova.

Pope John XXII canonized him on 18 July 1323. Pius V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church in 1567, and Leo XIII in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) presented Thomism as the surest philosophical and theological guide for the Catholic Church. His liturgical feast, once kept on 7 March, is now observed on 28 January, commemorating the 1369 translation of his relics to Toulouse. Known as the Angelic Doctor, he is patron of students, universities, Catholic schools, philosophers, and theologians. His principal remains rest in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse.