Thomas Aquinas

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Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher whose attempt to reconcile Aristotle with Christian doctrine became, after his death, the dominant intellectual framework of the Catholic Church. Born to a noble family near Aquino, in the Kingdom of Sicily, he was sent as a child to the abbey of Monte Cassino and later studied at Naples, where he encountered both the Aristotelian texts then newly arriving in Latin and the young Order of Preachers. His decision to join the friars rather than take a comfortable abbacy is said to have provoked his family to confine him at home for the better part of a year.

The setting matters. Aristotle’s full corpus had only recently reached Latin Christendom, by way of Arabic and Greek intermediaries, and much of it looked dangerous — an eternal cosmos, a remote first mover, no obvious place for a created soul. The conservative response was to ban or quarantine the new learning. Aquinas took the harder road, arguing that reason rightly used and revelation rightly received could not finally contradict, since both came from the same source. His two great unfinished summaries, the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae, set out to show this at length, moving from the existence of God through creation, the soul, ethics, and the sacraments in ordered question-and-answer form.

The system holds that God is being itself, not a being among others; that the human intellect knows the world through the senses rather than by innate vision; and that grace perfects nature instead of replacing it. Against the strict Augustinian inwardness that preceded him, Aquinas grants the created order its own integrity and intelligibility. Yet the Neoplatonic current is present too: he read and commented on the works of pseudo-Dionysius, and his account of God as the source from which all things flow and to which they return carries that inheritance, recast in Aristotelian terms.

His standing was not immediate. Some of his positions were caught up in the Paris condemnations of 1277, three years after he died, and only gradually did Thomism move from one school among several to a position of near-official authority — canonized in 1323, named a Doctor of the Church, and in the late nineteenth century commended by the papacy as the model for Catholic philosophy. That endorsement has shaped how he is read: as system-builder and arbiter more than as the contemplative he also was.

For the contemplative is recorded as well. Tradition holds that near the end of his life, after some experience while saying Mass, Aquinas stopped writing, leaving the Summa theologiae unfinished; asked why, he is reported to have said that what he had seen made everything he had written seem like straw. The report is later and may be shaped to a purpose, but it has clung to him — the most exhaustive of medieval reasoners, falling silent before something his reasoning could not hold.

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