Aquinas, Thomas, St.
Tomasso de Aquino was born in Rocca Secca near Naples, Italy, into a family of local fame and nobility. In his late teens, renouncing the family inheritance and against his father's strong opposition, he entered the mendicant Order of Preachers,�an order later to be called the Dominicans,�that had recently been founded by the Spaniard, Dominic Guzman. (A popular sketch of Aquinas, by G.K. Chesterton, can be read elsewhere on this CD.)
His career as a friar was one of ceaseless study and teaching, as his ability for acute reasoning became evident, both to his religious brethren in Naples and Rome, to the university authorities in the Sorbonne in Paris, and to the papal Curia. Having studied theology under his German confrere, Albert the Great, he taught for a few years in Paris; then was recalled to Italy in 1259 to act as theological adviser and lecturer to the papal Curia, which was located variously at Anagni then for a few years at Orvieto. From 1265 to 1267 he taught at the Dominican house of studies of Santa Sabina in Rome after which he was recalled for about a year, to work for the papal Curia, now in Viterbo, under pope Clement IV. In 1268, he returned to teach in Paris, where he was to spend most of his remaining years, until his untimely death, aged only forty nine, while on his way to attend the Lateran Council in Rome. He is buried in a church in Toulouse.
During his Paris years in particular, Thomas was at the heart of a radical theological renewal, made necessary by doctrinal crisis that confronted Christendom with the re-discovery of Greek science, culture, and thought through the Arabic scholarship emanating from Spain. Quickly seeing the merits of Aristotle's wide-ranging philosophy as offering a better basis than Plato on which to construct his theological system, Thomas set to work on his Opus Magnum, the Summa Theologica, which was still incomplete at the time of his death. His first biographer, William of Tocco, says that Thomas was highly persuasive in presenting his arguments. "To hear him teach a new doctrine, one could not doubt that God, by the irradiation of this new light and by the novelty of this inspiration, gave him the power to teach, by the spoken and written word, new opinions and new knowledge."
On the personal level, he was of a rather serious character, little given to small-talk or recreational diversions. His fellow-Dominican, Simon Tugwell, describes Aquinas as little interested in clothes or in the quality of his food, but attributes this rather to his preference to stay with his books, than to any special leaning towards austerity. He goes on to portray him in these terms: "Thomas was not a great conversationalist. He was habitually silent, and if he was occasionally lured into the parlor he said little and escaped as soon as he could. He seems to have had no small talk and perhaps he was rather devoid of humor. He was also quite unlike Albert in his lack of interest in the world around him. He lived in his own head and in his books." (Albertus & Aquinas, 1988, p.261)
His principal writings were: Commentary of the Four Books of Viewpoints (Scriptum super IV libros Sententiarum, 1254-56); On the Truth (De Veritate. 1256-59); Compendium on the Essentials of the Faith (Summa Contra Gentiles, 1258-64); Compendium of Theology (Summa theologiae, 1266-73; incomplete at his death); and his Biblical commentaries: on the Book of Job (1261-64); on the Gospels of Matthew and John (1269-72); on the Psalms (1272-73) and on the Letters of St. Paul (undated, and left incomplete). In addition he made the two impressive compendia of patristic observations on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, which are called the "Catenae".
From about 1266 the most keenly followed dispute at the University of Paris was between Aquinas and another philosophically energetic lecturer, Siger of Brabant, who proposed a dualistic interpretation of Aristotle which he had learned from the Arabic Spanish philosopher, Avveroes. When radical Averroism was condemned by the Church in 1270, Aquinas, who stoutly defended a more orthodox Christian reading of Aristotle, and continued to maintain the autonomy of reason under faith, was for a while discredited. But Aquinas' insistence that reason is compatible with faith and yet must be allowed to operate according to its own laws, was later vindicated, and indeed became, from the Reformation onward, the guiding principle of Catholic theology. In his system, the rules and structures of human reasoning are integrated in the light of faith, and it is in this sense that theology should be called a "science"�it is knowledge which is rationally inferred from propositions that are accepted as certain because they are revealed by God.
For the Thomist system, theology accepts authority and faith as its starting point and proceeds to conclusions using a proper system of logical reasoning; it is akin to philosophy in its method, except that the philosopher draws all of his data from observation and reflection, interpreted solely on the natural light of reason. In his own time, Thomas' confident appeal to reason provoked a storm of opposition in more pietistic circles. Even today a similar opposition endures, especially among religious enthusiasts for whom reason is an alien intruder in the realm of mystical communion and evangelical fervour. A keystone of his system was that the realities of nature be respected in their observable consistency. Only this would allow the construction of a science according to a logos, or rational structure.
Thomas avoided, as far as possible, any na�ve recourse to the miraculous or to the unpredictable dispositions of God; Nature, for him, (as indeed, for Francis of Assisi who so admired the birds, the plants, and the Sun), has its own religious value and should lead to God, not simply as a shadow of the supernatural. In parallel to this, the little treatise�De Regimine Principum (�On the Government of Princes�) that Thomas composed for the King of Cyprus in 1266, held that in the administration of justice, juridical investigations and procedures must replace the previusly ready recourse to ordeals and to judgments of God.
Theologians of more traditional bent grimly resisted Thomas as a rationalist innovator who would destroy faith in Providence, and undermine the gratuity of creation. Imbued with Augustine's doctrines, they emphasized the necessity of grace for a nature torn asunder by sin. The optimism of the new theology concerning the religious value of nature scandalized them.
Thomas maintains that human liberty is the highest act of divine creation. God is indeed all-powerful in all that he creates; yet his supreme government over the universe guided by an all-wise Providence that wills each being to act according to its proper nature. Human freedom, far from being destroyed by our relationship to God, finds its foundation in this very relationship. "To take something away from the perfection of the creature is to abstract from the perfection of the creative power itself." This Thomist axiom, at first regarded with great suspicion, came to become a cornerstone of mainstream Catholic theology in the centuries that followed.
Canonized a saint in 1323, honoured as a doctor of the church in 1567, Aquinas was officially chosen as the patron of orthodoxy during the modernist crisis at the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century.