St. Thomas Aquinas is generally considered the
most important philosopher in the scholastic tradition
that had begun with St. ANSELM more than
a century earlier. He was associated most often
with the University of Paris, though he maintained
ties with his native Sicily throughout his life. His
SUMMA THEOLOGICA, left unfinished upon his
death, remains his greatest achievement, and perhaps
the high point of scholasticism. Its goal is no
less than the reconciliation of Aristotelian rationalism
with Christian doctrine.
Thomas was born in his family’s castle in
Aquino. His family had ties to Frederick II, the
Holy Roman Emperor. In 1231, Thomas began
school at the Benedictine monastery of Monte
Cassino, where he learned Latin and studied the
church fathers. But he was forced to return home
in 1239, when hostilities broke out between the
emperor and the pope. Back in Sicily he attended
the University of Naples from 1239 to 1244. The
university was the first in Europe founded independently
of the church, and it had ties to Frederick’s
court, where translations of Aristotle and his
Muslim and Jewish commentators in Arabic and
Greek texts were revolutionizing the way people
thought about intellectual inquiry.
In about 1242 Thomas joined the Dominican
order. His family opposed the move, wishing to
have him named abbot of Monte Cassino, but
Thomas was drawn by the Dominican commitment
to teaching and preaching, and he soon left
to complete his studies at the University of Paris
with the most important thinker of his day, Albertus
Magnus.
When the Dominicans started an international
college in Cologne in 1248, Albert was sent to Germany
to take charge of the college, and he took
Thomas with him as his assistant. It is likely that
Thomas began teaching there, and that he was
made priest about 1250. In 1252 he returned to
Paris to lecture on the Scriptures and on PETER
LOMBARD’s Sentences, the most common university
textbook of the time. In the Sentences Peter had put
in one volume all of the most important opinions
of the church fathers on various theological questions.
But Aquinas saw that these opinions raised
a number of problems, and wrote a commentary
on the Sentences in which he tried to apply the new
Aristotelian method to theological questions.
In 1256 Thomas received his appointment to a
major divinity chair at the University of Paris. At
the time he was working on a major text, the
Summa contra Gentiles, which was intended to be a
handbook for missionaries. The Dominicans were
establishing a center in Barcelona to train missionaries
to the Jews and Muslims, and Thomas’s work,
intended to prove the truth of the Christian faith,
was meant to help them in their work—particularly
the first three of its four books, which explore
the basic principles available to Christians and
nonbelievers alike.
Thomas finished this Summa in 1259, and in
that same year he was sent to Italy, where he taught
at Anagni, then at Rome and Viterbo. It was in Italy
that Thomas did most of his writing.Here he produced
several works and wrote the bulk of the
Summa Theologica. The structure of the Summa is
a model of scholastic dialectic method: Thomas
divides the work into hundreds of related questions.
For each question he first gives several arguments
against his own position. He then gives a
quotation that supports his stance, usually from
“The Philosopher” (i.e., Aristotle) or from one of
the church fathers like St.AUGUSTINE. He then gives
his argument, and finishes by specifically countering
each of the opposing arguments with which
he had begun the question.
Thomas was in Paris again from 1268 to 1272,
though, and here he took part in an intellectual debate
with Siger of Brabant, the chief exponent of
Averroism in Paris. The theories of AVERROËS (Ibn
Rushd) had been causing a stir in Paris since the
1230s, and some of these theories—notably Averroës’s
doctrine that the passive intellect (the individuating
portion of the human soul) does not
survive death (and therefore there is no individual
immortality)—were incompatible with Christian
doctrine, and Thomas wrote a number of commentaries
on Aristotle aimed chiefly at disputing
this Averroist doctrine.
Ultimately Thomas returned to Naples in 1272
where he began the third part of his huge Summa
Theologica. However, on the evening of December
6, 1273, Thomas had a life-changing experience
that he said rendered everything he had previously
written meaningless. Most believe it was a mystical
vision of some kind, but Thomas never returned
to his writing. Then, invited by Pope
Gregory X to take part in the Council of Laon,
Thomas fell ill on the way to the council and died.
Thomas remains indisputably the greatest Christian
philosopher and theologian of the 13th century.
Although some of his doctrines were condemned in
1277 in a general crackdown on philosophical “errors”
made by scholastic philosophers, the Dominicans
themselves officially adopted his methods at
about the same time. His opinions ultimately came
to represent the solid expression of Roman Catholic
orthodoxy. He also seems to have been particularly
influential on DANTE, who places him in a lofty position
in paradise. The fourfold method of scriptural
exegesis that Thomas discusses (an idea that
goes back to St.Augustine) is one that Dante applies
to his DIVINE COMEDY as well. Thomas was canonized
in 1323 as “Doctor Angelicus.”
Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas, Saint. Summa Theologiae. Cambridge,
U.K.: Blackfriars, 1964ff.
Clark, Mary T., ed. An Aquinas Reader. Rev. ed. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
Davies, Brian. Aquinas. London and New York: Continuum,
2002.
Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas.
Translated by Hugh Bredin. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1988.