(ca. 1224-1274) theologian, philosopher
Thomas Aquinas was born at the castle of Roc-casecca, near Naples, Italy, to a noble family. He was sent away before he was five to be educated at the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino, where his father’s brother was abbot. Later he studied at the University of Naples. In this culturally rich environment Thomas became familiar with the writings of the Muslim thinkers avicenna and averroEs, whose study of the Greek philosopher aristotle, the ideas of whom had been almost forgotten following the collapse of the Roman Empire, was beginning to attract the interest of Christian Europe. Thomas Aquinas was among those who studied Aristotle’s theories.
In Naples, Aquinas also met members of the new Dominican order of mendicant friars, who led a more austere and self-denying life than that practiced by the older established monastic orders such as the Benedictines. Aquinas was still a teenager when he decided to join the Dominicans. His family opposed this decision and held him captive for more than a year, trying to force him to change his mind. Eventually they had to accept that their efforts were wasted, and he was allowed to take his vows in 1244.
The Dominicans sent young Thomas to Cologne to study with the scholar Albertus Magnus (later known as Saint Albert the Great, ca. 1200-80). Albertus Magnus had made an extensive study of Aristotle, and this shared interest contributed to the close relationship between master and pupil, which lasted for many years. Aquinas moved to Paris when Albertus Magnus took up a teaching position there in 1245. After completing his studies, he remained in Paris as a professor for another three years. He then spent 10 years in Italy, much of the time in attendance on the pope, but returned to Paris for another three years before taking up a teaching position at the University of Naples. A mystical experience in 1273 that made all his work seem to him “like straw,” as he told a friend, led to his ceasing to write, but he continued with his teaching and administrative work. When he was about 50 years old, he was on his way to Lyons on church business when he died, not far from his birthplace.
Critical Analysis
Thomas Aquinas wrote more than 60 works, all in Latin, the language of scholarship in his day. There are sermons, biblical commentaries, polemical tracts (he was often called on by Church leaders to respond to controversies and potential heresies), philosophical expositions, and theological works. His 13 commentaries on the works of Aristotle are still valued by students of philosophy for the help they give in understanding Aristotle’s ideas, but as a Christian philosopher, Aquinas probably saw them more as a means to a clear understanding of the unity of God’s creation.
The early medieval Catholic Church tended to dismiss classical philosophers like Aristotle, who had lived before the time of Christ, as pagan and therefore irrelevant or even harmful to Christianity. Aquinas demonstrated that Aristotle’s ideas were in fact compatible with Christian teaching. Aristotle’s confidence in the capacity of human reason to uncover the underlying order in the universe by studying the details of creation was pursued by Aquinas, who identified that underlying order with God. Aristotle’s proof of the existence of a prime mover was developed by Aquinas as proof of the existence of God. His modification of Aristotle’s approach was to argue that human reason could not discover everything, and God’s revelation was needed to discover the fullness of truth.
Aquinas’s greatest book, the Summa Theologica, which he began around 1265 and was still working on when he stopped writing in 1273, was conceived as an aid to students of theology and metaphysics. The original title, Summa Totius Theologiae, may be translated as “the summary of all theology,” and the work is indeed ambitious. It has three parts, dealing with the nature of God, ethics, and Christ. In a logical progression of ideas, Aquinas takes a philosophical and theological approach to reconciling the concepts of reason and faith. He includes commentaries by such philosophers, theologians, and scholars as Avicenna, ibn gabirol, Averroes, augustine, and maimonides.
Aquinas was the most important Christian theologian of the European middle ages, providing a new balance between theology and philosophy that held until the age of science began in the 17th century.
Aquinas was officially recognized as a saint by the Church in 1373, and his teachings (collectively known as “Thomism”) have become identified with the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. His work is still studied by modern philosophers.
English Versions of Works by Saint Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by Timothy McDermott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
A Shorter Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Edited by Peter Kreeft. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.
St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics: A New Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Translated by Paul E. Sigmund. New York: Norton, 1988.
Works about Saint Thomas Aquinas
Flannery, Thomas L. Acts Amid Precepts: The Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001.
McInerny, Ralph. A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: Handbook for Peeping Thomists. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Nichols, Aidan. Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to His Life, Work, and Influence. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003.
