Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae

About the Author

Thomas Aquinas stands as the scholastic theologian par excellence: The theology of this “Angelic Doctor” has either unofficially or officially served as the norm for the Roman Catholic Church since his lifetime. Thomas was born in 1225 to wealthy parents of the landed gentry at the family castle near Roccasecca, located between Rome and Naples in the Kingdom of Sicily. He obtained his primary education at the famed monastery of Monte Cassino founded by Benedict of Nursia. He then matriculated at the University of Naples, where he encountered two forces that revolutionized his life. First, the Western rediscovery of Aristotelian philosophy captivated him, as he found it the standard of sound reason. Second, the relatively new Dominicans order, consisting of friars founded by Saint Dominic de Guzman (1170–1221), was a popular religious renewal movement that greatly appealed to Aquinas and many other young intellectuals. But the Dominicans were considered dominicares, or fanatical “hounds of the Lord,” by the wealthy and powerful elite of society, including Thomas’s father, Landulf de Aquino. So when Thomas joined the Dominican order as a novice friar and moved into their house, Landulf commissioned his other sons to kidnap and “deprogram” Thomas so that he would return to his senses and play his assigned social role. Nevertheless, after two years of confinement in the family castle, Thomas could not be dissuaded from becoming a scholar of Aristotle among the Dominican friars. Granting defeat, his father finally released him from custody.

Leaving Italy as soon as possible to avoid recapture by his family, Aquinas quickly rejoined the Dominican order at the University of Paris, where he studied under the great scholastic master Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), whom he followed to a new Dominican school in Cologne in 1248. Although Thomas’s fellow students dubbed him “the dumb ox” because he was rather obese and shy, Albertus recognized his brilliance and prophetically declared before the entire student body, “We call this lad a dumb ox, but I tell you that the whole world is going to hear his bellowing.” Upon his graduation in 1256, Aquinas pursued a teaching career at the University of Paris, a hotbed of the controversy over Aristotelian philosophy. There he composed many works of theology, foremost among which were the multivolume sets Summa contra Gentiles (“Contra Gentiles”), his apologetic defense of Christianity against Muslim scholars in Spain and North Africa, and Summa theologiae, his systematic theology. Writing on virtually every conceivable topic in the university curriculum, Aquinas quickly grew famous and received acclamation from leaders of both church and state. Less than a year before his death on March 7, 1274, he suddenly retired from writing for no apparent reason. When his colleagues encouraged him to return to his scholarship, Aquinas replied, “I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me compared to the things being revealed to me.” Some scholars view this as a kind of nervous breakdown. Thomas’s own perspective was that he was having such profound mystical experiences of the “beatific vision,” or the heavenly glory of God, which he had written about as the goal of human redemption, that he felt it more important to attend to his spiritual life than to his literary output.