Thomas Aquinas was born in the family castle at Roccasecca, Italy, in 1225. He was schooled at the University of Naples, where he met members of the Order of Preachers, otherwise known as Dominicans.
The Dominicans were a begging order of friars who vowed to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience. However, in forming his order of men, Dominic emphasized education so they would be trained to refute any accusations of heresy.
At age 19 Thomas joined the Dominicans, to his family’s shock. To dissuade him, they held him captive for over a year. They didn’t mind his becoming a monk; in fact, they tried to persuade him to join the Benedictines and live at Montecassino, where his uncle had been the abbot. The difference of monk and friar then was a friar could travel.
His brothers put Thomas to the ultimate test and sent a young woman to his room to seduce him. Thomas sent her away, then fell on his knees to pray. So the family accepted Thomas’ choice.
He attended the University of Paris faithfully as a student. He rarely spoke and was a large man, so his colleagues nicknamed him “the dumb ox.” However today Thomas is considered the mind that saved the medieval church.
Along with a Franciscan named Bonaventure, Thomas challenged the university’s rules that did not allow friars to become professors. The two continued and completed the requirements for masters of theology. Only when the pope intervened were the two allowed on the university’s staff. Thomas was required to write biblical commentaries and disputations and preach.
During the twelfth and thirteen centuries, massive amounts of classical writings were translated into Latin. Artistotle’s works were some. And his works shattered the church’s confidence in the compatibility of reason and faith. Most scholars concluded Artistotle contradicted Christian doctrine.
However, after Thomas studied Aristotle’s writings carefully, he concluded that for the most part, Aristotle’s thought was true and compatible with Christian revelation. On some questions of divine providence, he argued Aristotle’s presumed errors derived from a misreading of commentators in other langugages.
After Thomas returned victorious from his verbal battle over Aristotle, he retired from writing. Though friends urged him to continue, Thomas answered, “I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.”
G. K. Chesteron wrote about Thomas, “This particular quarrel (over Aristotle) was the one point in which his outer and inner life had crossed and coincided; he realized how he had longed from childhood to call up all allies in the battle for Christ; how he had only long afterwards called up Aristotle as an ally; and now in that last nightmare of sophistry, he had for the first time truly realized some might really wish Christ to go down before Aristotle.”
Thomas had longed to remove all obstacles between himself and God. He had hated hating. According to Chesteron, Thomas never recovered from the shock that, though he possessed the brain of his time, people could invert his ideas to mean just that. His life’s purpose was to love and be Christ to others through his work. He returned home with a horror of all religion and truth perishing.
Thomas Aquinas died on March 7, 1274. Miracles began to happen often near his buried body. In fear of robbery, the Cistercian monks exhumed the body, yet in their jealousy, cut off its head to hide in their chapel. His sister was given a hand, and other body parts were taken by other people. Finally by 1319, Thomas’ corpse was reduced to bones. In 1396, these were moved to Toulouse. During the French Revolution they were relocated to St. Sernin but in 1974, returned to the monastery in Toulouse, where they rest today.
Out of the Depths