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 By universal
consent Thomas Aquinas is the preeminent spokesman of the Catholic tradition
of reason and of divine revelation. He is one of the great teachers of the
medieval Catholic Church, honored with the titles Doctor of the Church and
Angelic Doctor.
At five he was given to the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in his
parents’ hopes that he would choose that way of life and later become abbot.
In 1239 he was sent to Naples to complete his studies. It was here that he
was first attracted to Aristotle’s philosophy.
By 1243, Thomas abandoned his family’s plans for him and joined the
Dominicans, much to his mother’s dismay. On her order, Thomas was captured
by his brother and kept at home for over a year.
Once free, he went to Paris and then to Cologne, where he finished his
studies with Albert the Great. He held two professorships at Paris, lived at
the court of Pope Urban IV, directed the Dominican schools at Rome and
Viterbo, combated adversaries of the mendicants, as well as the Averroists,
and argued with some Franciscans about Aristotelianism.
His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church is his writings. The unity,
harmony and continuity of faith and reason, of revealed and natural human
knowledge, pervades his writings. One might expect Thomas, as a man of the
gospel, to be an ardent defender of revealed truth. But he was broad enough,
deep enough, to see the whole natural order as coming from God the Creator,
and to see reason as a divine gift to be highly cherished.
The Summa Theologiae, his last and, unfortunately, uncompleted work,
deals with the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped work on it after
celebrating Mass on December 6, 1273. When asked why he stopped writing, he
replied, "I cannot go on.... All that I have written seems to me like so
much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."
He died March 7, 1274.
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