Saint Thomas Aquinas

That man was Thomas Aquinas, the greatest mind Christian theology has ever produced, author of the massive Summa Theologiae, which theology faculties around the world still pore over page by page more than seven hundred years later. He is called Doctor Angelicus, the Angelic Doctor, because his mind seemed to reach heights ordinary people cannot attain. Yet at the end of his life this extraordinary man laid down his pen and said something that stunned learned Europe: everything he had written was only straw.

How does someone who built the greatest cathedral of thought in history come to call it straw? Not by rejecting it, but because for one moment he touched what no book, however learned, can fully express: God Himself. To understand that turning point we must go back to the beginning, to a silent boy from a noble family of southern Italy, whom his classmates thought slow and called the “dumb ox.”

Today the castle of Roccasecca is only crumbling walls clinging to the hillside and bare watchtowers against the sky, but in the thirteenth century it was one of the strongest fortresses on the border between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Papal States, a position that kept the d’Aquino family wary of both the rival powers, Emperor and Pope. Amid these power struggles, Thomas’s parents had a very worldly ambition for their youngest son: they wanted him to become abbot of the nearby Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, a post that would bring honor in the Church and strengthen the family’s standing in the region.

At five, little Thomas was sent to the Abbey of Monte Cassino to begin his education under the Benedictine monks. The accounts of his childhood keep a charming detail: the quiet boy used to go to his teachers with one question, asked over and over:

“What is God?”

That innocent question from a five- or six-year-old mapped out a whole life. For the next forty-nine years, all the enormous intellectual work of Thomas Aquinas would revolve around answering it, ever more deeply and ever more humbly before the boundlessness of the One he was seeking.

In 1239, when Emperor Frederick II expelled the monks from Monte Cassino in his conflict with the Pope, the fourteen-year-old went to study at the University of Naples, one of the liveliest centers of learning in Europe, where the newest Latin translations of Aristotle were causing a stir. There the big, quiet student who always sat silently in a corner of the classroom met the Dominican friars, the newly founded “Order of Preachers,” who lived in poverty and walked barefoot from city to city, preaching and studying. Their poverty and their hunger for truth stirred the young man deeply.

In the lecture halls of Cologne, the tall, slow, quiet young Italian who sat at the back and almost never spoke became a laughingstock. His classmates nicknamed him “the Dumb Ox of Sicily” (Bos Mutus Siciliae), because of his massive build and his puzzling silence, which they took for dullness.

But Saint Albert the Great, with the keen eye of a true teacher, soon saw something else. A story often told in the Dominican Order relates that one day some mischievous classmates decided to tease Thomas. Seeing him walking deep in thought in the friary grounds, they ran up and told him an ox was flying across the sky, just to see what the “dumb ox” would do. Thomas looked up in honest surprise. When they burst out laughing, he replied calmly:

“I would rather believe that an ox could fly than that my brothers in religion would lie to one another.”

That answer, funny and wise at once, silenced the mockers.

The whole hall fell silent in amazement. When he had finished, Saint Albert the Great turned to the other students and made a prophecy the Church still remembers: “You call him a dumb ox, but I tell you: the bellowing of this Ox will one day resound throughout the whole world!” Coming from one of the greatest scholars of the age, it was no exaggeration: seven hundred years later, that

“bellowing”

still echoes in every faculty of theology and philosophy in the world.

Thomas lived in an age of great intellectual upheaval. Translations of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, handed down through Arab and Jewish scholars and especially through the commentator Averroes, were flooding into Europe’s universities. They brought a powerful system of rational thought that seemed to contradict many Christian beliefs about creation, the immortality of the individual soul and God’s providence. The radical Averroists in Paris even taught the dangerous doctrine of “two truths,” one of philosophy and one of faith, which might contradict each other, as if a person could believe two opposite things depending on whether he stood in a lecture hall or in a church.

On that foundation Thomas built a work so massive that people compare it to a cathedral of thought: the Summa Theologiae. It has three great parts, divided into hundreds of questions, each laid out with astonishing rigor: the question is stated, the objections are listed, the answer is given, and then each objection is answered in turn. In the first part he presents the “Five Ways” (Quinque Viae) of showing by reason alone that God exists: from motion, from causation, from necessity, from degrees of perfection and from the order of the universe. He discusses creation, human nature as the union of soul and body, the moral and theological virtues, the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, and the seven Sacraments as the means God uses to pour out grace on humanity.

This was not the work of a scholar in an ivory tower. Those who worked closely with him tell us that when he met a hard theological problem, when even his powerful mind had to give up before a deep mystery, Thomas never tried to force an answer by his own strength. He would get up from his desk, go straight to the chapel, kneel before the tabernacle and weep. Some nights his brothers heard him sobbing in the dark church, begging God to enlighten his small mind before mysteries beyond human reach. The greatest mind of the Middle Ages, it turns out, was fed not only by books but by the tears of a man on his knees.

From the great theologian’s pen poured hymns of astonishing beauty that are still sung in Catholic churches all over the world: the Pange Lingua, with its majestic closing verses, the Tantum Ergo, sung at Benediction; the gentle, heartfelt Panis Angelicus, about the Bread of Angels become food for pilgrims on earth; the short O Salutaris Hostia; and the Adoro Te Devote, Thomas’s own deeply moving profession of faith before a mystery reason cannot fathom, which begins: “I adore You in silence, O Lord truly hidden beneath these appearances of bread...”

It is astonishing that the man who wrote the rigorous, dry reasoning of the Summa Theologiae down to the last detail also wrote poetry so lyrical and so full of devotion. But in Thomas these were not two different people. A sharp mind and an ardent heart were simply two ways of expressing one longing: to know God and to be wholly united with Him. The Dominicans sum up his spirituality, and that of the whole order, in a famous motto: Contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere — To contemplate, and to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation. Thomas prayed before the Eucharist, and out of that prayer he wrote theology; he pondered the mystery, and out of that he wrote poetry.

Not long before, Brother Dominic of Caserta had seen Thomas praying before the crucifix in the chapel, lifted from the ground, while a voice spoke from the cross: “You have written well of Me, Thomas. What reward would you have from Me for your labor?” Without the slightest hesitation, Thomas answered with a few words that held the longing of his whole life: “Non aliam nisi Te, Domine!” —

“Lord, I want no other reward but You!”

But what happened on December 6, 1273, went further still. After Mass that day, something happened to Thomas; historians and theologians still debate whether it was a mystical vision or a direct, overwhelming encounter with God’s presence. From that moment, the man who had written thousands of the sharpest pages in the history of Christian theology laid down his pen and never wrote another line.

His companions brought him to the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, near Terracina in Lazio, the first Cistercian abbey built on Italian soil, famous for its graceful early Gothic architecture, plain to the point of austerity in the Cistercian spirit of poverty. The monks gave their honored guest a small, simple room on the upper floor of the guesthouse, whose narrow window looked out on the vaulted roof of the abbey church and the dark green hills beyond. It is said that when they offered him the soft bed kept for noble guests, Thomas, faithful to his vow of poverty to the end, asked to lie on a simple mat on the floor like any other friar.

Knowing he would soon go home to the Father, Thomas asked for Viaticum. In the presence of the Body of the Lord, on which he had meditated all his life and for which he had written such hymns, he spoke his moving last words:

“I receive You, ransom of my soul. For love of You I have studied, kept vigil, toiled, preached and written...”

It was the humble summing-up of a life that had given its whole extraordinary mind to one purpose: serving the God he loved.

On July 18, 1323, in Avignon, Pope John XXII canonized Thomas Aquinas. In 1567 Pope Saint Pius V, recognizing his unrivaled stature as a theologian, declared him a Doctor of the Church, a title given to very few. In 1879, in the encyclical Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII made the thought of Thomas the foundation for teaching philosophy and theology throughout the Catholic Church. The “dumb ox” had become a lighthouse for generations of Catholic scholars. In 1880 he was proclaimed patron of all Catholic schools and universities throughout the world.

His body, moved several times over the centuries, rests today in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, France, where the Dominican Order, to which he gave his whole life, made one of its first foundations. The Church celebrates him on January 28 each year, the day his remains were translated to Toulouse.