Saint Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church

I was trained briefly by Dominicans once, and developed a great respect for this extraordinarily intelligent scholar-priest, who mingled his powerful intellect with a saintly quest for virtue and holiness and a life of mysticism. So, for today's departure from the Scripture posts, and as part of the Doctors page, we shall have a very quick look at Saint Thomas, the Angelic Doctor, the Common Doctor, who's theology became more-or-less the theology of the Church for centuries until the confusions of the twentieth century.

Saint Thomas was born in about AD 1225 to a noble family of the Aquino region of the Campania, below Rome, not far from the great Benedictine foundation at Monte-Cassino, where he received his primary education. He then moved to Naples, capital of the kingdom of Sicily, for his secondary education. Here he discovered the philosophy of the ancient philosopher Aristotle, and he discovered his vocation to the recently born Order of Preachers, established under the leadership of Saint Dominic. His noble family refused to accept his joining a mendicant Order and he had to take leave from his community to stay at home for a while. He returned to the Order later and was sent to Paris to study under the famous German Dominican Saint Albert the Great, and they soon built a strong friendship and Albert would have liked to carry Thomas across to Cologne, where the German Dominicans wanted to build a study hall. There, as in Naples, Thomas found the fever for Aristotelianism, newly discovered by Europe centuries after the decline of the Roman Empire. At a time when Europe was pitting the new learning (mainly Aristotelianism) against the classical Christianity as represented by the Saints, such as Saint Augustine of Hippo, Thomas was to discover and demonstrate a synthesis of both philosophical traditions, and so a synthesis of faith (represented by Christian revelation) and reason (represented by pre-Christian Greek philosophy) within a single philosophical system. Thomas returned to Paris to fill a chair as professor of theology, and Scriptural exegete. He travelled widely as a Dominican friar, at one point drawing up the programme of studies for the Order, and at another composing liturgical texts for the feast of Corpus Christi, at the request of the Holy Father Urban IV. He has given us our greatest Eucharistic hymnography: the Pange Lingua Gloriosi, the Adoro Te devote, etc. From 1265 to 1268, Thomas lived in Rome and directed another hall of study for the Order, and began to write his seminal Summa Theologica. He was also a gifted preacher, able to distil his immense knowledge into a simple delivery to ordinary people. In 1273, he made it known privately that he wished to end all his work because he had realised mystically in the course of offering Mass that all his past work until that point was thoroughly worthless - probably a way of saying that God is beyond any human conception in His beauty and majesty, which we will experience only beyond this world. He died not long after at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova. 

The popes have delighted in Saint Thomas' theological system and the Holy Father Leo XIII named him patron of Catholic schools and universities in 1880. It has been that synthesis of two distinct systems, one based on pure reason (pre-Christian) and the other on the the Christian philosophy that had developed until Thomas' time, that was vital in the nineteenth century, at a time when reason and faith was increasingly seen as incompatible. We can see, thanks to Thomas, that both these sciences, those of rational philosophy and of Christian philosophy come from the one divine Wisdom, and so must at least have an inner unity and support each other, while maintaining their mutual independence. In a related story, Thomas also developed the doctrine of sanctifying grace, the action of the Holy Ghost upon our human nature that builds us up to transform us, to divinise us, to bring to life within us the various Christian virtues that enable us to live the Gospel, if we are open to this grace in our lives. For you see, with his optimism about human nature, Thomas was able to see humanity not as entirely corrupt but as weakened and salvageable, and certainly to be an increasingly perfected image of God. Among Saint Thomas' available works today stands supremely the Summa Theologica, a rather long and fairly comprehensive rational grappling with the Christian Faith, a rationalism that is at the same time accompanied by prayer. Aside from these Summae, including the also-famous Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas has left behind homilies, in which he explains the Creed, common prayers and the Ten Commandments. And lastly, to crown it all, Thomas, like every other Dominican, was a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin.