Biography

Thomas Aquinas (1224/1226-1274) was born to Landulph Count of Aquino and Dame Theodora of the Neapolitan Caricciolo family at the family’s castle in Roccasecca, Italy (then part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies). The youngest son, Aquinas was given as an oblate to the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino in 1230/1231, likely with the aim of his acquiring the lucrative abbacy some day. Owing to renewed strife between Pope Gregory the IX and Emperor Frederick II, Aquinas was moved from Monte Cassino to the University of Naples in 1239, preceding Frederick’s capture of the abbey that November.

Naples was central to Aquinas’ spiritual and intellectual formation. Here he studied Aristotle, Maimonides, Averroes, and Avicenna, and was inspired by friars John of San Giuliano and Thomas of Lentini to join the Dominican order around April of 1244. Aquinas’ joining a mendicant order upset his family’s ambitions, but the friars’ foresight placed Aquinas on the road to Rome prior to Theodora’s arrival in Naples to dissuade him. Aquinas again eluded his mother at Rome, departing for Bologna just before her arrival. At this point, Theodora organized a group that took Aquinas in the region of Acquapendente, whence he was ultimately confined to castle Roccasecca.

Consequent on Aquinas’ refusal to change his mind and Innocent IV’s disposal of Emperor Frederick (an ally of the Aquino family), Aquinas was returned in 1245 to the Dominicans, who sent him to Paris. Aquinas remained there for about 3 years, likely pursuing his studies of the liberal arts (begun at Naples) and starting work in theology, while serving as an assistant to Albert the Great.

In 1248, Aquinas followed Albert to Cologne, where Albert had been sent to aid in establishing a studium generale, or house of study designed to train the order’s ablest students, mainly to serve as lectors at provincial studia, where they would organize disputations and lecture on the Bible and Peter of Lombard’s Sentences. At Cologne, Aquinas studied philosophy and theology under Albert, and perhaps began lecturing as a biblical bachelor, as required during the first year of one’s formation as a master in theology. He also produced literal commentaries on the Bible, and perhaps Deprincipiis naturae (On the Principles of Nature).

Aquinas returned to Paris in 1252 to begin the next stage in his formation as a bachelor of the Sentences, lecturing and producing his Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (Commentary on the Sentences), as well as De ente et essentia (On Being and Essence). In 1256, Aquinas received his license to teach and was appointed regent master at the University of Paris, against the protests of secular masters who resented the growing strength of the mendicant orders. As regent, Aquinas taught, commented on the Bible, and participated in disputations. Other writings from this time include several disputed questions as well as the Expositio super librum Boethii De trinitate (Commentary on Boethius’ De trinitate).

Aquinas left Paris for Italy in 1259, where he spent a decade teaching at various cities and writing (Summa contra gentiles (begun at Paris), Sententia super De anima (Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima), and the First Part of the Summa theologiae, among other works). Aquinas ended these travels at Rome in 1265, where he was sent to establish a studium and serve as its regent master.

In 1268, the order sent for Aquinas to serve an unprecedented second regency at Paris, where his talents were needed to combat secular attacks against the mendicants’ rights to teach, and also to check the spread of Latin Averroism (see below), while simultaneously persuading conservative theologians that Aristotelianism need not pose a threat to Christian teaching. Aquinas’ staggering output from this period - including On the Perfecting of the Spiritual Life, On the Unicity of Intellect Against the Averroists, and On the Eternity of the World - reflects these concerns.

Aquinas left Paris for Naples in 1272 to establish another studium and serve as its regent master. In December 1273, while saying mass, he had a religious experience that led him to cease writing. He disclosed to his friend and assistant Reginald of Piperno that in light of what had been revealed to him, he deemed his writings to be worth less than straw, and that he now wished to die. In February of 1274, Aquinas suffered an injury journeying to the Council of Lyons. While convalescing with his niece in the castle of Maenza, Aquinas requested that he be moved to the Cistercian abbey at Fossanuova, lest the Lord find him in a castle and not a religious house; he died here on March 2, 1274.

Aquinas matured during the flowering of scholasticism. By 1200, western scholars had rendered nearly all of Aristotle’s writings into Latin, marking a dramatic shift from the early twelfth century, when only Boethius’ translations of Categories and De interpretatione enjoyed wide circulation. The appearance of Aristotle’s writings precipitated a series of bans, prohibitions, and ultimately condemnations, beginning in 1210, when the Provincial Council of Paris forbade the teaching of Aristotle’s natural philosophy by the Parisian arts masters. In 1215, the Papal legate Robert de Courcon upheld the ban and added a prohibition against lecturing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics; and in 1231, Pope Gregory IX maintained the prohibition and appointed a commission to correct the prohibited books. The prohibition was likewise maintained by Popes Innocent IV and Urban IV; nonetheless, when Aquinas was finishing his studies as a bachelor of the Sentences in Paris, Aristotelian philosophy dominated the scene.

The conservative reaction to Aristotle grew from the fear that his work could be used in some way to undermine Christian teachings, which is just what happened in the mid-thirteenth century, when Siger of Brabant and other Parisian arts masters, reading Aristotle in light of the commentaries of Averroes (the Latinized name of the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd), interpreted Aristotle in a way that contradicted certain tenets of faith, and argued that philosophical insight into the ordinary course of nature does not always agree with revealed truth. Aquinas attacked these Latin Averroists (or Radical Aristotelians) during his second Parisian regency, claiming that they misconstrued Aristotle, particularly concerning certain ramifications of Aristotle’s claim that the human intellect is immaterial (De anima III.4-5). Siger had concluded that there can exist only one such immaterial intellect, as entities are not multiplied save through matter. Aquinas’ aforementioned De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas (On the Unicity of Intellect Against the Averroists) argues that a careful reading of Aristotle cannot support this position. What is important to note is that Siger advanced his claims as true according to philosophy, suggesting that philosophy and theology could arrive at different truths. One of Aquinas’ greatest contributions, his famous synthesis of faith and reason, was an insistence that this was not the case. While admitting that some truths of faith cannot be established on the authority of reason, Aquinas denies the possibility of valid demonstrations contradicting these teachings (Summa theologiae (ST) Ia.46.2; Summa contra gentiles (SCG) II.32). Even so, the efforts of Aquinas and like-minded thinkers were not immediately successful. Three years following Aquinas’ death, Latin Averroism led to the Condemnation of 1277, instigated by the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, and drafted with the aid of Henry of Ghent. Among the condemned propositions were 19 drawn from Aquinas’ writings (in 1325, 2 years after Aquinas’ canonization, the Condemnation was repealed to the extent it touched on his works).

After his death, Aquinas’ philosophy found support among his fellow Dominicans, and Pope Pius V declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1567, during the period of Second Thomism (dating roughly through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), which included thinkers such as Cardinal Cajetan, Domingo de Soto, and John of St. Thomas. Perhaps the most important revival of Aquinas’ teachings grew out of Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni patris, which recommended Aquinas as ‘‘the prince and master of all Scholastic doctors,’’ so as to furnish Catholic intellectuals addressing modernism with sound philosophical and theological principles. The period following Aeterni Patris has seen the foundation of numerous centers of Thomistic study, an interest in Aquinas’ thought spreading outside Catholic circles, and, with this, the growth of an intellectual climate generally amenable to the development of medieval philosophy.