St Thomas Aquinas

I

Introduction

St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), sometimes called the Angelic Doctor and the Prince of Scholastics, Italian philosopher and theologian, whose works have made him the most important figure in scholastic philosophy and one of the leading Roman Catholic theologians.

Aquinas was born of a noble family in Roccasecca, near Aquino, and was educated at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples. He joined the Dominican order while still an undergraduate in 1243, the year of his father’s death. His mother, opposed to Thomas’s affiliation with a mendicant order, confined him to the family castle for more than a year in a vain attempt to make him abandon his chosen course. She released him in 1245, and Aquinas then journeyed to Paris to continue his education. He studied under the German scholastic philosopher Albertus Magnus, following him to Cologne in 1248. Because Aquinas was heavy set and taciturn, his fellow novices called him Dumb Ox, but Albertus Magnus is said to have predicted that “this ox will one day fill the world with his bellowing”.

II

Early Years

Aquinas was ordained a priest about 1250, and he began to teach at the University of Paris in 1252. His first writings, primarily summaries and amplifications of his lectures, appeared two years later. His first major work was Scripta Super Libros Sententiarum (Writings on the Books of the Sentences, c. 1256), which consisted of commentaries on an influential work concerning the sacraments of the Church, known as the Sententiarum Libri Quatuor (Four Books of Sentences), by the Italian theologian Peter Lombard.

In 1256 Aquinas was awarded a doctorate in theology and appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris. Pope Alexander IV, who reigned from 1254 to 1261, summoned him to Rome in 1259, where he acted as adviser and lecturer to the papal court. Returning to Paris in 1268, Aquinas immediately became involved in a controversy with the French philosopher Siger de Brabant and other followers of the Islamic philosopher Averroës.

III

Study of Aristotle and the Averroists

To understand the crucial importance of this controversy for Western thought, it is necessary to consider the context in which it occurred. Before the time of Aquinas, Western thought had been dominated by the philosophy of St Augustine, the Western Church’s great Father and Doctor of the 4th and 5th centuries, who taught that in the search for truth people must depend upon the experience of the senses. Early in the 13th century the major works of Aristotle were made available in a Latin translation, accompanied by the commentaries of Averroës and other Islamic scholars. The vigour, clarity, and authority of Aristotle’s teachings restored confidence in empirical knowledge and gave rise to a school of philosophers known as Averroists. Under the leadership of Siger de Brabant, the Averroists asserted that philosophy was independent of revelation.

Averroism threatened the integrity and supremacy of Roman Catholic doctrine and filled orthodox thinkers with alarm. To ignore Aristotle, as interpreted by the Averroists, was impossible; to condemn his teachings was ineffectual. He had to be reckoned with. Albertus Magnus and other scholars had attempted to deal with Averroism, but to little effect. Aquinas succeeded.

Reconciling the Augustinian emphasis upon the human spiritual principle with the Averroist claim of autonomy for knowledge derived from the senses, Aquinas insisted that the truths of faith and those of sense experience, as presented by Aristotle, are fully compatible and complementary. Some truths, such as the mystery of the incarnation, can be known only through revelation, and others, such as the composition of material things, only through experience; still others, such as the existence of God, are known through both equally. All knowledge, Aquinas held, originates in sensation, but sense data can be made intelligible only by the action of the intellect, which elevates thought towards the apprehension of such immaterial realities as the human soul, the angels, and God. To reach understanding of the highest truths, those with which religion is concerned, the aid of revelation is needed. Aquinas’s moderate realism placed the universals firmly in the mind, in opposition to extreme realism, which posited them as independent of human thought. He admitted a foundation for universals in existing things, however, in opposition to nominalism and conceptualism.

IV

Later Years

Aquinas first suggested his mature position in the treatise De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas (1270; The Trinity and the Unicity of the Intellect, 1946). This work turned the tide against his opponents, who were condemned by the Church.

Aquinas left Paris in 1272 and proceeded to Naples, where he organized a new Dominican school. In March 1274, while travelling to the Council of Lyon, to which he had been commissioned by Pope Gregory X, Aquinas fell ill. He died on March 7 at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova.

Aquinas was canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius V in 1567.