A Family That Locked Him Up
Thomas was born about 1225 at Roccasecca, in the borderlands between the papal states and the kingdom of Sicily, into a family of minor nobility with plans for him. Sent as a child oblate to the great Benedictine house at Montecassino, he was expected to rise there as abbot, a position of land and influence. Instead, while studying at Naples, he encountered the Dominicans, a new order committed to poverty, preaching and study, and joined them. His brothers seized him on the road and his family held him under house arrest for roughly a year.
He did not yield, and by 1245 he was in Paris, then Cologne, studying under Albert the Great, the Dominican naturalist who was assembling the newly translated works of Aristotle for Latin readers. Thomas was heavy, quiet and slow to speak, and fellow students are said to have nicknamed him the dumb ox. Albert reportedly answered that the ox's bellowing would one day be heard across the world. The anecdote may be embroidered, but the teaching relationship was real, and Albert's confidence in Aristotle became the foundation of everything Thomas built.
The Architecture of the Summa
Aristotle reached Latin Europe largely through Arabic and Hebrew intermediaries, and Thomas read him alongside the commentaries of Averroes and Avicenna and the arguments of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Conservative theologians distrusted the whole enterprise, since a pagan philosopher who taught an eternal world and an impersonal intellect threatened the doctrine of creation. Thomas's response was neither surrender nor rejection. He held that grace does not abolish nature but perfects it, and that a truth reached by argument and a truth received by revelation come from the same source and therefore cannot ultimately conflict.
The Summa Theologiae, begun around 1265, was designed as a textbook for beginners in his order. Its method is relentless: state a question, set out the strongest objections, answer with a reasoned position, then reply to each objection in turn. It ran to thousands of articles on God, creation, human action, virtue, law and Christ. He worked with a team of secretaries, sometimes dictating to more than one at a time, and much of what survives from his lectures reaches us as reportationes, transcripts taken down by students, rather than as his own finished text.
The Silence and the Condemnation
In December 1273, while saying Mass at Naples, something happened that he never explained. He stopped writing. Pressed by his secretary Reginald of Piperno to finish the Summa, he answered only that all he had written seemed to him like straw beside what he had seen. Whether this was mystical experience, exhaustion or a stroke has been argued ever since. The third part of the Summa remained unfinished, and editors later assembled a supplement from his earlier writings. He died in March 1274 at Fossanova, on the road to the Council of Lyon, not yet fifty.
His victory was not immediate. In 1277 the bishop of Paris condemned two hundred and nineteen propositions taught in the arts faculty, and several of them brushed against positions Thomas held; Oxford issued related censures. Only in 1323 was he canonized, and the Paris condemnation quietly set aside in his case. Centuries later his framework was made the backbone of Catholic seminary teaching, which flattened him into a system he never wrote. Read as he actually argued, he is stranger and more tentative than the monument, a man who kept insisting that objections deserve their strongest form.
