Context
An indefatigable student, teacher, and writer,
St. Thomas Aquinas was the greatest Christian theologian of the Middle
Ages. He was born at Roccasecca, Italy, as the youngest son of Count
Landolfo of Aquino and Countess Teodora of Teano. At age five, he
began his studies at the Benedictine monastery in Monte Cassino.
From there, he went on to study at the University of Naples and,
over the objections of his family, became a Dominican friar in 1244.
He continued his studies in philosophy and theology at Paris and
then, from 1248 to 1252, at Cologne with Albert the Great. After
further study and teaching at the University of Paris, he returned
to Italy in 1259 and spent nearly ten years teaching and working
at Dominican monasteries near Rome.
Back at the University of Paris in 1268, he became embroiled
in arguments with clerics and theologians who opposed his philosophical
positions. He returned to Italy in 1272 and taught for one year at
the University of Naples before declining health forced him to quit
teaching in 1273. While en route to a church council in Lyon, he fell
gravely ill and died not far from the town of his birth early in 1274.
He was declared a saint by Pope John XXII in 1323, pronounced the
“Angelic Doctor” by Pope Pius V in 1567, and named Patron of Catholic
Schools by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.
Aquinas was a prolific writer. His most extensive work
is the Summa Theologica, which he probably wrote
between 1265 and 1272 but left unfinished. This imposing set of
tomes, which comprises thousands of pages of tightly-reasoned responses
to an astonishing range of questions about church theology and doctrine,
is not only the crown jewel of Scholasticism, that is, of medieval
theology and philosophy, but one of the crown jewels of Western
culture. His Summa contra Gentiles is remarkable
as an attempt to demonstrate to nonbelievers the reasonableness
of the Christian faith. In addition to these two most famous works,
Aquinas also wrote commentaries on numerous treatises by Aristotle;
various Bible commentaries; records of theological and philosophical
disputes; and sundry treatises, letters, and notes. This prodigious
output is especially impressive because Aquinas achieved it all
within the span of about twenty years.
Aquinas lived during an age when the Catholic Church was
the overwhelmingly dominant wielder of political and religious power in
most of Europe. The Protestant Reformation, which established a rival
alternative to the Catholic Church, was still some 250 years off when
Aquinas was alive. Church and state were not separated and, in fact,
were largely identical. There were no European nations in the modern
sense of fully sovereign countries that determine their own economic,
political, and social agendas.
Clerics, who were usually the only people who could read
and write, possessed a monopoly on the world of learning. Education was
necessarily Catholic learning and took place almost exclusively in
monasteries. Very few universities existed, and most of these were institutions
for the training of future clerics. For six years, candidates for
a bachelor's degree studied the seven liberal arts: geometry, grammar,
logic, rhetoric, astronomy, music theory, and arithmetic. After
completing this course of study, students could continue studying
law, medicine, or theology for up to another twelve years in pursuit
of a master's degree or doctorate degree. Theology was the most
difficult and prestigious field.
One of the distinctive features of universities in Aquinas's
day was the so-called scholastic method, which was embodied in the disputatio.
The disputatio was a public debate among scholars
on a particular topic or question and took place according to a
strict procedural format. First, a teacher posed a previously announced
question to an advanced student. This student then took a position
with respect to the topic in question. Other teachers and students
subsequently countered the advanced student's responses with objections,
which the advanced student then attempted to rebut. On a day soon
afterward, the teacher summarized the various arguments for and
against the debated question and rendered his own decision in the determinatio.
This culture of spirited public debate led to the development of
refined techniques of argumentation and rhetoric. Trained in this
arena of intellectual jousting, Aquinas proved himself to be one
of its foremost practitioners. The structure and topics of the Summa
Theologica and the Summa Theologica contra Gentiles are
derived directly from this tradition, and both works are essentially
transcripts of debates conducted according to the rigid rules of
the disputatio.
Aquinas's greatest influence on intellectual history was
his shifting attention from the works of Plato to those of Aristotle.
Much of the history of Western philosophy involves the elaboration
and development of ideas that are either explicit or implicit in
the writings of these two great ancient Greek philosophers. Plato
was particularly influential among thinkers in the church's early
history, and St. Augustine (A.D. 354–430), one of the church Fathers,
derived many of his views from Plato's writings. Plato had maintained
that an unbridgeable divide separates the transient, illusory, material world
that we perceive with our senses and the changeless, eternal world
of transcendent reality. For Plato, the realm of eternal and perfect
Forms is the only proper object of study, containing as it does
the only true reality. St. Augustine saw Plato's philosophy as profoundly
congenial to Christianity in that Plato's concept of two worlds,
one eternally perfect and the other inherently imperfect, mirrors
Christianity's own postulation of two worlds, earthly and divine.
In contract, Aristotle had drifted into obscurity, if
not outright oblivion, as far as the church was concerned, and it
is thanks only to the efforts of Jewish and Arabic scholars that
his writings survived at all until Aquinas came along. Thus, the
teachings of Plato reigned supreme in church orthodoxy when Aquinas
was studying. Aquinas bucked this tradition, recovering Aristotle
for the West and virtually single-handedly assimilating him into
Catholic orthodoxy.
Aquinas's views are of more than merely philosophical
interest, as they are official Catholic doctrine and thus represent
a living set of traditions and beliefs. The Roman Catholic Church
is one of the world's most ancient, enduring, and powerful institutions,
spanning nearly two thousand years and claiming some one billion
adherents all over the globe. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII declared Aquinas's
teachings to be official church doctrine, cementing Aquinas's status
as one of the most influential philosophers and theologians ever.
The question of whether Aquinas's writings represent the achievement of
human reason or the products of divine inspiration has been the subject
of fierce debate, and one's answer to that question is likely to depend
on whether one accepts church teachings in the first place. Within
the church, it is safe to say that Aquinas's significance is inescapable.
