Widely regarded as the most influential Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) was born into an aristocratic Italian family at his father’s castle in the town of Roccasecca, near Rome. He began his religious studies as a child, when his father sent him to live in a nearby monastery as an oblate, or monk in training.
However, Aquinas infuriated his father by fleeing to France at age nineteen to enter the University of Paris. On the road to France, his father’s men kidnapped him, hoping to persuade him to remain in Italy. Aquinas spent a year in captivity before he was finally allowed to enroll at the university.
At the university, which had been established on the banks of the Seine only about fifty years earlier, the young Aquinas encountered a lively scholarly community in the Latin Quarter that was far different from the traditional, feudal society in Italy from which he had escaped. In particular, the scholars in Paris were captivated by new translations of the works of the ancient philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), who had only recently been rediscovered in Christian Europe.
Aristotle’s philosophy, with its emphasis on rationalism and science, posed a serious challenge to many Christian beliefs and would form the touchstone of much of Aquinas’s writing. He received his Master of Theology degree in 1256 and was soon at work on the two books for which he is best known, the Summa contra Gentiles (1264) and the Summa Theologiae, the latter of which was unfinished at the time of his death.
In the two books, Aquinas sought to examine the relationships between faith and reason and to answer the questions Aristotle had raised. While some traditional theologians found Aristotle threatening, Aquinas believed that using Aristotle’s tools of critical reasoning could lead to a deeper understanding of religion and that theology could be approached like a science. His Summa Theologiae contained five elegant arguments in favor of the existence of God—the Quinque viae—that would be widely embraced.
Aquinas returned to his homeland in 1272, settling at the University of Naples. He was summoned to a conference in France by Pope Gregory X (1210–1276), but fell ill and died en route. He was canonized in 1323 and named a Doctor of the Church, the highest distinction for a Catholic theologian, in 1567.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Aquinas is considered the patron saint of Catholic schools—dozens of which are named in his honor across the world.
- It took many years before Aquinas’s theology was generally accepted by Catholic scholars. Indeed, he was posthumously excommunicated three years after his death by the bishop of Paris.
- One of Aquinas’s teachers in Paris was the German philosopher Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), who is also considered a Doctor of the Church.
