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Thomas Aquinas The Mind in Love
by Vivian Boland OP
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE
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Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Providentiae Particeps - Participant in Providence . . . . 7 Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Studying Aristotle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Albert the Great, Paris and Cologne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The Young Professor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Aquam in Vino - Water into Wine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Naples and Orvieto, 1259-1264 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The Summa Theologiae: A Great Unfinished Symphony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Faith and Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Verbum Spirans Amorem - Word Breathing Love. . . . . 29 Thomas of God the Creator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Doctor of Humanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Interruption: Back to Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Incarnate Word - Our Way to Happiness . . . . . . . . . . 37
O Sacrum Convivium - O Sacred Banquet . . . . . . . . . . 43 Life in the Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 The Sacred Banquet - Happiness Anticipated . . . . . . . . . . 49
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
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Introduction Normally the life of a saint is a story filled with action and characters. His or her personal story links with great events in the history of the Church and of the world. To write a life of St Thomas Aquinas is a bit of a challenge, however. The main action of his life took place in classrooms and libraries. The most significant characters in his story are not so much his contemporaries as they are great figures from the history of theology and philosophy, people like St Augustine and St John Chrysostom, Aristotle and Plato. Although Thomas is not a popular saint in the way St Francis of Assisi, St Thérèse of Lisieux or St Martin de Porres are, his contribution to the life of the Church has been second to none. Since immediately after his death, philosophers and theologians have used his work to think out and present an understanding of the Catholic faith, to develop ways of teaching the faith in very different times and places, and to engage with the many objections and difficulties brought against the faith in the centuries since he lived. He is called the ‘Angelic Doctor’ for the clarity of his mind, and the ‘Common Doctor’ because countless
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philosophers and theologians have based their work on his approach and on his central ideas. Intellect and Mystery Thomas Aquinas was an intellectual and this may seem to restrict his appeal. His work was with texts and translations, with ideas and arguments. He shows us that holiness is also about the mind, and that the mind too must fall in love with God. In order to be holy we must think properly and be united with God as ‘the First Truth’. For St Thomas, what the Catholic Church teaches is not just interesting information that we might take or leave but is the truth that heals and saves humanity, the crucial and essential truth therefore. Thomas teaches us that ‘mystery’, far from bringing thinking to an end, invites it to continue forever. Many people are attracted by the adventure of thought even though it is an adventure that moves slowly, made up of patient and persevering research undertaken over many years, with occasional dramatic insights and breakthroughs. The great intellectuals, whether within the Church or outside it, sow seeds that only bear fruit long after their earthly lives are over. It would be wrong to think that Thomas’s life was not touched by adventure in the ordinary sense. His family was involved in great political struggles and one of his brothers was executed. He was obliged to get involved in
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a bitter argument within the Church about the right to exist of the mendicant friars, the new form of religious life established by St Francis and St Dominic. Thomas was a key figure in the formative years of the Dominican Order as it consolidated its preaching and teaching mission. He was drawn into another bitter argument, this time between the Church and the new universities, about how the philosophy of Aristotle, a pagan Greek who lived four centuries before Christ, might be used by Christian philosophers and theologians. A saint for our times Clearly a man of his time, Thomas is also very much a saint for our times. At the root of social and political struggles are disagreements or lack of clarity about cultural and moral values. In the progress of humanity, thought clearly has a crucial place. What people believe to be true, and how they support their convictions about the truth, will always be matters of great concern among human beings. Contemporary thinkers who described themselves as ‘secular’ fear that faith in God is a threat to humanity, that men and women cannot be truly free until they shake off God. What we might call ‘Christian humanism’, the approach of which St Thomas is the supreme example, knows that the truth is directly contrary to this. The human being has nothing to fear from God. On the contrary, Christ, the Son of God is also
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the head of humanity, leading it towards its flourishing and not towards its destruction. Christ is our way to maturity, Thomas says, the love-breathing Word from God who finally introduces us to ourselves.
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Providentiae Particeps Participant in Providence Early Years When Thomas Aquinas died on 7th March 1274 he was about forty-nine years of age. It is not known precisely when he was born but it was sometime between late 1224 and early 1226. The Aquino family was minor nobility in the region of Monte Cassino, the great Benedictine monastery that guards not only the tomb of St Benedict but also one of the strategically important routes from southern to central Italy. The first twenty years of Thomas’s life were overshadowed by the on-going conflict between the Papacy and the Emperor Frederick II. Because of the location of their lands, Thomas’s family had no choice but to be involved. As the fortunes of these great antagonists waxed and waned the Aquino family was obliged to align and re-align itself accordingly. Thomas’s schooldays at Monte Cassino were interrupted by the changing political and military situation. He studied at home for some months after leaving the abbey and then went to Naples, to the budding university established by the Emperor. More dramatically, when he decided to join the Dominicans, and
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not the Benedictines as they had hoped, his family kept him under house arrest for a year. Tradition has it that he spent this time studying the Bible and reading the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Written a century earlier by a Bishop of Paris, the Sentences had quickly become the standard textbook of Christian theology. When his family released him and allowed him to return to the Dominicans, it may have been more to do with changing political fortunes than to any softening of heart on their part. The Dominicans were strong supporters of the Papacy in the battles that were going on. It would have been unwise for an Aquino to be too closely associated with them when the family needed the Emperor’s patronage. But when things changed, it might have been in their political interests to have a son among the Friars Preachers. We know that around the time of Thomas’s ordination to the priesthood, in the mid 1240s, one of his brothers was executed for acting against the interests of the Emperor. It would be good to know more about the first two decades of Thomas’s life. What we do know already gives us a picture of a studious boy and young man, quiet rather than assertive, but with a clarity of mind about what he wanted to do and a strength of will to persevere in his purpose. Studying Aristotle As a teenager and young adult at Naples Thomas made two crucial decisions, to join the Dominicans and to study
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Aristotle in depth. Frederick II was a humanist ruler, interested in scholarship and in the promotion of learning. His kingdom of Sicily and Southern Italy bordered Christian kingdoms to the north and east and Muslim kingdoms to the south and west. Naples was already a place where Muslim science and philosophy could be studied as well as Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy. We know that one of Thomas’s teachers was a man called Peter of Ireland, some of whose writings, on Aristotle’s natural philosophy, survive to this day. In the European ‘Dark Ages’, Damascus, Baghdad and Cordoba were the great cities of culture and learning where Greek philosophy and science were preserved and developed. One of the most important intellectual events just before and during Thomas’s lifetime was the translation into Latin of many works by Arab scholars. Christian Europe was in contact with Muslim learning and thought through Spain where the kingdom of Andalusia had been a centre of culture and scholarship for many centuries. The second ‘front’ of the great movement of translation was in Sicily and Southern Italy from where scholars could work with original Greek manuscripts and translate them directly into Latin. At Naples and Paris, Thomas studied the writings not only of the great Christian thinkers, the ‘Fathers of the Church’, but also of great Muslim scholars such as Avicenna and of important Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides.
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Above all he studied the writings of Aristotle who became for him, simply, ‘the philosopher’. This work of translation and study was stimulated by the emergence in Western Europe of the universities. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, there had been schools of various kinds in which the liberal arts, philosophy and theology were studied. The monastic schools and the cathedral schools preserved much of the Latin learning of the ancient world, and added some very important new works. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most influential and Aelred of Rievaulx’s writings on friendship show how monastic culture combined pagan learning with Biblical teaching. The emergence and growth of the university provided a new context in which study was undertaken. From the beginning there were tensions and arguments between different sources of authority, not only between Church authorities and those of the universities, but within the university communities themselves. So we find tensions between secular clergy and the friars, between theologians who took different views about the use of pagan philosophy, and eventually between different faculties of the universities. Thomas was still a long way from such controversies when he made one of his most significant decisions while he was a student at Naples, vigorously to pursue the study of Aristotle.