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Thomas Aquinas (January 28th) is one of the two greatest and most influential theologians in the history of Western Christianity (with St. Augustine). He was born ca. 1225 into Italian nobility and received his higher education at the University of Naples. In 1244 he entered the new Dominican Order of Preachers. His family so strongly opposed this that his brothers kidnapped him and held him in a castle for a year. After a failed attempt to seduce him away from his vocation by sending in a woman to tempt him (!), the family relented and set him free.
He went to Paris and then to Cologne for further studies, being ordained a priest during that time. From 1252 until his death in 1274, Thomas was engaged in teaching and writing—in Paris, Naples, Rome, back to Paris, and finally back to Naples. It was while he was in Rome that he began to write his most famous work, me immense Summa Theologica (a "synthesis" of theology), which he continued to work on until 1273. On December 6, 1273, while celebrating mass, he fell into a trance as he received a vision and revelation. After this experience, Thomas refused to write any more, saying "All I have written seems to me like straw compared with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me." Only a few weeks later, while in route to attend a Church Council, Thomas seems to have suffered a stroke. Taken to a nearby monastery, he recovered enough to teach the brothers but he relapsed, dying on March 7, 1274.
The massive scale of Thomas' thought defies neat summary. It must suffice to say that Thomas won the challenge to show conclusively that faith and reason are not in conflict—they are simply distinct. After Thomas, the Church could assert confidently that reason could be a great tool for faith. . |
