Thomas Aquinas

A friar of the Order of Preachers

Thomas was born about 1225 at Roccasecca, near Aquino, between Rome and Naples, the son of a noble family. As a boy he was placed in the abbey of Monte Cassino, and in 1244, while a student at Naples, he joined the Dominicans, the new Order of Preachers, founded to preach and to teach. His family, as the story is told, held him at home for about a year to change his mind; he did not change it. He studied under Albert the Great, became a master of theology at Paris in 1256, and taught for the rest of his life in Paris and in Italy.

A medieval master's first textbook was the Bible, and Thomas lectured on books of both Testaments. In the 1260s, at the request of Pope Urban IV, he worked through the four Gospels verse by verse, linking the comments of Greek and Latin Fathers into a single chain. Later readers called it the Catena Aurea, the ‘golden chain’, and it is the Catena this app reads (see How the Fathers read Scripture). The greatest of the schoolmen was first a deep reader of the Fathers' Bible.

In December 1273, after something he experienced while saying Mass in Naples, Thomas stopped writing. He is reported to have told his companion that all he had written seemed to him like straw; what he had seen, he did not say. The following March, on his way to the Council of Lyon, he died at the abbey of Fossanova, not yet fifty.

The Summa and its method

Thomas began the Summa Theologiae about 1265 in Rome and never finished it Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. His prologue says it was written for beginners. The first part treats God and creation; the second, the human journey back to God, with the virtues, law and grace; the third, Christ, who as man is our way to God, and the sacraments. It breaks off in the middle of the sacrament of penance.

The Summa is built of articles, each in the same order. Thomas states a question, ‘Whether…’, and then gives the objections: the best arguments he can find for the answer he will reject. Then comes ‘On the contrary’, usually a word of Scripture or a Father; then ‘I answer that’, his own reply; and last, an answer to each objection. In the article ‘Whether God exists’ the first objection is the problem of evil: if an infinitely good God existed, there would be no evil, and there is evil. Thomas hears the strongest case against his view before giving his own, and answers with Augustine that God is so good and so powerful that he would not allow evil unless he could bring good even out of evil Augustine, Enchiridion 11.

Grace perfects nature

The question that ran through Thomas's life was how faith and reason belong together. His answer is a sentence from the first question of the Summa: grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. Reason is God's creation, not grace's enemy; grace heals it and raises it to an end beyond its reach.

So Thomas distinguished two kinds of truth. Some truths about God reason can reach: that he exists, and that he is one. For these he offered his ‘five ways’, arguments that begin from motion, from causes, from things that may or may not exist, from degrees of goodness and truth, and from the order of the world, and lead to God. Other truths, such as the Trinity and the incarnation, reason could never find; God must reveal them. Even the truths reason can reach, Thomas added, had to be revealed, or only a few would have known them, after a long time and mixed with many errors.

For the way of reason he leaned on Paul:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

At the Areopagus in Athens Paul began from an altar to an unknown god, proclaimed the God who made the world, and quoted the Greeks' own poets (Acts 17:22-28). Thomas pointed to that scene: where philosophers knew the truth by natural reason, theology may use their words. In the Catena he compiled, Theophylact, a Byzantine archbishop of about 1100, says of the true light in John 1:9, "The intellect which is given in us for our direction, and which is called natural reason, is said here to be a light given us by God. But some by the ill use of their reason have darkened themselves" Theophylact.

Thomas read deeply in Aristotle, whose works had been newly translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and called him simply ‘the Philosopher’. But Aristotle was his tool, not his master: where Aristotle clashed with the faith, as in teaching that the world had no beginning, Thomas did not follow him. Many in his day thought it dangerous to bring a pagan philosopher so far into theology.

His teaching on law springs from the same conviction. Natural law is the rational creature's share in God's eternal law, and its first precept is that good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided. Paul says that Gentiles without the law "show that the work of the law is written on their hearts" (Romans 2:15). Wesley, on the verse before, agrees: "The ten commandments being only the substance of the law of nature" Wesley. Yet he adds that even this, strictly speaking, comes by ‘preventing grace’, the grace that goes before.

The Common Doctor, weighed fairly

Thomas defined a sacrament as the sign of a holy thing insofar as it makes people holy, and taught that the sacraments of the new covenant really cause grace, as instruments in Christ's hands. With Peter Lombard he counted seven. Of the Lord's Supper he explained, in Aristotle's terms, that while the appearances of bread and wine remain, their substance becomes the body and blood of Christ: transubstantiation, which the Council of Trent later confirmed Council of Trent, Decree on the Eucharist. How the traditions understand the sacraments is taught in the doctrine course's lesson Baptism and the Lord's Supper.

The Catholic Church honours Thomas as a saint and a Doctor of the Church, the ‘Common Doctor’ whose teaching belongs to the whole church, and in 1879 Pope Leo XIII urged that his philosophy be central to Catholic education. Protestant judgements have been mixed. Luther attacked the scholastic theology that had let Aristotle into the house of theology. Yet Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Girolamo Zanchi, read Thomas gladly and used his distinctions when they taught God's attributes, providence and natural law. His five ways are still weighed by those who ask Does God exist?, and his confidence that faith and reason are not enemies speaks to Do science and faith conflict?

There are real differences too. The first is merit. Thomas taught that no one can merit the first grace, but that works done in grace, moved by the Holy Spirit, merit eternal life. Protestants hold that eternal life is God's free gift in Christ (Romans 6:23), and good works its fruit, not its price. The second is fallen reason. Thomas held that sin wounded human nature; the Reformers weighed more heavily Paul's warning that people suppress the truth by their wickedness (Romans 1:18). Calvin said that as dim eyes need spectacles, so we need Scripture to see God rightly Calvin, Institutes 1.6, and Matthew Henry, surveying the idolatry of the ancient world, writes that "whatever may be pretended, as to the sufficiency of man's reason to discover Divine truth and moral obligation, or to govern the practice aright, facts cannot be denied" Matthew Henry. The third is the sacraments: most Protestants count two, baptism and the Lord's Supper, instituted by Christ, and teach that their grace comes with the word of promise received by faith.

If Thomas's words about straw are reported rightly, they were not a rejection of his theology but the silence of a man before the One all his thinking pointed to. Paul writes, "Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). For Thomas, the end of theology was to see God.

Practice