HIS LIFE AND WORK
A chance perusal of any of Augustine’s writings, even a page from his most abstract work, On the will convey the unmistakable impression: this was thought and written by a man of flesh and blood. But let someone take a similar glimpse into the tight structure of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, and he will be tempted to ask: Were these sentences really set down by a living man or did not rather the objective content formulate itself undisturbed—neither blurred nor warmed—by the breath of a living thinker? The vital products of Augustine’s thinking never allow us to forget their source in his personal life, from which they spring forth like the blossom from its root and stem. But the language of St. Thomas suggests its origin in a living mind as little as crystal suggests the essential liquid from which it is formed.
Yet only on a superficial interpretation would one infer from the untroubled and unhurried serenity of the work that the author himself lived in freedom from outer or inner disturbances. On the other hand, it is certainly clear that the Summa Theologica can only be the work of a heart fundamentally at peace. St. Thomas did not discover and map out his majestic outline of Christian teaching in the “silence of the cloister cell.” It was not in some idyllic sphere of retirement cut off from the happenings in the world that he lived out his life. Such presentations, as untrue to history as they are impermissibly simplified, not only color, or rather in many particulars the conventional portraits of Thomas; they frequently have an effect on biographical studies which make higher claims to accuracy.
The very fact that a work of such unperturbed objectivity and such deep, radiating peace could grow from a life which, far from being untroubled, consumed itself in strife, gives us an insight into the special quality of the man. His work, incidentally, shows immediate reflection and evidence of an outspokenly combative cast of mind, which, however, even in the heat of battle, was never divorced from the norms of truth and love and consequently never lost its fundamental peace. The writing On the Perfection of the Spiritual originating in his forty-fifth year, ends with the following words: “If anyone wishes to write against this, I will welcome it. For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction, according to the saying: ‘Iron is sharpened by iron.’ (Prov. 27:17). And between us and them may God judge, Who is blessed in eternity. Amen.”
Count Landulf of Aquino, Lord of Loretto and Belcastro, was one of the most loyal vassals of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II. During the years of the sharpest struggle between Emperor and Pope his youngest son Thomas was preparing himself for an office both remote and superior to the conflict—the priestly office of preaching the truth. He was studying at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino which at that time also served as an imperial castle, situated on the border between Hohenstaufen and papal territory. Under these circumstances, Thomas could hardly expect a secure life sheltered from external disturbances and dangers.
In the first months of the year 1239, when Frederick II was excommunicated, Monte Cassino came directly into the zone of battle. The garrison of the castle, half of which had to be supported by the abbey, was more than doubled. The fortifications were expanded by order of the Emperor himself, who had first entered his Sicilian kingdom twenty years previously at this very spot. In this same year, the monks had to leave their monastery. Among their company was the fifteen-year-old Thomas Aquinas.
This exodus led the boy to Naples—to the beginning of his particular destiny; it took him permanently out of seclusion and thrust him into the heated center of all the intellectual battles of that time. The University of Naples, founded in the year of Thomas’s birth, was the first “pure state university,”—not a “school for seminarians but a school for imperial Frederick II had designed it to work against the Church. Here, according to custom, Thomas studied the “liberal arts.” What is most important is that, under the tutelage of the Irishman, Peter of Hibernia, he became acquainted with the writings of Aristotle, which were at that time extremely suspect in the Church. “Aristotelian!” was an abusive epithet in the mouths of the orthodox, comparable to nihilist, freethinker, man of the “Enlightenment.” It was in Naples, too, that the flame of that urban “youth movement,” which was filling the ranks of the first generation of the mendicant orders, was first kindled in the heart of the young nobleman.
These two words, “Aristotle” and “mendicants,” indicate the two most important disputes which in the first half of the thirteenth century rocked Christendom with a passionate violence we can scarcely understand. Both Aristotle and the mendicant orders stood in the midst of a storm of approvals and rejections. At the time when Thomas came to Naples, hardly a decade and a half after the death of St. Francis of Assisi (1226), the two mendicant orders had not yet achieved any general recognition. On the contrary, all papal recognitions and privileges could not prevent the representatives of the established society—the temporal lords, the rising, urban middle class and the secular clergy—from calling these remarkable new “poor men” “demented” (which was partly understandable), and even “heretical” or “sons of the Anti-Christ.” This, of course, did not stem the upsurge of the young spiritual movement, nourished as it was by so many sources, among them the fundamental historical impulse of the times.
Above all it attracted, as if they were its rightful portion, young men of noble birth. We also know that both the Franciscan and the Dominican convents in Paris received many recruits from the student body. The records are similar for the University of Bologna, and quite probably the same was true of the University of Frederick II at Naples. For all these young men, events such as the following must have been like the illumination of sudden lightning and a charm to capture their hearts: In the year 1231, a professor at the University of Paris, Jean of St. Giles, was delivering a lecture on evangelical poverty in the Dominican Priory of St. Jacques. As he spoke, he was so carried away by his subject that he broke off his lecture and begged the Prior for the habit. Then, himself become a Dominican, he went on to finish his lecture. One could consider this report legendary, were it not a fact that in this very way the Dominicans acquired a chair, their second, at the University of Paris—a chair which Thomas Aquinas was to occupy twenty years later.
The power inherent in all these new things drew the young liberal arts student irresistibly into the discussions and forced him to a decision. At the age of twenty, Thomas entered the Order of St. Dominic which combines the ideal of poverty with that of study.
In more than one way this decision must have been a provocation to Frederick II, since Thomas was the son of one of his vassals. And it is probable that to Count Landulf of Aquino—whose brother was abbot of powerful Monte Cassino, and who doubtless preferred to think of his son rather as a successor to this almost princely office than as a mendicant friar—the whole mendicant order movement must have appeared as something positively inferior and disreputable, a judgment in which his whole family was likely to concur.
And though it would be absurd to seek in Thomas’s decision motives of politics, even ecclesiastical politics (the young man had already glimpsed the superiority of truth over worldly power), in the distorting mirror of minds dominated by power politics his entrance into a mendicant order might easily have been construed as a decision against the Emperor and for the Pope, as whose particular friends and tools the new communities of Franciscans and Dominicans were regarded. Accordingly, the haste with which the Friars Preachers sped Thomas out of the imperial district and away from his family is thoroughly understandable. They sent him forthwith on the way toward Paris.
But Thomas did not arrive so easily at the place of his future fame. On the way he was captured by his brothers and held prisoner. There are many indications that this was not done without the consent or even the assistance of the Emperor himself. In any case, Pope Innocent IV protested unsuccessfully to the Emperor against this act of violence. Thomas was imprisoned in his father’s castle of San Giovanni for over a year until, with the aid of his sister, he finally succeeded in making his escape.
He resumed immediately the interrupted journey to Paris. It is noteworthy that Thomas’s traveling companion, Johannes Teutonicus, then Master General of the order, and later his teacher, Albert the Great, were both Germans. Johannes Teutonicus was a Westphalian from the ecclesiastical district around Münster. In this same year 1245, when Thomas moved on to France, a General Council was being assembled at Lyons, which dethroned the Emperor and disinherited his line. While this threatening storm brewed in the West, Thomas arrived in Paris, a city so eminently the metropolis of theological studies that Scholastic research could claim that in the entire medieval era no Summa Theologica was written which does not relate to the university near Notre Dame Cathedral.
Thomas found the Friars Preachers of St. Jacques Priory in a precarious situation. They, as well as the Franciscans, could hardly show themselves in the streets without being insulted or attacked. The King of France, Saint Louis (later to become a friend of St. Thomas, who was some ten years his junior) had found it necessary to detail a royal guard to the convent to protect it against assault. In the whole order, special prayers were prescribed begging God to put an end to this evil, which was everywhere rampant, but particularly acute in Paris.
Thomas, then only a little over twenty, and because of his strength, his slow movements and his characteristic silence, dubbed by his fellow students “the dumb ox,” probably did not suffer unduly from these circumstances; though, of course, they do not convey the idyllic picture of a peaceful cloister cell.
An event of quite another sort must have claimed his entire attention: In the year of Thomas’s arrival, Albertus Magnus began to teach in Paris. The friendship that developed out of this encounter of master and pupil and the fruitfulness of their common work were to change the intellectual face of the West. A few years after their first meeting, in 1248, the year in which the foundation stone of Cologne Cathedral was laid, both Albert and Thomas were transferred to Cologne. Albert was instructed to establish there a college for the Friars Preachers. For Thomas, these years held the gift of fruitful silence and intellectual ripening. The halfway mark of his stay in Cologne coincided with the halfway mark of the century; for Thomas, it was already the halfway mark of his life.
The years in Cologne were ended by a letter from the Master General, Johannes Teutonicus, in which Thomas was summoned to prepare himself for a teaching assignment which led him back to Paris. Meanwhile, at the University of Paris, the old battle between the secular clergy and the mendicants had burst into new flame. It was now a battle between points of teaching as well as for teaching chairs. And it was a battle not always honorably waged. The headstrong defenders of the traditional forces, led by the pugnacious William of St. Amour, made use of very questionable weapons. Lies, calumny, falsification, and slander were by no means uncommon. But on the other hand it is also reported that the Dominican scholars terrorized the professors of the secular clergy and even the rector of the university with their pressure tactics. This was the whirlpool into which Thomas was returning.
A new personal contact awaited him, with the Franciscan Bonaventure. It is true that the old annals make scant mention of a friendship between these two saintly teachers of Christendom. Yet there is a compelling truth in the thought that these two great ones, above the feuds of their followers, were linked in friendship. Thomas and Bonaventure, who had entered their respective orders in the same year, found themselves at that time in the same trying situation. Both men, as mendicants, had been refused permission to begin an independent teaching course at the university. As the result of an explicit papal order, both were finally granted permission on the same day.
It seemed at first that, for Thomas, the permission alone would not be enough, for the University boycotted his inaugural lecture. And later on, during one of his lectures, an official of the philosophical faculty and a follower of William of St. Amour (who had meanwhile been banished), got up and loudly recited a poem lampooning the mendicants. Still, such happenings could not prevent Thomas from becoming one of the most beloved and celebrated teachers at the Paris university.
In these stormy early years of his first teaching assignment, Thomas composed his first work, On Essence and a work with the sharp clarity of a mountain panorama. The noisy and disgraceful tempest of strife and jealousy in which he had to work had not been able to cloud the mirror of a single sentence. The earliest, almost contemporary, biography of Thomas, which was written by William of Tocco, Prior at Benevento, mentions repeatedly his enormous power of concentration. While he was writing the Summa Contra it frequently seemed as if his senses were numbed. Once, while dictating at night, he did not notice that the candle he was holding had burned down and singed his fingers.
The Summa Contra which in spite of its title is anything but a polemical work, was written in Italy. After he had taught three years as full professor of theology at the University of Paris, Thomas was called to the papal court, often located in those days at Viterbo or Orvieto. From then until his death, Thomas never remained longer than two or three years in the same place or in the same office. He taught three years at the court of Urban IV. After that he went to Rome for two years, with the assignment to establish there a college for his order. At this time he conceived the outline and began working on the first part of the Summa his enormous main work, on which he labored for seven years, without finishing it entirely. After these two years in Rome, a new pope, Clement IV, called him once again to the papal court at Viterbo. The attempt, previously made, to appoint the mendicant friar Archbishop of Naples had been frustrated by his own resistance, even though he had been canonically In Viterbo, Thomas again stayed only two years. Those were the years in which the tragedy of the last of the Hohenstaufens, the boy Konradin, was consummated. At that time, Thomas wrote his treatise On the Governance of which contains, among other things, the magnificent chapter on the reward of kings.
That, in 1263, the former professor of the University of Paris should be called back for a second time to Paris at the direction of his order was against all custom in the thirteenth century. However, a man of his intellectual powers, and perhaps, too, a man of his unshakable calm, was evidently urgently needed at the university. Thomas, for the third time, took the road to Paris. (Here it may be noted that, as a mendicant friar, Thomas made all these journeys on foot—unless he had to take a ship to cross the waters—in much the same way as his teacher, Albert, who walked through nearly the whole of Europe during his long life, earning thereby his nickname “the Boot.”)
The returning teacher was awaited not by one opposing faction, but by three. The battle against the mendicants had ceased to center around teaching chairs; instead, the attacks were now directed against the theological and religious principles of the orders. The two additional factions, both aroused by the key word “Aristotle,” were so-called Augustinianism and Latin Averroism. We shall have occasion to treat of these two opposing theories and the conflicts they aroused.
It appears that Thomas belonged to that race of men whose imposing calm grows in proportion to the noise and tumult around them. “We never knew him to lose his composure,” remarked one of his confrères who had long lived in the same priory with him. At all events, the productivity of these years in Paris—once again it was only a three-year period—passes understanding. In this brief, embattled period Thomas wrote, in addition to short polemic pamphlets, voluminous commentaries on nearly all the major works of Aristotle and on all the epistles of St. Paul as well as the gospel of St. John. He produced the great Quaestiones Disputatae on the virtues, and, as a short summary of the whole of theology, the Compendium Finally, he wrote numerous treatises for the Summa In these works Thomas did not withdraw from the intellectual conflict. Rather, the works listed are for the most part contributions to it. And when, in 1272, his superiors recalled him from Paris (apparently on a sudden decision), their main intention was to cool the heat of that conflict. In any case, his successor in the teaching chair inclined more strongly toward the Augustinian, i.e., the traditional direction. It also deserves to be mentioned that among the students of St. Thomas at Paris was a Florentine Dominican, Remigio de’ Girolami, who in later years was to become the teacher of his fellow-citizen, Dante.
Thomas was once more commissioned to found a college for the order, this time at the place of his first decision: Naples. But in the year after, the Pope summoned him to a new General Council at Lyons. Toward the end of the winter 1273-74, Thomas set out on the long journey whose goal he did not reach. On the way, in the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova, he fell mortally ill and a short time later died, not quite fifty years old. Later in the same year, Bonaventure also died, at the very council to which both men had been called.
At the canonization process, the abbot of Fossanova testified under oath that the community had not celebrated the Mass of the Dead at the funeral of St. Thomas but, instead, the Mass Os in honor of a holy confessor, the Introit of which begins with the words: “The mouth of the just man shall meditate wisdom and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart.”