St. Thomas Aquinas

A Dominican Vocation Despite His Family

St. Thomas Aquinas was born around 1225 at the family castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino in southern Italy, to a noble family with high ambitions for him. Placed as a child oblate at the great Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, he later studied at the University of Naples, where he encountered both the newly recovered works of Aristotle and the young Order of Preachers. His decision to join the mendicant Dominicans around 1244 so scandalized his family that his brothers detained him for many months — a captivity he used to memorize Scripture and study, and which failed entirely to change his mind.

Studies Under Albert and the Summa

Released at last, he studied under St. Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne. Quiet and physically imposing, he was nicknamed 'the dumb ox' by classmates, prompting Albert's famous prophecy that the ox's bellowing would one day fill the world. Thomas went on to teach theology in Paris and in Italy, producing in barely two decades an astonishing body of work: biblical commentaries, disputed questions, the Summa contra Gentiles, and his unfinished masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae, a synthesis of faith and reason that remains a foundation of Catholic theology.

Corpus Christi Hymns and Final Silence

His learning was inseparable from prayer. At the request of the pope he composed the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi, giving the Church Eucharistic hymns — Pange Lingua, Tantum Ergo, and others — still sung today. In December 1273, after a profound experience during Mass, he stopped writing altogether, saying that compared with what he had seen, all he had written seemed 'like straw.'

Death at Fossanova and the Angelic Doctor

Summoned to the Second Council of Lyon, he fell ill on the journey and died on March 7, 1274, at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova. He was canonized in 1323 by Pope John XXII and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567 by Pope St. Pius V; he is known as the Angelic Doctor and the Common Doctor. His relics rest in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, the city where the Dominican Order was born. His feast is January 28, and he is the patron of students, universities, and theologians.

Significance

Thomas showed that the human mind, rightly used, can lead toward God, and his great synthesis of faith and reason still guides the Church's theology. His learning flowed from prayer, as the Eucharistic hymns still sung today reveal, and in the end he humbly judged all his writing as small beside what God had shown him. Students, universities, and theologians find in him a patron who teaches that the search for truth and the love of God belong together.