St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)
(1225-1274)
By universal consent, Thomas Aquinas is the preeminent
spokesman of the Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation. He is
one of the great teachers of the medieval Catholic Church, honored with the
titles Doctor of the Church and Angelic Doctor.
At five he was given to the Benedictine monastery at Monte
Cassino in his parents’ hopes that he would choose that way of life and
eventually became abbot. In 1239 he was sent to Naples to complete his studies.
It was here that he was first attracted to Aristotle’s philosophy.
By 1243, Thomas abandoned his family’s plans for him and
joined the Dominicans, much to his mother’s dismay. On her order, Thomas was
captured by his brother and kept at home for over a year.
Once free, he went to Paris and then to Cologne, where he
finished his studies with Albert the Great. He held two professorships at
Paris, lived at the court of Pope Urban IV, directed the Dominican schools at
Rome and Viterbo, combated adversaries of the mendicants, as well as the
Averroists, and argued with some Franciscans about Aristotelianism.
His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church is his
writings. The unity, harmony and continuity of faith and reason, of revealed
and natural human knowledge, pervades his writings. One might expect Thomas, as
a man of the gospel, to be an ardent defender of revealed truth. But he was
broad enough, deep enough, to see the whole natural order as coming from God
the Creator, and to see reason as a divine gift to be highly cherished.
The Summa Theologiae, his last and, unfortunately,
uncompleted work, deals with the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped work on
it after celebrating Mass on December 6, 1273. When asked why he stopped
writing, he replied, “I cannot go on.... All that I have written seems to me
like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to
me.” He died March 7, 1274.
Comment:
We can look to Thomas Aquinas as a towering example of Catholicism in the sense
of broadness, universality and inclusiveness. We should be determined anew to
exercise the divine gift of reason in us, our power to know, learn and
understand. At the same time we should thank God for the gift of his
revelation, especially in Jesus Christ.
Quote:
“Hence we must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs
divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not
need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all
things, but only in some that surpasses his natural knowledge” (Summa
Theologiae, I-II, 109, 1).
source: http://www.americancatholic.org/
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