The story of their life
Thomas was born around 1224 or 1225 at the castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino, in the Kingdom of Sicily. He belonged to a noble family connected with the regional political and military world of southern Italy.
As a young child, Thomas was sent to the nearby Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino for his first education. His family may have imagined that he would eventually obtain a prestigious ecclesiastical position connected with the abbey.
Political conflict later disrupted life at Monte Cassino, and Thomas continued his education at the University of Naples. The university had been founded by Emperor Frederick II and provided unusually direct access to works of Aristotle and to philosophical traditions transmitted through Muslim and Jewish scholars.
The intellectual world Thomas encountered at Naples was undergoing major change. Texts of Aristotle dealing with nature, metaphysics, ethics, the soul and knowledge were becoming increasingly available in Latin. Their arrival raised urgent questions about whether this philosophical account of reality could be reconciled with Christian revelation.
While in Naples, Thomas encountered the Order of Preachers, the relatively new religious community founded by St Dominic. The friars combined common prayer, voluntary poverty, serious study and itinerant preaching.
Thomas was drawn to this way of life and entered the Order of Preachers around 1244. His decision strongly opposed his family’s expectations. The Dominicans attempted to send him away from Naples, but members of his family intercepted him and kept him under supervision in their own residences for an extended period.
The purpose of this confinement was to persuade Thomas to abandon the mendicant order and accept a more socially prestigious path. He remained committed to his Dominican vocation. When the family’s opposition eventually eased, he returned to the friars.
In 1245, Thomas was sent to Paris, the leading centre of theological education in Western Europe. There he studied under the Dominican scholar St Albert the Great. Albert recognised Thomas’s exceptional intellectual ability and developed a lasting relationship with him.
Thomas followed Albert to Cologne when Albert was asked to establish a Dominican centre of study there. Under his guidance, Thomas studied Scripture, theology, Aristotle and the natural sciences.
Thomas was quiet, physically large and less outwardly impressive than some students. Later Dominican tradition remembers classmates underestimating him, while Albert recognised that his thought would eventually be heard throughout the world. The exact wording of these stories comes from later biographical tradition, but they express the contrast between Thomas’s modest manner and extraordinary ability.
After completing his formation and receiving priestly ordination, Thomas returned to Paris. He lectured on Scripture and on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the standard theological textbook of the period.
In 1256, Thomas was admitted as a master of theology at Paris. The path was complicated by conflict between university masters and the mendicant orders. Some secular professors objected to Dominicans and Franciscans holding university chairs, questioning their poverty, organisation and place within academic life.
Thomas defended the legitimacy of religious orders dedicated to study and preaching. For him, contemplation was not intended to remain private. The Dominican vocation involved receiving truth through prayer and study and then sharing its fruits with others.
His teaching always began with Scripture. A medieval master of theology was first a teacher of the sacred page, not merely an abstract philosopher. Thomas wrote commentaries on biblical books and constantly drew theological arguments from the Bible, the Church Fathers and the liturgical life of the Church.
At the same time, Thomas engaged deeply with philosophy. He believed that truth could not ultimately contradict truth. Genuine discoveries reached through human reason could therefore assist theology, even when they came from thinkers outside Christianity.
His treatment of Aristotle was neither uncritical acceptance nor fearful rejection. Thomas distinguished ideas that could be received, those requiring correction and those incompatible with Christian teaching. Through this work he developed a powerful account of the harmony between faith and reason.
Thomas also engaged with Muslim and Jewish philosophical traditions, including thinkers such as Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides. He disagreed with them on important questions but treated their arguments as intellectually serious rather than dismissing them merely because they came from outside Christianity.
In 1259, Thomas participated in the Dominican General Chapter at Valenciennes and helped establish a programme of studies for the Order. He then spent several years teaching and writing in Italy.
From 1261 to 1265, Thomas lived principally at Orvieto, where Pope Urban IV frequently resided. Urban asked him to compose liturgical texts for the newly established Feast of Corpus Christi.
Thomas’s Eucharistic poetry joined theological precision with prayer. Texts traditionally associated with this commission include portions of the hymns Pange Lingua, Sacris Solemniis, Verbum Supernum and the sequence Lauda Sion. Their verses continue to shape Catholic worship, especially during Eucharistic adoration and Benediction.
From 1265 to 1268, Thomas worked in Rome and directed a Dominican house of studies. During this period he began the Summa Theologiae, his most famous work.
The Summa was written principally as an organised introduction for students of theology rather than as an attempt to answer every possible religious question. It begins with God, creation and the human person; examines human action, virtue, grace and moral life; and then turns towards Christ, the sacraments and humanity’s return to God.
Thomas structures many questions by presenting objections, introducing an authoritative consideration, giving his own response and then answering the objections individually. This method allows opposing arguments to be heard clearly before they are answered.
His approach should not be reduced to cold logic. Thomas understood theology as wisdom ordered towards union with God. Reason clarifies, distinguishes and defends, but the final purpose of theology is contemplation and love.
Thomas returned to Paris in 1269 during intense controversy concerning Aristotle, the mendicant orders and the relationship between philosophy and theology. He debated other masters and wrote works addressing the unity of the human intellect, the eternity of the world and the nature of religious life.
He did not believe philosophy and theology were identical. Some truths, such as aspects of the existence of God and the moral order, can be approached through natural reason. Mysteries such as the Trinity and the Incarnation depend upon divine revelation. Faith raises reason beyond what it could discover alone without destroying reason’s proper integrity.
In 1272, Thomas returned to Naples to establish a Dominican centre of theological study. He continued teaching, preaching and writing the Summa.
His productivity was extraordinary. His surviving works include biblical commentaries, philosophical commentaries, disputed questions, university lectures, sermons, short theological works, the Summa contra Gentiles and the unfinished Summa Theologiae.
Thomas relied upon secretaries because he dictated much of his work, sometimes working on several texts during the same period. His close collaboration with friars such as Reginald of Piperno also reveals that his intellectual life was sustained by friendship and community rather than solitary brilliance alone.
His prayer was inseparable from his study. Early biographies describe him bringing difficult questions before the altar or crucifix and returning to his work only after prayer.
One traditional account relates that while Thomas prayed before a crucifix in Naples, Christ affirmed what he had written and asked what reward he desired. Thomas answered that he wanted nothing except Christ himself. Although preserved through early hagiographical witnesses rather than Thomas’s own writing, the account expresses the Christ-centred purpose of his theology.
Thomas had a particularly deep devotion to the Eucharist. He celebrated Mass with great reverence and understood the Eucharist as the sacramental presence of Christ’s sacrifice, the nourishment of the Church and a foretaste of eternal communion with God.
In December 1273, after an intense spiritual experience while celebrating Mass, Thomas stopped his major writing projects. When Reginald urged him to continue, early witnesses report that Thomas said his writings appeared like straw compared with what had been revealed to him.
This statement did not mean that he rejected theology or considered his works useless. It expressed the distance between even the finest human language about God and the reality of God encountered in contemplation.
Early in 1274, Pope Gregory X called Thomas to participate in the Second Council of Lyon. Although already physically unwell, he began the journey north.
During the journey, Thomas’s condition worsened. He was received by the Cistercian monks of Fossanova Abbey, where he spent his final days.
Thomas died at Fossanova on 7 March 1274 after receiving the sacraments. He was approximately forty-nine years old.
His death did not immediately end controversy over his thought. In 1277, authorities in Paris and Oxford condemned collections of philosophical and theological propositions, some of which were associated directly or indirectly with positions Thomas had defended. His teaching nevertheless continued to gain influence, particularly within the Dominican Order.
Pope John XXII canonised Thomas at Avignon on 18 July 1323. His remains were translated to the Dominican church in Toulouse on 28 January 1369.
Pope St Pius V declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1567. He became known as the Angelic Doctor because of the theological depth and spiritual purity associated with his work, and as the Common Doctor because of his broad authority within Catholic theology.
In 1880, Pope Leo XIII formally proclaimed Thomas patron of Catholic universities, academies, colleges and schools. His approach has repeatedly been recommended by the Church, not because every later theological problem can be solved by repeating medieval formulas, but because he provides a model of intellectual honesty, confidence in truth and disciplined dialogue between faith and reason.
Thomas’s legacy extends into theology, philosophy, ethics, law, political thought, sacramental teaching, metaphysics, education and Christian spirituality. His writings continue to be debated, translated and developed across different philosophical schools.
His lasting importance cannot be separated from his holiness. Thomas did not study merely to become impressive or win arguments. He sought truth as a path towards God and treated teaching as a work of charity: first contemplating truth and then sharing its fruits with others.
