Aquinas, Thomas (c. 1225–74)

THOMAS AQUINAS was an Italian Dominican theologian and the foremost medieval Scholasticist, usually credited for the integration of the recently discovered philosophy of Aristotle into Christian thought. As a Dominican friar, St. Thomas was part of the mendicant orders, which required their members to live in extreme poverty and beg alms. By choosing the newly established Dominican order, Aquinas renounced his feudal background and the traditional spirituality that his parents hoped he would follow.

Born at Roccasecca in the Kingdom of Naples, Aquinas's family owned a feudal domain in a territory torn by constant battles between the emperor and the pope. Young Thomas was first sent to study at the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, but later transferred to the University of Naples when the abbey became a disputed site in the medieval struggles between empire and papacy.

In Naples, Aquinas came into contact with the Dominican order and dashed his family's hopes for his future as a Benedictine abbot. Aquinas appreciated the more active attitude toward life of the new order, where preaching and teaching were more relevant than contemplative prayers and manual labor. When he was sent to Paris to pursue his studies, Aquinas was kidnapped by his family and was kept prisoner for more than a year. Yet his obstinate resistance convinced his parents to allow Aquinas to continue his life and career as a Dominican.

In 1245, Thomas arrived in Paris where he studied under the renowned scholar Albertus Magnus. After four years spent in Cologne with Albertus, he returned to Paris, where he first obtained his degree and then the license to teach. In 1259, he was appointed theological advisor and lecturer to the Roman Curia, a prestigious and influential position that put Thomas at the center of humanism.

In Thomas Aquinas's thought and writings, poverty is not an end in itself but a means to reach God.

In his later years, Thomas was sent to Naples where he was given the task to establish a Dominican house of studies at the local university. He died in 1274 at the monastery of Fossanova while en route to the Council of Lyons where the pope had summoned him in an attempt to prevent the schism of the Roman and Byzantine church.

Although Thomas's work was shaped by the encounter with academic life in Paris and the discovery of Aristotle, St. Francis of Assisi and the centrality of personal [Page 47]and corporate poverty in the Dominican order were also important influences in his thought. Aquinas's intellectual accomplishment was to stimulate a renewal at both a personal and a larger, institutional level of Catholic life. At a time when the discovery of Aristotelian philosophy and its emphasis upon reason was putting Catholic faith in danger, Aquinas was able to reconcile both reason and revelation in his major work, Summa Theologica, on which he worked until his death. Both in the Summa and in the earlier Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, Saint Thomas defined poverty as a means to perfection, an “instrumentum perfectionis.”

He was involved in the controversy over mendicant orders against William of Saint-Amour who, in the 1250s, had argued that the ministry of the religious who pretended to dedicate themselves to study and teaching, but who lived not from their work but from mendicancy, was not legitimate. While Aquinas conceded that religious orders could belong to professional bodies, he also forcefully asserted that mendicant orders were forbidden manual labor and thus advocated for them the right to absolute poverty.

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