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January 28
St. Thomas
Aquinas
(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).
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