In 1277, three years after the death of Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274), Pope John XXI asked Stephen Tempier, the bishop of Paris, to investigate the dispute between philosophy and theology that had flourished during the thirteenth century, after the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works. The result was a set of 219 propositions that were held by the philosophers and that opposed the Christian faith, including, for example, that the world is eternal and that there is no freedom of choice. On March 7, 1277, the bishop condemned these propositions, which included some of Aquinas’ attempts to harmonize Aristotelianism and Christian faith. With this act of condemnation the great task of uniting faith and reason, theology and philosophy, reached a turning point. What Aquinas had tried to achieve, both philosophers and theologians began to reject in their different ways, and his grand synthesis, later to be canonized as official Catholic doctrine, came to generate diverse criticisms.
Aquinas was born at the castle of Roccasecca, near Naples, Italy, the youngest son of Landalfo, the count of Aquino. At the age of five, he began his education under the Benedictine monks at nearby Monte Cassino, where he remained until 1239. He then went to the University of Naples and soon became acquainted with a vigorous young group of Dominicans, students of philosophy and theology. By 1244 Aquinas had joined this local convent of Dominican friars, against his family’s wishes. When the Dominicans arranged for him to accompany them on a trip to Cologne, with the plan to send him on to study for a Dominican novitiate at the University of Paris, Aquinas’ brothers kidnapped him and held him prisoner at Aquino for a year.
In 1245 Aquinas escaped and made his way to Paris, where he remained until 1248. From 1248 to 1252 he was a member of a Dominican house of studies in Cologne and became the student of the famous German Dominican Aristotelian, Albert the Great. In 1252 Aquinas returned to Paris, where he taught until 1259. He then moved to Italy, where, until 1268, he taught in and around Rome. Once again, he returned to Paris and engaged in controversy with the Latin Averroists and followers of Siger of Brabant, who argued for a pure Aristotelianism, and, on the other side, with the followers of Saint Bonaventure, who sought to establish an ultra-Augustinian (or voluntaristic) Christianity and ban Aristotelianism altogether. In 1272 he was sent to Naples to establish a Dominican house of study. By this time, his health was not good; indeed, some conjecture that he had suffered a stroke. When he was called to Lyons by Pope Gregory X to participate in a council, he struck his head and died of complications on the way, on March 7, 1274, at a monastery between Naples and Rome.
Aquinas’ life was intellectually rich, filled with study, teaching, and writing. He left an enormous corpus of work. While teaching in Paris from 1252 to 1259, he wrote his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and his treatises On the Principles of Nature, On Being and Essence, and On Truth. The Summa Contra Gentiles, a work intended to help Dominican missionaries in Spain and North Africa, was completed while he was in Italy between 1259 and 1268, and the great Summa Theologica was written between 1265 and 1273. During his relatively brief lifetime, he also published a variety of other treatises and commentaries on no less than twelve Aristotelian treatises.
Aquinas was both a theologian and a philosopher. As a theologian, he wrote about God and the world based on rational inquiry and the evidence of faith. As a philosopher, he was an Aristotelian who employed the data of the senses, examined and understood in the light of first principles. He sought to understand God in terms of an inquiry into nature and then to return to understand nature with new thoughts based on his grasp of the divine. The twofold character of his thought, moreover, influenced his ethics; in his understanding of man, the soul, human will, appetite, and moral purpose, he used the teleological notions of capacities, potentialities, and purposes. For Aquinas, man’s ultimate goal is happiness, which he takes to be the joyful knowledge of God and a life which attempts to realize the nature which God has given to man. It is a goal that can be achieved in a variety of ways; his moral theory focuses on these ways. On the one hand, Aquinas is concerned with virtue and the cultivation of character, as these facilitate human happiness; on the other, he is concerned with law as it directs our conduct from the outside but toward the same goal.
In a way, this dichotomy between internal and external control is also reflected in Aquinas’ political theory. His family had imperial connections in southern Italy, and hence he grew up with monarchist sensibilities. But he cast his lot with the democratic-style practices of the Dominican order. The result, in Aquinas’ thought, is a commitment to a kind of mixed form of government, a constitutional monarchy. Such a society, he argued, is the most conducive to the best human life, and that means to the life of virtue. The best government is government by law for the common good, the community’s well-being. It governs a society that best enables people to achieve happiness, which is a society both political in character and religious in purpose. Moreover, the mixed constitution does this through law, which helps people to prevent evil and to seek the good. For Aquinas, then, the state arises out of religious and moral purposes, and morality emerges from human nature and its tendencies, the object of God’s beneficent purposes.
Aquinas’ life coincides with a period when Christian faith and Aristotelian philosophy confronted each other and achieved as comfortable a synthesis as they would ever attain. His remarkable collection of works exemplifies that synthesis in a uniquely powerful way. Within two decades Aquinas crystallized the deep mood of an epoch, but his success was short-lived. By 1277, with the Condemnation of Paris, the unity was shattered and the main lines of response already plotted; the nominalist and conciliarist responses of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were developed in the following generation in opposition to Aquinas’ synthesis. Aquinas was, in short, a monumental figure, whose life, works, and intellect blend together as a decisive turning point in medieval thought.
Recommended Readings
Burns, James (ed.). Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 350–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Copleston, Frederick. Aquinas. London: Penguin, 1955.
Finnis, John. Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. New York: Random House, 1956.
Kenny, Antony (ed.). Aquinas. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1976.
Kretzmann, Norman (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Maritain, J. Man and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Sigmund, Paul (ed.). St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.