St. Thomas Aquinas

A scholastic theologian and philosopher, Tomaso d’Aquino was born in Rossaseca, the Kingdom of Naples in 1224. His father was the count of Aquino, from which he gets his family name. St. Thomas is considered one of the premier theologians of his day, and has had incalculable influence on all of subsequent Catholic thought. It was during his early studies with the Benedictines in Naples that he became acquainted with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings in the West. In 1245 Thomas joined the Dominicans and studied in Paris. He headed for Cologne, Germany in 1248, where he came under the influence of Albert the Great, also a disciple of Aristotle. Aristotle’s influence penetrates three of Thomas’s major works, the Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum (his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard), the Summa Contra Gentiles (his apology against Islamic thought), and the Summa Theologica (also referred to as the Summa Theologiae, or the Summa for short), begun in 1266, but never completed. After a mystical experience St. Thomas stopped writing the Summa in 1272, two years before his death in 1274.

In his masterwork, the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas represents the pinnacle of scholasticism, the philosophical and theological school that flourished between 1100 and 1500, and attempted to reconcile faith with reason and the works of Aristotle with the scriptures. Throughout all his writings, two of his major concerns are to oppose skepticism through his affirmation of the necessary connection between knowledge and sensible experience, and the tendency to read Christianity in Neoplatonic terms. His thought is characterized by the synthesis of the truths discovered by reason and those revealed by God. It is through the thought and work of St. Thomas that Natural Law moral theory, as understood in the Catholic moral tradition, developed.

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