Born into a Noble Family
Chapter One
Born into a Noble Family
“One will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are.”
—Thomas Aquinas
For someone who would later be known for his vows of poverty and simplistic, monkish existence, Thomas Aquinas had some not so humble beginnings. He was born in 1225, and his name stems from the place of his birth in the auspices of the castle of Roccasecca, Aquino, in the Kingdom of Sicily (present-day Italian region of Lazio).
His father was a nobleman by the name of Landulf, who served at the court of King Roger II as a knight. His mother, Theodora, hailed from Naples in southwestern Italy. On his father’s side of the family, there was a long tradition of military service, with the one exception being that of Thomas’s uncle Sinibald who served as an abbot at the first Benedictine monastery. It was the template established by his uncle Sinibald upon which Thomas would eventually mold his career. If legend is to be believed, Thomas’s life trajectory was aiming in this direction even before he was born. His mother Theodora allegedly had a holy hermit—a kind of religious, roving vagabond—prophecy over her unborn child, saying that one day he “would enter the Order of Friars.”
This was a career which began in earnest at the tender age of five when Thomas began his formal education at the monastery of Monte Cassino. Here, he first mastered the basics of his craft, and he would remain on at the school until he was 13 years of age. Not a whole lot is known about Thomas’s early years, but during his tenure at Monte Cassino, he was most remembered for his early budding philosophical thought, such as the time he boldly asked the question, “What is God?”
Aquinas’s stint at Monte Cassino came to an abrupt end, however, when the political situation in the region became quite untenable. By 1239, Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire was embroiled in a feud with the then-reigning pope, Gregory IX. In the past few years, Frederick had been on a campaign of expansion that included taking over additional parts of Italy—a conquest in which his troops were not at all hesitant to lay siege to monasteries and even hospitals in their mission to expand the Empire. Although the Vatican was supposed to be an ally of the Holy Roman Empire, these misadventures right in the pope’s backyard did not sit well with him at all.
In light of these circumstances, Frederick II was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for the third time in 1239. If the pope thought that excommunicating the most powerful leader in his vicinity would bring peace, however, he was gravely mistaken, and the conflict continued. Due to this instability, Thomas Aquinas was sent off to his mother’s hometown of Naples, where he would go to school at the studium generale , a university that had recently been established by Frederick II.
The coursework that Aquinas was immersed in at the university included all the classic works of the great philosophers, such as Maimonides, Averroes, and Aristotle, but most important to him during this time was the living breathing example of the Dominican monks that he encountered. Aquinas was inspired by the monks’ vows of poverty and that they eschewed the things of this world in order to exert all of their energy toward getting closer to God.
Some turned their noses at these poverty-stricken monks, likening them to nothing more than intellectual beggars. But in them, Aquinas thought he saw kindred spirits. He longed to don their cassock and join them in their pursuit of higher knowledge. Gazing at these wizened old spiritual scholars, he felt that he had found his true calling in life, but he would soon also find no small amount of disapproval and bitter resentment from his family.