Journey to Cologne
Chapter Five
Journey to Cologne
“To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of actual sin.”
—Thomas Aquinas
The family had been put on notice that they should set Aquinas free, but even after one year of imprisonment, it was a tough pill for them to swallow. In order to save face and avoid the embarrassment that his internment engendered, they reportedly devised a plan to make it seem as if he had escaped from their clutches instead.
Like some scene right out of the Bible, Aquinas’s sisters lowered him down from his room in the tower by a basket, which was received by Aquinas’s fellow Dominican monks who were patiently waiting outside. Aquinas was 19 years of age when he reclaimed this freedom of body, spirit, and destiny.
Although his family had freed him from his constraints, they had not yet entirely ceased in their efforts to dissuade him from his course in life, as was evidenced when they personally requested for Pope Innocent to annul his profession. But the pope, who had previously criticized the family for confining the boy, was not about to suddenly chastise his desire to be a monk without further information about it. In 1244, the pope summoned Thomas Aquinas to the Vatican so that he could talk to the young man in person. It is said by later chroniclers that here Aquinas put up such a spirited defense of his decision to become a monk that no one could doubt that it was from God.
Nevertheless, the pope, feeling the need to assuage the notable family from which Aquinas hailed, attempted to convince Aquinas to sign on with the more respectable (by the standards of the time) Abbey of Monte Cassino rather than the austere and bleak environs of a Benedictine monastery. This would provide Aquinas the eventual role as abbot, giving him an important position of theological prestige along with the temporal esteem of having a substantial income for taking on the post. The pope figured that this would be much easier for Aquinas’s family to accept and live with than the idea of him becoming a poor beggar of a monk shut up in a monastery.
Still, even after the pope attempted to persuade him to concede to this one adjustment of his destiny, Aquinas remained steadfast and would not turn away from what he believed to be his true mission. Pope Innocent, realizing that Aquinas would not bend, acquiesced and named him as an official friar of Mary, which was another way of calling him a Dominican in the common parlance of the day.
Shortly after this confirmation was made, Thomas Aquinas made the acquaintance of John the Teuton, who was the master general of the Dominican Order at the time. John took Aquinas under his wing and sent him to Cologne so that he could be educated under the auspices of the theologian known as Albertus Magnus, or as he has later been referred in the annals of Catholic history, Saint Albert the Great. Albert was a leading religious scholar in his day and among the first to entertain the writings of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Even though the nation of Germany as we know it today did not exist yet, Cologne of Thomas Aquinas’s time had deep German roots all the same. With its thinly spaced avenues and shops on every corner, German industry and ingenuity seemed to be already busting at the seams. Although he was a new addition, it is said that it wasn’t long before Aquinas’s peers realized that he was a serious student of the faith. They also noticed that he was an incredibly quiet student as well. This served as a source of ridicule for his detractors that lambasted him as a sullen outsider and even coined a nickname which mocked his Italian heritage: “dumb Sicilian ox.”
Aquinas was indeed rather quiet when he first arrived in Cologne, and some chose to interpret his silence as stupidity by joking that he was a “mute ox,” but these crude remarks were soon proven entirely false. Soon Albert was having Aquinas publicly defend complex theological arguments in front of all of his fellow pupils, demonstrating just how vast his understanding and erudition was.
When Thomas Aquinas publicly broke his silence in this manner, even those who had initially met him with mockery and jeers had to agree—dumb ox he most certainly was not. This point was proudly proclaimed by Albert as well, who is said to have declared of Aquinas, “We have called him the dumb ox, but he will bellow so loud that the sound of his voice will be heard throughout the whole world.”