Part Five Naples (1272–4)
PART FIVE
NAPLES (1272—4)
After a stormy three years in Paris, Thomas returned to Naples to take up the post of regent master in the Dominican convent there and to create a studium generale, in effect, a Dominican university. He continued commenting on Aristotle and completed his exposition of the epistles of St Paul, he commented on the psalms, getting halfway through the 150, and of course he continued work on the Summa theologiae, turning now to Part 3. It was in this period that he commented on the Book of Causes, a work of Arabic origin that was based on the work of the Neoplatonist Proclus. Thomas was clearly at the peak of his powers. He was forty-seven years old. And yet he was in the twilight of his life.
Josef Pieper, in The Silence of St Thomas, meditates on the event that suddenly altered Thomas’s life. A mystical experience of great intensity left him with the conviction that everything he had written was no better than straw. And he stopped writing. The last year of his life was spent in literary silence. The great Summa theologiae was to remain unfinished.
The canonization process gives us a vivid portrait of Thomas, one we would not otherwise have. There was an inquiry at Naples at which many Dominicans who had known him as a confrère at different stages of his life testified. There emerges a portrait of a man whose great intelligence and intellectual labours were the complement of his spiritual life. We learn of miraculous happenings, of the amount of prayer that formed part of his study and writing. Should we be surprised that a theologian who spent his life meditating on the Christian message exhibited it in his life? But it is the depth of his holiness that strikes us as we read these witnesses. Doubtless they were partisan, of course they wanted a member of their order recognized for his holiness, but only a cynic would think this vitiates their testimony. The Thomas who emerges from these accounts is an engaging personality. His charge against Averroes’s reading of Aristotle on mind was that the Commentator could not give a meaningful account of the statement, ‘This man thinks.’ The recollections of his friends acquaint us with the very singular man behind the thinking and writing.
Thomas was asked to attend a Council at Lyons and set off to comply with the request. He did not get far. He fell ill on the way, sought refuge with a sister but then was transferred to the Cistercian abbey at Fossanova. The abbey is still there. One can visit the room in which Thomas died. The distance from Roccasecca where he was born to Fossanova is perhaps fifty kilometres. The journey from beginning to end seems short. But something began on 7 March 1274 that continues to this day. The measured tones of Thomas continue to form part of the great philosophical conversation as friend and foe alike turn to his writings for clarity, precision and a relevance that transcends the thirteenth century.