Chapter Two
Chapter Two
St. Thomas’s Life
Emerson has observed that “great geniuses have the shortest biographies.”2 This is particularly true of the great thinkers. It is much easier to recount facts than thoughts, and a thinker must be understood before he can be described.
When, however, the thought has been really lived, and an effective philosophy has resulted, why not look to it for supplementary data?
St. Thomas belonged to a noble family, related through his father, Landulf, to Frederick Barbarossa, and through his mother, Theodora of Teano, to the Norman barons. Landulf was a rugged man, and somewhat violent, as was to be expected in that age of wars. The countess Theodora was an energetic, ambitious woman with a will of her own. St. Thomas’s elder brothers, Landulf and Raynald, were both in Frederick II’s army.
St. Thomas, the youngest son, was born about 1225, probably at the beginning of that year. He was born in the family castle of Roccaseca near Naples. Caustic opponents were ready to point out the symbolic meaning of this. The Summa Theologica was a rock as “dry” as that of the Counts of Aquin. However . . .
The famous abbey of Monte Casino was not far from the castle, and it was there that St. Thomas, at the age of five or six, was sent to study, under his uncle Abbot Sinibald. He was a fine-looking boy; mothers would watch him as he passed their doors, and he was loved by the poor, whom he assisted with whatever he could get from his home. When the servants complained of this, his delighted mother would tell them to let him continue his almsgiving. It is told of him that one day, when he was quite a baby and was about to be bathed, his nurse tried to take from his hand a piece of parchment that he would not surrender. On it was found the Ave Maria.
It is not absolutely certain, but highly probable that when he went to Monte Casino, he went, not as a noble pupil, but as a little monk, an oblate, and that he wore the Benedictine habit. His parents hoped that one day he would take over the vast revenues of the abbey and would use his influence on behalf of his own household. Religion and worldly interest were very much confused in those days. The abbey controlled seven bishoprics, supported armies, and was strongly fortified. In 1229, it had been besieged and taken by Frederick II in person, aided by the Count of Aquin, and when peace was restored, the sending of St. Thomas there was doubtless a kind of pledge, like a marriage made to ratify an alliance.
St. Thomas showed a marked taste for study and quiet, and a surprising lack of interest in noise and games. He was ever anxiously inquiring, “What is God?” and his whole life was to be an attempt to answer that question. The abbey, with its culture and learning, had a broadening influence on his mind; he learned to appreciate the beauty of the liturgy and of knowledge and took a larger and grander view of the world about him.
New conflicts between the Pope and the emperor caused the monks to be dispersed, and St. Thomas returned home. The abbot had discovered his extraordinary bent for study, and, doubtless desirous of gaining an illustrious subject later on, advised that he should be sent to the University of Naples to do what we should now call his humanities. He was then about fourteen years old. Little is known about his life there beyond the fact that he soon won fame for his learning and was far ahead of his class.
In 1244, at the age of about nineteen, his life took a different turn. For some twenty years, a learned, active order had been meeting with remarkable success. The Friars Preachers were university men, and they recruited most of their members from among the university professors and students. They devoted their lives to study, preaching, and learning. In Paris, in a single term, seventy-two students and professors had joined their ranks. It was like the astonishing growth of the early Church over again, and naturally proved a great attraction to a young man like St. Thomas.
The “modern” order had a monastic life as flourishing as that of Monte Casino, and a much more vigorous intellectual life. St. Thomas had nothing to lose and much to gain by joining it. He changed the black habit for the black and white: he relinquished the purely contemplative life for one that implied an equal sacrifice and a greater service. For the motto of the new order was Contemplata aliis tradere,3 which has an especial appeal to one seeking perfection.
Nor did he consider this move as showing any lack of filial piety; he was free. He was not tied to the Benedictine Order by the provisional vow of his parents, and he was not interested in his family’s ambitions. Young men, and especially young men of his caliber, are too generous to be influenced by such considerations. His father had died the year before, 1243, so that there was no fear of opposition from the head of the family, but he had still to face his mother and his two brothers.
As a matter of fact, he had only just received the habit from Thomas d’Agni, the Prior of San Domenico Maggiore, when the countess Theodora arrived to reclaim her son. She was told that he had left for Rome. She hurried thither, only to find that he had set out for Paris, where he had been sent by his superiors to complete his studies. Exasperated and determined to show that she was mistress of her own family, she sent to her sons in Frederick’s army to use every means to cut off St. Thomas’s escape.
Meanwhile, in company with the Master-General, John the Teutonic, and three other friars, St. Thomas was making for Bologna. They had stopped to rest by a fountain when the saint’s brothers suddenly appeared. Without waiting to argue, they tried to tear his habit from him, but he resisted them. Being loath to do him violence, they forced him onto a horse and led him off to imprison him in the castle of St. John, not far from Roccaseca.
Here he was confined and allowed neither to go out nor to see any other Dominican. They tried to subdue him by hardships, but that simply enabled him to practice strictly the rule of his order, from which they were trying to win him, while he made the solitude his novitiate and went on with his studies unperturbed. His fellow-religious found some means of communicating with him and sent him books: the Bible, the Sophisms of Aristotle, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard.
His sisters, Theodora and Marietta, were ordered to use their persuasion with him. He received them kindly, but their visits had just the opposite effect. One sister became a Benedictine nun, and abbess of the convent at Capua, so well did she learn that the greatest manifestation of sisterly affection was to help her brother to desert her.
Then they tried another kind of persecution. His brothers, home from the army, tried a method more in keeping with their own way of life. They brought a friend of theirs from Naples, a beautiful woman, and let her into the tower.
The present Pope once made the striking remark, that “if St. Thomas’s purity had failed at this critical moment, it was very likely that the Church would never have had an Angelic Doctor,”4 which goes to show how great is our responsibility when such a boon to the whole Church can depend on a private struggle.
St. Thomas did not succumb. Without a word, he drove the woman from the room with a brand, and burned a cross on the wall as a sign of his victory. The following night, his biographers relate, while he slept, he was visited by two angels who girded him with a cord of fire, and he awoke with a cry. That was the end of all temptation against purity. His confessor and friend, Reginald, was able to state to William of Tocco, one of the witnesses for his canonization, that his general confession on his deathbed was, in this matter, like the confession of a child of five.
After that, he seems to have been less carefully guarded. With the connivance of his sisters, and possibly even of his mother, certainly with the help of the monks, he contrived to escape and was let down from his tower “by means of a rope.” Later, the legend grew that he was let down in a basket like St. Paul. His family offered no further opposition, and seemed even to consent, “overcome by his constancy.” The confinement had lasted a year and some months.
Nothing had been lost by this delay; he was only the more confirmed in his vocation, which he now pursued from the point at which it had been interrupted. He set out for Paris with John the Teutonic, to study under Albert the Great, the most learned man of his times, and the one who, as we have seen, prepared the materials for that synthesis of doctrine which was to be St. Thomas’s life-work. The workman was sent to him; he fashioned him, foretold his future greatness, and might have said with St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”5 But they remained associated in the work, and their names are inseparable.
Fortunate it was that such a genius should receive his formation by six years of intimate association with a master like Albert the Great. He was an intrepid worker, a first-class intelligence, generous, a brother-religious, and a father — a splendid influence for the young, ardent, omnivorous mind of St. Thomas.
St. Thomas appeared so quiet that at Cologne he was nicknamed the great “dumb ox,” but he was living a life of intense activity. He was twenty years old and fully grown. In spite of his broad shoulders, he was delicate and extremely sensitive. “The least bodily ill upset him.” Delicacy of body is, according to Aristotle, a sign of an acute intelligence. At present, his charm was his youth, with his generous, simple personality, as pure and limpid as a diamond.
St. Thomas’s arrival at Paris in 1245 coincided with the fair reign of St. Louis; it was then that the Sainte-Chapelle was built. The University of Paris was in its heyday; it was the home of study, although a somewhat riotous one, and the entire intellectual world met there. Paris was, in the words of Albert the Great, “the city of Philosophers.” But St. Thomas did not stay here long. The Dominican Studium of Saint-Jacques was soon overcrowded, and the order had just opened a Studium Generale at Cologne, where Albert was sent as Regent of Studies. St. Thomas went with him. It was a matter of obedience, although it is hardly likely that he found it a wrench to leave Paris, as he was indifferent to his surroundings, his home being in the domain of knowledge.
At Cologne he devoted his time more and more to learning and solitude. He led the hidden life. We might apply to him what Carlyle says of Cromwell before he began his campaigns: “He had lived silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days.”6
His silence led his companions to imagine that he had a touch of brain-fog. One of them offered to help him, and he humbly accepted the offer. All went well until, one day, the instructor got into difficulties and St. Thomas charitably helped him out, thereby showing his natural bent to teach.
However, an incident was soon to arouse the dumb ox from his silence. His biographers recount it with much relish, and no doubt embroider it, although it represents substantially his sudden urge of self-expression, like a child’s first attempt to talk. What was then spontaneous and almost unconscious became afterward a recognized duty.
This is the story. Albert was giving a course of lectures on the Divine Names of Dionysius. Thomas took down some notes, a page of which fell, by chance, into the hands of Saint Albert. He was utterly astonished and decided to probe his knowledge and, if possible, to unveil it and put an end to all doubts. He therefore invited St. Thomas to get ready for a public debate, and, when the day came, he himself stood as his opponent. Albert put forward four subtle objections, and everyone thought that St. Thomas was worsted. But no: he put an end to the debate with a masterly distinction. “You do not speak,” said Albert, “as one on the defensive, but as a master expounding the truth.” St. Thomas modestly answered, “I can see no other way of replying to the objections.” He already realized that a clear, positive exposition of the truth will answer all objections and put an end to quibbling.
It was then that Albert prophesied, “You call him a dumb ox, but the time will come when so loud will be the bellowing of his doctrine, that it will resound to the ends of the earth.” Rather solemn words, and hardly those of a master to his pupil, but we do not vouch for their historical accuracy.
At all events, St. Thomas was henceforth made to give a course himself, and the manuscript of his treatise on the Divine Names, in his own rapid, difficult handwriting, is still extant as a part of his course on Ethics.
It was at this time, about 1250, that St. Thomas had an opportunity of finally settling his vocation. His family fell upon bad times. His brother Raynald was put to death by the emperor for siding with the Holy See, and the castle of Aquin was sacked. At the death of the emperor, a little later, Theodora appealed to St. Thomas to save the family from ruin. His vocation was no obstacle, as the Pope had granted him a dispensation to become Abbot of Monte Casino, without giving up his Dominican habit. It seemed his duty to accept this compromise, but he knew better and refused.
Later on, a further attempt was made. He was offered the Archbishopric of Naples, with the revenues of the rich abbey of Saint Pierre. The prospects were brilliant: he would be archbishop at an unusually early age; he was wonderfully gifted and well connected. What more could he want?
But he had other ambitions. He was to serve the world, not by ruling in a brilliant court, but by his knowledge. He had his allotted task, and he made up his mind. He must carry on the work that Albert had begun. In God’s providence he was to be knight, Benedictine, Dominican, persecuted and tried, student, and then, Doctor and saint. These successive phases sum up his whole life.
The time had come to begin in earnest. Albert proposed Thomas as a bachelor for Paris, the first step to the degree of Master. This needed the approbation of the Master-General, and John the Teutonic, although a friend of St. Thomas and one who knew his worth, refused. The proper age for a bachelor at Paris was thirty-five, not twenty-seven. But there was at Cologne another Dominican, Cardinal Hugo of St. Cher, and Albert found in him a powerful ally. He pointed out the necessity of sending to Paris a pupil so promising, and of using his great gifts to further the work that Albert himself had begun.
The Master-General gave way before their combined pressure; St. Thomas returned to Paris as bachelor and began teaching immediately (1252). He made a brilliant start and, in four years, had established his reputation and laid the foundations of his first writings. He commentated, orally and in writing, on the four Books of the Sentences, the then-classic manual of theology, and brought out his first philosophical treatise, De Ente et Essentia.7
It is worth noting that in his very first course, a trace of which we find in his Commentary on the Sentences,8 he sketched his method and, as it were, gave a synopsis of his whole intellectual position.
In 1256, by a papal dispensation, he was admitted to the Licentiate, four years before the statuted age. He began his new work at the same time as St. Bonaventure, who, although his opponent in matters doctrinal, was a greatly valued friend of his. He now had the right to teach unsupervised, and his course opened with a solemn inaugural address known as the Principium.
His biographers tell us that this first lecture was dictated to him in a dream, when he was diffident about himself, and could not think what to say. He felt the weight of responsibility in occupying a professional chair and addressing an audience, to say nothing of the greater, unseen audience of readers.
The strife was about to begin. It seems a strong word to use, but it has historical support. Despite St. Thomas’s objectivity in thought and expression, he was an ardent, passionate personality and a redoubtable antagonist.
The first quarrel was when William of St. Amour launched a campaign against the religious orders. The dispute, which had been going on for some time, now centered on St. Thomas, as he occupied a chair of theology, which the secular clergy wished to suppress, particularly when they saw with envy the success with which his teaching was met.
It was high time that somebody brought the matter to a head, for Pope Innocent IV, disquieted by the patent abuses in the religious orders, had issued bull after bull against them. He felt that the Church had lost its equilibrium and that there was danger to the hierarchy from the sudden growth and invasion of the mendicant orders, which seemed to exercise an undue influence over the whole Church.
Innocent died three months after the promulgation of his last bull, and his successor, Alexander IV, finding most of his fears unfounded, was content with demanding certain sacrifices from the orders, in return for their full rights. St. Thomas was charged with the defense of the Dominicans.
He was summoned to Anagni, where he published his treatise Contra impugnantes Dei cultum,9 and that soon restored peace. By the Pope’s orders, he was made Master, and returned to Paris triumphant, to continue his life of intense teaching and writing.
From 1256 until 1259, he presided at public disputations on Truth and kindred questions, and published the treatise De Veritate, one of his greatest works. His commentaries on Saint Matthew and on the De Trinitate of Boëthius were both written about this time. His reputation grew by leaps and bounds. He was admired, says a contemporary of his, for his brevity, clarity, easy style, and obliging disposition.
But what most impressed people (although some today may think it strange) was the novelty of his teaching. William of Tocco stresses this in the following significant passage: “He brought up new questions, inaugurated a new and valuable method of research and demonstration, and developed new arguments. Those who heard him resolving difficulties and problems in a new way, with new principles, believed that he had been endowed by God with a new light of understanding.”
In 1259, we find him at Valenciennes, where, with Albert the Great and Peter of Tarantaise, he reorganized the studies of the order and decided on new houses of study in Spain. At the wish of St. Raymond of Penafort, and by the express command of Alexander IV, he undertook the Summa contra Gentiles, to help in spreading Christian philosophy in Muslim countries.
This work he wrote, however, in Italy, whither he was called in 1261, to assist at the court of Urban IV. He spent ten years at Anagni, Orvieto, Rome, and Viterbo, consolidating his teaching and making it acceptable to high ecclesiastical authorities. He took advantage of the mass of manuscripts of all nationalities, which had found their way to Rome, and formed the nucleus of the Vatican Library. While he was in Paris, he had been fortunate to be able to consult the fine collection of manuscripts that St. Louis had formed near the Sainte-Chapelle and which provided the materials for the Speculum of his contemporary Vincent of Beauvais. But at Rome it was his genius rather than his erudition that called for admiration. The poet Henry of Würzburg wrote of his stay there, “He could have discovered philosophy anew, if it had been destroyed by fire. He could have restored it in a better way: his knowledge entitled him to fame, greater even than that of the ancients.”10
During these years, he wrote his commentaries on Job and Isaiah; the commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel (now lost); the Catena Aurea, a commentary on the Gospels, made up from the writings of the Fathers; and his main theological and philosophical treatises — namely, De Potentia, dealing with God’s activity, creation and government; De Malo, on the nature of moral evil; Quaestiones de Spiritualibus Creaturis, Quaestiones de Anima, Quaestiones de Unitate Verbi Incarnati, and others.
To help in healing the Schism of the West, he wrote Contra Errores Graecorum. In 1264 he wrote the Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi, having himself been partly responsible for its institution. Lastly, with William of Moerbeke, a Flemish Dominican and a distinguished Greek scholar, he set about explaining the principal works of Aristotle, and the much-used Platonist Liber de Causis. He was the first to employ textual exegesis, which is so important a part of all true criticism. He could not possibly have finished all these works while in Italy, and doubtless continued them at Paris.11
In 1265, he was put in charge of the Studium Generale, which had recently been founded at Rome by Charles of Anjou. He lived at Santa Sabina. In 1267, he was summoned by the Pope to Viterbo, and it was somewhere about this time that he first conceived the idea of his Summa Theologica.
He realized that his teaching was at last definitely accepted, and that he would have the sanction of responsible authorities for the vast plan that he had conceived. We shall return to this later on. He was already known as Doctor Catholicus, Doctor Communis, and by his proposed masterpiece he was destined to make his influence endure throughout the ages.
The purpose of the Summa was to coordinate, in a didactic but simple form, free from the obscurities in contemporary writings, the ideas he had elaborated during his years of study and teaching. It was to be a synthetic, illuminating, methodical work, for the use of young students. The Prima Pars, the most important doctrinally, was completed in two years.
Toward the end of 1268, St. Thomas was recalled to Paris, where the university was in a state of disorder, intellectual and moral. The persecution of the religious orders was still active, and, under the influence of Siger of Brabant and Boëthius of Dace, Averroism had gained a hold. Averroists maintained that there was only one intellect for all mankind, and they thereby ruled out all individual immortality. They claimed to derive their doctrine from Aristotle, and their excesses did much to prejudice that revival of Aristotle which St. Thomas had set his heart on. St. Thomas entered the lists, and took the side of Aristotle against the Averroists.
The culminating point of the dispute was his treatise De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas, written according to Mandonnet in 1270. The reader may judge how bitter the quarrel had become by the concluding paragraph of his work, so unlike the saint’s usual calm manner:
If anyone, boasting of knowledge falsely so called, wishes to say anything against what I have written, let him not speak in corners or to children, who are no judges of such difficult matters, but let him write against this treatise, if he dare: and he will find not only me, who am the least of all, but many others, lovers of truth, who will confound his error, or put an end to his ignorance.
After various fluctuations of fortune, St. Thomas was acclaimed victor, and medieval art records his victory. A picture by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Louvre, represents Averroes crushed under the foot of the Doctor in glory. Antonello da Messina, in the Palazza Bellomo at Syracuse, makes his plight even more lamentable: he lies flat on his back, pointing a finger at his vanquisher. Fra Angelico at St. Mark’s, and Andrea de Bonaiuto at Santa Maria Novella, with greater kindness depict him sitting at the feet of St. Thomas, deep in thought, and, as it were, preparing for his conversion. All these are graphic commentaries on the last words of the Opusculum.
At the same time, St. Thomas had to defend himself against certain followers of St. Augustine, who attacked a number of his tenets, particularly the unity of the vital principle in man, and the philosophical possibility of an eternal world. He published a tract on the latter question entitled De Æternitate Mundi contra Murmurantes. The murmuring did not trouble him greatly. In the course of the tract, he let drop a rather caustic remark, the only one (if we except the quotation from De Unitate Intellectus) to be found in all his works: “Those who see contradictions here have, doubtless, more subtle intellects than ours: they only are truly men and wise.”
In this quarrel, however, he was running the risk of evoking ecclesiastical censure. The Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, a former chancellor of the university, was personally very hostile to Aristotle, and hardly friendly to the religious orders. He viewed the progress of Averroism with just alarm and held solemn sessions, where St. Thomas was invited to explain his teaching and where he was vehemently attacked from all sides. His opponents tried to expose him as disloyal to authority, overzealous for the privileges granted to the orders, and abused by them. They tried in particular to show that his Aristotelianism had led him to favor the Averroists, and to run counter to the Faith.
St. Thomas, unruffled, had a clear answer to each of these charges, reassured the authorities of his orthodoxy, without relinquishing any of his principles, and was thus able to save his own propositions from the censure that fell on thirteen others. We shall see, however, that this was only a lull in the storm.
Despite these disturbances, which so agitated the university as to cause a split and, in 1272, a veritable strike, St. Thomas went on writing. It was at this time that he completed the Secunda Pars of the Summa, a masterpiece of moral theology, which even his most virulent opponents could not but admire. He also continued
his commentaries on Aristotle, namely, on the Perihermenias, Metaphysics, De Coelo et Mundo, De Meteorologica, De Generatione, and began the commentary on the Politics. He wrote concurrently, De Regimine Judaeorum, De Occultis Operationibus Naturae, De Mixtione Elementorum, De .Judiciis Astrorum, De Sortibus, De Motu Gordis, etc. To these must be added De Substantiis Separatis, written certainly later than 1268, and his commentary on St. John’s Gospel.
In 1272, St. Thomas left Paris. His colleagues there were so upset at his removal that they appealed to the General Chapter of the Order held at Florence. He was ordered to found a new Studium Generale in Italy, at some town of his own choosing. Thomas, doubtless at the request of Charles of Anjou, chose Naples. It was like returning home, but his stay was short-lived. He was played out; his strength had been undermined by continual work. Still, he went on with the Summa, the third part of which he had hardly begun at Paris. He got as far as the questions on Penance, and then he felt his courage failing him. An incident affecting his inner life, which we shall return to, made him all the less anxious to continue his work. He hung his harp on the willows by the river, says an old biographer, because he had caught a glimpse of heaven.
In 1274, he was summoned by Gregory X to the General Council of Lyons. He was taken ill on the way and put up at the Castle of Maienza, where his niece lived. He grew worse and asked to be removed to the Cistercian Abbey of Fossa-Nuova, so that he might die in a religious house. When he reached the monastery, he touched the wall and exclaimed, “This is my rest forever and ever.”12 He who had received his earliest training under the influence of St. Benedict, returned to him to die, and the two great orders were drawn together still closer by the bonds of friendship.
The monks received him with veneration, happy in the thought that he had entrusted his frail body to their keeping. He suffered from the cold, and they insisted on personally cutting and carting the wood for his fire, remarking that it was an honor too great to be given to beasts of burden. “Why,” asked the saint, “do these holy men wish to serve me like this? I am only a mere mortal.”
He lingered for a month, and in acknowledgment of the monks’ hospitality, dictated at their request a short commentary on the Canticle of Canticles. He asked for the Last Sacraments, and before his Communion, he exclaimed, “I receive Thee, price of my redemption, food of my journey, for whose love I have studied, kept vigil, and spent myself. Never have I knowingly opposed Thee in anything, but if I should have done so through ignorance, I willingly retract it. I leave everything to the correction of the Church, in obedience to whom I leave this world.”
He was about forty-nine years old. Thought, like a raging fire, had used up his strength. But longevity is not essential to genius and does not greatly affect its output. Genius is gauged by its height and its depth. It is its extent that matters; the multiplication of its fruits adds little to its glory, and not much to its services. Michelangelo lived to be ninety; Raphael died at the age of thirty-seven: but what difference there may be between them is due to quite other causes. St. Thomas had lived long enough to give his message; his prodigious mind had borne its fruit, and he went because his hour had come. And his death was but the harbinger of that worldwide influence which he was to exercise over generations to come.
The reader might like to know a little more about St. Thomas’s personality. In his works, his personality is hidden behind his thought, and his very thought is hidden behind the simple clarity of his language. We may speak freely. Other great men, outside their sphere of greatness, might have a mannerism or something about them that is suspicious, or puerile, or perhaps ridiculous, or even hideous. Not so St. Thomas: his personality is as perfect as his works.
He was corpulent and tall — sufficiently tall to attract the notice of farm-laborers as he passed by. He was brown, “the color of new wheat,” with an imposing head, a trifle bald, with a powerful, peaceful face, well-formed lips, penetrating eyes, and a quiet, frank expression. He was extremely sensitive to physical pain, but could endure it by concentrating on a problem, as was his wont when he underwent the “minutio,” or blood-letting, or when the ulcers on his legs were most painfully cauterized.
There is a widespread legend that he was afraid of storms. This would not be surprising, but it is not true. Once even, when in real danger at sea, he was the only one who kept his head. He had the pious habit of making the Sign of the Cross when it thundered.
He slept little, and often he would break his rest to consult some work, and especially to dictate. He was painfully bored by meals, being always absorbed and preoccupied in “adapting his thought to the world,” which he considered was a philosopher’s purpose in life; he neglected that other adaptation on which life depends. As he did not put into practice the principle primo vivere, “life first of all,” he was given Brother Reginald to look after him, and almost to nurse him.
He was silent even when a boy, and grew more and more so as he become more and more engrossed in his work. Ordinary affairs of the world interested him only insofar as they were related to abstract thought, or when charity demanded it. “No occupation,” says William of Tocco, “ever altered the direction of his mind.”
He was kind and cordial to all, spoke little, and never without good cause; he mixed as little as possible in crowds. By way of recreation, he would walk alone along the cloisters, at great speed, head erect and uncovered. He went out rarely and only when it was necessary. He made his work an excuse for refusing invitations even to the court of St. Louis, and his only visit there was under obedience.
The story of how he behaved on that occasion is well known. In the middle of dinner, he suddenly struck the table and exclaimed, “Now that settles the Manicheans.” The prior who was present was afraid that the king would be offended, but, on the contrary, a scribe was sent for to take down the saint’s new argument.
He was detached from what most appealed to the majority of men: what seemed to them vital was to him of no importance. One day, he was returning from Saint-Denis and saw stretched out below the whole city of Paris. Asked if he would not like to possess it, he replied that he would rather have a certain manuscript of St. John Chrysostom which he lacked.
He does not seem to have been greatly interested in the spectacle of nature; he lived in its causes and reconstructed them in himself: the soul is “potentially all things.” He was interested in men, only as so many souls, and not at all in the bustle and business of the world. Except where some doctrine is at stake, we find hardly any trace of history in his works.
He was simple and uneccentric, and he seems to have been as tranquil as his literary style. It is remarkable that so unsensational a writer should gain a worldwide public.
He was endowed with great intellectual, as well as physical, sensitiveness, but he dominated it and subdued it. If in his writings he appears scarcely human, it is because of his stern mental discipline, and not from any lack of human feelings.
This gave him extraordinary self-control in his controversies. The liturgy hails him as “Pugilist of the Faith”; his life was one of incessant fighting: yet he is “very patient” and “very prudent.” We never find him disconcerted by a reverse, or irritated by a contradiction, even of those principles which he held most dear. One of his most intrepid opponents, John Peckham, writing long afterward of an interview in which he had attacked the saint with extreme vehemence, was forced to admit that St. Thomas had replied “with rare gentleness and humility.”
In a word, his writings are eminently impersonal, in the good sense of the word, precisely because he was disinterested, kind, open to conviction, impartial, and balanced. Impersonality is as much a mark of his character as of his works. Wisdom was his only passion, and we can discover in his works, despite their sternly impersonal character, a yearning to serve others for the highest motives, hoping for nothing thereby.
His contemporaries speak of him as “wonderfully kind,” miro modo benignus. He was ready to help others, not only with his mind, but with his body as well. A lay-brother one day, not knowing who he was, took him on an errand around the town, and hurried him on. St. Thomas struggled along as best he could, without a word, and when bystanders protested at the lay-brother’s impudence, he only smiled.
He had a ready trust in everybody and would never think ill of another without definite evidence. One day, by way of a joke, a young fellow-religious said to him suddenly, “Brother Thomas, look at this ox flying!” St. Thomas walked quietly to the window, and, when they burst out laughing, he remarked, “I should be less surprised to see an ox flying, than to find a religious lying.” Said, no doubt, with his tongue in his cheek, but an indication of his character all the same.
The witnesses for his canonization extol the kind way he received people, the urbanity of his manner, his thorough good nature, his generosity, patience, prudence, piety, and the reasonableness of his charity, giving convincing instances of each.
His grace of manner and charming simplicity were, perhaps, his best-known and most-loved traits, although not the most important. We cannot help contrasting these homely characteristics with all that he stands for, as Doctor, in the eyes of the world. The hero of the pictures of his Triumph, the subject of panegyrics, can, without loss of dignity, joke about his embonpoint, and his proverbial absentmindedness. When he obtained, through the intercession of St. Agnes, the cure of his beloved Reginald of Piperno, who had a malignant fever, St. Thomas promised to provide the students of the convent at Naples with an annual dinner, on the feast of St. Agnes. He thenceforth charged the King of Naples one ounce of gold per month for his lectures. He was able, alas, to keep his promise only once, as he was approaching his end; but that does not make the incident any the less delightful.
He formed deep friendships, above all with his loyal and constant companion, Reginald, and with his master St. Albert. After St. Thomas’s death, Albert could not speak of him without tears, and when far advanced in years, he undertook the journey from Cologne to Paris, which in those days was hardly a comfortable one, in order to defend the memory and the doctrine of his pupil.
The childlike simplicity of his private life, and the solid, balanced, calm character of his public teaching are the salient features of St. Thomas. Yet he seems today hardly a human being, hardly real, so obscured is his private character by the impersonal character of his thought.