Thomas Aquinas

Italian Dominican friar, theologian and philosopher (1225–1274), born in the castle of Roccasecca into a noble family related to the imperial house, and educated as a child at the abbey of Montecassino before studying arts at the University of Naples, where he enthusiastically discovered the works of Aristotle, then only recently recovered in the West through Arabic and Greek translations. His decision to enter the Dominican mendicant order, considered socially inferior for someone of his lineage, provoked such fierce family opposition that his own brothers kidnapped him and kept him captive for over a year in a failed attempt to dissuade him. A disciple in Paris and Cologne of the great scholar Albert the Great, Thomas undertook the intellectual project that would define his life: a systematic and rigorous synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy — recently rediscovered and viewed with suspicion by conservative ecclesiastical circles for its pagan origin and its transmission through Muslim commentators such as Averroes — with revealed Christian doctrine, demonstrating that reason and faith, far from being incompatible, complement and illuminate one another within a hierarchical order of knowledge. His masterwork, the Summa Theologiae, an unfinished systematic treatise organised as disputed questions examining every possible objection with exhaustive dialectical method before reaching an argued conclusion, addresses practically every major theme of Christian theology and philosophy — the existence of God, demonstrated through his famous 'five ways', the nature of the soul, virtue ethics, natural law and divine law. Toward the end of his life Thomas underwent a mystical experience so intense that he abandoned writing altogether, declaring that everything he had written seemed like 'straw' compared to what he had contemplated. Canonised in 1323 and declared the Angelic Doctor, his philosophical system, Thomism, has since been the predominant official philosophical reference point of the Catholic Church.

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