Thomas had little more than a year left in Naples, but it was filled with the same intense activity that marked his second professorship in Paris. He pursued the writing of the Third Part of the Summa, possibly begun in Paris. He continued to lecture on the Bible, to dictate a variety of other works, and, of course, to organize the new house of studies. Along with the ongoing work on the Summa, it seems that most of the commentaries on Paul were either given or revised in Naples, as well as his commentaries on the Psalms. As always, Thomas continued to write treatises, both by request and for his own interests. Among the most important of these was the Compendium of Theology, a doctrinal synthesis organized around the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that he wrote for Friar Reginald. He seems to have begun this in his time at Rome, finishing off the chapters on faith. Now he took up the chapters on hope, but death was to preclude completing the work.
Thomas did not get to finish the Summa either. On December 6, 1273, something happened that ended his writing career and seems to have hastened his death three months later. The hagiographical sources provide us with considerable detail about these months, but leave us with many questions. Several sources indicate that when Reginald noted that Friar Thomas was even more abstracted than ever and asked him why he was no longer writing, Thomas replied, “Reginald, I cannot, because all I have written seems like straw to me.”15 He also expressed the wish that the only thing left for him was death. What is certain is that the immensely productive Thomas never wrote another word and that he seemed even less aware of his surroundings than ever. What had happened?
The medieval lives put the end of Thomas’s writing down to a mystical experience, a foretaste of the vision of God in heaven, the visio beatifica that Thomas had written about so brilliantly. God showed Thomas that however much he strove to penetrate the meaning of the beatific vision, his efforts were nothing more than the merest hint of an explanation (something Thomas himself would not have contested). A mystical experience? Perhaps. Modern investigators, noting the incredible pressures Thomas had been under for the past five years, think that there was also a psychological and/or physical component to the event of December 6, that is, a mental breakdown of some sort, or even a stroke.16 These medieval and modern explanations are by no means mutually exclusive.
As is customary with medieval hagiography, we are given a detailed picture of Thomas’s last months to demonstrate the sanctity of his death. In January 1274 he received a command from Pope Gregory X to attend the planned council at Lyons, where Thomas’s expertise would have been useful for the attempted reconciliation with the Greek Church. Thomas, Reginald, and their companions began the trip north. During the trip, he struck his head against a fallen tree encumbering the road and was injured (Thomas’s impaired mental state may have had something to do with this). According to one story, Reginald tried to cheer Thomas up by saying that he and his Franciscan contemporary Bonaventure would probably both be made cardinals at the council. Thomas was not amused and told him to be quiet.17 Providence had other things in store for Thomas. Within a few days, he felt the end was near and asked to be taken to the nearby Cistercian monastery of Fossanova south of Rome in order to be found “in a religious house” when the Lord came for him. Many stories surround his last few days at Fossanova, because the medieval impetus for saint-making was already at work. Two of these stories seem characteristic of the friar: Thomas’s profession of faith in Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and his express wish to leave his many writings to “the holy Roman Church, to whose judgment I submit all my teaching.” Thomas died on the morning of March 7, 1274.
The fact that Thomas Aquinas was seen by his contemporaries as a saint as much as he was a theologian is evidenced by the fate of his body, the relic of a holy man. The Cistercians of Fossanova were delighted to be in possession of Thomas’s body and to have so many stories about his last days. They soon began to receive pilgrims anxious to pray at the grave of the saint and possibly receive succor and healing. Miracle stories began to spread.18 Afraid that the Dominicans might steal or commandeer the body with papal approval, they moved it several times and may have cut off the head to keep it should this happen. We know that at one exhumation Thomas’s hand was removed and given to one of the saint’s sisters, though the thumb was later presented to the Dominicans. As ghastly as this all sounds, it fits medieval reverence for the relics of holy men and women. At some time after Thomas’s canonization, the remains were boiled down, and the more transportable bones were eventually given to the Dominicans, who laid them to rest in their church at Toulouse in 1369.
Thomas’s Writings
Thomas Aquinas’s literary output is immense. Granted that his whole life from his mid-twenties was committed to teaching and the composition of works for the training of students and the elucidation of theological issues, it is still impressive to survey the thousands of pages and many millions of words he left to posterity. Although specimens of the friar’s crabbed handwriting (called the littera illegibilis, or unreadable hand) exist, most of his works were dictated to secretaries. (Thomas was said to have been able to dictate different works at the same time, something like a chess master playing several games simultaneously.)19 We have already mentioned some of Thomas’s writings in the biographical sketch above, but it will be helpful to provide an overview of the more than a hundred works ascribed to him, ranging from short treatises, letters, and sermons, to exhaustive commentaries and immense syntheses.20
Something like the devotional triptychs that graced medieval altars, Thomas’s works can be divided into three major sections, or panels. In the center stands the panel of his large syntheses; various commentaries form one outside panel, disputed questions and treatises, short and long, the other. The syntheses include the early Writing on the Books of Sentences of Peter Lombard, the Summa contra Gentiles, and especially the Summa theologiae. Many would also add the unfinished Compendium of Theology here. Medieval theology was always based on lectio, that is, commentary on authoritative texts. Thomas’s earliest synthesis was officially a comment on the Lombard, but, like most scholastics, for him the Books of Sentences had come to serve as a springboard for his own treatment of theological issues. But Thomas was also a powerful commentator in the strict sense. Foremost among these works are his expositions of books of the Old and the New Testaments. Although formerly neglected, they are now considered basic for understanding his theology and have come in for much study in recent decades. His lengthy commentaries on Aristotle are also important, especially for understanding his position in the quarrels over the Philosopher in the thirteenth century.
Correcting the older Neoscholastic emphasis on the purely Aristotelian basis for Thomas’s thought, recent investigators have turned their attention to the Platonic element in his work, for which his commentaries on Platonic (better, Neoplatonic) texts are of importance, especially two works of the late antique Christian Neoplatonist Boethius (On the Trinity, and On the “De hebdomadibus”), as well as on The Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius and on The Book of Causes. Although Thomas never wrote any commentaries on Augustine, the African bishop, deeply indebted to Platonism, was his most important theological source, and hence many studies of the Augustinianism of Thomas have recently been produced. The recovery of the Neoplatonic element in Thomas’s thought has been a major achievement of the past generation of Thomist scholarship, but it runs the risk of repeating the mistake of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars who confidently asserted that Thomas was a “real” Aristotelian. Truth told, Thomas absorbed much from both Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, but he would not have been happy to be termed either an “Aristotelian” or a “Neoplatonist”—nor, of course, a “Thomist.”
The third panel of the triptych consists of Thomas’s investigations into special themes and issues, both individual problems and major themes of theology and philosophy. Thomas’s most penetrating discussions of many issues are often found in his Disputed Questions, es
pecially those he directed to what he felt were the most difficult intellectual problems: What is truth? What is evil? What is the power of God? What is the soul? What are the virtues? These disputed questions can be thought of as the workshops, or laboratories, where Thomas and his students studied the intricacies of speculative questions, weighing the arguments pro and con before establishing the positions he expressed in a briefer form in his syntheses, especially in the Summa theologiae. Where there is overlap between the arguments in the Summa and those detailed in the Questions, the same position is usually adapted, but the Questions give us a fuller sense of why Thomas chose a particular position after considering and rejecting alternative views. One of the delights of studying Thomas is to follow his argumentation from the exhaustive analyses in the Questions to the crisp summaries of the Summa.
The other part of the third panel consists of Thomas’s treatises. Most of these were occasional pieces, responding to issues of the day and often written in response to requests from powerful ecclesiastical or political figures who could not be refused (approximately twenty-six works fit this description). One can imagine that Thomas was not particularly happy with some of these distractions from his more important work, but he did his duty. A few of these treatises have had an impact on various disciplines, such as philosophy, where the early treatise On Being and Essence proved to be very popular (close to two hundred manuscripts). Another popular philosophical work is his response to Siger of Brabant, On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists. In theology his treatise On the Articles of the Faith and the Sacraments of the Church, written in the 1260s, gained a wide audience. In the early fourteenth century Bartholomew of Capua, who had known Thomas at Naples in the 1270s, began to collect stories about him and read his works. Bartholomew compiled a catalogue of the friar’s writings in which he noted, “These writings can be read with ease and profit by everyone, according to his mental capacity. Hence we find even laymen and people of modest intelligence desiring to possess copies of them.”21 This is strong testimony to Thomas’s impact on a wide readership.
The Plan and Purpose of the Summa theologiae
Imagine a warm autumn afternoon in the year 1266 in Rome on the Aventine hill overlooking the city from the ancient church of Santa Sabina.22 The church belonged to the Dominican Order, having been granted to Dominic and his followers by Pope Honorius III in 1221. On this afternoon Thomas Aquinas is engaged with his secretaries on a new kind of theological initiative, the book that will be called the Summa theologiae, that is, an ordered synthesis of theology (the title may not be original but appears in most early copies).23 During his time on the Aventine Thomas and his scribes would complete the Prima Pars of the Summa, consisting of 119 questions and 584 articles dealing with God and creation. In late 1268 Thomas was called back to Paris to serve as Dominican Regent Master for a second time. He would remain there from 1268 until the spring of 1272, teaching and writing at a pace that is still hard to imagine, finishing the largest, or second, part of the Summa. This Secunda Pars was so massive that Thomas split it into two subsections, the Prima Secundae of 114 questions and 619 articles, dealing with the role of human acts in general in attaining beatitude, and the Secunda Secundae of no fewer than 189 questions and 916 articles on human acts in particular in the return process. Considering the Summa alone, Thomas’s productivity during these Paris years is impressive. According to one calculation, he must have written about twelve pages of modern print every day to finish the Secunda Pars.24 Back in Italy by spring 1272, Thomas worked on the third part of the Summa, managing to finish 90 questions and 549 articles, dealing with Christology and most of the sacraments, before the incident of December 6, 1273, when he stopped writing.
Thomas’s Summa theologiae is one of the great works in the history of Christian thought.25 In its original form (i.e., minus the Supplementum of 99 questions on the final four sacraments and eschatology compiled by his students from his earlier writings), its three parts consist of no fewer than 2668 articles, or mini-disputations. Each of these mini-disputations follows a standard form: (1) posing the question to be examined (e.g., “Was it fitting for the Word to be incarnated?”), (2) giving a series of arguments against the answer that Thomas intends to support (usually three or four, sometimes more), (3) citing an authoritative text (most often from the Bible) as the proof or principle of the position to be taken (called the sed contra), (4) arguing for his own position in what is called the body of the article (corpus), and finally (5) answering the objections one by one. Sometimes Thomas’s position entails making distinctions concerning the question to be examined, exploring in what sense it can be affirmed and in what sense denied. The fact that whole books have been written about single questions shows that even in its small sections the Summa invites detailed commentary and, quite often, disagreement about Thomas’s meaning. We need to ask why, for whom, and to what purpose Thomas Aquinas undertook this project. Putting the Summa into the historical context of Thomas’s life helps us get a better sense of what he had in mind.
Christian theology, or sacra doctrina as Thomas preferred to call it in the Summa, treats not only eternal truths about God, but also the historical opera reparationis, or works of salvation (Ia, q. 1.7), so it is not illegitimate to ask how Thomas’s own story provides insight into what he sought to do in his great work. Few, if any, Christian theologians made more of the fact that our thinking about God is ineluctably tied to our existence as embodied subjects; human attainment of truth is in and through the body and its senses, though the intellect abstracts the intelligible form from the matter perceived by the senses (Ia, q. 85.1). The tall, corpulent friar sitting in Santa Sabina, later in the Dominican convent in Paris, and finally in Naples, was enmeshed in a rich history that helps us understand what his intentions were in writing the Summa.
Thomas’s growing reputation in the 1260s led to an unprecedented move on the part of his own Roman Province. The Dominican model of educating future preachers, confessors, and teachers was organized according to a carefully orchestrated program of study begun in the individual houses or priories, continued in the provincial houses of study (studia provincialia), and completed for the most gifted students in the studia generalia, the houses of graduate studies, of which Paris was the most important.26 When the Roman Province summoned Thomas to Santa Sabina in 1265 it seems to have intended him to set up an unprecedented studium personale, a house of study centered on his own teaching, with special privileges granted to students he selected who were guaranteed financial support from the order. He was also allowed to terminate their studies if he judged they were not measuring up.27
In his Roman teaching Thomas was required to comment on selected theological texts and to hold disputations at announced times. Ordinarily, he would have lectured on Lombard’s Sentences, and an incomplete fragment of a second commentary on that work gives evidence of this.28 Thomas, however, soon abandoned this in favor of beginning the Summa theologiae in 1266. Some of the commentaries and disputations he pursued during his years at Santa Sabina seem to have been chosen to help him think through issues he was treating as he progressed in the writing of the Summa. For example, Thomas commented on Dionysius’s Divine Names at Rome in two courses (1265–66 and 1266–67). This theological work, the Magna Carta of apophatic, or negative, theology, profoundly shaped his understanding of divine unknowability found in the early questions of the Prima Pars.29 Similar correlations between the progress of the Summa and works from Thomas’s later teaching in Paris and Naples are also illuminating.
Did Thomas actually teach the Summa at Rome? Authorities disagree, and the best answer is that we really do not know.30 We are not even sure if Thomas gave public lectures on the Summa at Paris and Naples; he did, after all, have many other teaching obligations, especially at Paris. Thomas and his select group of students and scribes may have had more than enough to do as they labored away on the new textbook within the context of their own discussions and dictation. On the
other hand, Thomas was insistent on the centrality of teaching and the need to create a new model of theological education, so we may wonder why he would not have put this model to the test.
It is clear from the “Prologue” to the Summa that Thomas was quite aware of the break he was making from standard pedagogy and his reasons for doing so. He says,
We have considered that beginners (novitios) in this teaching have been much put off by what has been written by different authors; in part by the proliferation of useless questions, articles, and arguments; in part by the fact that what is necessary for them to know for this science is not set out according to the correct order of learning (secundum ordinem disciplinae), but by what is required for commenting on texts, or for what provides material for disputations; and finally in part because the frequent repetition of these matters causes boredom and confusion in the hearers (Ia, prologus).
The reference to “beginners” has proven puzzling. How could a text so condensed, so brilliant, so deceptively clear be intended for “beginners”? It all depends on what we mean by beginners. It seems most likely that with regard to his immediate audience, the novices Thomas addressed are not to be understood as total beginners in the study of theology, but rather, in accord with the two levels of Aristotelian scientia, they are those who have absorbed the general principles of the understanding of faith through their previous courses on Aristotle, the Bible, and perhaps even Peter Lombard’s Sentences. In other words, these medieval novices are something like modern graduate students in theology.31 Thomas intends for them to deepen their knowledge and to learn how to introduce other beginners, the faithful, into a better understanding of belief through their preaching and teaching. Thomas may also have had in mind Dominican convent lectors whose task it was to introduce the majority of friars to basic theology.
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