Aquinas

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was the greatest of the medieval Scholastic philosophers. Responding, as did others of his era, to the rediscovery of Aristotle’s philosophy in the West through Latin translations of Aristotle’s Greek texts, Aquinas produced a comprehensive system of Christianized Aristotelianism that encompassed metaphysics, logic, cosmology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of nature, political philosophy, and ethics. While insisting upon, and indeed demonstrating, the compatibility of the “new philosophy” with Christian doctrine, Aquinas also famously distinguished philosophy and theology by their different starting points. Although both are rational enterprises, involving a search for truth guided by reason, philosophy begins from general first principles about the world that any reflective person would accept, whereas theology starts with truths about God or the divine as revealed in Scripture, which can be accepted only on the basis of religious faith. During Aquinas’s lifetime, aspects of his philosophy were resisted by more traditional theologians and formally rejected by the church. Some 50 years later,


however, he was canonized a saint, and during the Renaissance he was pronounced a doctor of the church. In the late 19th century Pope Leo XIII called for a return to Aquinas in the face of modernizing trends in both philosophy and science. Thomism (the philosophy of Aquinas and his later interpreters) became the official philosophy of Roman Catholicism in 1917, following a revision of the Code of Canon Law that required Catholic teachers of philosophy and religion to adopt Aquinas’s methods and principles. Later in the 20th century Thomism represented an important school of thought even outside Catholic philosophy, especially in ethics, the philosophy of law, and political philosophy.

*Aquinas joined the recently founded mendicant order of St. Dominic in 1244, when he was about 20 years old.

*While journeying to Paris to study, he was kidnapped by his family, who disapproved of his decision to join the Dominicans, and was then held at home against his will for about two years. During his detention his brothers engaged a prostitute to seduce him, an effort that was unsuccessful.

*Aquinas abruptly abandoned writing in 1273 after undergoing an experience during mass that led him to regard all of his written work as “like straw.” He died three months later.