St. Thomas Aquinas
One
Early life
Thomas was born in 1225 at Roccasecca, a castle near Aquino, Italy, into a noble family connected to the Counts of Aquino. At the age of five, he was sent to the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, where he began his early education. When he was fifteen, Emperor Fredrick II took over the monastery and the monks and students had to leave. So, Thomas went to the University of Naples. Thomas encountered two things that altered his life in Naples. First, the movement started by St. Dominic of living a radical poverty depending on Divine Providence for everything so as to be free to dedicate oneself to prayer, study, and sharing the Catholic Faith with others. Second, the writings of Aristotle.
At nineteen, totally against his famili’s wishes, Thomas entered the Dominicans. They immediately sent him to Paris to study. On the way, he was captured by two of his brothers and held prisoner for a year in his father’s castle. They sent a woman to his room where he was imprisoned to seduce him to break his commitment to chastity and celibacy for Christ. When she entered, Thomas sprang up, snatched a brand out of the fire, brandishing it like a flaming sword. The woman shrieked and fled. As the door slammed shut Thomas burned a large cross into it and returned the poker to the fireplace.
Then he fell exhausted into a deep sleep out of which he awoke to his own loud scream caused by an exceedingly painful operation. An angel had girded him tightly with a rope of fire to protect him from all attacks of lust from that time forward.
Lust makes a person blind to the truth. Purity and sexual self-control enable a person to see and love the truth. Thomas says that lust, unchastity, and sexual sins result in an intellectual and moral blindness. To grasp the truth of things, therefore, we need purity of heart.
Two
Prayer and Learning
Thomas did join the Dominicans in 1245 at the age of twenty and went back to Paris to study under Albert the Great. In 1248 both he and Albert went to Cologne to establish a center of learning there. Then back to Paris to teach where he became friends with St. Bonaventure. From that point Thomas taught at a different place every two to three years, so in demand was he.
Thomas did not live the quiet life of the monastery. He lived a hectic life of teaching, establishing academies, and fulfilling special projects for the Dominicans, the Universities, the Popes, and the Kings. At the same time he wrote the Summa Theologica over seven years, without finishing it entirely. Plus he wrote commentaries on all the major works of Aristotle, the letters of St. Paul and the Gospel of John.
How did he do all this? Thomas made a commitment to three things: prayer, impact, and leisure. Thomas dedicated himself to a deep life of prayer by daily meditation and union with Christ in the Eucharist. He made an impact through his efforts of education.
He used the rest of his time for leisure. Leisure is the free time we have after prayer and work. The purpose of leisure or free-time is to feed our intellect with reality in the form of truth and to feed our emotions with reality in the form of beauty. To accomplish this he removed all distraction and then used his free-time to nourish his soul, namely the powers of your soul, with the “food” they need. We need to feed the intellect, our mind, with reality in the form of truth and we need to feed our passions, our heart, with reality in the form of beauty.
Too often we feed the intellect and passions with junk, called entertainment, especially when it is mindless. Entertainment serves as a distraction or escape from reality. While it may provide temporary fun, it doesn't contribute to the nourishment of the soul or enhance our appreciation of life. Mindless entertainment often numbs the mind by overstimulating the senses without offering meaningful insights, leaving us feeling less happy and less equipped to face the real world after engaging with it.
Three
Corpus Christi
One of the special projects the Pope gave to St. Thomas was to explain transubstantiation, the complete change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at the consecration in the Mass. In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.
Thomas prayed and studied and wrote. Then he threw down what he had written at the foot of the Crucifix on the altar and left it lying there, as if waiting judgment. Then he turned, came down the altar steps and prostrated himself in prayer. But the other friars were watching and they say Christ came down from the Cross, stood upon the papers saying, “Thomas, you have written well concerning the sacrament of My Body and Blood.”
Then Jesus offered him a reward from all the things of the world. His answer, “I only want you Lord.”
Four
The Fundamental Question
The fundamental question for all people of all time is this: can we know reality, can we know the truth, can we know what is right and wrong, true and false, good and evil? St. Thomas answered emphatically, “YES!”
God gave the human person an intellect and reason precisely so that we could know reality. We can know truth in three ways: by observation and the scientific method, by reason, and finally, we can know perfect truth by what Christ has revealed and handed down in the word of God contained in Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.
People who want God more than anything else accept this and seek the truth that leads them to God. All the false philosophies say, “No! We cannot know reality.” They do this to avoid truth and responsibility to justify their evil desires because deep down they don’t want God, they want something else.
Thomas worked his entire life to battle relativism. Then something happened while he was celebrating Mass. Brother Reginald, his friend, asked him why he had stopped reading and writing. Thomas said, “After what I have seen, I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings seem like straw.”
Soon after, the Pope asked Thomas to come and help out at the Fourth Lateran Council in Lyon in 1274. Thomas died on the journey. He was just 48.
Five
The Art of Good Conversation
Thomas dealt with people radically different from him. Thomas did not lecture when he taught. He had discussions. He always began by learning the other person’s positions, thoughts, and opinions first. Thomas would understand the other person so well that he could present their opinion, which often opposed his own, even better than they could. This came from his spirit of genuine friendship, discussion, and good conversation.
To understand all the facets of reality, to arrive at the truth I need more than my own limited knowledge and experience. I need to be in conversation with others. Then all parties contribute to a fuller understanding of reality.
Thomas gives us a method for good conversation: Ask Questions that enable you to understand the other person and their position better. Listen to the other person. Understand their position, the way they see things, and see the world, even better than they do. Repeat their view in your own words to make sure you understand them correctly. We are not listening to catch our opponent's weak spots and how to craft our own logic to destroy their stupid ideas and score a victory. Instead, we genuinely want to listen and understand to gain a deeper grasp of the subject.
In every conversation, one of many facets of reality is expressed. There is always something right and truthful in what another person says. By listening we try to understand the person and respect their dignity with gratitude for the increase of knowledge we receive from the conversation. Thomas says, “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those who opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.”
Then after listening and understanding and repeating back to them their ideas, we explain how we understand things. So, good conversation happens when we ask questions, listen and understand, repeat their views, then express our own. Be humble enough to be questioned. Then repeat the process as you grasp more and more facets of reality, of truth. Thomas says this is the best method to reveal the truth for iron sharpens iron.