Thomas Aquinas
One
Early life
Thomas went to the University of Naples, where he encountered two things that decisively shaped his life. First, he encountered the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic, who lived radical poverty and depended entirely on Divine Providence so as to be free for prayer, study, and the preaching of the Catholic faith. Second, he encountered the writings of Aristotle, which would profoundly shape his intellectual development.
At 19, totally against his family's wishes, Thomas entered the Dominicans, who 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. To dissuade him from entering the Dominicans, they sent a woman to his room, where he was imprisoned, to seduce him. 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.
He then fell exhausted into a deep sleep from which he was awakened by 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 for that time forward.
Lust blinds the mind to truth. Purity and sexual self-control, by contrast, clear the intellect and free the heart to see and love what is true. As St. Thomas teaches, lust and sexual sins produce both intellectual and moral blindness. Therefore, to grasp the truth, purity of heart is not optional, it is necessary.
Two
Prayer and Learning
Thomas did join the Dominicans in 1245 at the age of 20 and headed 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, the great Franciscan theologian. From that point, Thomas was in such high demand that he taught at a different place every two to three years.
So, Thomas did not live the quiet life of the monastery. He lived a hectic life of teaching, establishing academies, 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 and the Bible.
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 daily reception of Christ in the Eucharist. He made an impact through his efforts in education. He devoted the remainder of his time to leisure. Leisure is the free time that remains after prayer and work, and it has a purpose: to nourish the intellect with truth and the emotions with beauty.
The real question, then, is how we use our free time. Do we feed our intellect with the truths of the faith and the truths of creation? Do we form our emotions through beauty, good books, art, music, and nature?
Or do we fill our minds and hearts with mere entertainment, the junk food of the soul, which stimulates but never truly satisfies?
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.
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.”
And what did Thomas write? Essentially this: 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.
Then Jesus offered him a reward from all the things of the world. His answer, “I only want you, Lord.”
What do we want most? Achievements, praise, security, and human relationships? None of these will ultimately do. God alone satisfies.
Four
The Fundamental Question
The most important question is this: Is there a universal, objective truth that defines right and wrong for all people, or is everything reduced to personal opinion, ‘you do you’?
False philosophies deny that any universal truth binds all people. And if such truth were to exist, they claim, it could not be known. This denial is not neutral. It serves to evade truth and responsibility, providing cover for disordered desires. At bottom, it is not God that is being sought, but permission.
Thomas Aquinas devoted his life to refuting this relativism. He showed that universal truth is real and knowable through observation of the world, the use of reason, and the light of divine revelation. From God flows an objective moral order that reveals what is true and false, right and wrong, for all people, in every age.
Then something happened while St. Thomas was celebrating Mass. God revealed something to him that made him stop studying and writing altogether. Brother Reginald, his closest friend, asked him what happened. Thomas said, “After what I have seen, I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings seem like straw.”
Thomas Aquinas stopped writing because his encounter with God revealed a reality so profound that his previous writings seemed inadequate. He recognized that while we can know truth through observation, reason, and revelation, the fullness of reality, the magnificence of God, vastly exceeds our human ability to capture it in words. We study in order to know the truth. We know the truth in order to love God. And when God reveals Himself, even the greatest words must give way to adoration.
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
St. Thomas Aquinas did not teach by lecturing at people. He taught through real conversation. He began by learning the other person’s position, their thoughts, assumptions, and conclusions. He listened so carefully and understood so deeply that he could often state his opponent’s view better than they could themselves, even when it directly opposed his own. This was not a tactic. It flowed from genuine friendship and a love for truth.
Thomas understood something essential: to grasp reality fully, I need more than my own limited experience and perspective. Truth is too rich to be seen from one angle alone. We arrive at it through conversation, where each person contributes a piece of the whole.
From Thomas, we receive a method for good conversation. First, ask questions that help you truly understand the other person and their position. Second, listen, not to prepare a rebuttal, but to see the world as they see it, even more clearly than they do. Third, restate their view in your own words to ensure you have understood them correctly.
This is not about listening for weaknesses, crafting clever arguments, or scoring intellectual victories. That is not conversation; it is combat. True conversation seeks understanding, because understanding leads us closer to the truth itself.
Only after listening, understanding, and faithfully restating the other person’s position do we explain how we ourselves understand the matter. And then we remain humble enough to be questioned in return. The process repeats, each exchange revealing new facets of reality.
As Thomas himself teaches, “We must love both those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”
This is how truth is revealed, not through domination, but through friendship. As Scripture says, iron sharpens iron.