St. Thomas Aquinas
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Thomas Aquinas was born around 1225 at Roccasecca in the Kingdom of Sicily, into a noble family, and died in 1274. When he announced he was joining the Dominicans, a new order of mendicant friars with no money and no standing, his family locked him up for the better part of a year to change his mind. It did not work.
He studied at Cologne and taught at Paris during the decades when the newly recovered works of Aristotle were arriving in the West and alarming a good many churchmen. He was large, quiet, and mocked as the dumb ox by fellow students. He was canonized in 1323 and declared a Doctor of the Church.
Why he wrote it
His working conviction was that faith and plain reason answer to each other rather than fight, and that an argument must be met with a better argument rather than with authority. His method shows it: he states the objections to his own position first, as strongly as he can make them, before answering.
The Summa Theologiae was written as a textbook for beginners. It was never finished. He stopped writing some months before he died, after an experience he refused to describe beyond saying that everything he had written seemed like straw.
Why he is in our catalog
Aquinas appears in Guardians of the Canon, where his teaching on virtue is discussed inside the story.
The useful part for most readers is his account of how virtue actually forms. Prudence, justice, courage and self-command are not moods that descend on you. They are trained, like a trade, by repeated acts, and they are lost the same way. He also insists that an action has to be judged by what it is, what you intended by it, and the circumstances it was done in, all three.
For a parent, that gives a child a reason a thing is right, not just a feeling about it. A rule without a reason lasts until the child is strong enough to ignore it.
How to read it
Nobody reads the Summa through, and you should not try. It is a reference work, built in articles, and it is designed to be opened at the question you actually have.
Learn the shape of one article and you can read any of them. Each begins with a question, then lists objections to Aquinas's own answer, then gives his reply, then answers each objection in turn. The objections are not strawmen. They are often the best statement of the opposing case you will find anywhere, which is why opponents have quoted them for seven centuries.
Start with the treatise on the virtues rather than at the beginning. The opening questions on the existence and nature of God are the hardest in the book and have defeated more first-time readers than any other part.
Pair it with
- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Aquinas is in constant conversation with Aristotle, whom he simply calls the Philosopher. Read the Ethics first and the Summa stops being opaque.
- Guardians of the Canon: David the Giant Slayer, where this material is put into a story a child can follow.
- Thomas à Kempis, for the other half of the tradition: Aquinas reasons it out, à Kempis asks you to live it.
His principal works
The surviving output is enormous, much of it dictated, reportedly to several secretaries at once.
- Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, around 1252 to 1256. His first major work, written as a young lecturer.
- On Being and Essence, around 1252.
- Summa contra Gentiles, around 1259 to 1265. The case made without appeal to scripture as authority.
- Commentaries on Aristotle, through the 1260s and early 1270s, including on the Ethics, the Physics and the Metaphysics.
- Disputed Questions, including On Truth and On Evil, from his teaching years.
- Summa Theologiae, begun 1265, left unfinished at his death in 1274.
- Liturgical poetry for the feast of Corpus Christi, including Pange Lingua and Adoro Te Devote, still sung.
General reference on Thomas Aquinas. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions drawing on Aquinas
Guardians of the Canon: David the Giant Slayer, Vol. 1, Hardcover