Ch. 16 - Saint Thomas Aquinas

CHAPTER XVI

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

Long before Saint Francis's death, in 1226, the French mystics had
exhausted their energies and the siecle had taken new heart. Society
could not remain forever balancing between thought and act. A few
gifted natures could absorb themselves in the absolute, but the rest
lived for the day, and needed shelter and safety. So the Church bent
again to its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new levies with
the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aristotle on the
Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine. The year 1215,
which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other easily fixed
events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the triumph
of the schools. The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the Gothic
architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis died at
Assisi and Thomas was born at Aquino. The Franciscan Order itself
was swept with the stream that Francis tried to dam, and the great
Franciscan schoolman, Alexander Hales, in 1222, four years before
the death of Francis, joined the order and began lecturing as though
Francis himself had lived only to teach scholastic philosophy.

The rival Dominican champion, Albertus Magnus, began his career a
little later, in 1228. Born of the noble Swabian family of
Bollstadt, in 1193, he drifted, like other schoolmen, to Paris, and
the Rue Maitre Albert, opposite Notre Dame, still records his fame
as a teacher there. Thence he passed to a school established by the
order at Cologne, where he was lecturing with great authority in
1243 when the general superior of the order brought up from Italy a
young man of the highest promise to be trained as his assistant.

Thomas, the new pupil, was born under the shadow of Monte Cassino in
1226 or 1227. His father, the Count of Aquino, claimed descent from
the imperial line of Swabia; his mother, from the Norman princes of
Sicily; so that in him the two most energetic strains in Europe met.
His social rank was royal, and the order set the highest value on
it. He took the vows in 1243, and went north at once to help
Albertus at Cologne. In 1245, the order sent Albertus back to Paris,
and Thomas with him. There he remained till 1248 when he was ordered
to Cologne as assistant lecturer, and only four years afterwards, at
twenty-five years old, he was made full professor at Paris. His
industry and activity never rested till his death in 1274, not yet
fifty years old, when he bequeathed to the Church a mass of
manuscript that tourists will never know enough to estimate except
by weight. His complete works, repeatedly printed, fill between
twenty and thirty quarto volumes. For so famous a doctor, this is
almost meagre. Unfortunately