St Thomas Aquinas

Vivian Boland OP, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472518903
• eBook ISBN: 9781441137388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

It may be surprising that the thought of a medieval theologian still informs many areas of intellectual debate, but there continues to be lively interest in the work of Thomas Aquinas. He considers the most radical questions for our thinking about education: what is a human being? what does it mean to learn? what does it mean to teach? what does it mean to know, to understand, and to search for the truth? In this text, Vivian Boland offers a short biography of Aquinas focused on his personal experiences as a student and teacher. The book then provides a critical exposition of the texts in which Aquinas develops his views about education and includes a short account of the reception and influence of his thinking. Finally, it considers in some detail the most significant points of contact between Aquinas's educational thought and current concerns – his conviction about the goodness of the world, his holistic understanding of human experience and his contributions to virtue theory – and highlights the continuing relevance and influence of this work and thinking within educational philosophy today.

Part 1

An Intellectual Biography of Thomas Aquinas

Knowledge of the life and writings of Aquinas is available in a number of standard works. For much of the latter part of the twentieth century, students approaching his thought for the first time could rely on a book by the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu (Chenu, 1950). Since then, the Cambridge medievalist and Renaissance scholar Kenelm Foster edited a translation of early biographies and other contemporary sources (Foster, 1959). James A. Weisheipl produced a major biography to mark the seventh centenary of Aquinas’s death in 1974 (Weisheipl, 1974 and 1983). In a translation of some works by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Simon Tugwell gave a full account of the chronology of Aquinas’s life and writings (Tugwell, 1988: 199–351).

A new point of departure is noticeable lately, clearly indebted to those already mentioned, but likely to remain the best place to begin for the foreseeable future. This is the work of Jean-Pierre Torrell (Torrell, 2002; Royal, 2005), which sets the chronology and content of Aquinas’s writings within their historical and cultural background, recovering a stronger sense of Aquinas as, first and foremost, a Christian theologian, and highlighting the distinctive options that gave shape to his thought. Torrell also corrects a tendency to focus on Aquinas’s best-known work, the Summa theologiae, to the neglect of other parts of his corpus, particularly his commentaries on scripture and on Neoplatonist texts.

Thomas Aquinas was born in 1224 or 1225 and died in 1274. He had become renowned in his lifetime as one of Europe’s leading scholars and died on his way to the Council of Lyons to which Pope Gregory X had summoned him. Three biographies of Aquinas appeared soon after his death, by Peter Calo, Bernard Gui, and William of Tocco. The canonization process at Naples gathered first-hand testimonies about his life and character from many friends and acquaintances. According to Simon Tugwell, the most important sources for Aquinas’s life are the biography by William of Tocco and the records of the canonization process at Naples (Tugwell, 1988: 291, note 1). Tugwell is not as negative about the reliability of the other two early lives as Torrell seems to be. The strength of William’s life is that his two main sources of information were Thomas of San Severino, a nephew of Thomas Aquinas, and Catherine of Morra, a niece who knew her grandmother Theodora, Thomas’s mother. The summary chronology followed here is drawn from Torrell (2002: 479–82) and Weisheipl (1974: 351–53), while keeping an eye on Tugwell (1988).

Chapter 1

Learning: Monte Cassino, Naples, Paris, and Cologne

Aquinas was a pupil and student at four different institutions. The first was Monte Cassino, the great Benedictine abbey near where he was born. The Aquino family lands of Roccasecca and Montesangiovanni belonged to the abbey, a fact that is still recorded on the walls of the cloister. Thomas was born in the family castle at Roccasecca, just north of Naples, in 1224 or 1225 (although Tugwell argues for 1226 [1988: 291–92, note 3]). His father was Landulf of Aquino, head of a minor branch of an important land-owning family, and his mother was Theodora Rossi of the Neapolitan Caracciolo family. The ruins of the Aquino castle in which Thomas was born can still be visited at Roccasecca.

From the age of six or so, Thomas went to school at Monte Cassino. As well as being taught how to read and write, he would have followed the established medieval curriculum of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (the trivium), followed by arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium). This gave him direct contact with the Benedictine monastic tradition which had been a major force in preserving the learning of the ancient world and consolidating the teaching of the seven liberal arts that together made up the ‘threefold way’ and the ‘fourfold way’ that prepared the mind for philosophy and theology. The story that Thomas was an oblate at the monastery seems sufficiently well supported, intended by his family to become a monk there and even, some day perhaps, the Abbot.

This plan was frustrated by developments in politics and in Thomas’s sense of where his vocation lay. The strategic position of Monte Cassino means it has always been a very desirable location to secure in military campaigns. An ongoing struggle between

the papacy and Emperor Frederick II affected this part of Italy in Thomas’s lifetime and his family became caught between the opposing forces. In the spring or summer of 1239, when Thomas was about fourteen, he was removed from the Abbey school and kept at home for some time.

When his schooling began again some months later, it was in Naples, in the ‘secularizing’ studium generale established there by Frederick II. At Monte Cassino, Thomas had been taught by a man called Erasmus who had moved to Naples before him (Torrell, 2002: 22, note 76). There was a lively intellectual atmosphere in Frederick’s kingdom in southern Italy of which the budding university in Naples was the centerpiece (Torrell, 2002: 8–9, 10–11; Tugwell, 1988: 203). Here Thomas continued his studies of natural philosophy and was introduced for the first time to the serious study of Aristotle’s philosophical writings at the hands of teachers like Master Martin who taught him grammar and logic, and Peter of Ireland who taught him natural philosophy and logic.1

In Naples, Thomas came to know more about Aristotle, and he also encountered the Dominicans there. Founded by Dominic Guzman, they were one of the new orders of friars and were approved by the Pope in 1216, the same year in which Francis of Assisi received confirmation for his friars. The Dominicans were known as the ‘friars preachers’ because their work was to preach and teach, while the Franciscans became known as the ‘friars minor’ because of their emphasis on poverty and humility.

Thomas’s family was not impressed with his desire to join the Dominicans – this band of peripatetic, mendicant friars who wandered from town to town, earning their living by questing for alms in return for preaching and teaching. Rather than living off the cultivated lands and other revenues of the great monastery, Thomas wanted to throw in his lot with what was, effectively, a group of intellectual beggars whose position in the Church was still controversial. In April 1244 (although Tugwell, 1988, argues for a year or two earlier), at the age of nineteen or twenty, Thomas joined them. Shortly afterwards, Thomas’s family kidnapped him and subjected him to a year of virtual house arrest in the family castles of Montesangiovanni and Roccasecca. We are told that Thomas spent this time praying, reading the whole of the Bible, and studying the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Torrell, 2002: 15).

For reasons that remain unclear, but which must have involved more than mere persistence on Thomas’s part, the family relented and he was allowed to return to the Dominicans. Perhaps fearing further changes of mind, the Dominicans acted quickly, and immediately sent him to Paris to continue his studies. It may be that changes in the political fortunes of the Aquino family also encouraged the Dominicans to get Thomas away sooner rather than later.

The Council of Lyons had excommunicated and deposed Frederick II on 17 July 1245 and it appears that the Aquino family may have then switched allegiance to the Pope. Certainly Reginald, the second son of Landulf, and Thomas’s older brother, not only changed allegiance, but conspired against Frederick. Reginald was arrested by Frederick’s forces, sentenced to death for his betrayal, and executed on Frederick’s orders in 1246 (Tugwell, 1988: 208, 303, note 101).

Torrell describes Thomas’s decision to join the Dominicans rather than the Benedictines as his most significant involvement in the politics of his time. His choice was not just against his parents’ wishes but was also anti-Frederick (Torrell, 2002: 11–15, 21–23; Tugwell, 1988: 298, note 60, 299, note 65).

Thomas was born into a Lombard family that had moved south some decades earlier and whose land lay across the borders of papaland imperial-controlled Italy. Part of the wider dispute between the papacy and Frederick II – ‘Antichrist’ as far as Pope Innocent IV was concerned – was the tussle for control of Monte Cassino. Thomas’s father was initially an ally of Frederick II so that the family’s fortunes were linked with the shifting fortunes of the Emperor. Thomas’s time at Monte Cassino was cut short in 1239 because of such a shift in fortune (Torrell, 2002: vii, 2–5). More significantly, this background might help to explain the initial reaction of Thomas’s family to his decision to join the Dominicans, who were solidly supportive of the papacy in its struggle with the Emperor. The irony in this is that Frederick’s humanism led to the establishment of the studium generale in Naples, in which Thomas was introduced to the study of the humanities and philosophy. Perhaps it was a more general shift of allegiance within the family along with Frederick’s excommunication that opened the way for Thomas to return to the Dominicans. (For Thomas as a young Dominican, see Torrell, 2002: 45–51.)

Leaving behind the chaotic, even explosive, situation engulfing his family, Thomas arrived in Paris, probably in the autumn of 1245, at the third and most important center of learning in which he was a student. Although the controversies in which he became involved in Paris were not political in the ordinary sense, they were no less heated and occasionally threatened to erupt into violence.

Throughout the previous century, the monastic and other schools located in and around Paris had begun to cohere as a loose association of colleges of different nations and interests. Peter Abelard, in his Historia Calamitatum, gives us a good account of how things were a century or so before Thomas arrived. By the mid-1240s, the schools of Paris had moved decisively in the direction of constituting a single institution, made up of colleges and faculties, well on the way to becoming a university. Similar developments were taking place in Oxford, Bologna, Padua, and other centers of scholarship across Europe. Thomas came to Paris to live and work at the studium generale of the Dominicans in Saint Jacques, deliberately established in proximity to the other colleges and faculties of the university to allow the friars to get involved in the city’s intellectual life.

Already there were Dominican and Franciscan professors at Paris, older men who had decided to become friars and who brought their chairs with them, much to the consternation of the secular clergy. Thomas was fortunate to have as his teacher in Paris one of the greatest intellectuals of the Middle Ages, Albertus (Albert) Magnus (c. 1200–1280), a German with encyclopedic interests. Most significantly, Albert was collaborating with the then Master General of the Dominicans, Humbert of Romans, in promoting the study of Aristotle’s philosophy. Albert was writing commentaries on all Aristotle’s philosophical works, and Humbert was making the institutional changes necessary to ensure that natural philosophy would become a standard part of the friars’ training. Just as Albert finished his commentaries, Humbert established the first studium of natural philosophy (Mulchahey, 1998: 145, 262).

It is thought that Thomas may have begun his career at Paris as a member of the faculty of arts, completing his philosophical studies under Alexander and Arnoul of Provence. Others believe he went straight into the theology faculty (Torrell, 2002: 28–36). In any case, we can say that he studied philosophy and theology at Paris from 1245 and that he quickly became Albert’s collaborator and colleague. In 1248, Albert was asked to go to Cologne to set up a house of studies for the Dominicans there. He took Thomas with him as his student and assistant. This time spent within the Dominican educational system completed Thomas’s formal education. When he returned to Paris in 1252, it was to begin his career as a lecturer in theology.

Chapter 2

Teaching: Paris, Naples, Orvieto, and Rome

Having been a student in various institutions, Thomas went on to teach in different kinds of institutions. Between 1252 and 1259, he was lecturer (sententiarius, commentator on the Sentences of Peter Lombard) and then professor at Paris, holding a chair in the faculty of theology, but maintaining close relations with the faculty of arts whose members were as interested in the reception of Aristotle’s thought as Thomas and his colleagues in the theology faculty were. Arguments about Aristotle were to come later. The main controversy in which Thomas became involved during his first professorship at P...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 An Intellectual Biography of Thomas Aquinas
• Part 2 Critical Exposition of Aquinas’s Work
• Part 3 The Reception and Influence of Aquinas’s Work
• Bibliography
• Index of Persons and Subjects
• Copyright