Medieval Europe · 1225–1274
Thomas Aquinas
Dominican friar who wove Aristotle into Christian theology
Reason and faith are two roads to one truth: reason can prove that God exists, through the “five ways”, while revelation adds what reason cannot reach. In every creature, its essence is distinct from its act of existing; only in God are they one.
Life and thought
Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 at Roccasecca, south of Rome, to a noble family that expected him to become abbot of Monte Cassino. Instead he joined the new Dominican order of begging friars; his brothers held him captive for about a year, but he persisted, studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne, and taught in Paris, Naples and Italian priories. In December 1273 he stopped writing, saying that all he had written seemed like straw, and he died in 1274.
Aquinas built a synthesis in which reason and revelation are two routes to one truth. Reason, working from what the senses show, as Aristotle taught, can prove that God exists: things move and are caused, the chain cannot run back forever, so there is a first mover and first cause, the “five ways”. Revelation adds what reason cannot reach. In every creature what it is differs from the fact that it is; only in God are essence and existence the same. Partly condemned in 1277 and canonised in 1323, he later became the Catholic Church’s official philosopher.