My Confirmation Saint

← Every saint

St. Thomas Aquinas

He wrote the Summa Theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles, arguing that faith and reason cannot finally contradict each other, and he taught in the schools of Paris, Cologne, Rome and Naples for more than twenty years.

Feast January 28the Kingdom of Naples, and Paris

Died 1274 · Canonized 1323

He died at Fossa Nuova on 7 March 1274, and nothing disputes it. His birth is another matter. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives 1225 or 1227, and notes that there was already doubt about his age when he died; Benedict XVI gives 1224 or 1225. Three years are in play across the two sources held here, so no year of birth is recorded and no age at death follows from it.

A lifelong Catholic

Thomas Aquinas was the son of a count, and his family locked him up to stop him becoming a friar. He had been sent at five to the monks of Monte Cassino, where his teacher was struck by how often the child asked one particular question — what is God? — and years later, at Naples, he joined the Dominicans instead of taking the career his birth had arranged for him. His brothers caught him on the road at their mother's instance and held him in the family fortress for the better part of two years. He came out still a Dominican, lowered to his brethren in a basket.

The rest is teaching and writing. He studied under Albert the Great, who said of him: we call this young man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world. He took his doctorate at Paris in 1257, at the end of a long fight in which the university had tried to keep friars out of its chairs and it took eleven papal briefs to settle. He was appointed Archbishop of Naples in 1265 and begged, in tears, to be let off; the Summa Theologiae exists partly because he was.

His argument, across sixty-odd works, was that faith and reason cannot finally contradict each other, because both come from God.

On 6 December 1273 he stopped. He told his secretary that such things had been revealed to him that everything he had written now appeared of little value, and he never wrote again. He died three months later on the road to a council, at a Cistercian abbey, where he asked his hosts why servants of God should have to carry wood for his fire.

What they carried

The opposition was entirely domestic. His mother set it in motion, his brothers carried it out, and through the two years in the fortress his parents, brothers and sisters worked by various means to destroy the vocation. The people trying to break him were the ones who had raised him.

Patron of

  • Catholic universities, academies, colleges and schoolsformal

State of life

priest · friar · theologian · Doctor of the Church

Themes

questions and study · faith and reason · teaching · Eucharist · holding a vocation against family opposition

Benedict XVI on St Thomas Aquinas (General Audience, 2 June 2010)

  • THE WORD 'DOCTOR' ATTACHES TO HIM THREE DIFFERENT WAYS AND ONLY ONE OF THEM IS AN ACT. THIS WAS CHECKED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. (1) The UNIVERSITY DEGREE: he was 'admitted to the degree of Doctor in Theology' at Paris, and 'The date of his promotion, as given by many biographers, was 23 October, 1257' — note that the encyclopedia hedges the date rather than asserting it. (2) The TITLE DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH, a different act three centuries later: 'St. Pius V proclaimed St. Thomas a Doctor of the Universal Church in the year 1567.' A year only; no day, no month, no instrument named. Independently corroborated by the Universal Calendar, which prints him as 'Priest, Doctor of the Church'. (3) The EPITHETS, which are neither: the encyclopedia's headnote 'Angelicus Doctor', and Benedict XVI's 'the one whom the Church calls the Doctor communis' and 'He was also called the Doctor Angelicus, perhaps because of his virtues'. A record saying he was 'declared Angelic Doctor' would be wrong, and that is the easiest error to make here. WHERE (2) SITS ON THE THREE-WAY GRADIENT, NOW DEMONSTRABLE ACROSS FOUR RECORDS: he is the middle rung. Teresa of Ávila (Multiformis Sapientia Dei, 1970) and Hildegard of Bingen (the apostolic letter of 7 October 2012) hold the instruments themselves. He has the year and nothing else. Augustine has neither — three attestations of the title and no act at all. The claim reads the same on all four cards and rests on three different things.
  • born IS NULL BECAUSE TWO HELD SOURCES GIVE THREE YEARS AND NOTHING RESOLVES THEM. Catholic Encyclopedia headnote: 'Born at Rocca Secca in the Kingdom of Naples, 1225 or 1227'; its body adds that 'at the time of the saint's death there was a doubt about his exact age', that 'The end of 1225 is usually assigned', and that Father Prümmer 'thinks 1227 is the more probable date'. Benedict XVI, 2 June 2010: 'Thomas was born between 1224 and 1225'. Both are kept and neither is picked, and age_at_death follows. The death is not in doubt: 'All agree that he died in 1274', on 7 March.
  • THE PATRONAGE IS FORMAL AND IS THE CONTRAST CASE THAT GIVES THE TEST ITS TEETH. SCOPE OF THE CHECK: all four held documents were searched for 'patron'; four occurrences. The operative one is the Brief of 4 August 1880, quoted on the patronage itself, and it is corroborated by a second, independent, modern document. This is what a declaration looks like when it exists — which is worth stating in the same corpus that leaves Cecilia's and Nicholas's fields empty. DO NOT CONFUSE IT WITH THE ENCYCLICAL: Aeterni Patris of 4 August 1879 declared him 'the prince and master of all Scholastic doctors'. Same day of the year, one year earlier, a different instrument, and not a patronage.
  • AN OMISSION OF THE THIRD KIND — AUTHENTIC, LEFT OUT FOR CONTEXT, NOT FOR CREDIBILITY. The encyclopedia's account of the imprisonment includes this: 'The brothers even laid snares for his virtue, but the pure-minded novice drove the temptress from his room with a brand which he snatched from the fire', followed by two angels girding him with 'the girdle of perpetual virginity'. The passage is genuine to the source and is not in doubt as a piece of thirteenth-century hagiography. It is left out of the summary for the same reason Monica's counsel to the beaten wives of Tagaste is left out of hers: the episode as usually told cannot travel to a fourteen-year-old without the world that produced it, and this record cannot carry that world. Two further reasons for the call rather than against it. Benedict XVI, given three full audiences on the man in 2010, omits the whole episode and says only that 'his family opposed this decision and he was obliged to leave the convent and spend some time at home'. And the fifteenth-century telling is an embellishment on a thirteenth-century imprisonment that is itself well attested — so what remains in the struggles field is the part that does not depend on it. THE OMISSION IS RECORDED HERE BECAUSE A CHOICE THAT IS NOT WRITTEN DOWN LOOKS LIKE AN OVERSIGHT, AND THE NEXT READER OF THE ARTICLE WILL RESTORE IT.
  • HIS LIFE IS SEPARATED FROM HIS THOUGHT IN THIS RECORD, ON THE AUGUSTINE PRECEDENT, AND THAT DECISION SHAPED WHAT WAS FETCHED. The companion encyclopedia article 'Thomism' (14698b) is his thought rather than his life and was deliberately not fetched. The three Benedict XVI audiences held here are themselves overwhelmingly thought — the harmony of faith and reason, analogical language, grace perfecting nature, natural law, the structure of the Summa — and they already supply far more of it than a record of this length can carry. The summary therefore gives his argument one sentence and spends the rest on what happened to him. Benedict's own compression of the achievement, for anyone who wants the thought: 'Thomas Aquinas showed that a natural harmony exists between Christian faith and reason' (2 June 2010).
  • TWO NUMBERS AND ONE ATTRIBUTION WHERE THE HELD SOURCES DISAGREE, SO NONE OF THEM IS ASSERTED. (1) The size of the Summa: the encyclopedia gives '38 Treatises, 612 Questions, subdivided into 3120 articles, in which about 10,000 objections are proposed and answered'; Benedict XVI gives '512 questions and 2,669 articles'. Neither explains its count, so no figure is used. (2) The Office of Corpus Christi: the encyclopedia reports Mandonnet as declaring 'it is now established beyond doubt that St. Thomas is the author', naming Pange Lingua, Tantum Ergo, O Salutaris Hostia and Lauda Sion; Benedict, a century later, says only that the hymns 'are attributed to his faith and his theological wisdom'. The 1912 source is more confident than the 2010 one, so this record claims neither, and any future line saying he wrote Tantum Ergo must carry the gap.
  • THE CRUCIFIX AT NAPLES — SAME WORDS, DIFFERENT FRAMING, BOTH KEPT OUT OF THE SUMMARY. The encyclopedia places it at Naples in 1273 'after he had completed his treatise on the Eucharist', with 'three of the brethren' seeing him lifted in ecstasy; Benedict XVI places the same exchange in the chapel of St Nicholas at Naples, overheard by 'Domenico da Caserta, the church sacristan'. The words are identical in both — 'Thou hast written well of me, Thomas; what reward wilt thou have?' and 'None other than Thyself, Lord'. The divergence is in the setting, not the substance, and the summary uses the December 1273 silence instead, which both sources tell the same way.
  • Catholic Encyclopedia (Herbermann, 1907-1913), Daniel Kennedy, 'St. Thomas Aquinas', vol. 14 — source of the parents Landulph, Count of Aquino and Theodora, Countess of Teano; Monte Cassino at the age of five and the repeated question 'What is God?'; the Dominican habit taken 'Some time between 1240 and August, 1243'; the capture near Aquapendente and the detention at Rocca Secca; the release 'being lowered in a basket into the arms of the Dominicans'; Albert's 'We call this young man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world'; ordination at Cologne 'probably in 1250'; the refused Archbishopric of Naples under Clement IV in 1265; the pen laid aside on 6 December 1273 and 'I can do no more'; the collapse near Terracina; 'This is my rest for ever and ever'; the words to the Cistercians carrying his firewood; and the canonization 'by John XXII, 18 July, 1323'. NOTE: predates the 1969 reform and is not a source for the feast day. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14663b.htm
  • Benedict XVI, three consecutive General Audiences on St Thomas Aquinas, 2, 16 and 23 June 2010 — source of the birth dating 'between 1224 and 1225', the Dominican vocation formed at Naples, the friendship with Albert, Urban IV's commission for the Corpus Christi texts, the second Paris cycle in 1269, the December 1273 revelation after which everything he had written 'was worthless', the death at Fossanova, and the 1880 patronage. https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20100602.html
  • Feast 28 January, memorial. Universal Calendar, Liturgy Office of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, which prints '28 St Thomas Aquinas, Priest, Doctor of the Church — memorial'. The two encyclopedia mentions of a feast were not used: one is a passing reference to the lessons of the Breviary, and the article predates the 1969 reform in any case. https://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Calendar/Universal/JanUC.shtml
  • HIS TEACHER NOW HAS A RECORD, AND WRITING IT SHOWED THE FOUR DOCUMENTS DISAGREEING ABOUT WHERE THE TWO MEN MET. THE SUMMARY WAS AMENDED ON 2026-08-11 BECAUSE OF IT: it read 'He studied under Albert the Great at Cologne' and now reads 'He studied under Albert the Great', because the place was the one part of that sentence the sources will not carry. What is stable across all four documents: Albert went to Paris in 1245 and to Cologne in 1248, and Thomas was with him for both. What moves is which end the relationship started at. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA HAS COLOGNE FIRST AND HEDGES IT: John the Teutonic took Thomas 'to Paris and, according to the majority of the saint's biographers, to Cologne, where he arrived in 1244 or 1245, and was placed under Albertus Magnus' — and the dumb-ox exclamation follows, 'In the schools', with no place of its own. The article on Albert agrees: 'The disciple accompanied his master to Paris in 1245, and returned with him, in 1248, to the new Studium Generale of Cologne.' BENEDICT XVI READS IT THE OTHER WAY, PARIS FIRST: 'He was sent to Paris to study theology under the guidance of another Saint, Albert the Great ... Albert even wanted his disciple to follow him to Cologne' (2 June 2010). His catechesis on Albert is compatible with either — 'He brought with him from Paris an exceptional student, Thomas Aquinas' (24 March 2010). Neither record picks, both carry this note, and two cards contradicting each other was the thing worth avoiding. The friendship itself is not in doubt on any of the four.
  • convert IS FALSE. He was born to a noble Christian family and sent at the age of five to be educated by the Benedictines of Monte Cassino. Nothing in either held source suggests a reception into the Church at any point.
  • Every person working to break him belonged to his own household, and the encyclopedia is exact about it: 'At the instance of Theodora, Thomas's brothers, who were soldiers under the Emperor Frederick, captured the novice near the town of Aquapendente and confined him in the fortress of San Giovanni at Rocca Secca. Here he was detained nearly two years, his parents, brothers, and sisters endeavouring by various means to destroy his vocation.' One thing from the same passage is left out and is worth knowing: the captivity was where he read. His sister smuggled him the Scriptures, Aristotle's Metaphysics and the Sentences, and he emerged having 'made as much progress as if he had been in a studium generale'. It is left out because the summary has no room to narrate it. And the counterfactual about the Summa is the article's own, not this record's reading — in the sentence immediately after the refused archbishopric: 'Had this appointment been accepted, most probably the "Summa theologica" would not have been written.'