Description

St Thomas Aquinas Holy Card – Patron saint of Catholic Schools, universities and colleges

9 x 5cm – laminated card

St

.

Thomas Aquinas

was the greatest of the Scholastic philosophers. He produced a
comprehensive synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian
philosophy that influenced Roman Catholic doctrine for centuries and was
adopted as the official philosophy of the church in 1917.

In 1880,

Saint Thomas Aquinas

was declared

patron

of all Catholic educational establishments.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Biography

Early Life

The
son of Landulph, count of Aquino, Saint Thomas Aquinas was born circa
1225 in Roccasecca, Italy, near Aquino, Terra di Lavoro, in the Kingdom
of Sicily. Thomas had eight siblings, and was the youngest child. His
mother, Theodora, was countess of Teano. Though Thomas’ family members
were descendants of Emperors Frederick I and Henry VI, they were
considered to be of lower nobility.

Before Saint Thomas Aquinas
was born, a holy hermit shared a prediction with his mother, foretelling
that her son would enter the Order of Friars Preachers, become a great
learner and achieve unequaled sanctity.

Following the tradition
of the period, Saint Thomas Aquinas was sent to the Abbey of Monte
Cassino to train among Benedictine monks when he was just 5 years old.
In Wisdom 8:19, Saint Thomas Aquinas is described as “a witty child” who
“had received a good soul.” At Monte Cassino, the quizzical young boy
repeatedly posed the question, “What is God?” to his benefactors.

Saint Thomas Aquinas remained at the
monastery until he was 13 years old, when the political climate forced
him to return to Naples.

Education

Saint
Thomas Aquinas spent the next five years completing his primary
education at a Benedictine house in Naples. During those years, he
studied Aristotle’s work, which would later become a major launching
point for Saint Thomas Aquinas’s own exploration of philosophy. At the
Benedictine house, which was closely affiliated with the University of
Naples, Thomas also developed an interest in more contemporary monastic
orders. He was particularly drawn to those that emphasized a life of
spiritual service, in contrast with the more traditional views and
sheltered lifestyle he’d observed at the Abbey of Monte Cassino.

Circa
1239, Saint Thomas Aquinas began attending the University of Naples. In
1243, he secretly joined an order of Dominican monks, receiving the
habit in 1244. When his family found out, they felt so betrayed that he
had turned his back on the principles to which they subscribed that they
decided to kidnap him. Thomas’s family held him captive for an entire
year, imprisoned in the fortress of San Giovanni at Rocca Secca. During
this time, they attempted to deprogram Thomas of his new beliefs. Thomas
held fast to the ideas he had learned at university, however, and went
back to the Dominican order following his release in 1245.

From 1245 to 1252, Saint  Thomas Aquinas
continued to pursue his studies with the Dominicans in Naples, Paris and
Cologne. He was ordained in Cologne, Germany, in 1250, and went on to
teach theology at the University of Paris. Under the tutelage of Saint
Albert the Great, Saint Thomas Aquinas subsequently earned his doctorate
in theology. Consistent with the holy hermit’s prediction, Thomas
proved an exemplary scholar, though, ironically, his modesty sometimes
led his classmates to misperceive him as dim-witted. After reading
Thomas’s thesis and thinking it brilliant, his professor, Saint Albert
the Great, proclaimed in Thomas’s defense, “We call this young man a
dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout
the world!”

Theology and Philosophy

After
completing his education, Saint Thomas Aquinas devoted himself to a
life of traveling, writing, teaching, public speaking and preaching.
Religious institutions and universities alike yearned to benefit from
the wisdom of “The Christian Apostle.”

At the forefront of
medieval thought was a struggle to reconcile the relationship between
theology (faith) and philosophy (reason). People were at odds as to how
to unite the knowledge they obtained through revelation with the
information they observed naturally using their mind and their senses.
Based on Averroes’ “theory of the double truth,” the two types of
knowledge were in direct opposition to each other. Saint Thomas
Aquinas’s revolutionary views rejected Averroes’ theory, asserting that
“both kinds of knowledge ultimately come from God” and were therefore
compatible. Not only were they compatible, according to Thomas’s
ideology, but they could also work in collaboration: He believed that
revelation could guide reason and prevent it from making mistakes, while
reason could clarify and demystify faith. Saint Thomas Aquinas’s work
goes on to discuss faith and reason’s roles in both perceiving and
proving the existence of God.

Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that the existence of God could be
proven in five ways, mainly by: 1) observing movement in the world as
proof of God, the “Immovable Mover”; 2) observing cause and effect and
identifying God as the cause of everything; 3) concluding that the
impermanent nature of beings proves the existence of a necessary being,
God, who originates only from within himself; 4) noticing varying levels
of human perfection and determining that a supreme, perfect being must
therefore exist; and 5) knowing that natural beings could not have
intelligence without it being granted to them it by God. Subsequent to
defending people’s ability to naturally perceive proof of God, Thomas
also tackled the challenge of protecting God’s image as an all-powerful
being.

Saint Thomas Aquinas also uniquely addressed appropriate
social behavior toward God. In so doing, he gave his ideas a
contemporary—some would say timeless—everyday context. Thomas believed
that the laws of the state were, in fact, a natural product of human
nature, and were crucial to social welfare. By abiding by the social
laws of the state, people could earn eternal salvation of their souls in
the afterlife, he purported. Saint Thomas Aquinas identified three
types of laws: natural, positive and eternal. According to his treatise,
natural law prompts man to act in accordance with achieving his goals
and governs man’s sense of right and wrong; positive law is the law of
the state, or government, and should always be a manifestation of
natural law; and eternal law, in the case of rational beings, depends on
reason and is put into action through free will, which also works
toward the accomplishment of man’s spiritual goals.

Combining traditional principles of theology with modern philosophic
thought, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s treatises touched upon the questions and
struggles of medieval intellectuals, church authorities and everyday
people alike. Perhaps this is precisely what marked them as unrivaled in
their philosophical influence at the time, and explains why they would
continue to serve as a building block for contemporary thought—garnering
responses from theologians, philosophers, critics and
believers—thereafter.