Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Doctor of the Church
January 28 · d. 1274
also known as Thomas of Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis
Thomas Aquinas, born at Roccasecca in the Kingdom of Sicily about 1225 and dead at Fossanova on 7 March 1274, was a Dominican friar and teacher at Paris and in Italy. He wrote the Summa Theologiae, the Summa contra Gentiles, and the office of Corpus Christi. He stopped writing three months before he died. The Church canonized him in 1323 and named him a Doctor of the Church in 1567.
Thomas Aquinas was the youngest of nine children born to a family of castle-holding nobility near Aquino, allied to the emperor and confident of its own standing. At about five years old he was handed over to the Benedictines of Monte Cassino as an oblate, and the plan for his life was already settled: he would be abbot there one day, and the family would have its abbey. When the emperor's quarrel with the pope emptied the abbey of its monks, Thomas was sent instead to the schools at Naples, where he studied the liberal arts and met, for the first time, friars who owned nothing and begged their bread. He asked to join them. He took the Dominican habit at Naples, against everything his family wanted for him.
His brothers, soldiers in the emperor's service, rode out and took him on the road north. They shut him up in the family castles for the better part of two years to wear him down. A sister brought him books. His brothers, by the account he later confided to his companion Reginald of Piperno, sent a woman into the room to break his chastity; Thomas snatched a burning brand out of the fire, drove her out, marked a cross on the door, and that night two angels girded him, saying, "We gird thee with the girdle of perpetual virginity." Whether the story is remembered exactly as it happened, the Dominicans have carried it since the canonization inquiries as the shape of what that captivity cost him. He came out of it a Dominican still.
He went north to study, and at Cologne he was put under Albert the Great. He was large and he was silent, and the other students called him the dumb ox. Albert, who had read his work, answered them: "We call this young man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world." It did. Thomas became a master of theology at Paris in 1257, and wrote for the rest of his life at a pace almost nobody has matched: the Summa contra Gentiles, the enormous Summa Theologiae, commentaries on Aristotle, arguments against the masters who denied that each person has a soul of his own. Pope Urban IV asked him in 1264 to write the office for the new feast of Corpus Christi, and the man who could argue anything wrote poems instead: Pange Lingua, whose fifth stanza the whole Western church still sings at Benediction, and Lauda Sion, and Sacris Solemniis, and Verbum Supernum Prodiens. Faith supplies, he wrote there, where the senses fail. When Pope Clement IV made him Archbishop of Naples in 1265, he wept and begged to be let off, and was.
Then on 6 December 1273, something happened to him during Mass at Naples, and he stopped. Reginald, who had been at his side for years, pressed him to go back to the Summa, which broke off in the middle of its treatment of penance and was never finished. Thomas said he could not. Reginald asked again. "I can write no more," he said. "All that I have written seems like straw." He set out in January, already ill, for the council the pope had summoned him to at Lyon, and got no further than the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, where the monks took him in. He made his last confession to Reginald and died there on 7 March 1274.
The monks buried him, and almost at once people came to the grave and cures were reported there. Forty-five years later the Church took sworn testimony about him at Naples and then at Fossanova, from more than a hundred and forty witnesses, and canonized him at Avignon in 1323. His relics rest today at the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, and in 2024 they were carried through that church in procession, seven hundred and fifty years after the man who called his own work straw laid down his pen.
You have almost certainly been told that Thomas Aquinas wrote more than anyone, and that at the end he called all of it straw. It is easy to hear that as a rebuke to study, and it is not one: this is the man who prayed for acuteness in understanding what he read and clearness in expressing it, and who held that the last end of the universe is the good of the intellect, and that this is truth. The straw remark is not the abandonment of that work but its measure against something he had glimpsed. It is worth asking which of the two halves you actually need this week. If you have been careless with your mind, treating thought as beneath faith, he is against you. If you have been quietly proud of your understanding, he is against you too. What is the work in front of you that you would want to be found doing, and could you also bear to be shown that it was small?
Thomas is among the best-documented figures of the thirteenth century, and yet the documentation is uneven in a way worth naming at the start. The prose corpus is secure: transmitted continuously in manuscript and print, copied on an industrial scale within a generation of composition through the Paris pecia system, and now edited critically in the Editio Leonina, founded by Leo XIII in 1879 and still incomplete after some 39 volumes. The life, by contrast, comes to us chiefly through the canonization process of 1318 to 1323 and through the lives written in the same years by William of Tocco, Peter Calo, and Bernard Gui. Tocco was the postulator of the cause and a Dominican who had known Thomas at Naples; Calo and Gui drew on the same community memory. These are best treated as one family of related accounts rather than three independent witnesses, and they were gathered by men with an interest in demonstrating sanctity. Ptolemy of Lucca, a student of Thomas who became Bishop of Torcello, gives a separate account inside a general church history.
The birth year is not settled and will not be. Most reference works assign the end of 1225; the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Peter Calo's Vita supports 1227, and Britannica brackets 1224 to 1225. The reason is documented rather than modern: Ptolemy of Lucca records that at the time of Thomas's death there was already doubt about his exact age, so every birth year is a back-calculation from an age that a near-contemporary did not know. No register survives to settle it. The date of death, by contrast, is not disputed: 7 March 1274, at Fossanova.
Two further dates are contested between sources rather than merely uncertain. The Catholic Encyclopedia puts the move from Monte Cassino to Naples at about 1236 and the taking of the Dominican habit between 1240 and August 1243; modern scholarship (Torrell) gives 1239 and about 1244. This account follows the earlier chronology where it must choose, and notes the disagreement rather than averaging it. The ordination is weaker still: the Catholic Encyclopedia says only that he was raised to the priesthood at Cologne "probably in 1250," by Conrad of Hochstaden, and no document confirms it.
The cause of death carries three accounts that coexist. The devotional one attributes the cessation of his writing on 6 December 1273 to what was shown him at Mass, and offers no medical cause at all. The second is a poisoning: Dante, in Purgatorio XX, written within forty-five years of the death, has Hugh Capet accuse Charles I of Anjou of having Thomas poisoned to keep him from testifying at Lyon. That is evidence of what was believed early, not of what happened. The third is a clinical-historical hypothesis published in World Neurosurgery in 2024, arguing from a chronicle account of a head-strike against a fallen tree on the road and from symptoms consistent with a chronic subdural haematoma; the team examined the skull relic at Priverno directly and reports that examination as inconclusive, so the case rests on textual analysis. None of the three is settled, and this page does not adjudicate between them.
Devotion began at the grave. The Cistercians of Fossanova recorded pilgrims and cures at the tomb almost at once, and kept the body for nearly a century, resisting the Dominicans' claim to it. In 1369 Urban V ordered it released, and the relics were installed at the Dominican church in Toulouse, the Jacobins, on 28 January. The Revolution scattered that arrangement: the convent was seized and the relics moved to the Basilica of Saint-Sernin, where a sarcophagus of gold and silver was blessed by Cardinal Desprez in 1878. They returned to the restored Church of the Jacobins in 1974, and are there still, carried in procession in 2024 for the 750th anniversary of the death. A skull venerated at the cathedral of Priverno, reportedly found in the altar at Fossanova in 1585 with notarized documents, complicates the account; the authentication question is genuinely open.
The feast was fixed at 7 March, his death day, in 1323. In the 1969 revision of the General Roman Calendar it moved to 28 January, the date of the Toulouse translation, because 7 March fell regularly inside Lent, where feasts are suppressed. Commontide follows that reasoning. The older date is kept in the Extraordinary Form, by some Dominican communities, and locally at Fossanova and Roccasecca.
In art he is shown in the black and white Dominican habit with a book or an open Summa, and often a chalice or a monstrance for the Corpus Christi office; a dove at his ear for the inspiration behind the writing; a radiant emblem on his breast; and an ox, the schoolboys' insult turned into an honour. A crucifix at San Domenico Maggiore in Naples is shown as the one that spoke to him, saying he had written well and asking what reward he would have, and receiving the answer that he wanted nothing but the Lord himself. The legend took its present form long after his death; the crucifix is still displayed there.
The prose is quoted here from the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, whose translation of the Summa Theologica first appeared in 1911 and was revised in 1920, and whose Summa contra Gentiles was made from the Leonine text (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne). The scholarly standard in English is now the bilingual Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae, 60 volumes with an index, under Thomas Gilby, published 1964 to 1973 and reissued by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Albert the Great's retort about the dumb ox, the imprisonment, the angelic girding, the declining of the see of Naples, and the relic history through 1878 are all given in the Catholic Encyclopedia article "St. Thomas Aquinas" (1911), which remains the fullest single English synthesis of the medieval lives and is in the public domain. The "straw" remark is quoted in the English form printed by the Christian History Institute; it was reported at the Naples canonization inquiry of 1319 by Bartholomew of Capua, who had it from John del Giudice, who had it from Reginald of Piperno. Pange Lingua is quoted from the Latin as transmitted in the Roman Breviary, with the English of Edward Caswall, first published in Lyra Catholica (1849) and here as printed in Catholic Hymns (1860). The opening chapter of the Summa contra Gentiles is Book I, chapter 1; the article on the necessity of revelation is Prima Pars, question 1, article 1. For the death, see G. J. LeBeau and others, "A Plausible Historical and Forensic Account of the Death of Thomas Aquinas," World Neurosurgery 182 (2024), 45 to 51.
S. Thomas Aquinas, of the order of the friars preachers, was a right sovereign doctor, high and of noble lineage, which was born in the realm of Sicily, and tofore that he was born he was shewed by divine purveyance. For in those parts there was a holy man in work and in renomee which with many other hermits led a right holy life, and all the people had him in great reverence. This holy man, replenished of the Holy Ghost, came to the lady and mother of this holy child, not yet born, and with great joy said to her that she had conceived a son, and she supposed that she had not conceived. Then the holy man said to her: Lady, be you glad, for you shall bring forth a child which shall be called Thomas, and shall have great name and renomee through all the world in science and in holy life, and he shall be of the order of the friar, preachers. All the which things like as the holy hermit has said were accomplished in the name of the Saviour of the world, and to the glory of his glorious saint. When the child was born he was called Thomas by his right name. He had the world and the vanity thereof in despite, and for to live in the more holy and clean life he entered into the order of the friars preachers, and after, he was drawn out thereof by his brethren, and was closed up in a chamber in a tower two years. And because that by menaces ne fair words his brethren might not change his good purpose ne revoke it in no manner, they put in to his chamber a young damsel to the innocent child, for to subvert his good courage, and anon he took a brand of fire, and drove the damsel out of the chamber, which was come for to deceive him.
And after that, he put him in humble prayers, devoutly beseeching our Lord that by his benign grace he would always maintain his chastity. Anon as he had made his prayers two angels in marvellous habit appeared to him, saying that his prayer was heard of God, and they distrained him by the reins, saying: Thomas, we be sent to you by the commandment of God, and in his name we gird you with the girdle of chastity, which shall never depart from you, ne shall be broken. The which gift was given to him of special grace, and was in him so fast and firm that he never after felt pricking of his flesh, and so kept him as long as he lived, as it appeared hereafter in his life. When he surmounted one of his adversaries with his ministers, his good mother considering and having mind of that which the good man had told to her, and shewed how he should be of the order of the friars preachers, and let him to be led to them peaceably, notwithstanding that tofore his brethren would have empeshed him of the entering in to the order, and of his study. For when he was returned in to the order by consent of his good mother he began to study, which was as sweet to him as it is to the bee to make the honey, and like as of the bee the honey is multiplied, right so in like wise was by this glorious doctor the honey of holy scripture. Whereof he made marvellous books in theology, logic, philosophy, natural and moral, upon the evangiles, in so much that the holy church throughout all the world of his holy science is replenished. And as he thus profited he was sent to Paris. Then his brethren, heard that he should depart, anon came after him, saying that it appertained not that a child of so great lineage as he was, should be in the order of mendicants ne of truants, and all to-rent his coat and cope, and would have taken him away from his good purpose. And when he was restored to the order to serve and give praising to our Lord, he set all his intent to study, in thinking on God when he was in contemplation that his thought was replenished with great joy. For many times were, as he was in a secret place and set all his intent in prayer, he was seen lifted up many times without aid of anything corporal. This then is well a holy doctor, for thus as he set not his thought in this world, he set all his heart and his thought toward God, and was enhanced as he that had not had no flesh ne bone, ne any weight. We read that the blessed doctor desputed, read, or wrote, or argued, or did some other virtuous thing, and after when his prayer was past, anon he had in his mouth that which he should dispute or write as if he had tofore long studied in many books. All which things he shewed secretly to his fellow, named friar Reynold. To whom privily he shewed all his other secrets as long as he lived, and would that none other should know it, to the end that the vain glory of the world should not surprise him. For the science that he had was not of human study, but was of the administration divine by the prayers and service that he did to our Lord. This holy man is then as Moses was, which was given to the daughter of Pharaoh. For like as he was taken out of the sea and saved and rendered unto the said daughter, right so the blessed doctor, not withstanding that he was born of the great lineage of the Earl of Alquin was by the purveyance of God rendered to his mother holy church, and cast out of the flood of this world, and enhanced and nourished by the paps and mammels of the scripture of holy church. And like as Moses made many marvellous signs tofore the children of Israel, in Iike wise has this blessed doctor and his science and blessed doctrine in destroying errors always preached verity and truth, as his holy life witnesses.
As on a night this glorious doctor was in his orisons and prayers, the blessed apostles Peter and Paul appeared to him and induced him in holy scripture, and especially of the prophecy of prophets all entirely and holy. This then is a holy doctor to whom the chancellor of heaven and the doctor of divine scripture have opened the gate; and he that was ravished to heaven has shewed to him the secret of all the verity. And thus this blessed doctor is taken from the world and made burgess of heaven he being yet in the earth.
On another time as he was in the convent of his order at Naples, being in the church in devout prayers he was enhanced and lifted up from the ground the height of two cubits and more. Then a friar that saw him was much abashed and amarvelled, and after, was heard a clear voice of the image of the crucifix tofore whom the holy man was turned and made his prayer, the which voice said unto him: O Thomas, you have written of me, what reward will you have for your labour? S. Thomas answered to him: Lord, I will none other reward but yourself; for he himself wrote in his time and made the service and office of the precious sacrament of the altar. And for as much as on a time a question was moved among the scholars of Paris how the accidents might by right be without subject, and hereof made they doubt, and determined all wholly unto that which the glorious doctor should say, which thing he clearly shewed to them. And for so much as said is that the demand or question was moved of our Lord, it was given to understand of the end of his life which was nigh. And as he was sent for of the Pope Gregory the tenth, he went by Champagne into the realm of Sicily, he began to be sick in such wise that he lost entirely his appetite. And in passing by the abbey called Fossenew of the order of the Cistercians, he was prayed greatly of the monks that it would please him to come to their abbey. His sickness began for to increase from day to day, and yet notwithstanding his malady, he ceased not to sow and spread his holy doctrine of divine scripture and sapience, and then he was prayed of the monks for to expound to them the canticles.
And that time it happed that in that monastery was seen a star three days tofore his death in manner of a sun, whereof they were abashed what it might signify, but certainly it signified that the holy man should depart out of this world within three days, and that appeared well, for when the holy man was dead the star was no more seen, and it was in the year of our Lord twelve hundred and fifty-four. And anon brother Reynold, his fellow, witnessed in truth, part saying and openly preaching in this wise; I, friar Reynold, have heard many times and now, the confession of this glorious doctor, and have always found him clean and net as a child of five years of age, for he never consented ne had will in mortal ne deadly sin. And it is not to be forgotten what marvellous tokens were shewed when the blessed doctor should depart out of this world and of the entry of the perdurable felicity which was granted to him. For a friar, much devout, saw in the hour of his death the holy doctor reading in the school, and S. Paul entering into him. And S. Thomas demanded him if he had had good and true understanding in his epistles. Then S. Paul answered to him: Yea, as good as any creature living might have. And above that S. Paul said to him: I will that you come with me and I shall lead you to a place where you shall have of all things more clear understanding. And it seemed to the friar that S. Paul drew S. Thomas out of the school by his cope. Then this friar began to cry, saying: Help brethren, for friar Thomas is taken from us, and by the voice of this friar the other friars awoke and demanded that friar what he had. Then he told to them and expounded this said vision, and the friars made inquisition of the truth, and found that it was so as the friar had said, for in the same hour that the friar had so cried, the holy doctor departed out of this world. And like as he had had in divine sapience and science a doctor and teacher, right so in his passing he had a leader unto the glory perdurable. And long after that he was put in his sepulchre, the monks doubted that the holy corpse should have been taken away against their will, for the glorious doctor had commanded that his body should be borne to Naples, forasmuch as he was of that place. Wherefore the monks translated his body from one place to another, wherefore the prior of the abbey was in the night grievously reproved in a vision of S. Thomas. The prior, which doubted the judgment and sentence divine, commanded that the body of the Saint should be remised in the place that they had taken it from, and as soon as the sepulchre was opened there issued so great and sweet an odour that all the cloister was replenished therewith, and it seemed not that anybody had been buried there, but it seemed that there had been all manner of spices, which body they found all whole in all his members. The habit of his order, his cope, his scapulary and coat, were all without any evil corruption, and the odour of his precious body and his habit were sweet smelling by evident witnesses seven years after that he was translated, and the body was translated all whole. Our blessed Lord has honoured his blessed saint with many marvellous signs and miracles. By his benefits and merits he has raised some from death and some from wicked spirits, and from the puissance of the fiend, and many from divers maladies, which have been brought to health by the grace of God and the merits of this glorious saint.
We read also that there was a friar much devout, called brother Albert, which on a day was much devoutly in prayers tofore the altar of the Virgin Mary, and two reverend persons, marvellously shining, appeared to him. That one of those twain was in the habit of a bishop and the other in the habit of friars preachers, which had a crown on his head round beset with precious stones, and about his neck two collars, one of silver, the other of gold, and on his breast he had a great stone which of his brightness cast out many rays of clearness and illumined all the church, his cope that he had on was full of precious stones, his coat and scapulary were all shining of whiteness. When the friar saw this sight he marvelled much. Then he, that was in the habit of a bishop, said to him: I am Austin, that am sent to you to the end that I may show the glory of brother Thomas Aquinas which is in heaven in glory like unto me, but he precedes me in the order of virginity, and I him in dignity pontifical. Many other signs and miracles has our Lord showed unto the honour and glory of his glorious saint, S. Thomas, whose merits be unto us aidant and helping. Amen.
One more thing belongs here plainly. On 7 March 1277, three years after his death, Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, condemned 219 propositions circulating in the Arts faculty, and roughly twenty of them touch positions associated with Thomas's teaching. He was not condemned by name, and a parallel curial inquiry aimed at him personally was left incomplete when it was halted during the papal vacancy of that year. The condemnation was later lifted insofar as it touched his teaching, and he was canonized in 1323, declared a Doctor of the Church by Pius V in 1567, and named "the prince and master of all Scholastic doctors" by Leo XIII in the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 4 August 1879.
British (Received Pronunciation): Disputatae /ˌdɪspjuːˈtɑːteɪ/; Doctor Angelicus /ˈdɒktər ænˈdʒɛlɪkəs/; Doctor Communis /ˈdɒktər kəˈmjuːnɪs/; Hostia /ˈhɒstiə/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Thomas Aquinas, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.