Thomas Aquinas

Okay, here's an embarrassing one: for most of my academic life, Thomas Aquinas was my symbol for everything wrong with how institutions think about God.

Super confident. Extremely systematized. Twelve-line sentences in Latin. The three-thousand-five-hundred-page Summa Theologiae that gets assigned in undergrad theology as if it's a light weekend read.

He seemed like the opposite of honest spiritual seeking—someone who had already decided all the answers and was just filing them alphabetically.

Then I learned about his family kidnapping him, and something shifted.

A Noble Italian Family's Worst Nightmare

Thomas was born in 1225 into minor Italian nobility, and his family had a plan: he would become the prestigious abbot of the nearby Monte Cassino monastery—a position that would bring honor, land, and influence to everyone involved.

Thomas wanted to join the Dominicans. A new mendicant order that traveled, taught in universities, and owned nothing. Think: giving up a guaranteed legacy position to wander around being poor and asking hard questions. His family was horrified.

So they kidnapped him.

His brothers literally intercepted him on the road to Paris, carried him back to the family castle, and held him for over a year. His mother came to talk sense into him. They locked him in a room. According to the accounts, they even sent a woman to seduce him and break his vows.

He reportedly grabbed a burning log from the fireplace, chased her out, scorched a cross into the stone wall with the soot, and fell to his knees weeping.

He never broke. When they finally gave up, he walked back to the Dominicans without looking back.

I find that important. Before we even get to the philosophy: here is a man who knew what he was about. His certainty wasn't arrogance—it was conviction deep enough that a year of family pressure couldn't dent it.

The Dumb Ox

When Thomas finally got to the University of Paris, his classmates were not impressed. He was large, quiet, and didn't perform. While everyone else was showing off in debates, throwing around citations, trying to sound brilliant—Thomas sat in the back and thought.

They called him the Bue muto. The dumb ox. The big silent cow.

His teacher, Albertus Magnus, eventually had enough. He stopped the class one day and said: "You call him the Dumb Ox, but I tell you that the bellowing of that Ox will be heard throughout the world."

He was right.

What the classmates didn't understand is that Thomas was doing something different from everyone else. He wasn't performing intelligence. He was doing it. Slowly, carefully, in ways that produced work that lasted eight hundred years.

I think about this in conversations where everyone is trying to have the hottest take in real time. Thomas wasn't built for that. He was built for something else.

What the Summa Actually Is

Here's where I have to be honest: I have not read the Summa Theologiae. I've tried. I've gotten through maybe fifty pages before the architecture of objections and replies buries me.

But I've come to understand what it actually is, and it's not what its reputation suggests.

The Summa is not Thomas announcing he has all the answers. It's Thomas having an argument—with everyone who disagrees, including himself. He takes a question, then presents the strongest possible objections to his own position, then answers them one by one. He models intellectual honesty through the form itself: here is the strongest case against what I believe, and here is my response to it.

That's the opposite of what I assumed. I assumed he was a dogmatist building a fortress. He was actually a thinker building a conversation.

He was also trying to show that faith and reason aren't enemies—that you don't have to choose between them, that asking hard questions doesn't threaten God, that the intelligence you were given is something to use rather than suppress.

I find that more appealing the older I get.

The Parts That Bother Me

A few things, though, because I promised myself I'd stop doing the thing where I only mention the parts of saints that are comfortable.

Aquinas's views on women were bad by any standard, historical context included. He followed Aristotle in describing women as "defective males" and held that women couldn't teach or hold authority. He was wrong. This wasn't just unreflective medievalism—his contemporaries were arguing with him on this point. You can't celebrate someone's intellectual legacy without acknowledging where the intelligence went wrong. That's part of what "all is straw" means.

Also: the Five Ways—his famous arguments for God's existence—are hard to evaluate honestly. I've read defenses and critiques. Smart, careful people land on opposite sides. The First Way (everything that moves is moved by something, trace it back to an unmoved mover) is genuinely interesting. Whether it holds as a proof is a different question. I'm not qualified to adjudicate, and I'm suspicious of anyone who sounds too confident in either direction.

What I'm Still Sitting With

At the end of his life, Thomas had some kind of experience during Mass in Naples and put down his pen. His secretary begged him to finish the Summa. Thomas said: "All that I have written seems like straw to me."

I think about this constantly.

The person who did more than anyone to prove you can reason your way toward God ends his life in a silence no argument can reach. Not regret—he didn't burn his manuscripts. But something more disorienting: the best work of a great mind, held up next to what he touched, and called straw.

It doesn't mean the work was wasted. But it locates it. All the logic, all the beautiful systematic architecture—straw, compared to what he encountered.

I don't know what to do with that. I don't think it means reason is useless. But it means something about the limits of reason that I haven't finished working out.

A Place to Start

If you want to actually meet Aquinas, don't start with the Summa. Start with his Eucharistic hymns—Pange Lingua and Adoro Te Devote. They're genuinely gorgeous. The same mind that produced all that systematic theology was also writing poetry about encountering God in a piece of bread.

The distance between those two modes—the logical and the stunned—feels like a real person to me.

From there, maybe try one question of the Summa. Just one. Let Thomas argue with himself in front of you and see how it feels.

He's not who I thought he was. He's more interesting.