Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / St. Thomas Aquinas — The Catholic Genius His Own Family Tried to Stop
Transcript
- : A young man is locked in a tower. His own brothers put him there. Soldiers, both of them, serving in the Emperor's army. They had just ridden him down on a public road, dragged him off his horse, and hauled him back to the family castle against his will. His crime, in his family's eyes, is that he wants to become a friar. A poor, begging, humble friar. And his family has decided that is not going to happen. no matter what it takes to stop him. He will stay locked in that tower for a year. Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. If you are new here, welcome to our porch. Stick around and if this connects with you, subscribe so you don't miss next week. We drop a new saint every Thursday. Every other week on this show, we go to unfamiliar territory. Last week, that was a Roman martyr almost nobody has heard of, Saint Perpetua. This week, we go back to a name you absolutely know. Well, Sort of, even if you don't realize how much of your own thinking has been shaped by him. His name was Thomas Aquinas. And here's what I find remarkable about him before we even get into the story. You have used his ideas today, this week, this month, without ever hearing his name. Ever argue that something is just wrong? Not illegal, not unpopular, just wrong, deep down, no matter what any law says. That instinct has a name, and Aquinas is the man who built the case for it 800 years ago. Ever hear a politician or a general try to justify a war by saying it's necessary, it's proportional, it's a last resort? They are reciting an argument Aquinas wrote down in the 13th century, whether they know it or not. Go back to your high school health class or a debate about human rights or even an argument with a friend about right and wrong that started with the words, it's just human nature. Somewhere underneath that conversation is a framework this one man built, sitting quietly in the background of how the entire Western world has learned to argue about good and evil. You have been shaped by this man's mind your whole life. and almost nobody knows his name. And almost nobody knows that his own family locked him in a tower to stop him from becoming who he was supposed to be. This is the story of Saint Thomas Aquinas. We are starting around the year 1225, the castle of Rocaseca in the Kingdom of Sicily, what is now central Italy, a rugged hill country with fortified stone castles that controlled the roads and valleys beneath them. Thomas is born into a family that has real standing. His father, Landolf, is a count. His mother, Theodora, is a countess with bloodlines that reach back to emperors. So this is not minor nobility. This is a family with land, soldiers, and political weight in a region where power was measured in exactly those terms. And Thomas is the youngest of nine children, which, in a medieval noble family, was its own kind of fate. The oldest sons inherit land and title. The younger sons go into the church, not necessarily out of devotion, but because the church was where ambitious families parked sons who needed a respectable, powerful career path that didn't compete with the family inheritance. At five years old, Thomas is sent to the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. Picture this. A five-year-old child handed over to monks, beginning an education that his parents have already mapped out in their minds. They are not hoping he becomes a monk who prays quietly in a corner. They are hoping he becomes the abbot of Monte Cassino, one of the most powerful, wealthy, politically connected religious positions in Southern Italy. A position that would extend the family's influence for another generation. Thomas thrives there. He is, by every account, a serious, quiet, unusually thoughtful child. The kind a student monks notice. He falls in love with the rhythm of the monk's lives. Prayer, study, silence. It suits something in him. War interrupts this plan. Conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope spills out into the region. and Monte Casino becomes unsafe. Thomas is moved to the University of Naples to continue his education. And in Naples, at around age 19, everything his family had carefully planned for him starts to come apart. At the University of Naples, Thomas encounters something his noble family had never anticipated factoring into his education. a renewed religious order called the Dominicans. Now, the Dominicans were shockingly different from the kind of established wealthy monk life Thomas had been raised to expect. They were friars, not monks, meaning they didn't stay enclosed in a monastery with land and income. They lived in poverty. They begged for their food. They walked from town to town, preaching in the streets and marketplaces. teaching ordinary people, living among the poor rather than above them. For a noble family in the 13th century, this was close to scandalous. Begging was something done by the desperate, not by the sons of counts. A young nobleman choosing to become a Dominican friar was, in the eyes of his own class, choosing to throw away his birthright for a life that looked from the outside. like voluntary poverty and humiliation. But Thomas was drawn to it anyway. He met a Dominican preacher named John of St. Julian and something about the order's combination of rigorous study and radical humility captured him completely. Not the power of Monte Cassino, not the title of Abbot, but this. In April of 1244, at 19 years old, Thomas received the Dominican habit. Now, that phrase needs a little explaining and I had to research what this was. A habit is the formal robe and belt worn by a monk or friar. For the Dominicans, it was a white tunic, a black cloak over it, and a rosary hanging from a leather belt. Receiving the habit was the ceremony where you were formally and publicly accepted into the order. The moment the commitment became real, visible and very hard to walk back. Thomas made his decision. His mother, Theodora, was, by every account, devastated. She immediately set out for Naples to retrieve her son and bring him home before the decision could harden into something permanent. The Dominicans, sensing the danger, tried to move Thomas out of reach, sending him towards Rome, then onwards towards Paris. hoping to get him far enough from his family's grasp that the matter would just simply be settled by distance. It did not work. Thomas's brothers, soldiers serving in the army of Emperor Frederick II, intercepted him on the road near a town called Acqua Pendente. Picture the scene precisely. A young man recently committed to a vow of poverty and humility traveling in the simple habit of a beggar friar, confronted on a public road by his own brothers in full military gear. There was no negotiation. They pulled him from his traveling party and took him by force. He was brought to the family fortress of San Giovanni near Rocosecca, which is about 25 miles from Monte Cassino. And yes, I did use Google Maps for that. Anyways, in the fortress, the door was locked. For nearly a year, Thomas Aquinas, a man who would become one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western civilization, was held prisoner by his own family in his own family's castle. His parents' strategy was simple. Isolate him completely from the Dominicans. Cut off every outside influence. Wait him out. Surely, given enough time and enough comfort and enough family pressure, the boy would come to his senses. He did not come to his senses, or rather, by his family's definition of sense, he never did. By his own, he never wavered from it. His sisters, who were permitted to visit him, found him calm, studying. He spent the months of his imprisonment reading whatever he could get his hands on, reportedly including most of the Bible. and a significant portion of Aristotle's work, which he had access to through whatever books his sisters managed to smuggle in. He used the captivity itself as an extension of his own education. The tower that was meant to break him became, in his own quiet way, a classroom. His brothers tried one more thing, frustrated that isolation and comfort weren't not working. The two of them arranged for a woman to be brought into his cell, a deliberate attempt to break his vow of chastity, and with it, his entire vocation in one stroke. They account of what happened next very slightly in their details, but the core of the story has been told consistently for nearly 800 years. Thomas drove her from the room. using a burning piece of wood pulled from the fireplace to force her out and then locked the door behind her. And then, according to his own later account, given privately to his secretary years afterward, he knelt and prayed, asking God for the strength to remain faithful to what he had chosen. He said he received, in that moment, an assurance that he would never again be seriously tempted in that particular way for the rest of his life. Now, whatever you make of the elements of that account, what is not in dispute is this. A 19-year-old boy, locked in a tower by his own family, faced with every available tool his brothers could use to break him, did not break him. Eventually, his mother, recognizing she could not force her son to change his mind, but also unwilling to be seen publicly losing this battle of wills against her son, arranged for his quiet escape through a window, lowered down by a rope in the middle of the night. A private defeat dressed up as something that hadn't quite happened. Thomas walked free. He went straight back to the Dominicans. Free from his family at last, Thomas went to study under a Dominican teacher named Albert the great, one of the most respected scholars in Europe. Thomas was a large man, physically imposing, slow to speak, deliberate in his movements. His fellow students, not yet understanding what was actually happening inside his mind, nicknamed him the dumb ox, not cruelly necessarily, just descriptively. He didn't perform brilliance the way some students do. jumping in quickly with clever remarks and answering questions quickly. He sat. He just listened. He just thought. Albert the Great saw something the other students missed. There's a story, almost certainly embellished over the centuries, but carrying real truth at its core, that after observing Thomas quietly working through a complex theological problem that had stumped the rest of the class, Albert said, and this is the quote, we call him the dumb ox, but this ox will one day bellow so loud, the whole world will hear him. For the next several decades, Thomas did exactly that. He taught in Paris, in Cologne, in Rome, in Naples. He was summoned by popes. At one point, he was even offered the chance to become the archbishop of Naples. Basically, the top religious authority over the entire city, one of the most powerful and prestigious positions the church could offer anywhere in Italy. He turned it down. He chose instead to keep teaching and writing as a humble Dominican friar with no land, no title, and no power beyond the strength of his own arguments. Now, think about that for a second. As a boy, his family had wanted him to become an abbot. the head of a monastery, basically the person in charge of all the monks, the land, and the money that came with it. As a grown man, he was handed something even bigger than what they'd ever dreamed for him. And he said, And what he wrote during those years changed the trajectory of Western thought. He took the philosophy of Aristotle, a pagan Greek thinker writing centuries before Christ, and showed methodically and patiently how reason and faith were not enemies, that you could use careful, rigorous, logical argument to investigate the existence of God, the nature of morality, the structure of justice, and arrive somewhere true. His great work, the Summa Theologica, attempts nothing less than a complete systematic account of theology and philosophy together. God, creation, human nature, virtue, law, and salvation organized with the kind of structural precision that still leaves scholars astonished eight centuries later. This is where the part of the story most people miss really matters. Aquinas' framework for natural law, the id- idea that there is a moral order built into human nature itself, discoverable through reason, that exists prior to and independent of any specific religious revelation, became foundational to how the Western world thinks about justice and human dignity and law. When later thinkers argued that human beings possess inherent rights simply by virtue of being a human, That framework owes an enormous debt to Aquinas. When the Catholic Church speaks today about the dignity of the human person or about what makes a war just or unjust, it is still drawing on categories Aquinas built 800 years ago. You have been shaped by this man's mind whether you ever knew his name or not. By the early 1270s, Thomas Aquinas was the most famous theologian in Christianity. He had written more in his lifetime than most people could read in several lifetimes. He was still working, still teaching, still pushing forward on what would become his master work. And then, on the feast of St. Nicholas in December of 1273, something happened that he would never fully explain. He was at a mass in Naples. in the chapel of St. Nicholas, praying before an image of the crucified Christ. Witnesses, including those in the chapel, reported seeing him weeping and apparently lifted slightly off the ground in prayer. According to the account passed down by his own secretary, a voice came to him from the crucifix. Thou hast written well of me, Thomas. What reward will you have? Thomas answered. Nothing except you. Whatever happened in that chapel, something in Thomas changed completely and immediately. He stopped writing, not gradually, but immediately. His secretary begged him to return to his life's work to finish the Summa Theologica, the masterwork he had poured years into and which remained unfinished. Thomas's answer has echoed for 800 years. I cannot, because all that I have written seems like a straw to me now." Now picture that. A man who had built one of the most towering intellectual achievements in human history looked at all of it, every page, every argument, every carefully constructed proof, and called it straw. Not because it was wrong, not because the arguments failed, but because whatever he had seen however briefly made the achievement of his entire life's work seem suddenly, completely small. He never wrote another word of theology. A few months later, traveling to a church council, he struck his head on a low tree branch and fell seriously ill. He was taken to the monastery of Fasanova to recover. He died there on March 7th, 1274. He was 49 years old. All right, back on the porch. I keep coming back to the straw. mean, here's a man who spent his entire adult life building something, carefully, methodically, page by page, argument by argument, convinced that what he was doing mattered enormously. And in a single moment, given a glimpse of something larger, he looked at the whole towering achievement and called it straw. I don't think that means the Summa didn't matter. mean, 800 years of scholars, theologians, and ordinary believers who have been shaped by it would tell you otherwise. I think what it means is something more specific to all of us. That even our best work, our most serious accomplishments, the things we have organized our entire identity around building, are still smaller than the thing they are pointing towards. We build careers. We build reputations. We build elaborate intellectual frameworks for understanding our lives. The same way Thomas built his frameworks for understanding God and justice and human nature. And most of us never get the glimpse Thomas got. The one that put it all in perspective in an instant. But maybe we don't need the vision to learn the lesson. Maybe we can just take Thomas's word for it. The straw is not nothing, but it is not everything either. Whatever you are building right now, your career, your reputation, the version of yourself you are constructing one careful decision at a time. Hold it a little more loosely than you currently are. It is good work. It might even be great work, but it is not the thing itself. So, the practical challenge this week. Identify the one accomplishment or project you are most attached to right now. The thing you'd be most tempted to call your straw, if you are honest. Not to abandon it, just to ask yourself, am I holding this as if it's everything, or am I holding it as a good and useful thing pointing towards something bigger than itself? All right, it is time now for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Thomas. Thank you for a brilliant mind that shows poverty over power, even when his own family locked him in a tower to stop him. For everyone listening who is building something right now, a career, a reputation, a body of work they are pouring everything into, give them a little of Thomas's perspective at the end. Not to make them stop building. just to help them remember what all of it is pointing towards. And for anyone who feels locked in their own tower right now, boxed in by family expectations, by other people's plans for their life, by pressure to become something they were never meant to be, give them Thomas's quiet, patient resolve. Help them use whatever time they are given, even the hardest and most confined seasons, to keep becoming who they actually are. We love you, even when we can't yet see what all our straw is pointing towards. Amen. One more thing before we go. Thomas Aquinas is the patron saint of Catholic universities, colleges, and schools, which makes complete sense given that nearly every serious Catholic institution of higher learning still teaches some version of his thought. He is also somewhat charmingly a patron saint invoked by students and academics struggling with their studies, which feels appropriate for a man once dismissed by his own classmates as the dumb ox. He was canonized less than 50 years after his death, remarkably fast for the medieval church, and declared a doctor of the church in 1567. His feast day is January 28th. The man whose own family locked him in a tower to stop him from becoming a poor begging friar became one of the most powerful intellectual forces the Catholic Church has ever produced. They wanted him to be an abbot. He became something they could have never imagined and could never have planned for. That is episode seven of Everyday Saints. If Thomas' story hits you somewhere, share it, one person, someone who might be in their own tower right now, waiting for the moment they can walk back out and become who they actually are. Leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely helps more people find the show. Next week, we go looking again in the places nobody else looks. A little girl so unwanted by her own parents that they sealed her away and walked off. She turned out to be one of the most joyful people anyone in that town had ever met. Well, I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on our porch with us, and I will see you next week.