In a review of Denys Turner’s Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait, James R. Kelly looks at the human behind the holy saint:
We learn that Thomas disappointed his ambitious parents when he joined the recently formed
Dominicans, who sided with the era’s 99 percent with their off-putting vow of poverty and their street-preaching, that he did grow fat and balding, that he knew no Greek, that he unhesitatingly drew on Arabic sources of Aristotle, that his sermons were “mercifully short,” that he was not scintillating, that he had a plodding deadpan style, that he too thought of himself as a “dumb ox,” that he didn’t complete his Summa Theologiae and that this very incompletion was symptomatic of his non-self-promotional personal and professional style.
Thomas was the smartest person in the room, but he always took the last seat in the last row. So—how did Thomas the Unlikely become the founder of that periodically discarded only to be rediscovered philosophia perennis called Thomism? A deep Catholic sensibility is part of it. Thomas’s philosophy aces the F. Scott Fitzgerald criterion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In his own little paradox, Turner characterizes Thomas’s thought as combining both the Protestant either-or and the Catholic both-and.
Nathaniel Peters notes Thomas’s intellectual humility in his final days:
Is Thomas a saint because he made good arguments, and if not, what is it that he did? Turner’s answer is simple: He fell silent. Thomas’ refusal to finish the Summa speaks volumes about the limits of theology and the magnitude of God. More than that, though, there is a holiness lying behind everything Thomas wrote, precisely in the fact that he lies behind it, not in front. Thomas’ writing is not about Thomas; it is about the truth. His holiness, Turner concludes, “is a theologian’s holiness, the holy teacher invisible otherwise than in the holy teaching itself.” In his writing as in his life, Thomas embraced poverty so that God might be preached all the more.
Previous Dish on Turner’s biography here.
(Detail from Gentile da Fabriano’s Valle Romita Polyptych, circa 1400, via Wikimedia Commons)
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