“Nothing but you, Lord”: On the death of St. Thomas Aquinas

There was nothing of the sensitive intellectual genius about Thomas, afraid of being questioned or corrected. He was the servant of Truth and not its—His—master.

Detail from "The Temptation of St. Thomas" (1632) by Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velázquez. (Image: Wikipedia)

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the death of Dominican Friar Thomas Aquinas. A Doctor of the Church ranking with the Fathers of the Church in honor and esteem, he died at age 49 on March 7, 1274, on his way to the Council of Lyons. Because his feast is currently celebrated on January 28, it is fitting to remember his passage from this life now.

And what a passage it was! Dante believed Thomas was poisoned by Charles of Anjou because he feared Thomas was going to make a charge against him. Few scholars believe Dante right; the evidence is Thomas died from the effects of an accident. But if the legend is false in facts, it carries with it important information: Thomas was a man of truth, and a charge by such a man would carry consequences.

The most important facts about death have less to do with its medical causes than with the spiritual condition of the soul, which itself depends upon how much one has allowed the Holy Spirit to make one like the Incarnate Son. The physical details of death almost always have an ugliness about them, even in the most peaceful of cases. But even an ugly death can have a beauty when the image of Christ is seen crowning a life of service.

That is certainly true for Thomas. When the devil’s advocate, who offered objections to the canonization of prospective saints in the Church, stated that no miracles were attributed to Thomas, a cardinal responded, Tot miraculis, quot articulis—there are as many miracles as there are articles of his Summa Theologiae. His intellectual work was itself an act of love and service for the Lord. As he said when receiving the Eucharist on his deathbed, “I have written and taught much about this very holy Body, and about the other sacraments in the faith of Christ, and about the Holy Roman Church, to whose correction I expose and submit everything I have written.” There was nothing of the sensitive intellectual genius about Thomas, afraid of being questioned or corrected. He was the servant of Truth and not its—His—master.

To speak only of his writing and his intellectual production, however, is somewhat deceptive. He wasn’t just a brain in a vat filled with holy water. He was a living, breathing man with an exciting story. Born in the castle of San Giovanni at Roccasecca, Thomas was the son of Countess Theodora of Teano and Count Landulf of Aquino, a wealthy and powerful knight in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Through both parents Thomas was related to royal and noble families around the region. Though his brothers were destined for military careers, the family had decided that young Thomas should follow in the footsteps of Landulf’s brother, Sinibald, abbot of the famous Benedictine monastery Monte Cassino.

Thomas may well have followed the family plan had not Providence had other ideas. He began studying at Monte Cassino at the age of five, but due to a military conflict between Emperor Frederick and Pope Gregory IX, the family decided after about five years that it was better to enroll Thomas at the university (or studium generale) in Naples, which was protected by the emperor. It was there that he was exposed to both the thought of non-Catholic philosophers Aristotle, Maimonides, and Averroes, and to the influence of the newly-formed Dominican order in the person of a charismatic friar named John of St. Julian.

At age nineteen, Thomas determined to join this upstart mendicant order, a decision that did not please the family—particularly his mother. The Dominicans attempted to give Thomas some space by moving him to Rome, but Thomas’s mother had his brothers kidnap him along the way. Thomas was thus a prisoner in the castle at Roccasecca for over a year, where, it is related, his brothers attempted to get him to change his mind by sending a prostitute into his room—he drove her out with the fireplace poker.

Whether because of political pressure or spiritual insight, Countess Teodora finally relented. Thomas joined the order, traveling to Rome and then Cologne, where he studied with the greatest mind of the time, Albert the Great. Albert recognized this rather thick-set and silent young man nicknamed the “dumb ox” for what he was. “We call this young man a dumb ox,” Albert said, “but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world.”

Thomas accompanied Albert to Paris, then back to Cologne. In 1250, he was ordained as a priest. In 1257 he returned to Paris, this time as a teacher in the university. The old Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes the rest of his life as a cycle of “praying, preaching, teaching, writing, journeying.” So it was. His brilliance and his competence were widely known. The possibility of higher office, so desired by his family, appeared again when Pope Clement IV offered to make him Archbishop of Naples in 1265. Thomas refused. Instead, he continued his cycle.

It was during this last period of his life that he wrote his most famous—and unfinished—work: Summa Theologiae. It was also during this time that he wrote the great hymns Panis Angelicus and Pange Lingua. And it was during this time, especially the last few years in Naples, that he preached extensively—every day of Lent in 1273—to ordinary people who loved him.

Thomas’s death was spectacular because his life, and not merely those articles of the Summa, was miraculous. His Dominican brothers testified that he had the gift of levitation. In 1273, after Thomas had finished his treatise on the Eucharist, several of them saw him lifted into the air as he prayed. A voice was heard from the crucifix on the altar saying, “You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward would you have for your labor?”

Thomas responded, “Nothing but you, Lord.”

(Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Servant.)


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About David Paul Deavel 41 Articles
David Paul Deavel is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX, and Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. The paperback edition of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, is now available in paperback.

8 Comments

  1. Instead of tempting Thomas with a prostitute, his brothers should have predicted that in less than eight centuries the updated Church would be more “welcoming” . . .

    That the Church would even bless “irregular” unions of all sorts; and instead of imperfect persons, anti-binary “couples”—-And then, “walking together” and talking-around, would aim the hot poker at any who might pause at the double-speak and the actual “scandal and confusion.”

    Very medieval (!), the binary prostitute thing instead of a broad-road evolutionary sort of thing (“time is greater than space!”), or the clarity of a moral theology thing, or even the existential risk of a hell sort of thing! Since the incarnate Jesus Christ never really mentioned (of Himself) the irreducible difference between the wide road and the narrow road. Wait, what?

    Oh, both and, not either or. . .

    So, yes, about the “welcoming” thing: “Come to me all ye that labor and are burdened” (Mt 11:28-30). But, also this: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Mt 7:13-14).

    About our current moment, then, what would St. Thomas the theologian say? What does Jesus the Christ say?

    • The Church has not changed and HAS NOT blessed homosexual unions. The liberal media twisted Pope Francis’ words and he CLARIFIED that he DID NOT mean he was blessing homosexual unions. The practice of homosexuality is a sin and one that will cause the soul to go to hell.

  2. “Nothing but You, Lord” . . was the response of Jesus FROM the Crucifix
    on St. Thomas’s writing table, AFTER he had finished composing the
    Liturgy and Hymns {we still sing them at Benediction ! ] for the new
    feast of Corpus Christi [ The Body and Blood of the Lord ] which was
    promulgated by the Pope shortly after [ 1274 AD ? ]

    What strikes me is that Thomas’s response to Jesus’ subsequent question
    [“Well done, Thomas My own; IS THERE ANYTHING YOU DESIRE ?” To whiich
    Thomas replied “Nothing but You, Lord” . . which is identical to the recent
    youthful Blessed, Carlo Acutis —died at 15 of Cancer —who LIVED by his
    stated watchword: “Always to be united to Jesus, that is my life’s
    programme”.

  3. Thanks to the author for this interesting historical account of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Author Deavel’s mention of Aquinas’ initial contact with Aristotle at the University of Naples is not well known. Frederick II the storied Holy Roman Emperor who held his seat at Palermo because he was also king of Sicily through his mother Constance Queen of Sicily. Although Frederick’s father was a Hohenstaufen, his mother, a Norman de Hautville, prevailed. Frederick founded the U of Naples which still bears his title. The emperor had invited Arab Aristotelian scholars to the royal court that later helped convince him to establish the university.
    Insofar as Aristotle Aquinas transcended the Philosopher largely due to his faith and the subsequent enlightenment of his intellect. Although the road for me to understand Aquinas began with Aristotle. His great achievement was validating the immense importance of philosophy, not as an exercise of personal musing, rather as a science of the perennial principles of acquiring knowledge. Thomas gave us knowledge of God, of morality, and the means of developing our intellect to reason rightly and with accuracy. His ethics unfortunately was not compiled in any text, rather it must be gleaned from the entire corpus. Presumably he would have written such a text had he lived longer. It’s well worth the effort to study Aquinas today to better assess precisely what’s occurring within our Church.

  4. In a well-documented incident that occurred three months before he died, Saint Thomas Aquinas was celebrating Mass, during which he had a vision or revelation. After the Mass he announced, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” True to his word, he never wrote another word, and left his Summa Theologiae unfinished.
    I’ve long wondered what bearing that incident has on our Church’s acceptance of the teachings in his Summa Theologiae, his Summa contra Gentiles, and his other writings. Our post-Vatican-II Church leaders, I think, read too much (or maybe too little) in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s cryptic announcement as they reject his teachings in favor of their new-found enthusiasm for the wisdom of the world.
    I like to think that Thomas was telling us that his writings but touch the surface of God’s Truth, like straw floating on the surface of a lake—a lake whose depth is unfathomable and whose beauty and glory are beyond human wisdom. Thomas spoke out of the humility that must underlie all human efforts to put God’s Truth into human words..

  5. Thank God for St. Thomas Aquinas.
    I was too young to appreciate the naming of my high school in his honor, for “Youth…is wasted on children” (George Bernard Shaw). Shaw’s charitable opponent, G.K. Chesterton appealed to universal (time and space) doctrinal truth in “Orthodoxy”, while also having written “arguably the best book ever on Aquinas” (Society of Keith Gilbert Chesterton).
    Such universality in Scholasticism was “overcome” (Fr. Dulles citing Fr. de Lubac) to a degree by the vestiges of German idealism (static doctrine is contradictory to evolving human experience) at the Council and after, more or less in this or that theologian (e.g., one can trace Congar back to Friedrich Schelling, while Kasper is absorbed in Tubingen idealism…
    https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/06/09/german-idealism-and-cardinal-kaspers-theological-project/
    One begins to understand how, in the last decade, “Time is greater than space” (evolutionary process in the Church), “rigidity” fails to address the “concrete” needs in the experience of life and liturgy, and 2+2 can equal a theological 5… https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/01/06/close-papal-confidant-2-2-in-theology-can-make-5/
    Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange foresaw the implications of idealism which essentially states, “Whatever is outside the mind is unknowable”, and which deconstructs Scholastic metaphysical demonstrations of God’s existence for one, in favor of religious experience and “creative evolution”. If one hasn’t encountered creative evolution (the substitution of an idea, e.g. “Proportionalism” in Catholic moral theology, rather than a legitimate redefinition of doctrine), one isn’t trying. Additionally, taking a cue from the current culture is crucial to this evolving process, requiring interdisciplinarity and therefore some actions become clearer… https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/09/23/farewell-to-the-pontifical-john-paul-ii-institute-for-studies-on-marriage-and-family/
    In my ever deepening claim that compromise and accommodation, however slight and well intentioned, invariably leads to weakness of one’s own position, and as Drs. Edward Feser and Matthew Minerd have proposed here and elsewhere, perhaps a return to Scholasticism is in order.
    St. Thomas Aquinas, pray fpr us.

  6. So, one can argue that God wanted nobody idolise Summa Theologia and assume developement of theology completed. Since God keep running this world of sinners and keep creating new human lives in original sin, it is high time to devolope the doctrines, after all both Jesus, Paul and early church expected God would soon end the Sin for good.

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