Saint Thomas Aquinas and Jesus

No. Thomas was born around 1225 at his family's castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino in central Italy. Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the early thirties of the first century. Close to twelve hundred years separate the crucifixion from Thomas's birth. There is no scene to tell, no conversation on a road, no name of his in any gospel.

The world Thomas woke up in had been Christian for most of a millennium. Paris had a university with a theology faculty and a great deal of infighting. The Dominican order he joined at about nineteen had been founded within a decade of his birth. Aristotle was arriving in Latin through Arabic and Greek hands, and a good part of the faculty considered him a threat to the faith. Thomas spent his working life arguing that a pagan philosopher and the gospel of John could sit on the same page without either one being damaged.

That distance changes how you read him. When Thomas says something about Jesus he is reasoning from a text, and he tells you which text he is reasoning from. He offers you the objection first, at its full strength, and then his answer, so you can watch him work.

Ask him why God would become a man at all and he answers from the nature of goodness itself. In the third part of the Summa Theologiae he writes that it belongs to the essence of goodness "to communicate itself to others," and so it belongs to the essence of the highest good "to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature." On that reading the incarnation is what infinite goodness does when there is nowhere higher for it to go.

Ask him why the cross, when God could have forgiven by simple decree, and he gives five reasons in order. The one people quote is the first. By the passion, he writes, "man knows thereby how much God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return." The rest are practical. Christ set an example of "obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues displayed in the Passion." He "merited justifying grace" for us. He made sin harder to shrug off, and here Thomas simply hands the point to Paul, quoting 1 Corinthians 6:20 in the old Latin form, "You are bought with a great price." Last, he says a man had been overcome by the devil, so it was right that a man should be the one to overthrow him.

His conclusion is that it was "more fitting that we should be delivered by Christ's Passion than simply by God's good-will." Fitting is his favorite word for this whole subject. He rarely says God had to do it this way. He says this is what love looks like when it is free to choose its own method.

Every quotation above comes from the English translation of the Summa made by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, second and revised edition of 1920, which is in the public domain. The links at the foot of this page open the exact articles, so you can read the objections he answers and decide whether he answered them.

Two stories about Thomas and Jesus have come down to us, and both deserve their sourcing attached, because the popular retellings flatten them into miracles with no chain of custody. Thomas told neither one about himself.

The first is set at Naples in 1273, after he had finished his treatise on the Eucharist. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia reports it this way: three of the brethren saw him lifted in ecstasy, and they heard a voice from the crucifix on the altar say "Thou hast written well of me, Thomas; what reward wilt thou have?" His reply has been repeated for seven and a half centuries. "None other than Thyself, Lord." You will see the witness named as a sacristan in later devotional retellings. The oldest published English account leaves him unnamed.

The second is 6 December 1273, the feast of Saint Nicholas. Thomas was saying Mass. Something happened that he never described to anyone. Afterward he stopped writing, and the Summa Theologiae ends where it ends, unfinished, in the middle of the treatment of penance. His secretary Reginald of Piperno pushed him to go back to work, and the Catholic Encyclopedia gives his answer this way: "I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value."

The version most people know is sharper. All that I have written seems to me like straw. Both renderings run back to testimony gathered for his canonization inquiry in 1319, where a witness repeated at second hand what Reginald had told him. That is a few people deep and forty six years after the fact. Worth knowing before anyone builds a sermon on the exact wording, and worth saying plainly that he retracted nothing. He simply stopped adding.

He died three months later, on 7 March 1274, at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, travelling to the Second Council of Lyons at the pope's request. He never arrived.

Both had families who tried to stop them. Thomas joined the Dominicans at about nineteen and his relations shut him up at home to break the decision. Accounts of how long vary from one year to nearly two. He went back to the order the moment he could. The gospels record Jesus' own family arriving to take him home because they had concluded he was out of his mind, and record the answer that redefined who counted as his mother and brothers.

Both taught by taking questions head on. The Summa is built out of objections, each one stated at full strength before any reply, and Thomas often argues the case against himself better than his opponents managed. The gospels show a rougher version of the same instinct, where Jesus meets a trap question with a question of his own until the questioner has to say out loud what he actually thinks.

Both put the weight on bread and wine. When Rome extended the feast of Corpus Christi to the whole church, Thomas was given the job of writing its office, and the hymns that came out of it are still sung. Pange Lingua. Sacris Solemniis. Verbum Supernum. He was composing liturgy for a meal that Jesus had instituted with almost no explanation attached.

And both went quiet at the end. Mark records Pilate marveling that Jesus would answer some charges and refuse others. Thomas, after that December morning, would not say what he had seen. The silence is where the parallel actually bites.

Jesus is worshiped. Thomas is honored. The distinction is older than Thomas, and he inherited it from Augustine and the Greek fathers, but he gave it the most precise version it ever received, so it is fair to use his own terms.

In the Summa he separates latria, the worship owed to God, from dulia, the honor owed to a creature who excels at something. His reason turns on the kind of lordship involved: "God has absolute and paramount lordship over the creature wholly and singly, which is entirely subject to His power: whereas man partakes of a certain likeness to the divine lordship." Two different acts that English lazily covers with one word.

He gives latria to Christ without hesitation, and extends it to Christ's human flesh, because "to adore the flesh of Christ is nothing else than to adore the incarnate Word of God." No saint receives that from him. Asked whether we should call on the saints to pray for us, Thomas answers yes, and his reason keeps them firmly in second place. God's goodness reaches us through intermediaries, so "the Divine goodness pours forth its effect into us through them," and our answer travels back along the same road. The saint stands on the road. The destination is God.

The Catholic Church still teaches it in those two registers. Paragraph 957 of the Catechism keeps the verbs apart by quoting the second century account of Polycarp's death, which worships Christ as the Son of God and loves the martyrs as his disciples and imitators.

Thomas is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of England and several other Anglican provinces commemorate him on the same day. The Eastern Orthodox churches do not venerate him, and Greek theologians have argued with his theology since Demetrios Kydones first translated him into Greek in the fourteenth century. Orthodoxy draws its own line between worship and veneration, settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, in different words and without his categories.

Many Protestants place the line somewhere else, and they do it while reading him closely. Reformed scholastics like Peter Martyr Vermigli and Francis Turretin used his tools and rejected his conclusion on invocation. The objection is narrow and it is real. It says that asking a saint in heaven to pray for you has no clear command or example in scripture, and that Christ's work as the one mediator makes the request unnecessary. That objection lands on a practice. It leaves his standing as a thinker alone, and the seminaries that hold it still assign the Summa.

PrayWithJesus.ai is software. It has no ecclesiastical approval and no teaching authority of any kind. Take the question of praying to saints to your own church, your own priest, or your own pastor.

Born about 1225 at Roccasecca. Educated by the Benedictines at Monte Cassino, where his parents hoped he would one day be abbot. He joined the Dominicans at Naples at about nineteen instead, and his family confined him at home to reverse it, for a year by most accounts and nearly two by the oldest published English one.

Studied under Albert the Great and followed him to Cologne in 1248. Taught at Paris. Wrote the Summa contra Gentiles and then the Summa Theologiae, which he left unfinished. Died on 7 March 1274 at Fossanova.

Canonized by John XXII on 18 July 1323. Called the Angelic Doctor long before Pius V declared him a Doctor of the Universal Church in 1567. Named patron of Catholic universities, academies, colleges, and schools by Leo XIII in a brief dated 4 August 1880. His feast is kept on 28 January.

The traffic on this name splits several ways, and most of it wants something other than a biography.

A share of it is a student with a paper due who needs the five ways in order and one clean sentence on natural law. Behind that is a reader who has been told that faith and reason cannot both be held by an honest adult, and who has heard there was a man who spent a lifetime holding both without flinching. And then there is whoever is at the end of a long stretch of doubt, wanting to know whether the most rigorous defender Christianity ever produced also had nights when the whole structure looked like words.

He did, at the end, and he said so out loud. That is the part to sit with. The man who filled a lifetime with argument about God finished by calling it straw next to whatever he had been shown, and he never took back a line of it. He just stopped adding to the pile.

If that is why you are here at this hour, try what he did before he wrote anything at all. He prayed first. Then he said the question out loud, in the plainest words he had.