Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was a Dominican friar and scholastic theologian whose synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine became foundational for Latin Christian thought. Educated at Monte Cassino and the University of Naples, he joined the Dominican Order against family opposition and studied under Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. He held the Dominican chair in theology at Paris and taught at the papal curia. His major works include the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, commentaries on Aristotle and Scripture, and disputed questions on truth, evil, and the soul. Aquinas is best known for the Five Ways (quinque viae)—arguments from motion, efficient causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and final causality—articulated as demonstrations that God's existence is knowable by natural reason while affirming that revealed doctrines such as the Trinity exceed reason. He developed the doctrine of analogical predication of divine attributes, the real distinction between essence and existence, and a natural-law ethics. His Aristotelianism provoked the Condemnations of 1277 issued by Bishop Tempier shortly after his death, and his thought was contested by Franciscan theologians including Duns Scotus and later by William of Ockham. Canonized in 1323 and declared Doctor of the Church, Aquinas became the basis of Thomism, revived in the neo-Thomism of Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris (1879) and developed by Cajetan, Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Gilson, and contemporary analytic Thomists.