Over three years—2023, 2024 and 2025—we are marking a trio of important anniversaries for St Thomas Aquinas. In 2023, we celebrated the 700th anniversary of his canonisation; in 2024, on 7 March, we celebrate the 750th anniversary of his death; and on 28 January 2025, we will mark the 800th anniversary of his birth.
These celebrations hold a special importance for Dominicans around the world. In this interview, Fr Paul Rowse OP, parish priest at St Dominic’s Camberwell East, reflects on ‘our brother’ Thomas, what this great Italian saint has meant to him personally, and why he became so popular within the Catholic Church.
As a Dominican, what do these anniversaries mean to you?
The jubilees of the birth, death and canonisation of St Thomas Aquinas have twofold significance for us Dominicans.
First, it is a return to that universal acknowledgement of our brother’s sanctity. His holiness has formally featured in the Catholic memory and devotion since his death in 1274. Thus, over seven centuries, St Thomas has been an intercessor for students and thinkers, schools and friars for all of that time. But closer to home, it means that our way of life, as the pursuit of truth, works well. Every Dominican can legitimately aspire to holiness through the example of St Thomas. Dedication to learning such as our brother Thomas had contributes mightily towards our growth in divine grace. He is a shining example of what contemplation is: the pursuit of wisdom and truth.
Second, this jubilee also means the Church has the opportunity to return to his teaching, the better to understand what God has revealed of himself.
While we listen to everyone and hope for mutual understanding, some voices among us speak more clearly and powerfully than others—clearly and powerfully because they are trained by attention to revealed truth. It would be a very strange situation indeed if Catholics regarded their teachings as derived from the times in which they found themselves or by the feel of a particular generation. That would indeed be intellectual slavery: the succeeding generation would be bound to reject what their forebears adopted simply because they are different from them. If that were the case, there would be no continuity, no mutual understanding between generations, because each is necessarily adverse to its predecessor.
But the writings of our brother Thomas still speak to us because he successfully avoided the tyrannies of contemporaneity by his close attention to revelation. What God has revealed is for the salvation of all humanity.
What has St Thomas meant to you personally over the years?
St Thomas has been an especially close companion in my eucharistic devotion. When I was a student, many were the times when I would take one of his hymns to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. It is well known that Pope Urban IV asked our brother to write the Office of the newly promulgated feast of Corpus Christi. This meant he composed hymns, antiphons and prayers. In one of hymns for Corpus Christi, Adoro Te Devote (Godhead here in hiding), St Thomas gives us words to address to our eucharistic Lord about what is in front of us:
Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived;
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.
The sensed deception is in fact a sacred mystery to be adored, accessed in fact by the words given by the Lord to his priests: ‘This is my body; this is the chalice of my blood.’
However my day might have gone, whatever I might think I have achieved, I shall not have done better than to adore Christ in his tabernacle by saying St Thomas’ prayer at the start, middle, close and end of the day.
In later life, I am immensely grateful to St Thomas for his prayer O Sacrum Convivium (O Sacred Banquet). In this part of the Dominican world, our friars begin each hour of the Divine Office on our knees in adoration of the mystery:
O Sacred Banquet in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and we are given the pledge of future glory.
However my day might have gone, whatever I might think I have achieved, I shall not have done better than to adore Christ in his tabernacle by saying St Thomas’ prayer at the start, middle, close and end of the day.
For people wanting to explore St Thomas, are the prayers a good place to start?
Do consider starting with his prayers. The orderly schema of the Prayer for a Good Life, for example, is valuable for its delightful harmony and sincere affection. Here is a short excerpt from that prayer:
Grant to me, O Lord God,
a vigilant heart that no subtle speculation may ever lead me from you;
a noble heart that no unworthy affection may draw me from you;
an upright heart that no evil purpose may turn me from you.
If that orderliness and devotion appeal to you, there might be an opportunity to dip into his largest and greatest work, Summa Theologiae (Compendium of Theology). Of interest to us might be Thomas’ exploration of grace in the life of Christ or what the Eucharist is for.
In addition to his prayers, there are many good guides to Thomas and Thomism. You might consider Fergus Kerr’s Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction or Denys Turner’s Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait. GK Chesterton’s Thomas Aquinas is a classic, written as the companion to his Francis of Assisi.
Do you have a favourite quote or saying of St Thomas?
In this age of self-care and boundary setting, I am tempted to return to the well-loved quote: ‘Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.’ But more helpfully, I could offer one of the quotes attributed to him on his deathbed as a goal of life for each of us: ‘I submit all to the judgment and correction of the Holy Roman Church, in whose obedience I now pass from life.’
What is a key idea people can take away from St Thomas today?
St Thomas comes at the world he lives in as a created reality, that is, as coming from the mind of the benevolent Creator; therefore, the Creator’s intentions for his creation are written into the patterns we might observe in it.
That same worldview, at once reverent and practical, can be ours if we recognise that human efforts to exceed or ignore those intentions introduce undesirable consequences. For example, modern means of transportation are good insofar as they make produce more widely available and carry people to where they need to go; they also give us pollution, jetlag and high risk to personal safety. Somehow, humanity has to account for the undesirable consequences it brings on. That, St Thomas would say to us, is the work of redemption.
Somewhere along the line, the term ‘medieval’ came to suggest something negative, or maybe something ‘backward’. Does St Thomas challenge this notion?
If we take the original meaning of medieval, we find ourselves at the threshold of pre-modernity: the medievals were originally thought to have come between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.
The alliance of lecture hall and church nave, uneasy in modernity and nowadays suspect, enabled the production of some of the most enlightened works of architecture and art, literature and theology. It was into this milieu that Thomas was born.
‘Medieval’ need not be a slur; it is a description of a historical situation—that is, until Marcellus Wallace triumphs in Pulp Fiction: ‘Imma get medieval on you …’ To be medieval, in our day, is to be dark and ignorant and cruel, when those can be features of every human person in need of redemption by the Son of Man.
However, the medieval period was one of glorious light. Many of the great cathedrals of Europe were begun in this period, with their façades and windows of vivid colour. The university emerges as a stable institution adjoining each of them. The alliance of lecture hall and church nave, uneasy in modernity and nowadays suspect, enabled the production of some of the most enlightened works of architecture and art, literature and theology. It was into this milieu that Thomas was born.
We could do well to regard Thomas’ day with as much esteem and worry as we do our own: the rapid pace of societal development comes at the cost of homogenising cultural identities, with the potential for political instability to follow. The potentates of Thomas’ day would periodically crusade in the East and so defer the question of peace among neighbours; in ours, is there a common enemy, the contempt for whom papers over conflict at home?
How, and why, did St Thomas become so popular within the Catholic Church? He didn’t even have social media.
This is a very good question, because St Thomas’ importance could have eluded us because of the great volume of his writing.
We estimate he wrote several million publishable words over the course of his life (and he wrote in Latin, which is much more concise than English). These days, fame comes with brevity, as in TikTok and Snapchat; well might we wonder whether someone as detailed and thorough as St Thomas would go viral today. Also, Thomas was regarded as suspect for his appropriations of Greek, Arabic and Jewish philosophers into his own work: how could an unbaptised person possibly shed light on divine revelation?
Thomas so equipped the people of his generation to pass on sacred doctrine that they need not look elsewhere. Thomas stands out among his contemporaries for the clarity of his writing and breadth of his subject matter.
The reasons for St Thomas’ fame begin with his teachers. St Albert the Great was notable in his own day, having the theology chair at the great University of Paris. In a matter of a decade only, our brother Thomas would succeed him as one held in high esteem for his precision and charity. It is Albert who had great openness to all the learning the world can give; Thomas followed him in this. By observation and abstraction—that is, by noticing what is around us and generalising about what we notice—we can come to a set of principles that can be compared against and even inform humanity about its Creator.
Our brother was also involved in some of the novel institutions of his day, everything from teaching in fledgling colleges to public debates with frolicsome Franciscans. He gained the trust of popes and was often called on to assist with matters before the Holy See. We have mentioned his papal commission to author the liturgical texts for the feast of Corpus Christi. Thomas was summoned to the Second Council of Lyon, which gave itself to discussion of peace in the Holy Land and, dear to Thomas’ heart, the unification with the Eastern Churches. Tragically, our brother never made it to Lyon II: he struck his head on a branch on the Appian Way and died at the nearby Fossanova Abbey on 7 March 1274.
By the time he died, Thomas’ writings were in the hands of many teachers. He so equipped the people of his generation to pass on sacred doctrine that they need not look elsewhere. Thomas stands out among his contemporaries for the clarity of his writing and breadth of his subject matter.
Would it be true to say there’s been something of a revival of interest in the thought of Aquinas in recent years?
Interest in St Thomas reached high points in the 19th and 20th centuries during the pontificates of Leo XIII and St John Paul II.
Pope Leo’s famous openness to the sciences led him to re-present St Thomas to the Church as the theologian who would best help her to receive from them. It is one thing to be open-minded but quite another to have an adequate theological system that will help to demonstrate how all knowledge ultimately harmonises in Christ. Pope John Paul was personally affected by Leo’s return to Thomas, completing higher studies in Thomism at our university in Rome. John Paul’s embrace of modernity and postmodernity’s focus on the individual, always welcome and sometimes excessive, led him to adopt the Angelic Doctor’s teaching on the natural capacities of every individual to know their Creator.
There is more that could be said about the re-emergence of Thomism in the 20th century. For now, we can note that Thomism in the 21st century will look rather different.
Our generation has begun to show interest in the behaviour of corporate bodies: the righteousness of nations and integrity of organisations, the transparency of allegiances and worthiness of schemes. We spend a good deal of time discerning the value of an institution for the good of society. Twenty-first-century Thomism will certainly have much to say about how the success of a corporate body will depend largely on the virtue of the individuals who support, comprise or subscribe to it. Our brother will challenge the assumption of our contemporaries, that bad institutions are irreformable and its wicked members should be cancelled. Rather, forgiveness, conversion of life by conformity to truth, and attentive listening, even to the sanctity-destined scoundrel, will see us through.
Banner image: Andrea di Bonaiuto, Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas, ‘Doctor Angelicus’, with saints and angels, fresco, 1366, Basilica of Santa Maria Novella (detail).
