A New Life of St Thomas Aquinas

Extract

Perhaps Fr Weisheipl rather labours the point that it isn’t enough to see St Thomas in a ‘speculative perspective’, that he should be studied with ‘historical method’ as well as ‘philosophical acumen’. Surely, that can be presumed. Can it, on the other hand, be presumed right from the start that to us readers as well as to the author St Thomas’s doctrine seems ‘sublime’ and his insights ‘transcendental’ (pp. 1-2)? Such encomiums would surely come better further on in the book. Fortunately there is, in fact, far more sense than rhetoric in this work, and far more history than exercise of philosophical or theological ‘acumen’; neither of which is really Fr Weisheipl’s forte. And as a historian—or better, as a biographer—he has done a very good job. Indeed I would say that he has written the best biography in English, and probably in any language, of our greatest theologian.

His aim was the large one of presenting ‘a rather full picture of the life, thought, and works of Thomas’, but his special achievement is to give the most complete and reliable account so far available of Thomas’s external existence, including in this of course the chronology and circumstances of his writings. And this is a great achievement. The subject bristles with problems and difficulties. To be sure, the background and setting of Thomas’s life are fairly well documented, intertwining as this does with the history of three great institutions whose official records are preserved: the Dominican Order, the University of Paris, and the Papacy. But such records do not, of course, interpret themselves except to the scholar’s eye, and it is often a very delicate matter to assess the exact meaning of this or that technical term (studium, for example, in its various official or semi-official connotations) or the relative importance—relative to St Thomas—of this or that contemporary movement or event or series of events.