Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [33]
As a child of five he was sent by his father to live and study in the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino some miles away. His boyhood there could hardly have been carefree or joyous, and by the time he left at fourteen he was a confirmed scholar and ascetic. After five more years at the University of Naples, he became a Dominican monk, to the great distress of his family; they had expected him, rather than leading a life of poverty in a mendicant order, eventually to assume the prestigious post of abbot at Monte Cassino. At his mother’s instigation—his father had died—Aquinas’s brothers kidnapped him and imprisoned him for a year at the family castle, hoping he would change his mind. He did not; accepting his lot with saintly calm, he pursued his studies in his prison apartment.
He did lose his temper, however, when his brothers, in an attempt to lure him away from asceticism, slipped a seductive young woman into his chambers. On seeing her, Aquinas seized a flaming brand from the fire, drove her in panic from the room, and burned the sign of the cross on his door; his brothers sent him no more temptresses. Eventually Aquinas’s piety won his mother over; she helped him escape, and in 1245 he resumed life as a Dominican in Paris, where he studied theology under Albertus Magnus, the champion of Aristotle.
A prodigious student, Aquinas, thanks to a papal dispensation, was granted his doctorate in theology at thirty-one, three years earlier than regulations allowed. He had such powers of concentration that he could pursue a complex train of thought under the most distracting circumstances. Once, at a banquet in the court of King Louis IX, Aquinas, pondering how to refute the Manichaean heretics, was oblivious of the pomp, jewelry, great personages, and witty conversations all around him. Suddenly he slammed his big hand down on the table and cried out, doubtless alarming the assemblage, “And that will settle the Manichaeans!”
Not that he was a forbidding person; he was soft-spoken, easy in conversation, and cheerful, but he had important things on his mind and much to do. From waking to sleeping, his days were filled with study, writing, teaching, and worship. He attended all the hours of prayer, either said one Mass or heard two every day, and prayed before delivering every lecture or sitting down to write.
With so many devotions, the wonder is that he got so much done before his death at forty-nine, in 1274. In less than twenty years, while teaching at the University of Paris and at schools in Italy, he wrote a great many sermons, tracts, hymns, and prayers, a number of lengthy commentaries on the works of the earlier philosophers, and the massive (four-volume) Summa Contra Gentiles and the gargantuan (twenty-one-volume) Summa Theologica.
The Summa Contra Gentiles is aimed at philosophic nonbelievers whose rationalism prevents them from believing. Aquinas seeks to lead them to faith by a route as unlike Augustine’s impassioned mysticism as imaginable: he presents them with rigorously logical philosophic arguments intended to engender faith through reason alone. As he writes in a tract addressed to a group of opponents, “Behold our refutation of [your] errors. It is based not on documents of faith but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.”37
The Summa Theologica, intended for students of theology, expounds and defends the whole body of Catholic doctrine; it comprises thirty-eight treatises on various subjects, including metaphysics, ethics, law, and psychology, and takes up 631 “questions” or topics, to which it presents some ten thousand objections or replies. Throughout, Aquinas uses dialectic to examine each question by step-by-step reasoning;