Thomas Aquinas's own family kidnapped him to stop him becoming a friar
At nineteen, Thomas Aquinas decided to join the Dominicans, a mendicant order his noble family considered beneath him. His brothers seized him on the road to Rome and held him for about a year. His mother finally let him slip out through a window at night, preferring a quiet escape to open surrender.
Thomas was born around 1225, probably at the family castle of Roccasecca near Aquino, the youngest of nine children of a knight in the service of Emperor Frederick II. His uncle was abbot of Monte Cassino, and the family planned for Thomas to follow him. He began school at the abbey aged five, and when war between emperor and pope reached it in 1239 he moved to the university at Naples, where he met the works of Aristotle, Averroes and Maimonides.
During his captivity he tutored his sisters and kept writing to the Dominicans. His canonisation dossier claims his brothers even sent a woman to seduce him, and that he drove her out with a burning log. Free by 1244, he went to Paris and followed the scholar Albertus Magnus to Cologne. Classmates nicknamed the quiet student the dumb ox; Albertus replied that his bellowing would one day be heard across the world.
From 1256 he was regent master of theology at Paris, where he befriended Bonaventure though they disagreed about faith and reason, and both advised King Louis IX. At Orvieto he finished the Summa contra Gentiles and wrote the liturgy for the new feast of Corpus Christi; hymns such as Pange lingua and Panis angelicus are still sung. In 1265 Pope Clement IV called him to Rome as papal theologian.
His great project was to fuse Aristotle's philosophy with Christian teaching, holding that both reason and faith come from God. That produced the Five Ways, arguments for God's existence, and the Summa Theologiae, a sweeping guide to Catholic doctrine begun in 1265 and left unfinished when he died on 7 March 1274. He was canonised in 1323 and is one of 38 Doctors of the Church, known as the Angelic Doctor.
Source: Thomas Aquinas
