Around the year 1225, in a stone castle called Roccasecca, halfway between Rome and Naples, the youngest son of Count Landulf of Aquino and his wife, Theodora, was born. They named him Thomas. The family was powerful and related to kings and emperors, and they had the boy's whole future arranged already: he would enter Monte Cassino, the great Benedictine abbey nearby, and one day he would be its abbot. An abbot of Monte Cassino was very nearly a prince.

So, at the age of five, Thomas was handed over to the monks. He grew up among cold stone corridors, bells, chanting and enormous books copied out by hand. His early biographers say that even as a small boy he kept asking the monks the same question, always perfectly calmly: what is God? Nobody could give him an answer that satisfied him, and the question stayed with him for the rest of his life.

A Choice Nobody Expected

When he was older, Thomas went to study at the university in Naples. There he found new books, argumentative teachers, and above all a group of friars who walked the streets in a white habit and a black cloak: the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, founded a little over twenty years earlier by Saint Dominic. They owned no land and had no income. They lived on alms, preached in the squares, and spent their lives studying so that they could explain the faith to anyone who asked.

Thomas looked at them and knew what he wanted. At about nineteen he asked to join the order and put on the habit of a begging friar.

At home the news struck like lightning. His parents had dreamed of an abbot from a noble family, and their son had just chosen the life of men who ask for bread from door to door. His mother sent his older brothers after him. The knights caught up with Thomas on a road to the north, seized him, and carried him back to the family's lands.

The Locked Year

Thomas spent almost a whole year shut in a tower of the castle. The family were sure that time and boredom and homesickness would wear the young man down. They offered him positions, riches, even a promise to obtain the rule of an abbey for him. He listened politely and always gave the same answer: he was still a friar.

Since nothing moved him, his sisters began bringing him food, and he asked them to bring books as well. Locked up, Thomas studied. He worked through books of philosophy, learned long passages of the Bible by heart, and taught his sisters what he was learning. Tradition says that when it became clear that nothing would change his mind, the family gave way at last, and that the Dominicans received him back one night, lowered from a tower window in a rope basket.

And so, without quarrelling with anyone, the young man returned to the place he had chosen.

The Dumb Ox

His superiors sent Thomas far away to study, first in Paris and then in Cologne, under the most admired teacher of the age: Friar Albert, whom history would call Albert the Great. Albert studied everything — stars, plants, stones, animals, philosophy — and his lecture room was full of brilliant, noisy students.

Thomas was not noisy. He was tall, broad, heavy and silent. He walked slowly, spoke rarely, and sat through the lectures watching his master without a word. The others thought this funny and invented a nickname for him: the dumb ox of Sicily. An old and much-repeated story says that one day they called him to the window, shouting that there was an ox flying past outside. Thomas went to look. When the class burst out laughing, he only remarked that he found a flying ox easier to believe in than a lying friar.

Albert, however, had been reading that silent student's notebooks. One day he called Thomas to the front of the room and questioned him in front of everyone, with the hardest problems he could set. Thomas answered them all, as calmly as ever, and went on to explain points his master had not even asked about. When the room fell silent, Albert turned to the class and said a sentence that has never been forgotten.

— You call him a dumb ox. I tell you that the bellowing of this ox will be heard all over the world.

The Master of Paris

Albert was right. By a little past thirty, Thomas was a master of theology at the University of Paris, the most important school in Christendom. He spent his life teaching, debating in public and writing — in Paris, in Rome, in Orvieto, in Naples. He wrote so much that he needed several secretaries at once, and it is said that he would dictate different works to each of them.

The way Thomas thought is curious, and it is still taught today. He would begin by asking a question. Before giving his own opinion, he carefully gathered the best arguments against it — the strongest he could find — and set them out honestly, as though they were his own. Only then did he answer, and at the end he went back to each objection in turn to show exactly where it stumbled. He believed that truth is not afraid of questions, and that anyone who loves the truth must understand very well the things he disagrees with.

Out of all that work came books that have crossed the centuries. The greatest is the Summa Theologiae, which Thomas began around 1265 and never finished. He wrote it, he said, for beginners, and in it he tried to set in order, question by question, everything human reason can say about God, about the world, and about what makes people happy.

For all his fame, he was still the same absent-minded, gentle man. His early biographers tell how he was once dining at the table of King Saint Louis of France when he became so lost in an argument that he forgot where he was, banged the table with his fist and announced out loud that there was the point that settled an old error. Then he apologised, embarrassed. The king, instead of scolding him, sent for a clerk so that the idea would not be lost.

The Corpus Christi Verses

In 1264, Pope Urban IV established the feast of Corpus Christi for the whole Church, in honour of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, and asked Thomas to write the texts and the songs for that day. The greatest professor of the age sat down to write, and what came out was not a treatise. It was hymns.

The Church still sings them, in Latin, more than seven hundred and fifty years later. One of them begins with the words Pange, lingua, gloriosi, asking one's own tongue to sing the mystery. Put into English, those lines say something like this:

Those who knew Thomas said that he wrote better after praying, and that he settled his hardest doubts before the tabernacle rather than in front of his books.

The Silence at the End

Tradition keeps one scene from the Dominican church in Naples. Thomas was praying before a large crucifix when he heard a voice telling him that he had written well of him, and asking what reward he would have. Thomas is said to have answered simply:

— Nothing but yourself, Lord.

On 6 December 1273, the feast of Saint Nicholas, Thomas was saying Mass when something happened inside him. He stayed a long while in silence, and from that day on he never wrote another line. His friend and secretary, Friar Reginald, insisted that the Summa had to be finished. Thomas gave him an answer that has been remembered ever since: compared with what had been shown to him, everything he had written seemed like straw.

A few weeks later the pope called him to a great council of the Church in the city of Lyon. Thomas set out ill and never arrived. He stopped on the way at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, where the monks nursed him, and there he died on 7 March 1274, not yet fifty years old. In his last days they asked him to explain the Song of Songs once more, and he explained it lying down, for as long as his voice held out.

In 1323 the Church declared him a saint, and in 1567 he was named a Doctor of the Church. He became known as the Angelic Doctor: the big, silent friar whose bellowing, just as old Albert had promised, was heard all over the world in the end.