Thomas Aquinas's body was believed to have miraculous powers. To prevent it from being stolen, monks buried it in a secret place

At the beginning of 1274, Thomas Aquinas was on his way from Naples to a council in Lyon. He was already ill, and his condition deteriorated rapidly after an accident – ​​he reportedly hit his head on the branch of a fallen tree. Sensing that his end was near, he sought shelter in the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova near Rome, which was on his way.

After his death, just a few days later, he was buried before the high altar in the beautiful late Romanesque monastery church. Since the "angelic doctor" had a reputation for having led an immaculate life and his body was attributed miraculous powers, a local veneration of the saint soon developed.

The Cistercians feared that the Dominicans, to whose order Thomas Aquinas belonged, might steal this precious relic. They therefore buried Thomas's body in a hidden place, but later placed it back in the original grave because their abbot was plagued by nightmares. Fearing a possible snatching, they later severed the head, the most important part of the relic, and hid it.

This head, along with the rest of the body, was transferred by ecclesiastical decree about a hundred years later to the old Dominican convent in Toulouse, where Saint Dominic founded his order in 1215. Two years ago, this skull embarked on a world tour from which it has not yet returned. The relic's tour is intended to commemorate several anniversaries: 700 years since the canonization of Thomas Aquinas (1323), 750 years since his death (1274), and 800 years since his birth (1225).

The life of Saint Thomas is impressive; his legacy is even more so. Thomas was born in 1225 at Roccasecca Castle near Aquino in Lazio. He came from the noble Aquino family. His family had destined him for a career in the church, which Thomas readily pursued. At the age of nineteen, he joined an order. However, he joined the Dominican Order, which was experiencing explosive growth at the time. His family attempted to prevent this decision by temporarily imprisoning him.

The Dominicans were a mendicant order committed to poverty. Their primary goal was preaching, specifically the preaching of heresy. The order's founder, Saint Dominic, had closely observed the inability of secular priests to deal with the Albigensians and Cathars, who were denounced as heretics, as they were better educated and more theologically versed.

He wanted to counter these with an army of well-trained religious men, and he demanded a solid education from his confreres. The early history of the Order of Preachers he founded is therefore intimately connected with the history of early European universities, with the development of scholastic theology and philosophy, and with the intellectualization of doctrine.

Thus, one can view the life of Thomas as a consequence of Dominic's desired interweaving of philosophical education and theological persuasion. One can also view it as the synthesis that the academic scholarship of the time achieved with the needs of a theologically trained church. In the era of Neo-Thomism, the orientation of Catholic thought toward the teachings of St. Thomas, which Pope Leo XIII called for in 1879, his writings were indeed regarded, removed from any historical context, as the quintessence of theological thought.

Anyone who examines Thomas's intellectual biography, however, will recognize elements that come together in his work. Already in his youth in Naples, he had been introduced not only to Augustinian and Neoplatonic ideas, as was in keeping with the philosophical and theological thinking of the time, but also to some extent to Aristotelian teachings. The major translation program of Aristotle's writings from Arabic and Greek into the academic vernacular, Latin, was in full swing at the time.

Under his later teacher in Paris and Cologne, the Dominican Albertus Magnus, Thomas's engagement with Aristotelianism deepened even further. In any case, his teachings are unthinkable without Albertus. In his subsequent career as a lecturer in Paris, Naples, Orvieto, Rome, Viterbo, Paris again, and finally Naples again, he wrote theological works, the most famous of which are the major survey works, the "Summa contra gentiles" and the "Summa theologiae." In later years, he also wrote commentaries on the works of Aristotle.

An unusual propaganda painting attributed to Lippo Memmi helps to understand the importance the Dominicans attributed to Thomas after his death. It was created around 1323, around the time of Thomas's canonization, and has hung in the Church of Santa Caterina in Pisa for 700 years. It depicts the saint centrally and in an unusual size, with a halo and his gaze fixed on the viewer. He sits before concentric circles representing the structure of the universe. Golden lines flow from Jesus, at the very top, directly onto his head.

Further lines reach him from above, from the books of the four evangelists, Paul and Moses, and from the side, from the books of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, whose books, in turn, are illuminated by Thomas's. Below lies the exhausted and defeated Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), whose book, turned upside down and thus refuted, also receives a beam. Below, one sees the assembled congregation, including many Dominicans, who are also illuminated.

If ever intellectual history has been depicted as a history of influences between texts, then it is here. Jesus, too, holds a book. But in his case, the ray springs from his mouth, that is, from the spoken word, from literal revelation. The rest is a dialogue between texts.

The fact that Averroes is also depicted in the painting deserves special attention. In the second half of the 13th century, the philosophers teaching at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris had alarmed theologians by defending certain Aristotelian theses developed further by Averroes, which ran counter to the Christian faith. The local bishop had such theses condemned twice, with the list containing 1,277 theses commonly attributed to Thomas Aquinas.

What would later be called Thomism was thus not successful from the start. Rather, various critics, including scholars teaching in Paris, felt that Thomas had allowed himself to be too influenced by the pagan philosophy of Aristotle. For philosophers, Aristotle was simply "the philosopher" and his Islamic interpreter, Averroes, "the commentator." But theologians could not possibly recognize two nonbelievers as the primary sources of thought. That Scholasticism would eventually turn to Aristotle was not a given, but was largely due to the lobbying efforts of the Dominicans.

This task wasn't entirely easy. The two philosophers had to be separated. Aristotle could be recognized as an important source for Thomas, but Averroes not only had to be kept at a distance; Thomas had to become his antithesis. And so he was given the place in the picture that heretics traditionally occupy: as vermin beneath the feet of orthodoxy.

Thomas Aquinas was a man of enormous creative power. He is said to have written and dictated eight million words in his almost fifty years of life. In the biographies written after his death—which are actually legends about saints—it is reported that he could dictate to four secretaries simultaneously. He even dictated in his sleep. Most of this is, of course, exaggeration. But when you consider how much he put on paper alongside his work as a lecturer, institute founder, administrator, advisor, and monk, you won't relegate all accounts to the realm of fables. In any case, his work is so extensive that it could have fed Neo-Thomism, the dominant school of Catholic philosophy for almost a century.

Christoph Lüthy teaches the history of philosophy at Radboud University in Nijmegen.