January 2023 Print

The First Biography of the Angelic Doctor in Translation

By David M. Foley, Ph.D.

Angelus Press is in the final stages of preparing this previously untranslated text for publication. The following article has been written by the translator as an introduction to the forthcoming edition.¹

Seven hundred years have now passed since a venerable Dominican friar, William of Tocco, offered the final version of his little book to the Vicar of Christ, Pope John XXII. The cause for the canonization of Friar Thomas de Aquino († 1274) was officially opened five years earlier, in 1318, after the Pope had first received William at his court in Avignon. It was on this occasion that William, acting as an emissary of the Order of Preachers, presented John XXII with the initial draft of his biography of Friar Thomas, the Historia sancti Thomae de Aquino, a document which would prove decisive in the process of raising St. Thomas to the altars. As our first biographical account of Thomas Aquinas, compiled from the testimonies of his family members, confreres, and witnesses to the prodigies surrounding the friar’s life and death, the Historia is the original source for many scenes from the earthly career of the Angelic Doctor that are still indelibly impressed upon the Catholic imagination: our saint chasing a harlot from his prison cell with a firebrand before tearfully inscribing the Sign of our salvation upon the wall, collapsing in the corner, and being vested with the girdle of perpetual virginity by two angels; the mystical vision that he received of Our Blessed Lord as he levitated in ecstasy while contemplating the Crucifix: “You have written well of me, Thomas…”; or the occasion that our friar upset the sumptuous banquet laid out by St. Louis when he hammered his fists upon the table and bellowed: “Now that is the end of the heresy of Manichaeus!” Despite its profound historical significance and the palpable influence that it still exerts over the Church’s devotion to one of her greatest saints, William’s Historia has only been dignified by a critical edition fairly recently (1996), and it has taken seven centuries since its publication for the text to be available to English readers, with the advent of this new edition.

Before offering prospective readers a glimpse into the Historia, it is worth considering how William of Tocco, a friar well into his seventies who had never written a book or taught a course of theology in his life, was entrusted with the first biography of the greatest theologian that medieval Christendom would ever produce. William was born in Southern Italy in the 1240s, right around the time that a youthful Thomas made his dramatic entrance into the Order of Preachers against the wishes of his family. (The aspirant friar was held prisoner in the family castle for nearly two years, according to the Historia, and throughout his confinement Thomas refused to wear anything but his Preacher’s habit, reduced to tatters during an altercation with two of his brothers, professional soldiers in the Emperor’s army, who were sent by the saint’s mother to capture him.) By the time William embraced his Dominican vocation as an adolescent at the Order’s monastery in Benevento, Thomas’ fame as a “Master of the Sacred Page,” as a Doctor whose theological genius had never been rivaled since the age of the Church Fathers, had spread throughout all of Europe; it is entirely possible that stories about Thomas’ sanctity and intellectual achievements had inspired William to pursue the mendicant life. Perhaps the most decisive period of William’s religious formation were the two years, from 1272 to 1274, that he spent as a young friar at San Domenico in Naples; providentially, it was at this Dominican friary that Thomas himself passed the greater part of these last years of his life. Here, our two friars would have met regularly in the various scenes of conventual life—in choir for the daily recitation of the Office, in the monastic refectory and chapter-room, and during recreation, the “friars’ daily period of conviviality” (Crean, Preface). Likewise, in addition to hearing Thomas preach, William would have attended some of the final lectures of the saint’s teaching career: that is, the magisterial courses on the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles that Thomas gave for all the friars of the priory. In the years following Thomas’ death, William went on to enjoy a career of some distinction in the Dominican Order, successively holding the offices of Preacher General at the provincial chapter of Lucca, Prior at the Dominican monasteries of Naples and Benevento, and Grand Inquisitor in Naples. Yet William’s most lasting achievement, and that to which he devoted the final years of his life, was the composition of the Life of St. Thomas Aquinas.

With the rapid and spontaneous growth of Thomas’ cult in the decades following his death, the Dominican province of Sicily took decisive action to advance the cause for his canonization: in 1317, the chapter selected William of Tocco as the promoter of Thomas’ cause, and he began to compile testimonies concerning the life and miracles of Friar Thomas, which were ultimately to be submitted to the Holy See. Despite the fact that William was not numbered among the intellectual elite of the Dominican Order, he was justly recognized for his piety, industry, and vivid memory of Friar Thomas as the man best qualified to undertake this first, authorized biography of the saint. Animated by a deep personal devotion to the Angelic Doctor, with whom he had studied sacred Scripture and chanted the Divine Office nearly fifty years earlier, William took up his office as the saint’s biographer with prodigious energy. Apart from collecting the reminiscences of elderly Dominicans from numerous priories who had known the saint personally—above all those of Reginald of Piperno, who had been Thomas’ lifelong companion (socius continuus)—William traveled widely, and at times to the peril of his own life, to interview members of the Aquino family and other eyewitnesses of the saint’s miracles, heroic virtues, and in particular of the prodigies surrounding his death. In 1318, within a year of his being named as the promoter of Thomas’ cause, William was able to present Pope John XXII with the first version of his Historia.

William of Tocco’s Life of St. Thomas Aquinas bears little resemblance to a biography in the modern sense of the word. From the first, it is clear that Tocco does not understand himself to be writing in the capacity of an historian; in fact, William is not writing a biography at all, but a hagiography: the life of a saint. At times, the pious author’s inattention to persons, places, and dates is rather vexing to the contemporary reader (to say nothing of the scholar), but we should come to recognize with William that the historical accidents surrounding the life of the medieval friar Tommaso d’Aquino might only serve to distract us from the essential subject of the Historia: St. Thomas’ profound participation in the Divine Life. Although the Life of St. Thomas Aquinas is replete with delightful stories and vital details about Thomas’ career, the text reads more like a ‘story of a soul’ than a critical study of the saint’s life and thought. Indeed, as the official biographer of the greatest intellectual who ever lived, William displays an amusing lack of intellectual curiosity. Exactly one sentence of his Historia is devoted to Thomas’ Summa—the composition of which consumed fully seven years of the saint’s career, or more than a third of his academic life. In fact, the Historia makes no pretense of introducing readers to the thought of Thomas Aquinas; rather, the text offers us a glimpse at “St. Thomas the thinker” (Crean, Preface). William recognized that St. Thomas’ supreme virtue was the astonishing absorption of his mind by the truths of God, and it is largely around this principle of Thomas’ sanctity that the Historia is composed.

Both the structure and style of the Life of St. Thomas Aquinas reinforce the devotional character of the text. Apart from the opening and concluding chapters of the Historia, which are devoted respectively to our saint’s early years and the events surrounding his death, the biography does not follow a recognizably chronological order. Instead, the nucleus of the Life, which is devoted to St. Thomas’ career as a Dominican friar, follows a thematic structure. William’s explicit adoption of a hagiographical scheme leads him to present scenes from Thomas’ adult life, not in an ordered historical narrative, but according to the supernatural virtues that they illustrate. Similarly, the literary style of the Historia advances the devotional aim of the text. William’s Latin prose is governed by a form of High Medieval rhetoric known as Cursus, which was designed to heighten the “nobility of noble themes.”² Although many textual features are necessarily effaced in translation, some of the author’s rhetorical devices remain distinct in the English text: Apostrophe, or pious invocations of the saint at the ending of certain chapters, elaborate symmetrical constructions, and Antithesis (e.g. opposing images of light and darkness, or freedom and bondage). As with almost all medieval texts, William also makes constant and unpremeditated recourse to the Scriptures to illuminate his portrait of St. Thomas, most conspicuously with complex metaphors likening our saint to figures from the Bible. It is William’s sincere belief, and not a literary conceit, that St. Thomas’ life was a salvific event ordained by God for the good of His Church, standing in perfect continuity with the ages of salvation history represented by Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers. In virtue of this fact, William writes his Historia as a kind of lectio divina, according to which he meditates on the divine mysteries contained in the hidden life of Friar Thomas; the author’s mode of expression is thus calculated to draw readers into his prayerful contemplation of the saint’s life.

Francisco de Zurbarán, St. Bonaventure Visited by St. Thomas Aquinas, c. 1659.

In William of Tocco’s Life of St. Thomas Aquinas, we are given a uniquely intimate glimpse into the life of a saint. Among the innumerable books written about St. Thomas in the last century, only Chesterton’s idiosyncratic biography, The Dumb Ox, can be said to bear even a remote resemblance to the original account fashioned by Tocco. What emerges from each of these books is not an historical record so much as a spiritual portrait. In the case of Tocco’s Historia, one leaves the account with only a vague impression of the towering edifice of Thomas’ doctrine or of the chronological dimension of his life and teaching, yet the reader feels that he has made contact with something immeasurably greater: the saint’s temperament, his virtues, his gentleness and humility, the constant abstraction of his mind from the five senses and its transfixion upon the five wounds of Jesus Christ; in a word, the soul of St. Thomas. Although William recognized in Thomas’ theological corpus the most cogent defense of the Catholic Faith ever committed to parchment, the biographer recognized that his hero’s essential greatness did not reside in the products of his intellectual life; rather, it was in his hidden life of contemplative prayer from which these products all necessarily issued. To the English-speaking world, Tocco’s spiritual portrait has remained hidden for centuries, and our knowledge of St. Thomas’ personality has been largely confined to the saint’s famously impersonal writings and to the critical studies of modern scholars. With this new translation of Tocco’s Historia, it is hoped that contemporary readers will be inspired with the same devotion to the Angelic Doctor as that which inspired this work of High Medieval hagiography. With the deplorable eviction of the Latin language from every domain of Catholic culture witnessed in the middle of the last century, we have been alienated from our vast medieval patrimony of liturgical, devotional, and theological literature. If we wish to know the saints and to conform our minds once more to the language of Heaven, it is texts like William’s Historia that we must reclaim. That traditional publishers like Angelus Press are beginning to make new translations of such texts accessible is a sign of hope for the continued restoration of the Catholic intellectual tradition.

Sample handwriting of St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, viewable at the Vatican Library website.

Endnotes

¹ The author wishes to thank Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P., who has written an excellent Preface to the forthcoming edition, which serves as the source for many of the ideas developed in this article.

² Kenelm Foster, O.P., The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas: Biographical Documents (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1959), 9.

 

TITLE IMAGE: The Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1631) by Francisco de Zurbarán.