The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Therefore spare me, God and Saviour!

CHAPTER XXIV.
THOMAS AQUINAS AND JOHN BONAVENTURA.

In Southern Italy, about midway between Rome and Naples, the road which connects these two cities passes near the site of the ancient city of Aquinum. It was a stronghold of the Volscians, although not mentioned in the account of their wars with the Romans. As a Roman municipality it rose to greater importance than the other cities of the district, and became the birthplace of the satirist Juvenal and other eminent men. But in the seventh century it was destroyed by the Lombards, and the site never re-occupied. What were left of its inhabitants found another site, more capable of defence in those wild days, and built Aquino on a mountain slope. It runs along the cliff in a single street, like our own Mauch Chunk, and the remains of its oldest buildings show that its mediaeval architects drew freely upon still earlier structures for their materials.

In one of these old structures, still known as the Casa Reale or royal house, lived the noble family who were the lords of Aquino. Here Thomas Aquinas was born in the year 1225, being one of the five children of Count Landulf of Aquino, and his wife, Theodora Caraccioli, Countess of Teano. The family was not a royal house, but it was connected by intermarriage with the royal caste of Europe. It is said, but I have not been able to verify the statement, that Thomas’s grandfather had married a sister of the Emperor Barbarossa. His mother was descended from the Tancred of Hauteville, whose sons, Roger and Robert Guiscard, effected the Norman conquest of the two Sicilies. Sibylla, Queen of the Tancred who ended the first line of Norman sovereigns, is said to have been a daughter of the family. But the real importance of the lords of Aquino was due to their strategic position on the northern frontier of Apulia and to their military spirit. Richard of Aquino, the grandfather of Thomas, was the mainstay of Tancred’s cause on the mainland of Italy, and merited, by his treachery and barbarity, the cruel death the Emperor Henry VI. inflicted on him after the final conquest of the two Sicilies. His father, Landulf, seems to have been a man of less warlike character; but his uncle, Thomas of Aquinas, who succeeded Richard in the countship of Acerra, was the ablest of the Ghibelline chiefs of Southern Italy, and one of Frederic the Second’s most trusted captains. That emperor enlarged the dominions of the family, and gave ample scope to their fighting propensities in his wars with the popes. And Thomas’s two brothers, who were older than himself, embraced the opportunity of a military life. His sisters formed illustrious alliances with the noble families of Southern Italy. Pope Honorius III. is said to have been his godfather.

Thomas’s youth seems to have been uneventful, with the exception of the calamity by which he lost a younger sister, who was killed by lightning while sleeping by his side. In his fifth year his education began. Less than five miles away, as the bird flies, lay the Monte Casino, the greatest and first of the monasteries of the Benedictine order. Here it was that Benedict of Nursia in 529 laid the foundation of the first great order of Western Christendom. And although Monte Casino had shared in the calamity of Aquino at the hands of the Lombards, and had lain desolate for a hundred and fifty years, it had been rebuilt with new splendor, and was at this time the grandest ecclesiastical establishment outside the city of Rome. And here, in 1227, Landulf Sinibald, himself of the Aquino family, had become abbot, thus attaining one of the highest dignities open to a Churchman. To his care the young Thomas was intrusted, and on Monte Casino he spent the next seven years of his life, undergoing the discipline and receiving the instruction for which the schools of the Benedictine fathers had always been famous. Probably it was the hope of the family of Aquino that the young man would enter the order and rise to the same dignity as his uncle, becoming a prince of the Church, and thus more powerful and wealthy than any of his uncles or brothers.

In 1239 the second outbreak of hostilities between the Pope and the Emperor led to the conversion of Monte Casino into a great fortress, in which were left but eight monks to carry on the routine of monastic services. The rest found a home in other Benedictine houses, the schools were suspended, and Thomas returned home. But the same year he seems to have proceeded to Naples to study in the university which Frederic had established in 1224, and amply endowed with wealth and privileges, and had revived in 1234, after its suspension during his first war with the papacy. He had forbidden his Italian subjects to leave the kingdom to attend foreign universities, and he had used every available means to make them contented with that of Naples, one of these being the employment of the ablest teachers he could secure in all the sciences then recognized as belonging to the higher education. We are told that Thomas pursued his studies two years in Naples, when the influence of his Dominican teachers led him to form the purpose to become a Dominican friar,[14] and to put on the garb of a novice. This step was a most momentous one. Whether his family looked forward to his becoming a Benedictine monk and abbot, or contemplated his embracing the offers of promotion in the civil service of the kingdom, which Frederic II. had held out to the graduates of his pet university, they could not but regard his adoption of the life of a mendicant friar with indignation and disgust. To be a Benedictine Pater was to be a gentleman and a scholar, to have a share in the influence, wealth, and power of the order, and possibly to rise to the dignity of the Dux et Princeps omnium Abbatum et Religiosorum, the Abbot of Monte Casino. But the Mendicant orders were affairs of yesterday, with all the rawness if also the effusive enthusiasm of youth. Francis of Assisi died within a year of Thomas’s birth; Dominic, five years earlier. And the mendicant mode of life was most offensive to the proud Italian nobles, who must have recoiled from the idea that one of their race should carry the beggar’s wallet in his turn, and live always upon alms. In this respect the requirements of the orders were far stricter and more humiliating than in later times, when the practice, if not the rule, was relaxed. Those who were unaffected by their enthusiasm thought of the Mendicants as the average man thinks of the Salvation Army, or thought of the Methodists at the middle of the last century.

No notice was sent to Aquino of the step Thomas had taken. The monks always had their share of the wisdom of the serpent, and they were to show it in this case. But some of the vassals of the family had recognized the young novice under his Dominican garb on the streets of Naples or in the church; and through them the news reached his family. Landulf seems to have been dead; I can find no mention of him later than 1229. But the Countess Theodora hastened, with all a man’s energy, to rescue her son from the career of a mendicant. The friars learned of her coming and hurried their novice off to Rome, and to Rome his mother pursued him. To avoid her he was sent forward to France, but he had to pass the lines of the imperial army then engaged in the war with the Lombards. The influence of the powerful Ghibelline family roused the vigilance of the imperial authorities. At Acquapendente, on the frontiers of Tuscany, Thomas and the friars who escorted him were arrested, and the young noble was sent back to his family at Aquino.

Every means, foul as well as fair, seems to have been used to break him from his purpose to join the Dominicans, while he remained a prisoner at Aquino, or in some of the mountain castles of the family. But Thomas was assured of his vocation, and he had a fund of obstinacy in his character which showed to good purpose. It is said that the Pope interfered in his behalf, but this is hardly probable, as the Pope was waging war at the time on the Emperor and his vassals, the Lords of Aquino. At last the countess and her children abandoned the attempt to influence him, and at least connived at his escape to Naples, where he took the vows of obedience, celibacy, and poverty, which sealed his connection with the Dominican order, in 1243.

We have looked at this step through the eyes of his family, and seen its offensiveness. But if we regard it more impartially, we are impressed with its wisdom. It was among the Dominicans, not the Benedictines, that Thomas could serve his day and generation the best. The Benedictines, in the new age which the era of the Crusades opened to Europe, had fallen behind the times. It was because of this that that century saw the rise of the two great orders founded by Dominic and by Francis, and their rapid growth, until “a handful of corn on the top of the mountains” shook like the forests which clothe Lebanon. The Dominican order was still in the blossom of youth; the Benedictine had rather “gone to seed.” Thomas felt the difference when he met the Dominicans as professors of theology in the Studium at Naples. Scholarship rather than thought had been the strong point with the Benedictines. They would be apt to meet the questions which welled up in the mind of the eager youth by an inapposite quotation from some Church father, or to repress them altogether, as tending to vanity. What, indeed, could Abbot Landulf and his brethren on the hill-top do with a deep-eyed boy, who went from one to another with the question, “What is God?” But at Naples, and in contact with the more lively intellectual life of his age, his acute and alert intellect found a satisfaction and an encouragement which the Benedictines could not give him. He was encouraged to ask questions instead of being snubbed. There were opened to him vistas of research and speculation, which could not but attract a hungry and active mind like his. The Dominicans were the order which had undertaken to face and answer the questions of the age, and in Thomas these questions were craving a solution. What wonder if he fell in love with the preachers, and they with him! They discovered what capacity lay in the young noble, and knew that they had better use for him than his hum-drum uncle on the hills and among the hawks. And any scruples as to his admission to the novitiate without the consent or against the will of his family were set aside by the belief that his “vocation” was directly from God, and therefore set aside all merely human authority.

Having secured their prize, the Dominicans showed that they knew how to use it. The order was, on one side of it, a great educational institution to select and train young men to fight the intellectual battles of the Church. The young Dominican at once put on the yoke of the “course of study” (Ordo Studiorum), which had been prescribed by the General Chapter, and proceeded as far toward the highest dignities and responsibilities of learning as his abilities were thought to warrant. The decision on this point rested with the General of the Order, who at this time was John of Germany, the fourth in the succession begun by Dominic. He selected for Thomas as his best teacher, Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert the Great (Magnus), who was teaching in the monastic school at Koeln (Cologne), and who had the reputation of having absorbed all that Aristotle knew, and worked up his teaching into a harmony of Christian theology with Greek philosophy. According to his biographers generally, Thomas was sent at once to Koeln in 1245, and accompanied Albert when he proceeded to Paris in that same year to take his degree as Doctor of Theology, returning with him in 1248. Dr. Heinrich Denifle, however, assigns 1248 as the year when Thomas came to Koeln from Italy, and limits their intercourse as master and scholar to the two years required by the rules of the order. Whether their relations as such extended over five years or were limited to two, they were enough for the formation of a life-long friendship based on mutual respect and admiration. Strangely enough the young Italian from the garrulous South was noted more for silence than for speech among the students at Koeln. He had found a teacher whom he thought worth hearing in silence, and he heard to better purpose than his associates. Bos mutus, a dumb ox, they called him. Albert foretold that “the sound of his bellowing in doctrine would yet go through the whole world.”