How many angels can sit on the head of a pin? Was it harder for God to create the universe than to create man? In the resurrection, will man get back the rib he lost in Eden?

Such questions were debated by the scholastics, the theologians of the Middle Ages.

While today we might laugh at such questions, we also can appreciate a certain aspect of their thinking--they took Truth seriously, and they wanted to know every detail about God and his creation. The greatest of all the Scholastic theologians was Thomas Aquinas.

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Thomas was born about 1225 into a dynamic age--the age of chivalry, the Crusades, and Marco Polo. Towns were competing with one another to build taller and more glorious Gothic cathedrals. As the younger son of the Count of Aquino, near Naples, Italy, Thomas was also born into a well-connected family, related to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick and descended from the famous crusader Tancred.
Yet Thomas lived largely apart from the attractions of this medieval world, focusing instead on affairs of the mind. When he was five, his parents sent him to the prestigious monastic school at Monte Cassino. As his family saw it, Thomas could use his religious education to obtain a lucrative and influential position as an abbot or even archbishop. But this young man had other ideas. While studying at the University of Naples, Italy, Thomas chose to enter the Dominican order, taking a vow of poverty. His parents were outraged when they found out. Being religious was one thing, but being poor, that just wouldn't do. They quickly attempted some damage control.

When his dad got the Pope to offer him the archbishopric of Naples, Thomas wouldn't take it. How about being abbot of the affluent monastery at Monte Cassino? No, Thomas wasn't budging. In fact, he reaffirmed his vows and set out to study with the Dominicans in Paris.

He never got there. His family had him kidnapped along the way, and they imprisoned him in the tower of a castle for seventeen months. Think of it as a kind of cult deprogramming. Thomas' brothers even hired a prostitute to seduce him. When she entered his room, he knew he had better not leave any room for temptation, so he quickly grabbed a firebrand from the hearth and chased her out. Then he branded the sign of the cross in the door.

As the story goes, his mother was moved by Thomas' determination, and she eventually helped him escape out the window.

The Ox Brays
He went on to study in Paris and Cologne, where he became the pupil and friend of Albertus Magnus, a renowned German theologian. Since Thomas was a big, quiet man, he gained the nickname of "Dumb Ox." But, recognizing the genius inside, Albertus quipped, "This is an ox whose braying all Europe will hear."

After completing his formal studies, Thomas spent the rest of his life teaching theology in Paris and various papal centers in Italy. During the high Middle Ages, all education was in the hands of the church. The schoolmen, or teachers at the medieval schools, tried to systematize the teachings of Scripture and church writers. The great minds of the age, Anselm, Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Duns Scotus, all set their hand to bring some logical order to the first millennium of Christian thought. Aquinas became the greatest of these systematizers. His mentor was right: the "braying" of this plodding scholar reached throughout Europe and beyond. Some have described Aquinas' thought as a lake with many streams flowing into it and many drawing from it, but not a water source itself. It might be true that there was little originality in his work, but Aquinas organized medieval thinking better than anyone else did.