I. The Dumb Ox

Paris, around 1245. An early biographical story about a “dumb ox” lets us imagine a Dominican classroom.

A tall, heavy young man sits in the corner, reading. He does not say much. The other students think he is slow. They give him a nickname: the dumb ox. He hears it. He does not push back.

Biographical tradition gives his teacher Albert the Great a famous reply: they might call this student a dumb ox, but his voice would be heard across the world. It is not a classroom transcript. The story preserves a teacher refusing the label supplied by the class.

The dumb ox is named Thomas Aquinas.

He was about twenty and had already resisted his family’s plans. They hoped for an influential Benedictine future connected with Monte Cassino; he wanted the poverty of the Dominicans. His family detained him in 1244 and tried to change his mind; he regained his freedom the following year. Biographies also tell of a woman sent to tempt him. Evidence, hagiography and later imagination need separating in these early stories.

Paris with Albert, then Cologne, then Paris again; later, teaching and writing in several cities of Italy and France. Born around 1225 and dead in 1274, he lived about forty-nine years and left an immense body of Latin writing. Dividing an estimated word count by every day since birth would add precision without adding understanding.

How did he do it?

Early biographies describe his ability to dictate to several assistants, often retold as four works at once. Exactly how the work rotated need not be settled here. The corpus and the collaborative labor are real. He was not a miraculous pen with no need for paper, scribes or time.

What was he writing?

He was attempting something almost impossible. He was trying to take the entire system of Aristotelian logic and use it to organize the whole of Christian faith from the ground up.

This was not merely academic. Aristotle’s natural philosophy and some interpretations of it prompted prohibitions and disputes. How far a pagan thinker’s arguments could go in a Christian university was an institutional question. Aristotle himself was not a Christian heretic; his readers could nevertheless face charges.

The dumb ox set himself the task of placing this suspect source at the very center of Christian theology.

II. Aristotle Comes Back

For much of the early medieval Latin West, only part of Aristotle was readily visible.

Logical works such as the Categories and On Interpretation remained through Boethius’s translations and commentaries. Natural philosophy, metaphysics and other writings circulated differently. Byzantine and Arabic-speaking readers had not all “lost Aristotle.” His disappearance is a description from a particular Latin vantage point.

Then Aristotle came back.

There was more than one road back: Arabic into Latin, and Greek directly into Latin too.

The transmission line we described in the previous essay — Greek texts translated into Syriac by Christian scholars in Syria, from Syriac into Arabic by translators in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad — was, in those centuries, being read, annotated, and developed by generation after generation of Muslim philosophers. Two names from this line were especially important for Aquinas. Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037), a Persian physician and philosopher, who wrote the Canon of Medicine and The Book of Healing. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198), a Cordoban judge and philosopher, who wrote commentaries on almost the entire Aristotelian corpus.

Averroes often became “the Commentator,” as Aristotle was “the Philosopher.” The titles register his importance, not a monopoly on interpretation. Aquinas read him seriously and opposed him strongly on questions including a single shared intellect.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, translation at Toledo and elsewhere brought Arabic works into Latin learning through people of different languages and religions. It was not one uniformly harmonious workshop. Direct translations from Greek, notably those of William of Moerbeke, also mattered. Many hands carried the books into universities.

The Aristotle available to Latin readers became much larger.

It was an earthquake.

Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius had already shaped Latin theology. Platonic traditions offered languages of soul, ascent and light, but had never joined Christianity without friction. Inheritance had always involved selection and transformation.

Aristotle offered powerful tools for thinking about sensory experience, natural causes, form and matter, body and soul. The eternity of the world and the nature of intellect were especially contentious. “The soul dies with the body” is not an adequate summary of Aristotle and all his interpreters.

Some questions pressed sharply against faith; others supplied resources theologians could use.

Restrictions on teaching natural philosophy and related works appeared in Paris in 1210 and 1215; review was again prescribed in 1231. The books nevertheless entered teaching later. Neither deleting a few sentences nor issuing a prohibition could settle the encounter permanently.

In 1270 Bishop Étienne Tempier condemned thirteen propositions; in 1277, another condemnation listed 219. Its targets, and the extent to which it touched Aquinas, remain debated. The list was not simply a personal sentence on him or a rejection of everything Aristotle wrote.

He had been dead for three years by 1277. Canonization and a different institutional standing came later. Knowing that outcome should not erase the disputes he worked amid, or turn him into a lone hero against an undifferentiated Church.

What did taking him seriously look like?

It did not mean merely citing Aristotle as supporting material. Logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics and the soul entered the structure of theology to be examined. Aquinas wrote extensive commentaries; the Summa repeatedly argues with Aristotle. Faced with a conflict, he could reconsider an interpretation, reject a particular argument, or distinguish what natural reason demonstrates from what revelation discloses. He neither accepted everything wholesale nor made faith a stamp of approval for an established contradiction.

He did not hold that contradictory claims could both remain true indefinitely. True reason and true revelation, he believed, could not conflict; apparent conflicts called for examination of argument and interpretation. We may question that confidence. We should not rewrite it as two modern, mutually noninterfering territories.

This structure later came to be called the high point of scholastic philosophy.

It rested on centuries of copying, commentary, translation and new thinking: Greek scholars, Syriac translators, Avicenna, Averroes and Latin translators. Hypatia belonged to an earlier world of teaching. We cannot prove that a particular book on Aquinas’s desk necessarily passed through her hands.

He was neither an isolated genius nor the final link. He stood inside a network crossing languages and religions, inheriting work and leaving new arguments for those who followed.

Putting Hypatia and Aquinas into successive parts of this story makes shared labor visible: opening what one can understand so another reader may enter. It does not manufacture a book’s fully documented itinerary.

III. The Five Ways

Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 2, Article 3.

The work is enormous. We will stop first at a single article.

The article asks: Does God exist? Utrum Deus sit.

Aquinas's manner of answering follows the standard scholastic format. First the objections are listed. Then the contrary view. Then his own argument. Then a response to each objection in turn. In the section of his own argument, he gives five ways — quinque viae — five paths from experience to the conclusion that God exists.

The first begins with change: what is potentially something becomes actually so through something actual. If every mover merely borrows its power, Aquinas asks, what enables the ordered series to act at all? He argues for an unmoved first mover. Motion here means more than movement from place to place.

The second begins with the order of efficient causes. Nothing can be its own efficient cause, and an ordered series whose members depend on others requires an account of that dependence. “First” should not simply be pictured as the earliest billiard ball on a cosmic timeline.

The third considers things that come into being and perish, moves from possible being and nonbeing to necessary being, and asks whether that necessity is derived. Its steps remain disputed. “Something must exist” is not by itself the whole proof.

The fourth moves from degrees of truth, goodness and nobility toward a source of perfection, relying on metaphysical claims about maxima and causation. It is not the commonplace that every arbitrary ranking must have a winner.

The fifth argues from the regular directedness of natural things without intelligence toward an intelligent ordering source. Its background is final causation, not simply the modern slogan that a complex organ must have a designer.

Five ways.

We can question the premises, structures of dependence and inferences, and consider their relation to modern science. But “physics allows an infinite regress” or “God has not been measured” does not automatically answer the argument he made. Criticism also begins by identifying its object.

These are all reasonable engagements. They have been pursued for eight centuries and will be pursued further.

I am not going to pursue them in this section.

What I want to point to is the posture in which Aquinas wrote the five ways.

The prologue does address beginners. Aquinas places questions and objections before his reasons. He is not merely pretending to offer proofs: he explicitly thinks God’s existence demonstrable. Admiring his humility must not require deleting his confidence.

And he himself was very clear about their limits.

First, the Five Ways are not the whole of his natural theology. Later questions argue for divine simplicity, perfection and unity. He does not leave several unrelated gods at the junction. The Trinity, however, is not established by these arguments of natural reason.

Second, reasoning from effects better known to us toward their cause is a form of demonstration for him, not modern statistical induction from a handful of cases. It has metaphysical premises; discussing it means discussing those premises too.

Third, demonstrating existence is not comprehending essence. He thinks natural reason can know some divine attributes, while explicitly denying that it can demonstrate the Trinity. Reason is not speechless at the doorstep; faith is not a license to fill every blank.

The Five Ways express ambition as well as limits. Describing them only as an admission of inability would fail to respect a man seriously trying to prove something.

He distinguishes how something may be known, and how far that knowledge extends.

He uses reason and revelation. They work together in theology, but cannot simply pass off each other’s warrant as their own.

That discrimination is harder work than a simple “reason ends here.”

He was not the only philosopher to recognize limits, or a mediator determined to offend neither faith nor reason. He had firm conclusions and could argue forcefully against others. Yet the form of his questions reminds a reader to let objections speak before concluding.

What I want to carry from this is a caution against mistaking one’s account for the whole of its object.

That caution is not a complete ethical guarantee. Acknowledging God’s incomprehensibility and respecting every person of another faith do not automatically coincide. We will return to that crack.

For now, retain the distinction: he says a great deal without thinking everything can be exhausted in the same way. This is not having nothing to say. It is someone with much to say still needing to know what kind of work his words are doing.

IV. Straw

December 6, 1273, the feast of Saint Nicholas, Naples. Early biographical tradition locates the decisive interruption of his writing on this day.

Aquinas was saying his morning mass. He had been doing this every day for decades — every day, mass; after mass, work.

That morning, after mass, he did not go to work.

He returned to his cell. He sat down. He did not write.

His close companion Reginald tried to bring him back to work. Part Three of the Summa was unfinished. The conversations that follow reach us through early testimony and biography, not Aquinas’s own diary.

Aquinas said: "Reginald, I cannot."

Reginald urged him to continue. Accounts preserve the urging and refusal; they do not let us reconstruct every exchange day by day.

Later, in a longer conversation, Aquinas said the sentence —

"Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me."

Everything he had written, compared with what he had been shown, seemed like straw.

Palea can mean straw or chaff. It need not place a literal rice harvest in the room. The image concerns the disparity between his writing and what he believed he had received.

The Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles, Aristotle commentaries, scriptural commentaries, philosophical and theological disputes: the remark places this immense labor in a new comparison. Beside what he had seen, it seemed like straw.

He was not blaming himself. He was not saying "I wrote badly."

Straw is not garbage. Straw is what is left after the harvest. The grain is elsewhere. Straw is real — it does come from that harvest — but it is not the harvest itself.

What he had written was straw compared to what he had seen on that morning of December the sixth.

What did he see?

We lack evidence to reconstruct the experience from outside. Biographies speak of revelation; later readers have suggested illness. This is not a clinical record from which to diagnose someone seven centuries later. We can neither certify what he saw nor cancel his understanding with a speculative diagnosis.

Not knowing first means our knowledge is limited. A gap in the sources is not itself proof of absolute ineffability. Still, a writer of such magnitude stopping leaves later readers looking for a long time at the pen.

He did not go on writing the Summa.

That is the firm center of this part of the story.

We may read a restraint in the interruption: language need not occupy everything. That is our reading, not proof that his bodily condition, motives and theological experience all have one explanation.

He left no detailed first-person account of that day. It does not follow that he never spoke another word or abandoned thought altogether. The account is powerful partly because it does not fill everything in for us.

We can read it beside his discussions of the limits of knowledge.

But do not arrange his life backward as an inevitable approach to this day. He argued actively, and then came an interruption surviving evidence cannot fully explain. Rigorous thought and an unfinished book can belong to one person.

He stopped.

On March 7, 1274, traveling to the Second Council of Lyon, he died at Fossanova, aged about forty-nine. Accounts of the journey and illness differ. We will not identify a reported collision or the December experience as a medically established cause.

The Summa stops at Part Three, Question 90. The later Supplement was compiled from his earlier Commentary on the Sentences. Its material is indeed his writing; the compilation is not the same thing as his completing Part Three himself.

The dumb ox put down his pen.

In the comparison handed down to us, his writing was like straw.

He did not explain what the grain was.

V. Naples

Roccasecca, around 1225.

A castle near Roccasecca in southern Italy, on his family’s lands. His noble parents, Landulf and Theodora, had political ties that also shaped their plans for their child.

The standard practice for the younger sons of southern Italian noble families at that time was the Church. The specifics required calculation. The monastery of Monte Cassino was nearby — the founding house of the Benedictines, one of the oldest and richest monasteries in Europe. The abbacy was traditionally controlled by the local nobility. To send a younger son in, to walk him up the ranks, to make him abbot — this was a respectable, lucrative, politically valuable career, both for him and for the family.

Aquinas was sent to Monte Cassino at the age of five. He read there for nine years.

Then Monte Cassino fell into danger because of the political conflict between Emperor and Pope. His family pulled him out and sent him to the University of Naples to continue his studies.

Frederick II founded the university at Naples in 1224, among other things to train officials for his rule. Southern Italy’s linguistic and intellectual exchanges made it an important place to encounter writings newly entering Latin learning. Cultural curiosity coexisted with political aims; the university was no power-free paradise.

Aquinas arrived in Naples at fourteen. There he read Aristotle.

A wider Aristotle than his earlier education had offered, accompanied by questions from Greek and Arabic traditions of commentary.

At Naples he encountered Aristotelian natural philosophy; Peter of Ireland is the teacher commonly associated with it, not an Irish Dominican named Martin. He also encountered the Dominicans there. Approved in 1216, the mendicant order’s preaching, study and teaching offered a life different from the one his family envisioned.

Aquinas fell in love with Aristotle. He fell in love with the Dominicans.

At nineteen he decided to join them.

The family did not oppose all religious life; they had intended him for the Church. The conflict concerned an order and a position unlike those they expected to serve the family’s interests. An abbacy was an ambition, not an appointment already in his pocket.

His family could not accept this. His sister and his mother joined in trying to talk him out of it. He did not move. After a year his family gave up.

He left Italy for Paris. Then to Cologne. Then back to Paris to teach. Then on to various Italian cities to lecture. His whole life he was on the road. But the last part of the Summa Theologiae he wrote in Naples — in 1272 the Dominican order sent him back to Naples to found a school. On December 6, 1273, in Naples, he stopped writing. In early 1274 he left Naples for the Council of Lyon, and died on the way.

Naples was the entry point of his intellectual life, and its exit point.

Here as a young man he entered a wider intellectual world; here in his late forties he stopped work on the Summa.

In between, for several decades, he did the work of building a bridge between Aristotle and Christianity. He completed most of this work. He did not complete all of it.

Did the incompletion have anything to do with his stopping?

Possibly. Possibly not.

Perhaps what he saw on the morning of December 6 made him realize that the bridge meant something different from what he had originally thought. Perhaps it made him realize that whether the bridge was finished was not the important question; what mattered was acknowledging what was on the other side. Perhaps it had nothing to do with any of this. Perhaps he was simply ill, and stopped.

We do not know.

We know only that he began in Naples, stopped in Naples, and died on the road to Lyon. The circle was completed, but not in the manner he had planned. He had planned to finish the Summa. What happened was that he did not finish, that he stopped, and then died.

Perhaps the circle was drawn by him. Perhaps it was drawn by something else.

No surviving record allows us to say everything he felt about that ending.

VI. The Tower

Paris. The Dominican priory of Saint-Jacques.

Aquinas had returned to Paris for his second professorship. He was forty-four. He was already among the most famous theologians in Europe.

His daily life was as follows.

Prayer, Mass, teaching and disputation divided the day into different kinds of labor. We need not invent a timetable beginning at precisely four every morning.

A master of theology expounded Scripture and conducted disputations. An objection needed to be presented, heard and answered, not quietly made weak for the teacher’s convenience. Some teaching and disputes subsequently became written works.

The rest of the time he wrote.

His way of writing was not to sit alone at a desk. He used secretaries. The secretaries sat at the desk; he walked around the room, dictating. The secretaries took down what he said. Then he revised. Then they made fair copies. Then he revised again.

It was said that he could dictate to four secretaries at once, four different works on four different topics. This was treated as a miracle in his time. It may have been an exaggeration. But even if not literally simultaneous, his pace of composition was extraordinary.

We may imagine pages still waiting to be copied by candlelight. The light and furnishings make labor tangible; they are not an inventory recovered from one particular night in 1270.

His cell was small. A bed. A desk. A chair. A crucifix. Some books. The walls were stone. Cold in winter, stifling in summer. This was his tower.

Poverty belonged to his chosen religious life. It did not make books, assistants or the conditions of teaching disappear. Not owning private property is not the same as needing no communal resources.

But there was one thing in his tower that was unusual.

Early biographies describe absorption in prayer, sometimes tears or apparent obliviousness to surroundings. Such hagiographically shaped testimony should not all be turned into a personal phrase he supposedly repeated: “being drawn in.”

Accounts also tell of silences amid work, followed by its resumption. Even accepting an account does not disclose what occurred inside the silence.

His tower was not only the place where he worked. It was also the place where he met something.

He did not make every personal experience a warrant for an argument.

His works certainly discuss contemplation, rapture and knowing God. Theology also works from revelation, not within natural reason alone. The useful distinction is between discussing these matters and using “I experienced it” to silence every objection.

Why?

Perhaps humility played a part, perhaps distinctions of genre and responsibility. The absence of a personal report does not establish a single motive.

I read a demand here: even when convinced of what one has seen, one must say what one is offering others as a basis for shared discussion.

That is a lesson drawn from his work, not a psychological biography supplied on his behalf.

The friar in our imagined room writes, dictates, revises, prays, and returns to unfinished work.

Work and prayer share a life without needing to impersonate each other.

They affect each other without becoming the same kind of evidence. In December 1273 the pen stopped.

We cannot eliminate every competing explanation of that interruption.

We can leave it there: a vast system with a place beyond which its author did not continue writing.

VII. Unsayable

This movement concerns the other, and the place left for another.

We arrive here at a fact that looks strange: the largest other Aquinas wrote about all his life was God. But God in the Christian context is not the "other." God is the center, the Father, the Creator, the source of all things. How could God be other?

The strangeness is exactly what I want to point at.

The previous essay examined how political rumor reduced Hypatia to an obstacle. It does not authorize a verdict that Cyril’s entire theology lacked transcendence, or make Aquinas his perfect opposite. Both men exceed that convenient contrast.

In Aquinas's world, God was other.

This does not measure him as a deeper believer than somebody else. Drawing on traditions including Pseudo-Dionysius, he holds that creatures can lead us to knowledge of God without our comprehending the divine essence in this life. Negation, affirmation and analogy work together; not everything collapses into “nothing can be said.”

Aquinas was a fairly systematic affirmative theologian — he wrote the five ways, he wrote on the divine attributes, he wrote on the inner structure of the Trinity. But beneath all this work he held a line. All these affirmative descriptions, summed together, did not equal God. Whatever human language could say of God, compared with God himself, was straw.

God in Aquinas was an other who could not be absorbed.

There is a crack we must not cover for him. In Summa II–II, question 11, article 3, he supports handing obstinate heretics to secular authority for execution. That is not a conclusion others merely forced upon him. Recognizing God’s incomprehensibility did not make him consistently recognize the inviolability of people who believed differently.

We cannot sort Christians into those who destroy the other and those who never do, and simply place him on the safe side. History offers no such clean arrangement.

That makes the lesson of straw harder, and more dependent on action. An intellectual acknowledgment of limits is not already a relinquishment of power to punish another.

In SAE terms, my concern is that an account cannot close upon everything, and a living person should not be compressed into a position within it. This is the question I bring, not a claim that Aquinas already held the SAE framework.

Acknowledging that one is not the whole is a beginning, not the completion of every ethical test.

Buddhist emptiness, the Christian God, Islamic divine unity, Zhuangzi’s dao and Zen’s cautions about language can enter a conversation here. They are not one concealed doctrine. Conversation requires real differences rather than absorbing everyone into my vocabulary.

His faith has particular content: Trinity, incarnation, sacraments. He does not merely believe in “something I do not know.” We may reject his doctrines while attending to his arguments, distinctions, and failures to observe boundaries we think should hold.

Likewise, criticizing violence around Cyril requires evidence, not a claim to have penetrated the whole of his faith. Preserving complexity does not excuse harm.

Reading Aquinas today, whether or not we believe the God he believed in, we can take from him one thing —

The health of a way of thinking depends both on how it understands its limits and on the actual place it leaves for dissenters.

A system professing humility can still persecute. A person can be harsh in one place and open a path in another. We need particular judgments and acts, not a blanket acquittal under the word “open.”

Respect need not mean obedience; criticism need not erase an entire person.

I still want to keep the image of the stopped pen: a builder of a vast system finding his words unequal to all they pointed toward. The reminder deserves a hearing. It exempts none of his other conclusions from examination.

Straw is not shame. Straw is acknowledgment. The acknowledgment that what I can do has limits. That there is a boundary. That on the other side of the boundary there is grain — but the grain is not something I can hold up in my hand and show you.

Bringing that acknowledgment into relations between people remains work for us to do.

Not granting another permission to exist from above, and not confusing equality with sameness. Equal standing can accommodate real difference. My judgment cannot describe a person without remainder.

Hypatia’s teaching and Aquinas’s stopped pen can meet beside this question. They do not prove an identical doctrine; one person’s fate need not become an illustration for another’s theory.

VIII. The Bridge

There is one more figure on the bridge tonight than there was last time.

Hypatia stands there. The astrolabe in her hand. Her position is in the middle of the bridge.

Aquinas walks up.

A large friar in Dominican clothing walks slowly. On this imagined bridge he carries no book. Poverty did not mean a life without the things needed for work; tonight, it means no volume needs to stand between him and someone else.

He reaches the middle of the bridge. He sees Hypatia.

He stops.

He was born more than eight centuries after her. We cannot give him a reading list directly inherited from her, but both knew the labor of reading, teaching and commentary. They can meet without first proving a direct genealogy.

He says something to her in his own language. She replies in hers. Neither understands the other's words very well — his is the Latin of medieval scholasticism, hers the Greek of late antiquity. But they understand each other's posture.

He bows his head a little to her.

Not far away stands Augustine. Born some eight hundred years before Aquinas. He watches the two of them meet. The work of his own life — bringing Greek philosophy into Christian theology — was an early node on this same line. He was Hypatia's contemporary, and one of Aquinas's spiritual ancestors. He does not approach. He stays where he is and watches.

Further away, Socrates is sitting. Plato is crouching, drawing a diagram.

Aquinas glances at Plato. Then at Hypatia. Then at the cluster of figures further on — the ones drawing equations, watching corn, writing poems, reading star charts.

At the center of the bridge he can imagine many hands: Greek copyists, Syriac translators, scholars writing Arabic, desks where Latin was made. Not a single route with every stop established, but many paths meeting in his reading.

He is not the end of the line. The line goes forward. The next node, he does not know. He stopped writing in 1273; how could he know.

He only walked the stretch given to him.

His Summa stopped at Part Three, Question 90. The image of straw and grain leaves a question: how far can my instruments take me? It did not draw every boundary for later readers or dissolve the contradictions of his own life.

This was what he could do.

At the far end of the bridge, the figure who has always been looking into the distance, who once before had looked at Hypatia, this time looks again.

This time, he is looking at Aquinas.

He does not say anything. He only looks.

Aquinas knows someone is looking at him. He does not turn his head. He is looking, attentively, at the astrolabe in Hypatia's hand.

The night deepens. The markings on the astrolabe glint in the moonlight.

He stands in the middle of the bridge and writes no more tonight. We borrow the straw image without pronouncing the books worthless. Straw comes from real labor. Later readers can still read, and still object.

The one who did the harvesting has now stopped.

He and Hypatia look into the distance, with more than eight centuries between them. Her astrolabe, his pen. Both used instruments. Instruments can help a person; there are also things they cannot do on a person’s behalf.

Tonight neither needs to fit the other inside an instrument.

The bridge continues. No book has finished writing it.^[1][2][3]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives