The Disciple of Charity: St. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Life

Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli | Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain

In 2024 the Church will celebrate the 750th anniversary of the passing of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure in 1274. Certainly there will be many analyses in the next year and a half that will discuss the enduring intellectual heritage of these two great friars and Doctors of the Church, and well there should be. However, what should not be overlooked when marking the lives of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas is the Christian witness provided by these saints, a witness that stands as a model of discipleship for all (not merely academics) who would look to their example. It is in this particular way, then, that I would like to sketch out here what makes St. Thomas Aquinas worthy of imitation as a disciple of Christ, especially today. In doing so, the student of St. Thomas should look not merely to Aquinas’s academic writings (great as they are) but also to how Aquinas himself lived, to his own artwork, and to how this holy priest is remembered in Christian iconography. In such a light, the true treasures of Aquinas’s theological and philosophical writings are thrown into their greatest relief. 

Alongside St. Bonaventure the Church holds up St. Thomas Aquinas as a theologian worthy of particular study.[1] Moreover, Pope Leo XIII extolls St. Thomas for his teaching and for his wisdom.[2] And Leo is doubtlessly correct; St. Thomas was a singularly gifted scholar and this is often the first impression that comes to mind for most people when they think of St. Thomas. However, Aquinas is remembered differently in the artistic tradition of the Church. In contrast to St. Dominic de Guzmán, who founded the Order of Preachers and who is usually depicted with a star over his head, Aquinas not long after his death began to be consistently depicted with a star over his heart. Di Lese’s Triumph of St. Thomas (1471), Crivelli’s St. Thomas Aquinas (1476) and de Zurbaran’s Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas (1631) are probably the most famous examples of this. The artistic message regarding Aquinas’s greatest achievement then is unmistakable. Even more than for his towering intellect, Aquinas is remembered in Christian art and piety for his tremendous love of the Lord. Such love is confirmed by St. Thomas’s socius, Br. Reginald, who reports of Aquinas that the Common Doctor habitually turned to God first before beginning work on a disputed question, taking more profit from prayer and time with the Lord than from study and the effort of the mind.[3] Moreover, so strong was Aquinas’s prayer life that this giant of a man (for Aquinas was not only very broad but also tall) is reported to have regularly wept in heartfelt prayer.[4] St. Thomas truly was a first rate philosopher and theologian, but he is remembered as a model Christian not because of his intellectual gifts but because even the cultivation of his intellectual talents flowed from his love of God. Aquinas is great because he loved the Lord greatly.

A particular moment in Aquinas’s own life—a moment attested to not by Aquinas himself but by his fellow Dominicans—may show best Aquinas’s love of the Lord and devotion to Him. When Aquinas had finished writing the section of the Summa Theologiae on Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, he placed his writings on the altar early one morning, dedicating them to Jesus. As Fr. Torrell tells it, “as was his habit, he [Aquinas] prayed quite early in the morning in the chapel of Saint Nicholas; Dominic of Caserta, the sacristan who observed him,…heard a voice coming from the crucifix; ‘You have spoken well of me, Thomas, what should be your reward?’—‘Nothing other than thee, Lord,’” was the reply from St. Thomas.[5] Here one should not overlook Aquinas’s response to the crucified Jesus. Aquinas does not respond as Solomon did to God’s remarkable offer of a gift. Solomon famously asked for wisdom (2 Chron. 1:10). Aquinas makes no such request. Aquinas asks only for the Lord, himself. What should the good disciple want according to the life and witness of St. Thomas? Only the Lord.

Aquinas’s own artwork bears this out as well. Indeed, it would be a mistake for Christians to overlook St. Thomas’s own artistic contributions. Although he was an academic, Aquinas is also a saint who understands the artist’s heart. Given that Aquinas was so singularly focused on Christ, it is no mere happenstance that it was St. Thomas Aquinas’s heart that was inspired to pen the poetic words of the Pange Lingua—which most know by its final verse, the Tantum Ergo—and the Adoro Te Devote.[6]  Moreover, it was St. Thomas who composed the prayers for the Liturgy of the Hours for the feast of Corpus Christi. 

Thus, it is right that Christian iconography places the sun over St. Thomas’s heart. Just as St. Paul won heaven through the sword and St. Lawrence through the grill, Aquinas won heaven by his great love of God above all else and all else in God. It was Aquinas’s love of God which inspired his poetry and which began his every study. As a youth (and much to the chagrin of his mother and brothers), Aquinas abandoned any pursuit of politics (whether in the Church or the Holy Roman Empire), would not take up a career in the military (as other family members had done), and seems not to have had much interest in trade. No, Aquinas as a youth chose a life of poverty with a new upstart religious order (the Order of Preachers) such that his only inheritance might be Jesus Christ. “Only you, Lord,” was not a pious prayer but the way Aquinas lived. In the end, though, it was Aquinas’s wisdom achieved through love and his personal disinterest in riches and political power (because he was solicitous only of the Lord) that was the very reason Aquinas was chosen as an advisor to St. Louis King of France, chosen to mediate inheritance disputes between nobles, and chosen to compose prayers for the Church that we still sing today. Indeed, Aquinas accomplishing what his family always knew he could but only because he loved God first and all things in Him. 

Having briefly sketched out Aquinas himself, the flesh and blood disciple and not merely some arid academic, one is then best able to turn to Aquinas’s actual writings to see what can be learned about what it means to love God from a saint who did it so well. For Christians, love of God and all other things in God is the virtue of charity, caritas. This theological virtue is not something we manufacture by our own power. Rather, it is a supernatural type of loving with the divine love, of loving even our enemies with Christ’s love. We love by the power of God so that by our cooperation we are made perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect (Mt. 5:48). Such a view is seen perhaps most starkly in the martyrs who love God and neighbor (including their persecutors) with a power beyond what seems human. Just as torture and execution were powerless to change Jesus’s salvific love for humanity, so too the martyrs display this supernatural power to love in Christ, come what may. This charity then is not merely a fleeting feeling or happy disposition on their part but rather a firm and stable characteristic moral perfection. Christians hold that the theological virtue of charity is given in the sacrament of baptism, and so all Christians—not merely the martyr—are gifted this power to love heroically this way if they choose to cooperate with Christ. Moreover, we are able to love and grow in this love because God first gives us the initial ability to do so. Indeed, we are able to love to such a supernatural degree because God first loved us (1 Jn 4:19). Here then the saints (whether martyred or not) “win” heaven in a fascinating way, by receiving and responding to God’s love given efficaciously in baptism and the sacramental life. God’s love is primary and we receive it and live in it, or as Jesus emphasizes “I am the vine; you are the branches.” (Jn. 5:15). 

If this is the general Christian understanding of charity (caritas), what then should the average Christian take from the witness of St. Thomas—whom the Church commends to us as a teacher for all (i.e., the Common Doctor)? For Aquinas, charity is the very form or nature of the Christian moral life (ST II-II, q. 24, a. 8). It directs every love and every good act to our final purpose: shared life and union with God. Thus, on Aquinas’s account, whether one fasts in Lent or feasts in Easter, cultivates a warm and inviting home or mourns a death with neighbors and family, it can and should be done out of love for Christ. Here Aquinas is very easily misunderstood (as if all things of this world and even neighbors are loved only as a means to an end) and so I’d like to draw attention to another aspect of Aquinas’s treatment of charity, namely, that it can be understood as a type of friendship. Friendship, Aristotle notes, is loving a person ‘as another self’ (Ethics IX.4; ST II-II, q. 25, a. 4). Here one can think of any human person whom we love: a best-friend, a spouse, a close family member. Loving another as a true friend creates a ‘we’ (which is why Aristotle lists a good marriage as one example of an ideal friendship). Good done by anyone for the friend/beloved is treated as good done to ‘me’ and harm done to him or her is treated as harm done to ‘me.’ Similarly, their loves (their favorite pastimes, joys, important people in their lives) become our loves (important pastimes, joys, and people) in our lives. Their good and my good become truly common or shared goods that do not admit of competition or division. Here then we can see Aquinas’s point. When we love things in God, we love them not only for their particular goodness but also because of what they mean to God. Thus the world is to be loved for its own finite goodness but also because it reflects God in a certain way. So too each person is to be loved, certainly for their own goodness as a created image of God but also because they are uniquely beloved by God and called (along with us) to union with God (ST II-II, q. 26, aa. 2 & 4). Moreover, just as we wish to know more and more about those we love (such as their experiences, family history, thoughts on things, etc.) and to spend time with them in a shared life, so too with our love of God (ST II-II, q. 23, a. 1 & q. 25, a. 3). What then does it mean to love God, according to St. Thomas? To work for His good as our own, to seek to spend time with Him in a shared life and be in union with Him, and to learn His ways and thoughts on things so as to love the things He loves. To have charity for God and all things in God is to love God as another self. Furthermore, just as loving human persons involves more than words, so too does loving God (James 1:22; 2:26). Love of God commits us to love of neighbor. Such friendship with God—shared life as another self—is to want only God, His good, and all things in Him. However, this type of friendship would seem impossible because God is infinite. We are finite. By nature there is no life or quality that could possibly be shared by us with such a God. For this reason, the possibility of such a love and friendship is infrequently mentioned in Greek and not deeply discussed by the pagan philosophers.[7] True friendship with God, as Aquinas observes, is possible only because of Jesus Christ, who gives us the Holy Spirit—the very love between the Father and the Son (ST II-II, q 24, a. 2). God comes and shares our human life so that we may share His divine life. We are able to love (have charity) as Christ did because He first loved us.

Aquinas’s view of love of God thus shares a great continuity with human loves. We love God in the way that we love those very closest to us: we will their good, seek to know them better, share our lives/time/our very selves with them. However, there is a great difference as well. The object of our love is supernatural, namely God. Yet, how is one to love something properly beyond-our-nature, i.e. the super-natural? For Aquinas, because the one we love (the Triune God) is supernatural, the virtue or perfective moral power which we are given and by which we love is also supernatural (and could not possibly be otherwise). For this reason, Aquinas says that the moral power of charity—which is given us by God in baptism and which we grow in through our repeated cooperation—perfects us and makes us more like God’s own nature (ST II-II, q. 23, a. 2, ad 1). We become divinized or deified, and more and more so. As St. Peter puts it, we are made in Christ “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pt. 1:4). We share in God’s very own life because God shared in ours first, and this transforms the way we live and love all things in our lives. When we were still slaves God, made us friends (Jn. 15:15) and enabled us to share his divine life.

Think again of St. Thomas’s response to the vision of the crucified Christ: “Only you, Lord.” What should the good disciple want? To love God and share His very life, loving Him and all things in Him. We love Creation and everything else best when we love God first and all things in Him. Such an understanding of the Christian life of charity transforms all our other actions and virtues because we live for another—the beloved God who is love (1 Jn. 4: 7-8)—and no longer only for ourselves. Indeed, declares Aquinas, charity is the very ‘form’ or ‘life’ of all other virtues (II-II, q. 23, a. 8; II, q. 4, a. 4).

Having examined Aquinas’s thought, I want to return again to the depiction of St. Thomas in art: as a friar with a star of grace radiating over his heart. Why was the flesh and blood Aquinas a saint, one might ask? Even when Aquinas is depicted holding books (as he often is), Christian art refuses to allow its audience to answer ‘because of Aquinas’s learning’ or ‘because of his great intellect.’ Aquinas is a saint not because he thought greatly but because he loved God greatly. This love (charity) inspired all that he did: his scholarship, his teaching, his art, his prayer, his advising of monarchs and nobles. In all this, Aquinas left his fellow Christians a model of discipleship and an explanation for how all people might come to love God well. As the Church marks the 750th anniversary of the passing of the “Common Doctor,” let us strive to follow St. Thomas as our teacher in being true disciples of Christ so that we may ‘love as Christ loves us’ (Jn 15:12). May we, like St. Thomas Aquinas, want only the Lord and to ever grow in likeness of Him. St. Thomas Aquinas, great disciple of charity, pray for us.[8]

[This essay originally appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Joie de Vivre. To purchase this issue or an annual subscription, click the “Subscribe” tab above.]

Christopher Ragusa, Ph.D., is a Professor of Theology at Franciscan University in Baton Rouge.

[1] Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, Vatican Website, August, 4, 1879, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html (accessed August 29, 2018), 14.
[2] Aeterni Patris, 21-22.
[3] Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1958), 47. See also, Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work Vol 1., trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2005), 284.
[4] Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, 47. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 284.
[5] Torrell, Aquinas, 285.
[6] Indeed, not only was the Pange Lingua composed by St. Thomas but also the whole Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 129-135. Torrell explicitly notes that the Adoro Te Devote was also likely written by St. Thomas as well.
[7] See more in Deus Caritas Est, no 3. It is true that Aristotle spends two books of the Nicomachean Ethics to the topic of friendship and the love therein. However, even when discussing friendships in which the parties are unequal, he does not fathom that the relationship between the human and divine could ever be described as ‘loving the other as another self.’ Rather, Aristotle notes in Book I of the Ethics that we call the divine ‘blessed’ and ‘happy’ but writes somewhat wistfully that we can be happy “but only as human beings.” Nicomachean Ethics, I, 10; 1101a. 20-21.
[8] Sections of this essay initially appeared as the introduction to Christopher L. Ragusa, Jr.’s dissertation “Partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:4): The Role of Participation in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theology, Catholic University of America, 2023.