St. Thomas Aquinas adored his God and gave glory to Him through his works; but it was his love that won him eternal glory and the sun for a crown.

Thomas Aquinas: Child of Christ

by Sean Fitzpatrick

There are a great many saints who will never be known on this side of God’s grace, whose lives merited heavenly bliss but not the history books. This host of secret saints represents the central secret of what it means to be a saint: who a person is is more important than what a person does. In other words, the prestige of sainthood is not necessarily determined by whatis done but how it is done.

Thomas Aquinas is a saint; and his sanctity, by this reasoning, is prior to anything of note that he may have done—such as writing the Summa Theologica. Bearing out the distinction between character and career, the Summa suddenly becomes a sign of the holiness of St. Thomas and not the reason why he was holy. Most people know and recall Thomas for being a master theologian, philosopher, teacher, preacher, and a Doctor of the Universal Church—for thus is his overwhelming legacy. Few are aware of his position concerning the role of “playful deeds and jokes” to maintain a healthy mind. There are only a handful of legendary anecdotes and historical scraps which offer insight into the soul, into the person, who achieved such wonders and earned such titles. Those that do exist are strangely suggestive of one whose profundity is both foreign and familiar—the profundity of angels and infants.

Though Thomas Aquinas was a man of formidable stature with a fair head like the sun at the crest of a hill, he possessed a delicate genius. He looked upon the world with the wide-eyed wonder and perceptive power of a youth, and engaged it with a youth’s zeal, honesty, and solemnity. There are few things more serious than a child engrossed in his play, and Thomas resembled one of these in his work. The brilliance of his writings shines with a virtuosity like play. Though the tendency exists, and with good reason, to depict or classify Thomas as an austere academic of furrowed brow and no nonsense, there is a straightforward delight and precision about this saint and his compositions that can evoke the schoolboy as much as the scholastic.

The heart of this mystery surrounding Thomas Aquinas is a terrible innocence. By a miraculous grace, Thomas was permitted to retain a moral integrity throughout his fifty years of life, and a disposition that was not drawn toward regions of depravity. His sins were reputedly the simple sins of small children, and this virtue freed his intellect from the temptations and distractions that drive away wisdom. Thomas had the liberty to examine the intricacies of the worlds around him unencumbered with the disturbances that human nature often introduces.