A Novena to Saint Thomas Aquinas
Doctor Angelicus
Roccasecca, c. 1225
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
Thomas was born about 1225 at the castle of Roccasecca in the Kingdom of Sicily, youngest son of Landulf, Count of Aquino. At around five he was placed as a child oblate with the Benedictines of Monte Cassino, where his family expected he would one day be abbot, the position being effectively in their gift.
Naples
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
Sent on to the university at Naples at about fourteen, Thomas encountered two things that shaped the rest of his life: the works of Aristotle, only lately recovered in the Latin West and regarded with suspicion, and the Dominicans, a mendicant order then barely twenty years old and of no social standing whatever.
Held by His Own Family
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
When Thomas joined the Dominicans around 1244 his family had him seized on the road and held him roughly a year in the castles of Monte San Giovanni and Roccasecca, hoping he would give up an order of beggars for the abbacy they had planned. He did not, and was eventually let go.
The Dumb Ox
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
His fellow students called Thomas the dumb ox, for his bulk and his silence in debate. His teacher Albert the Great is reported to have told them that the bellowing of this ox would one day be heard throughout the world.
Master at Paris
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
Thomas became a master of theology at Paris, then the leading university in Europe, and taught there in two separate terms. Much of his working life was spent defending the use of Aristotle, a pagan philosopher known to the West partly through Muslim commentators, as a legitimate instrument of Christian theology.
The Summa
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
Thomas began the Summa Theologiae around 1265 and described it in its own prologue as a book for beginners. It runs to 512 questions and 2,669 articles, each article stating the objections to his position before answering them, and it was never finished.
The Hymns for Corpus Christi
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
When Urban IV established the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264 he asked Thomas to compose its office. The hymns he wrote for it are still sung: the last two verses of Pange Lingua, which begin Tantum Ergo, are what a congregation sings at Benediction to this day.
December 1273
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
On 6 December 1273, while saying Mass at Naples, Thomas experienced something he afterward refused to describe. He never wrote again. The Summa was left unfinished where it stood, and when his secretary Reginald urged him to take it up once more, he is reported to have answered that everything he had written seemed to him like straw compared with what he had seen.
Fossanova, 1274
The Novena Prayer
O ineffable Creator, who out of the treasure of thy wisdom hast appointed three hierarchies of angels and set them in admirable order above the heavens, and hast disposed the parts of the universe in such marvellous array: thou who art called the true fount of light and wisdom, and the highest beginning, deign to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine own brightness, and take from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, of sin and of ignorance.
Thou who makest eloquent the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour upon my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me keenness of understanding, capacity to remember, method and ease in learning, subtlety in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech. Order the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the completion; through Christ our Lord.
Thomas died on 7 March 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova, on his way to the Council of Lyon, aged about forty-nine. He was canonized in 1323 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1567.
The prayer that opens each day is Thomas’s own, Creator ineffabilis, which he is said to have used before writing or teaching; thirteenth-century and long in public circulation. It is given in place of the modern novena prayer circulating under his name, on the same principle as St. Augustine and St. Francis, whose novenas likewise open with words of their own. What follows each day is a fact from his life, one per day.
