Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican friar from a noble family near Naples, taught at Paris and in Italy and died at forty-nine on the way to a council. His work was to reconcile Aristotle, newly recovered through Arabic and Greek texts, with Christian teaching, and the Summa Theologica, left unfinished, is the result: thousands of questions, each with objections, a reply and answers to the objections. Leo XIII made it the standard of Catholic philosophy in 1879, and Thomas Aquinas College reads it in junior and senior year. The shorter works on being, teaching and kingship show the method at smaller scale.