Thomas Aquinas: Philosophy in an Hour

Albertus Magnus was a Swabian, whose teaching was instrumental in the revival of student interest in Aristotle. (He was belatedly canonised, for no apparent reason, in 1931. Now known as St. Albert the Great, he is the patron saint of natural scientists who feel the need of protection from heretical beliefs – a category into which almost every major scientific advance has fallen at some stage.) Albertus Magnus was quickly impressed by the gauche twenty-three-year-old from southern Italy. Thomas Aquinas had grown into a rather awkward giant. He could express even the most complex ideas with utmost clarity, yet he was all but incapable of expressing his feelings (except with the aid of a flaming faggot). His large oxlike eyes would stare out imploringly as his rowdy fellow students ragged him unmercifully – though from a safe distance. He soon became known as ‘the dumb ox’, though Albertus Magnus is said to have reproved Aquinas’s tormentors: ‘Mark my words, one day the lowing of that ox will be heard all over Christendom’. This story, typical of the flimsy hagiographic anecdote that attaches itself to someone about whom there’s not much else to say, nonetheless seems to confirm a rather bovine manner and appearance.