Thomas, the new pupil, was born under the shadow of Monte Cassino in 1226 or 1227.  His father, the Count of Aquino, claimed descent from the imperial line of Swabia; his mother, from the Norman princes of Sicily; so that in him the two most energetic strains in Europe met.  His social rank was royal, and the order set the highest value on it.  He took the vows in 1243, and went north at once to help Albertus at Cologne.  In 1245, the order sent Albertus back to Paris, and Thomas with him.  There he remained till 1248 when he was ordered to Cologne as assistant lecturer, and only four years afterwards, at twenty-five years old, he was made full professor at Paris.  His industry and activity never rested till his death in 1274, not yet fifty years old, when he bequeathed to the Church a mass of manuscript that tourists will never know enough to estimate except by weight.  His complete works, repeatedly printed, fill between twenty and thirty quarto volumes.  For so famous a doctor, this is almost meagre.  Unfortunately his greatest work, the “Summa Theologiae,” is unfinished—­like Beauvais Cathedral.

Perhaps Thomas’s success was partly due to his memory which is said to have been phenomenal; for, in an age when cyclopaedias were unknown, a cyclopaedic memory must have counted for half the battle in these scholastic disputes where authority could be met only by authority; but in this case, memory was supported by mind.  Outwardly Thomas was heavy and slow in manner, if it is true that his companions called him “the big dumb ox of Sicily”; and in fashionable or court circles he did not enjoy reputation for acute sense of humour.  Saint Louis’s household offers a picture not wholly clerical, least of all among the King’s brothers and sons; and perhaps the dinner-table was not much more used then than now to abrupt interjections of theology into the talk about hunting and hounds; but however it happened, Thomas one day surprised the company by solemnly announcing—­“I have a decisive argument against the Manicheans!” No wit or humour could be more to the point—­ between two saints that were to be—­than a decisive argument against enemies of Christ, and one greatly regrets that the rest of the conversation was not reported, unless, indeed, it is somewhere in the twenty-eight quarto volumes; but it probably lacked humour for courtiers.

The twenty-eight quarto volumes must be closed books for us.  None but Dominicans have a right to interpret them.  No Franciscan—­or even Jesuit—­understands Saint Thomas exactly or explains him with authority.  For summer tourists to handle these intricate problems in a theological spirit would be altogether absurd; but, for us, these great theologians were also architects who undertook to build a Church Intellectual, corresponding bit by bit to the Church Administrative, both expressing—­and expressed by—­the Church Architectural.  Alexander Hales, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the rest, were artists; and if Saint