The Biography That Wasn't
Fans of G.K. Chesterton will enjoy this apologetic masquerading as a biography, but those looking for details of Saint Thomas’s life may come away disappointed.
Review by Vienna Scott
Kidnapped by his brothers and confined to an Italian castle, Thomas Aquinas didn’t seem to mind. In fact, his captors had unwittingly rewarded him for forsaking his aristocratic future when they offered him the peace and quiet of imprisonment: these were the perfect conditions for deep philosophizing. Aquinas had no desire for power. His abduction-prone family did not object to his pursuit of religious life per se, but rather to his decision to join the Dominican order—a mendicant begging order—and as a lowly friar, not even seeking leadership within the order. The brothers Aquino snatched him on his journey to Paris to prevent him from studying with the Dominicans there. But since Aquinas could live a powerless ascetic life just as well as an imprisoned aristocrat as he could as a begging friar, their interference made little difference to him.
Realizing the failures of their schemes, Aquinas’s brothers, naturally, sent him a prostitute. They assumed that this would be the best way to wrest someone from the intellectual life—by tempting the flesh. But when the woman entered his room, Aquinas sprang from his seat wielding a brand hot from the fire. The woman shrieked and fled. He strode to the door, burned the sign of the cross into it, slammed it shut, and continued to write.
This sordid scene of family drama featuring kidnapping, prostitutes, and home improvement is one of only two peeks into the personal life of the Angelic Doctor that G.K. Chesterton affords his readers in the whole of his biography of Aquinas. (The other is a tale of the saint’s misbehavior at a banquet.) It’s also one of the rare moments of narrative in an otherwise expository text.
Chesterton claims this work is “a popular sketch of a great historical figure who ought to be more popular.” What he neglects to tell his readers, though, as he lures them into this alleged biography, is that he wants Thomas Aquinas’s manner of thinking to be more popular—not the man himself. In fact, Aquinas himself would be an unappealing title character. Even his own classmates at university called him “the dumb ox.” The irony of this title for the man recognized as one of history’s most brilliant philosophers is the ballast of the book, but it also reveals that Aquinas wasn’t winning any popularity contests in his own time. His head was irregularly large, his chin and jaw heavy. He had a roman nose, bald brows, and odd concavities. The most generous comparison Chesterton can conceive is to Mussolini and the most accurate, to the corpulent Count Fosco. By all accounts, Aquinas was tall, fat, and silent most of the time. When he did speak, it was often completely unrelated to the conversation at hand. While he wrote on important subjects, he exerted significant effort to avoid social importance. He rejected promotions within his order to pursue his work as a scholar and remained in the monastery rather than seeking the public eye.
Piecing together the glimpses Chesterton offers into the Angelic Doctor’s personality, an inquisitive reader can see why a traditional biography would be impossible and unpalatable. Biography is popularly understood as an account of a life: the events and the subject’s experience of the events woven together into some sort of story. Chesterton certainly selected an uphill battle by approaching the interiority and activities of a notoriously silent and sedentary scholar, so perhaps his readers won’t fault him too much for largely neglecting this task.
Chesterton’s methodology means that readers naturally won’t learn about Aquinas’s interiority or the events of his life that have been hidden from history.
Instead, Chesterton situates the saint in a sea of more affable faces. Saint Francis, the subject of Chesterton’s previous biography, dominates the entire first chapter and recurs frequently in the rest of the book. His joyful, singing, animal-loving peer makes Aquinas more likable by association. Chesterton skirts the matter of Saint Thomas’s personality entirely by giving the reader dashes of charm through the more charismatic evangelist. Saint Augustine, too, appears at the end of the text to bolster Aquinas’s literary reputation. Like the great rhetorician Augustine, Aquinas was occasionally a poet. But more importantly, he was the kind of philosopher who inspired poetry.
In the introductory note preceding the first chapter, Chesterton tells the story of a woman who picked up a book of the selected works of Aquinas. She naively read the section on the “Simplicity of God” and then abandoned the project entirely because if that selection described divine simplicity, the complexity of the Godhead would certainly be incomprehensible. Chesterton talks himself from this beginning to his true point: that Thomism is common sense. This is what he wants his modern readers to take away from this book.
This, however, is where Chesterton’s lack of sourcing becomes most frustrating. In his great apology for the ideas of Aquinas, he handwaves away references to the saint’s texts because “there’s just too much, thousands of pages to be studied”—so none of them become worth mentioning at all. Chesterton intentionally leaves out his subject’s theology—the “most important thing”—in favor of philosophy, and even then only grabs in the direction of philosophy without ever hanging on to a thread and following it to its conclusion. Without any recourse to the supposedly simple syllogisms, generously, the biography can only tantalize. If the saint’s life cannot be constituted by events or personality, but instead, in great deference to his vocation as a scholar, only by his ideas, this seems like the most natural form of biography for some footnotes.
The earnestness (and slapdash approach to sourcing) apparent in Chesterton’s prose is true to his methodology. According to Chesterton biographer Maisie Ward, he rapidly dictated the first half of the book to his assistant Dorothy without consulting any authorities or doing any research into his subject. When he was halfway through, he told her, “I want you to go to London and get me some books.” When she asked what books, he said, “I don’t know.” She collected an assortment of books on Saint Thomas, and he flipped through them rapidly, skimming bits and pieces, and then dictated the rest of the biography without any further reference to them. Chesterton’s methodology means that readers naturally won’t learn about Aquinas’s interiority or the events of his life that have been hidden from history. Instead, Chesterton conveys only the tidbits of the life of Aquinas that were common knowledge enough for him to know them already. This book’s real contribution to the genre of Aquinas biographies is Chesterton’s use of Thomism in conversation with the modern world.
Aquinas himself enters and exits the text. Chesterton uses him more often as an entrance point into discussion on the medieval church than as a particular medieval man. At its best, this biography captures the reciprocal animation of a world through a person and a person through a world. At its worst, it reads as a disingenuous attempt to sell readers on a piece of life-writing and hand them a work of apologetics instead. This may be a byproduct of Chesterton’s own positioning, of course: the author and subject of this biography are tied by a structure that isn’t simply the endnotes (of which there are none): The Roman Catholic Church. This turn of genre shouldn’t come as a surprise. Chesterton is best known for his apologetic writings in works like Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Naturally, apologetics enters his biographies as well.
This shared association between Chesterton and his subject means that Chesterton presents Saint Thomas uncritically to his audience—and to some extent ahistorically. When Aquinas does appear in the text, readers are apt to think more of a hagiography than a biography. He has no flaws; his intellect is a mountain. Everlasting. Humble. Hulking. Maybe this is one of the great errors of the present world: the inability to believe a historical figure was truly great, and the desire to connect with the past through mutual faults rather than shared virtues.
Vienna Scott is an MAR student in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. She graduated from Yale College in 2021 with degrees in Religious Studies and Political Science. In her free time, she enjoys baking, hiking, and hanging out with friends.
Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox was published in 1933. You can purchase a copy here.
