Italian · 1225–1274
Thomas Aquinas spent his life arguing that faith and reason could not contradict each other, and built the Summa Theologica to prove it. The Dominican friar took Aristotle — recently returned to Latin Europe through Arabic commentators, and suspected of heresy — and made him the philosophical spine of Christian theology. The Summa proceeds by a method of relentless fairness: state the question, give the strongest objections first, answer them one at a time. His five arguments for God's existence are still taught, and still attacked, in every introductory philosophy course. Born to a noble family near Aquino, he was locked up by his own brothers for a year when he refused a comfortable abbacy to join a mendicant order. His students at Paris and Naples called him the Dumb Ox for his silence and bulk. After a mystical experience in December 1273 he stopped writing entirely, saying that everything he had produced seemed like straw. He died three months later, aged forty-nine, leaving the Summa unfinished.