In his beautiful treatment of the resurrection in the Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas writes that one of the reasons why Christ had to rise from the dead is to “confirm our faith in his divinity” (ST IIIa, q. 53, a. 1) Christ’s resurrection—and his prior raising of Lazarus—are miracles that
St. Thomas deals with free will and impeccability on several occasions: first, around 1254–1256, in his commentary on the second book of the Sentences; then, in 1258 or 1259, in the De Veritate; around 1259–1261, in the third book of the Contra Gentiles; around 1265–1268, in the first part of the
One of the great political fights in medieval Christendom affected St. Thomas Aquinas’s own studies as a youngster. A fortuitous military conflict between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX spilling into the abbey of Monte Cassino, where Aquinas was doing his elementary studies, led to his parents sending him