Thomas Aquinas: life of the week

Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. Thomas Aquinas was a 13th-century Dominican theologian whose groundbreaking ideas set medieval Europe aflame. And continue to resonate with many today. As 2025 marks the 800th anniversary of his birth, I spoke to professor of philosophy Robert Pasnow to find out more about the man behind some of medieval Europe's most significant philosophical and theological works. To start, we need to get to know Thomas Aquinas.

If you could sum him up very briefly, who was he? Yeah, he was the greatest philosopher/slash theologian of the High Middle Ages, at least in Europe, if you're going to focus on European philosophy, he was the great figure. He was the person who took the traditions of antiquity, joined them together with a Christian worldview and created a new philosophy that really carried forward in its broad outlines all the way to the early modern period in the 17th century. Aquinas was the formative force who pulled these things together.

That's quite the sales pitch there for him. Now, as we get to know him, obviously we're going to come on to some of his works later as we talk. But we need to go right back to the beginning here. What do we know about Thomas's early life, his family, background, his upbringing? Right, as it happens, he was born 800 years ago.

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