Gnosticism was one of the biggest and most widespread heresies in the early church. Because of this, it’s also a complicated one, with lots of different versions of Gnosticism, enormous volumes of writings and strange apocryphal gospels, and so it’s hard to give a fair account of its details. There are three main strands in what we count as Gnosticism, though, which go as follows:
Firstly, the idea that this imperfect world is separates from the Supreme Being by a series of intermediaries or ‘aeons’. There are different opinions on how many aeons there are, and what exactly their nature is, but they generally all have names. This idea they got partly from Plato and partly from other Greek philosophers including Pythagoras, who thought it was really important that God was One and simple. This then created the problem of how you get from the One and simple God to the multiple and complex world, and as the gnostics didn’t want the simplicity of God to be spoiled, they placed these intermediaries between God and the world.
Secondly, the Gnostics thought that our souls were perfect entities that had somehow got trapped in human bodies. When people realised that this was what had happened, they naturally wanted their souls to be set free, which they did by mastering each aeon dividing their souls from the Supreme Being, which meant that they needed to know the names of the aeons. The Gnostics claimed to know these secret names.
Thirdly, the Gnostics thought that it was possible for souls to escape and be set free, and that this was made possible by redeemers who appeared at different points in history to reveal the secret knowledge needed to escape the physical world. They saw Jesus as one of these redeemers.
Apart from the fact that it’s pretty weird (and quite like Scientology, I think, though definitely less expensive), there are several problems with Gnosticism from a Christian point of view. Firstly, they were really secretive with their ‘special knowledge’ - you had to get in the club to be told how to be saved. They were less like missionaries and more like the Masons, probably with the strange initiation rites to boot.
Secondly, they were often quite elitist. A lot of them thought that not everyone had a ‘divine spark’ for a soul, but it was only a few special people who could be saved. You had to be the ‘right sort’ of person to get in, unlike Jesus’ kingdom which welcomes the tramps, the prostitutes, and the tax collectors. I think it's fair to suggest that this is a tendency Christianity hasn't entirely lost (though, to be fair, we did let you in).
Thirdly, and this is the biggy, they thought that the world was something bad that kept us from God, that our bodies were evil, and that creation as a whole wasn’t made by God himself but by some lesser, probably evil being. It’s this form of Gnosticism that pops up most often throughout the history of the church, and which undermines both the fact that God created the world and declared it good and also the Incarnation, which suggests that salvation comes through and in the physical world, not despite it. You can see Gnostic tendencies today in the Church's sometimes funny attitude to sex but also, I think, in wider society's attitude to food (ooh, isn't this chocolate cake sinfully good. Oh, I'm so naughty).
Friday, 30 January 2009
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Thomas Aquinas and the end of humankind
This isn't about hell or the End Times. Chill out. For Aquinas, it's really important that everything has its own particular end, by which he means a goal or a purpose. The end of physical but non-living things is to resemble God insofar as they participate in his properties, mostly just by existing. The end of a plant is to resemble God, particularly by existing and being alive. The end of animals is to resemble God by existing, being alive, and having some sort of consciousness. Everything exists to be caught up into God in accordance with its own particular thingness. A rock exists to be the rockiest rock it can be; a poodle to be maximally poodle-y, and your momma to be so fat that when she steps on the scales they say “to be continued...” Everything came from God, and everything has its end in God.
So, what is the distinctively human end?
This is complicated because human nature is complicated. On the one hand, humans are animals, and like animals we participate in God in existing, in being alive, and in having consciousness (One of my lecturers once got involved in an icebreaker game in which everyone had to answer the question, ‘What is your favourite animal?’ Being an Aquinas scholar, she was used to thinking of people as animals and so she replied, ‘My husband.’ Only later did it occur to her that the funny looks she got might be the consequence of implying that ‘My husband is an animal’ which means something rather different now than it would have for Aquinas). Humans are distinguished from the rest of the animals by the fact that they have reason and intellect, and are also distinguished by the fact that, where the end of the animals is in fulfilling their nature, the final end of human nature surpasses the intrinsic capabilities of human nature. Our end is in God, not just in participating in his qualities, but in contemplating his essence, in knowing and loving him, which is made possible by our reason but also by additional grace that takes us beyond what we’re naturally capable of. Our end is ‘the beatific vision’ which basically means ‘the happy vision.’
A note on reason
When we think about reason, we think about it in a post-Enlightenment world in which it often feels a bit like the sort of calculation a computer or a machine does, and see it as being fundamentally opposed to other things that make us human, like emotion. This isn’t quite the case for Aquinas, firstly because he doesn’t chop human nature up quite so completely, but also because for him, our emotions and gut instincts and all the things that make mathematicians feel a bit queasy are parts of us which can get caught up into reason and make it richer. The reason that reason gets us to God is because it starts us thinking about the world. We see all the stuff going on, and we start asking why and how and who and when, and eventually we want to know how it all started in the first place, and what we’re doing here, and how we should live, and whether it’s even worth it, and much as in Plato’s Symposium, the beauty of the world leads us in the end to Beauty itself, to God.
So, what is the distinctively human end?
This is complicated because human nature is complicated. On the one hand, humans are animals, and like animals we participate in God in existing, in being alive, and in having consciousness (One of my lecturers once got involved in an icebreaker game in which everyone had to answer the question, ‘What is your favourite animal?’ Being an Aquinas scholar, she was used to thinking of people as animals and so she replied, ‘My husband.’ Only later did it occur to her that the funny looks she got might be the consequence of implying that ‘My husband is an animal’ which means something rather different now than it would have for Aquinas). Humans are distinguished from the rest of the animals by the fact that they have reason and intellect, and are also distinguished by the fact that, where the end of the animals is in fulfilling their nature, the final end of human nature surpasses the intrinsic capabilities of human nature. Our end is in God, not just in participating in his qualities, but in contemplating his essence, in knowing and loving him, which is made possible by our reason but also by additional grace that takes us beyond what we’re naturally capable of. Our end is ‘the beatific vision’ which basically means ‘the happy vision.’
A note on reason
When we think about reason, we think about it in a post-Enlightenment world in which it often feels a bit like the sort of calculation a computer or a machine does, and see it as being fundamentally opposed to other things that make us human, like emotion. This isn’t quite the case for Aquinas, firstly because he doesn’t chop human nature up quite so completely, but also because for him, our emotions and gut instincts and all the things that make mathematicians feel a bit queasy are parts of us which can get caught up into reason and make it richer. The reason that reason gets us to God is because it starts us thinking about the world. We see all the stuff going on, and we start asking why and how and who and when, and eventually we want to know how it all started in the first place, and what we’re doing here, and how we should live, and whether it’s even worth it, and much as in Plato’s Symposium, the beauty of the world leads us in the end to Beauty itself, to God.
Sunday, 25 January 2009
Evil as deprivation
I promised you more about participation, so here's my first attempt to make good on that pledge. One of the big questions in theology is that of the nature of evil: what is it? How can it come to be in the good world God made? When you start to say that existence is a predicate of God, and that therefore insofar as anything exists, you start to force yourself towards a particular answer to that question, and so a lot of patristic theologians argue for some sort of concept of evil not as a thing in itself, but as a deprivation of the good.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is a good example of this, so I'll start by introducing you and then talk a bit about what he says. He's called Pseudo-Dionysius because he writes as if he's the Dionysius who is mentioned in Acts 17:34, someone who converted to Christianity after Paul's sermon in Athens about the unknown God. But he was probably actually writing in 5th century Syria. He was incredibly influential in theology, particularly in the West, even though not many people have heard of him these days. He's particularly famous for his mystical/apophatic theology, which is about the limitations of language when talking about God, but also gets into the discussion about the nature of evil.
He says that, because everything that exists gets its being from God, evil can't produce beings or give birth - instead it's good that has got broken, misdirected, twisted in some way. Evil is good gone wrong, not a thing in itself. That means that nothing can be evil by nature - even the demons aren't inherently evil, but are evil because of the ways they fall short of the good. There's no such thing as pure evil, because evil depends on the good for its very existence. It's a parasite - any power it has, any existence, any intelligence, any will - it gets from the good and distorts. One of the characteristics of God is stability: he is always who he is, and his goodness never changes, never grows or shrinks, and so evil can't even have stability except inasmuch as it gets it from the good.
This solves quite neatly on of the big theological problems of evil - how can there be something that God didn't create (answer: because evil doesn't be as such), and feels in a lot of ways like quite a satisfying way of thinking about it, but here's what seems to me to be an issue: if evil isn't a thing as such, and nothing can be inherently and stably evil, then does that mean that even Satan can be redeemed? Answers on a postcard.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is a good example of this, so I'll start by introducing you and then talk a bit about what he says. He's called Pseudo-Dionysius because he writes as if he's the Dionysius who is mentioned in Acts 17:34, someone who converted to Christianity after Paul's sermon in Athens about the unknown God. But he was probably actually writing in 5th century Syria. He was incredibly influential in theology, particularly in the West, even though not many people have heard of him these days. He's particularly famous for his mystical/apophatic theology, which is about the limitations of language when talking about God, but also gets into the discussion about the nature of evil.
He says that, because everything that exists gets its being from God, evil can't produce beings or give birth - instead it's good that has got broken, misdirected, twisted in some way. Evil is good gone wrong, not a thing in itself. That means that nothing can be evil by nature - even the demons aren't inherently evil, but are evil because of the ways they fall short of the good. There's no such thing as pure evil, because evil depends on the good for its very existence. It's a parasite - any power it has, any existence, any intelligence, any will - it gets from the good and distorts. One of the characteristics of God is stability: he is always who he is, and his goodness never changes, never grows or shrinks, and so evil can't even have stability except inasmuch as it gets it from the good.
This solves quite neatly on of the big theological problems of evil - how can there be something that God didn't create (answer: because evil doesn't be as such), and feels in a lot of ways like quite a satisfying way of thinking about it, but here's what seems to me to be an issue: if evil isn't a thing as such, and nothing can be inherently and stably evil, then does that mean that even Satan can be redeemed? Answers on a postcard.
Thursday, 22 January 2009
The Death of Christian Britain
I was all going to stop talking about gender for a while, but then I went to a seminar yesterday with Callum Brown, a Scottish cultural historian, and he was so interesting that I thought I'd serve him up fresh for your delectation.
Brown's argument goes a little something like this: historians often talk about the secularisation of Britain as a slow process which took place over several centuries. They are wrong. Actually, the 1870s-1890s saw a high point of church attendance and of the Church's integration into popular culture. At this point, there was a change in the way that people understood piety – where before the archetypal pious person was male, there was a dramatic shift, with piety becoming understood instead as distinctively feminine. The characteristics of femininity and piety came to be seen as basically the same. At the same time, masculinity was conceived as religiously vulnerable: while women were devoted mothers, good Christians, and pure of heart, men were easily tempted by the dangers of drink, drugs and sex. Men were the problem, and women the solution.
This gender world broke down in the 1960s, with the beginning of free love, sexual liberation, the Pill, and second-wave feminism, and as it fell apart, so did Christianity's dominance in popular culture. Piety and femininity were uncoupled, and so began the long decline of Christianity in Britain over the rest of the 20th century.
Brown is unusual among historians in using Foucault's ideas about discourse as a tool for doing history – to understand the changes in the relationship between Christianity and popular culture of the last few centuries, he looked at the way that people's language about religion, piety and gender changed over the period he focuses on. This was a dramatic change for him – as recently as the mid-90s he was sitting in pubs bitching to fellow historians about this pesky postmodern history; a few years ago he wrote a book about postmodernism for historians. He's got quite a lot of flak for this, but he's tough enough to take it, and is about to rerelease his original book with an extra chapter explaining why he's right and his critics are wrong.
Brown's argument goes a little something like this: historians often talk about the secularisation of Britain as a slow process which took place over several centuries. They are wrong. Actually, the 1870s-1890s saw a high point of church attendance and of the Church's integration into popular culture. At this point, there was a change in the way that people understood piety – where before the archetypal pious person was male, there was a dramatic shift, with piety becoming understood instead as distinctively feminine. The characteristics of femininity and piety came to be seen as basically the same. At the same time, masculinity was conceived as religiously vulnerable: while women were devoted mothers, good Christians, and pure of heart, men were easily tempted by the dangers of drink, drugs and sex. Men were the problem, and women the solution.
This gender world broke down in the 1960s, with the beginning of free love, sexual liberation, the Pill, and second-wave feminism, and as it fell apart, so did Christianity's dominance in popular culture. Piety and femininity were uncoupled, and so began the long decline of Christianity in Britain over the rest of the 20th century.
Brown is unusual among historians in using Foucault's ideas about discourse as a tool for doing history – to understand the changes in the relationship between Christianity and popular culture of the last few centuries, he looked at the way that people's language about religion, piety and gender changed over the period he focuses on. This was a dramatic change for him – as recently as the mid-90s he was sitting in pubs bitching to fellow historians about this pesky postmodern history; a few years ago he wrote a book about postmodernism for historians. He's got quite a lot of flak for this, but he's tough enough to take it, and is about to rerelease his original book with an extra chapter explaining why he's right and his critics are wrong.
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Participation
Participation is a theme which you'll find throughout patristic theology (that's theology written by old dudes). It refers to the idea that everything that exists gets its particular properties (goodness, wisdom, stability, blackness, fluffiness, nakedness) from God, who is the source of everything. And everything gets those properties not to keep, but only as a sharing in God's properties – so my wisdom, wit, beauty, goodness, kindness etc. aren't absolutely mine but are my sharing in those properties in God (he's been good to me). One of the quirks of this way of understanding creation is that existence, “beingness” is counted as a property (I've heard that this raises interesting philosophical questions and difficulties, though I couldn't for the life of me tell you what), which means that to the extent that I exist, I get my existence from participation in God.
In this way of seeing the world, God's simplicity is really important. That doesn't mean that he's stupid, but that God can't be divided: we might have a whole collection of different attributes which are stuck together to make an individual, but in God those different attributes are absolutely united, so his goodness is the same as his wisdom is the same as his existence is the same as his orangeness.
This is a lot to do with Plato, and Neoplatonism (which dates from about the 3rd century AD) which has the idea of one absolutely unified principle as the source of everything, like the top point of a pyramid, and everything else radiating or emanating outwards from it like the rays of the sun, becoming more fragmented, more diverse and further from the source the further out it gets. This means that everything not only has different degrees of closeness and resemblance to the source, but also that things have different degrees of beingness. Things in the world can be more or less real, and confusingly, this is taken to mean that spiritual things and qualities – intellect, goodness, beauty – are more real than more physical and tangible things like rocks and pencils.
Lots of interesting consequences ensue. It means that everything in creation, however big or small, significant or insignificant, bears some sort of resemblance to God. It means that we can be more or less real, more or less existent, and that the more we come to resemble God, the more we participate in him and his goodness. It means that every attribute of everything that there is bears some resemblance to God. I'll come back to this, probably repeatedly, because there's a lot of meat here, but for now I'll leave you with this thought: God is naked.
In this way of seeing the world, God's simplicity is really important. That doesn't mean that he's stupid, but that God can't be divided: we might have a whole collection of different attributes which are stuck together to make an individual, but in God those different attributes are absolutely united, so his goodness is the same as his wisdom is the same as his existence is the same as his orangeness.
This is a lot to do with Plato, and Neoplatonism (which dates from about the 3rd century AD) which has the idea of one absolutely unified principle as the source of everything, like the top point of a pyramid, and everything else radiating or emanating outwards from it like the rays of the sun, becoming more fragmented, more diverse and further from the source the further out it gets. This means that everything not only has different degrees of closeness and resemblance to the source, but also that things have different degrees of beingness. Things in the world can be more or less real, and confusingly, this is taken to mean that spiritual things and qualities – intellect, goodness, beauty – are more real than more physical and tangible things like rocks and pencils.
Lots of interesting consequences ensue. It means that everything in creation, however big or small, significant or insignificant, bears some sort of resemblance to God. It means that we can be more or less real, more or less existent, and that the more we come to resemble God, the more we participate in him and his goodness. It means that every attribute of everything that there is bears some resemblance to God. I'll come back to this, probably repeatedly, because there's a lot of meat here, but for now I'll leave you with this thought: God is naked.
Saturday, 17 January 2009
NT Wright and the New Perspective on Paul
NT Wright is the Bishop of Durham, and a New Testament scholar, who started out mostly writing about Paul, but has since embarked on a massive multiple-volumed work about Jesus as well as Paul.
The New Perspective focuses on one of the big debates in Pauline scholarship (that's the study of Paul, not Pauline (as far as I'm aware there's no name for that – Paulineine? Anyway, who's Pauline?)): what exactly does Paul mean when he talks about justification by faith? The traditional answer would be that it means that we can't ever be good enough for God by ourselves: we'll always sin, and can't pay for our sin out of our own resources, and so justification by faith means that we have faith in Jesus, and as a result, his holiness gets credited to us – a bit like handing in someone else's work as the coursework for a module you just couldn't get your head around.
But no! says our Tom, and the New Perspective along with him. That's not what it means at all. Actually, for Israel, justification meant something different. Being less hung up that we about the nasty things we think when no one is looking, their understanding of justification is a lot less internal and individualistic, and a lot more about God's covenant with them as his people. For them, God's grace came first: he called Israel and appointed them his chosen people, and covenantal observance wasn't about passing some sort of test to get into heaven, but about being invited into the exclusive club of God's chosen people and being asked not to be an arse, or the bouncers will kick you out.
The sense in Israel at the time of Jesus was that they had, in fact, been arses – they hadn't just got too drunk, but they'd gotten off with the bouncer's girlfriend, danced naked on the table and then started a fight. So they got kicked out, into exile, and although they'd made it back to Israel, they weren't in charge any more – they were ruled by the Romans, and were not happy about that. They'd been let back into the club, but instead of the special treatment God had originally promised them, they were the glass collectors. Exile was not over. For the Jews, then, justification was about longing for the day when God would come down and say hey, what are my people doing collecting glasses? And he'd kick out the Romans and put them back where they belonged, in control of Israel. The good news that Israel were waiting for was, in fact, deeply political – it was about independence from Rome, possession of the land that God had promised them, the real return from exile, and victory over the Romans.
Everyone was looking for justification at the time of Jesus. They all wanted to know what they had to do in order to be the people of whom God would say “these people are mine; let them back in the VIP lounge.” The Pharisees thought that they could mark themselves out as VIPs by sticking really strictly to the law of the Torah. The Sadducees thought they could do it by collaborating with the Romans in order to be allowed to run the Temple. The Essenes thought they could do it by running away to the desert and leaving corrupt society behind to live lives of chastity and purity. The Zealots thought they could do it by terrorism, and by constantly trying to defeat the Romans by violent uprisings.
This is the background to Paul's writing, then, and what he says about what Jesus has done is a lot more subversive than we notice a lot of the time. Jesus, he says, is the new Emperor of everything. He rules and the Roman empire does not (Jesus is the Christ – the anointed one and therefore the King, and the Lord – the term used to refer to the Emperor). Jesus is the new king of Israel, and what he has done announces the end of Israel's exile – they're back in the VIP lounge, only this time everyone else is invited too. What do you have to do to get on the guest list? Keep the law? Scrabble for power? Escape the world? Fight the Romans? No. Just believe in Jesus. You might have expected a war, you might have expected political power and the physical land God promised, you might have expected the temple to return to the hands of the true Israel, but this is what you get instead: Christ crucified, and the kingdom of God which looks a lot like a mustard seed.
The New Perspective focuses on one of the big debates in Pauline scholarship (that's the study of Paul, not Pauline (as far as I'm aware there's no name for that – Paulineine? Anyway, who's Pauline?)): what exactly does Paul mean when he talks about justification by faith? The traditional answer would be that it means that we can't ever be good enough for God by ourselves: we'll always sin, and can't pay for our sin out of our own resources, and so justification by faith means that we have faith in Jesus, and as a result, his holiness gets credited to us – a bit like handing in someone else's work as the coursework for a module you just couldn't get your head around.
But no! says our Tom, and the New Perspective along with him. That's not what it means at all. Actually, for Israel, justification meant something different. Being less hung up that we about the nasty things we think when no one is looking, their understanding of justification is a lot less internal and individualistic, and a lot more about God's covenant with them as his people. For them, God's grace came first: he called Israel and appointed them his chosen people, and covenantal observance wasn't about passing some sort of test to get into heaven, but about being invited into the exclusive club of God's chosen people and being asked not to be an arse, or the bouncers will kick you out.
The sense in Israel at the time of Jesus was that they had, in fact, been arses – they hadn't just got too drunk, but they'd gotten off with the bouncer's girlfriend, danced naked on the table and then started a fight. So they got kicked out, into exile, and although they'd made it back to Israel, they weren't in charge any more – they were ruled by the Romans, and were not happy about that. They'd been let back into the club, but instead of the special treatment God had originally promised them, they were the glass collectors. Exile was not over. For the Jews, then, justification was about longing for the day when God would come down and say hey, what are my people doing collecting glasses? And he'd kick out the Romans and put them back where they belonged, in control of Israel. The good news that Israel were waiting for was, in fact, deeply political – it was about independence from Rome, possession of the land that God had promised them, the real return from exile, and victory over the Romans.
Everyone was looking for justification at the time of Jesus. They all wanted to know what they had to do in order to be the people of whom God would say “these people are mine; let them back in the VIP lounge.” The Pharisees thought that they could mark themselves out as VIPs by sticking really strictly to the law of the Torah. The Sadducees thought they could do it by collaborating with the Romans in order to be allowed to run the Temple. The Essenes thought they could do it by running away to the desert and leaving corrupt society behind to live lives of chastity and purity. The Zealots thought they could do it by terrorism, and by constantly trying to defeat the Romans by violent uprisings.
This is the background to Paul's writing, then, and what he says about what Jesus has done is a lot more subversive than we notice a lot of the time. Jesus, he says, is the new Emperor of everything. He rules and the Roman empire does not (Jesus is the Christ – the anointed one and therefore the King, and the Lord – the term used to refer to the Emperor). Jesus is the new king of Israel, and what he has done announces the end of Israel's exile – they're back in the VIP lounge, only this time everyone else is invited too. What do you have to do to get on the guest list? Keep the law? Scrabble for power? Escape the world? Fight the Romans? No. Just believe in Jesus. You might have expected a war, you might have expected political power and the physical land God promised, you might have expected the temple to return to the hands of the true Israel, but this is what you get instead: Christ crucified, and the kingdom of God which looks a lot like a mustard seed.
Thursday, 15 January 2009
Meet Thomas Aquinas
I thought that Thomas Aquinas deserved a whole post about him and his life - I suspect I'll come back to him more than once in the future, so you ought at least to be introduced. Aquinas is one of the great theologians, like, ever. He wrote about pretty much everything theological topic you can imagine, and was influential enough to be one of the few theologians still studied outside of the world of theology by people writing about ethics, law, politics and philosophy. He's one of only 33 people the Catholic Church have designated a Doctor of the Church (33 might sound like a lot, but bear in mind that's 33 people over 2,000 odd years), and some would argue that he's the Catholic theologian. He's famous for being one of the main people to rediscover Aristotle in the West, for basically inventing the doctrine of transubstantiation, for writing about natural law, and for lots of other things. His most famous work is the Summa Theologiae, possibly the longest theological work ever (if you can fit it on one shelf you're doing well). I reckon a good few days of my life so far have been spent reading Aquinas, and I've read maybe 1% of it.
Thomas was born in 1225 or 1227. His family wanted him to be a Benedictine abbot, which was a very respectable career for a younger son of a noble family in those days. But he decided he wanted to join the Dominican order, much less reputable – where the Benedictines were wealthy landowners, the Dominicans earned their keep largely through begging. His family were unhappy about that, so did what any loving relatives would do – kidnapped him and locked him in their castle for two years. At one point, his brothers tried to break his will by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, but he fought her off with a burning stick. Later on, he told a friend that he'd prayed for God's help in resisting the temptation and had a vision of two angels who gave him a white girdle and told him that it was the girdle of perpetual virginity. In the end, his family let him escape, and off he went. He went to the university in Paris, and began a life of studying and teaching, which continued until his death. He got involved with all sorts of theological controversies, but none of them were that funny, so I won't go into details.
The later years of his life were spent writing his massive Summa Theologiae – basically a comprehensive work about the whole of Christian theology, broken into three parts: the first about God and his creation; the second about humanity and ethics; and the third about Christ and his saving work. Part way through part 3, Aquinas stopped writing, and told his scribe that he couldn't write any more because “it all seems like straw.” Shortly afterwards he became ill, and died on 7 March 1274.
Thomas was born in 1225 or 1227. His family wanted him to be a Benedictine abbot, which was a very respectable career for a younger son of a noble family in those days. But he decided he wanted to join the Dominican order, much less reputable – where the Benedictines were wealthy landowners, the Dominicans earned their keep largely through begging. His family were unhappy about that, so did what any loving relatives would do – kidnapped him and locked him in their castle for two years. At one point, his brothers tried to break his will by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, but he fought her off with a burning stick. Later on, he told a friend that he'd prayed for God's help in resisting the temptation and had a vision of two angels who gave him a white girdle and told him that it was the girdle of perpetual virginity. In the end, his family let him escape, and off he went. He went to the university in Paris, and began a life of studying and teaching, which continued until his death. He got involved with all sorts of theological controversies, but none of them were that funny, so I won't go into details.
The later years of his life were spent writing his massive Summa Theologiae – basically a comprehensive work about the whole of Christian theology, broken into three parts: the first about God and his creation; the second about humanity and ethics; and the third about Christ and his saving work. Part way through part 3, Aquinas stopped writing, and told his scribe that he couldn't write any more because “it all seems like straw.” Shortly afterwards he became ill, and died on 7 March 1274.
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