The Mystical Skeleton in the Thomistic Closet: Aquinas’s Impassibility

On the subject of pain, the Dominican scholastic St. Thomas (1225–75) challenged the prevailing norm of contemporary religious sensibilities. Or, at least, this is implied by Thomas’s first biographer, William of Tocco.¹ William made clear that, unlike mystics and saints of his day, Thomas neither courted pain nor often experienced it. To the contrary, according to William, Thomas was impervious to pain in many instances. As I shall argue in this essay, William’s treatment of Thomas’s lack of pain was meant to redound to his hero’s glory, ultimately (if somewhat ironically) helping to give him the likeness of a mystic and the prestige of a St. Francis.² This was the mystical skeleton in the Thomistic closet.

William’s understanding of Thomas’s impassibility was grounded in a theory of the emotions—or, more precisely, a theory about the passions of the soul—that Thomas elaborated in his Summa theologiae, written 1266–73.³ William, born between 1240 and 1250, was in Naples during Thomas’s last years there (1272–74) and heard the master teach and preach. We can be quite sure that William knew Thomas’s theory of the passions because he made good use of at least one of Thomas’s ideas there, a peculiarly Thomistic notion of “ordered love.” Before Thomas, the idea of ordered love referred to a hierarchy of love’s objects. St. Augustine provided the basic formulation: “Four things are to be loved: first, that which is above us; second, we ourselves; third, that which is next to us; fourth, that which is below us.”⁴ For Thomas, however, ordered love was not defined by love’s objects but by its nature. Ordered love was the source of virtuous emotions: “Every disposition to virtue [affectio virtutis] is derived from some well-ordered love [ex aliquo amore ordinato], and similarly every disposition to sin [affectio peccati] is derived from some disordered love [ab aliquo inordinato amore].”⁵ For William of Tocco, this idea of ordered love was exemplified by Thomas’s mother, who desired, with “well-ordered affect [ordinatum affectum],” to see her son at the Dominican friary at Naples.⁶ But the friars misunderstood and thought her love “disordered [turbatum] by maternal affection,” with bitter consequences for the young Thomas.⁷

But even if William did not know particularly well the theory of the passions in the Summa, he, like Thomas’s theory itself, aimed to reconstruct the image of the Dominicans. Indeed, William’s Ystoria—his Vita of Thomas—was written with a view to Thomas’s canonization. ⁸ Both this text and Thomas’s discussion of the passions of the soul were written (in part) to make Dominican scholarship more palatable to contemporaries by associating the Order of Preachers with the one good that everyone at the time could agree on: love.⁹ Thomas’s impassibility was part of that effort.

Unlike Thomas of Celano, who spent nearly the whole of the second book of his First Life of St. Francis on his hero’s many bodily torments, William documented only one instance in which Thomas felt pain. ¹⁰ This was very early in Thomas’s religious career. He had just entered the Dominican Order, and his family tried to get him back by kidnapping him, incarcerating him in the family home, and stripping him of his friar’s habit. They also tried to tempt Thomas with a very pretty girl (puellam pulcherrimam). But, explained William, Thomas was already married—to the “Wisdom of God” ¹¹ —so that when he felt sexual desire at the sight of the girl, he expelled her with a firebrand and, falling to the ground, prayed tearfully to God for “the belt of virginity” (virginitatis cingulum). Soon he fell asleep, and two angels appeared and duly placed a chastity belt (cingulum castitatis) on him. He felt pain (dolorem sensibilem percepisset),¹² but thereafter he abhorred the sight of women.

Now let us consider the moments in which Thomas was impassible:

1. 1. Once when his leg was to be cauterized, he “was raised up in...