As a translator of medieval Latin, I keep a running list of works that I could potentially bring into English in the future. For years now, near the top of that list—but never quite near enough for me to have actually gotten around to doing it—has been the Ystoria of William of Tocco. Mentioned often in Thomistic circles, this is the great hagiography of St. Thomas Aquinas compiled for his cause for canonization by a fellow Dominican friar, perhaps twenty years his junior, with whom Thomas lived at the Dominican priory in Naples toward the end of his life. Alas, I missed my chance to translate it—because a friend has done so instead, and his edition is marvelous.
David Foley’s translation of the Ystoria, published by Angelus Press under the title The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas by William of Tocco, is everything one could want from such a volume. His prose is Latinate without being illegible. His footnotes are informative without being too academic. The cover is handsome, the book itself sturdy.
St. Thomas is a saint who famously does not speak about himself. There is no Confessions of St. Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, especially for those of us who spend our days poring over St. Thomas’s writings, it is a special treat to read Tocco’s Life. At the risk of a trivializing comparison, it feels kind of like watching a documentary about your favorite filmmaker. The chapters are short, often edifying, sometimes curious. They include familiar events, like St. Thomas’s chasing away the prostitute with a firebrand or being teased as “the dumb ox” by classmates in St. Albert’s courses. But there are also stories I had never heard before. Who knew, for example, that just after St. Thomas died, a blind monk was healed by pressing his face against that of the doctor’s corpse—or that various animals (Thomas’s former mule, a random dog) simply dropped dead as his body was carried by in funeral procession?
Over and above Foley’s translation of Tocco’s Life, this book is also worth the modest $24.95 pricetag for its lovely foreword—by Josias contributor Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P., in fact. I am grateful to Fr. Crean, to David Foley, and to Angelus Press for their permission to reprint a portion of that foreword below. May it whet our readers’ appetites for the book, which is my favorite I’ve read so far this year:
Unlike his hero, William of Tocco was no theologian. Dr. Gouanvic writes: “Many passages in the Ystoria show that he was not at home in tackling philosophical or doctrinal questions.” This book is thus in no way an introduction to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is a portrait of a saint. Three aspects of the portrait stand out: St. Thomas appears as a religious; as a man in communication with heaven; and as a man who communicates truth to others.
First, St. Thomas emerges from the Ystoria as someone committed to the religious life, which he enters as soon as he can, in accordance with his later warning against extended periods of ‘discernment.’ After all: “However early a man sets out on the way of perfection, there will always be further room for him to advance.” William insists on his hero’s loyalty to the outward sign of his new state: although surely unused to physical combat, the young Brother Tommaso refuses to allow his own brothers according to the flesh—professional soldiers in the army of the emperor!—to strip from him his religious habit. He continues to wear it during his two years of captivity, though the struggle had left it in shreds.
But he was not only a religious, but specifically a Dominican, and those who know the life of St. Dominic will recognise the ways in which the disciple imitates the founder. It was said, for example, of St. Dominic that he spoke only to God or about God; the Ystoria portrays Brother Thomas as doing the same, though with this additional note, that he does not even want to listen to conversations on any other subject, which seem to him irrelevant to his state. Again, like St. Dominic, Brother Thomas has the gift of tears, especially when offering Mass; and like him, he is accustomed to pray in the church in the middle of the night. Both men also preserved virginity throughout their lives. And both showed on their death-bed the delicacy of their conscience and their gift of reverential fear: St. Dominic, when he regretted having revealed to his brethren the fact of his own purity, and St. Thomas, when he will not eat the food that God has miraculously provided for him, since he believes that he coveted it too much.
William of Tocco shows us Friar Thomas in all the various scenes of conventual life. We find him in choir, weeping at the beautiful antiphon, Media vita in morte sumus, sung during mid-Lent at Dominican compline. We find him in his cell, prostrating himself in prayer to ask for insight into a difficult passage in St. Paul’s epistles. We see him at the altar, saying Mass every day unless seriously ill, and often serving another friar’s Mass as well. Fr Vincent McNabb OP (1868–1943) was struck by this last fact—the greatest theologian of Christendom happy to act as an altar-boy.
There are also humorous, if sometimes slightly alarming, incidents in William’s description of his confrère’s conventual life. In the refectory, Brother Reginald has to make sure that his master eats something, but must also beware “lest in a state of unbroken distraction he should eat something by error than might cause him harm.” One wonders what—did he have some allergy? Or did mediaeval refectories already have salt and pepper pots on the table which he might have emptied onto his plate? We find him also in the parlour, taking part in a recreation or called there to meet some eminent man, but liable to forget his surroundings, whereupon he would without a word get up and “wander through the cloister or garden, absorbed in his accustomed meditations.” Yet with the exception of one visiting friar who did not recognise Master Thomas despite his fame, and who took him on an ill-fated shopping-trip—a chance for the saint’s humility to transpire—we do not find his brethren growing angry with him, for all his absent-mindedness. No doubt they felt that he was someone not to be judged by the usual standards. No doubt they understood, in Chesterton’s phrase, that absence of mind means presence of mind somewhere else…