Thomas Aquinas Completes Summa

The chapel air hung thick with incense and the low murmur of brothers at prayer. I stood near the back, my hands still ink-stained from the morning's pages, watching Thomas move through the familiar motions at the altar. His shoulders had grown broader over the years, not from ease but from the steady weight of the work. Every day for months he had dictated until his voice grew hoarse, the secretaries scribbling to keep pace. On this feast of St. Nicholas the light through the narrow windows fell in thin bars across the stone floor.

Mass began as it always did. The words rose and fell. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, thinking already of the questions that waited back in the scriptorium. Part Three still needed the final articles on the sacraments. Thomas had reached the ninetieth question, and the brothers spoke of how close the end lay.

Then the change came without warning. His hands, raised above the chalice, stayed lifted longer than the rite required. The silence stretched until the servers glanced at one another. One of them stepped forward, then stopped. Thomas's face had gone still, the eyes fixed on something none of us could see. Time passed in the small chapel the way it does when a man holds his breath underwater.

Reginald of Piperno, standing closest, touched his sleeve at last. The Mass finished in fragments. We filed out into the corridor where the winter damp met the smell of old parchment. Thomas walked slowly, one hand against the wall. When Reginald asked whether we should return to the work, the answer came low and final.

I cannot do any more.

The words settled in the air between us. Reginald pressed again, saying the end was near. Thomas answered that everything he had written seemed straw now. He did not raise his voice. He simply stopped moving toward the stairs that led to the room where the secretaries waited with their quills.

We led him to his sister's house a short distance away. Theodora met us at the door, her face tight with worry at the sight of him. For days he sat without speaking, sometimes staring at the fire, sometimes at nothing. The strength that had carried eight million words across two decades had left him like water draining from a cracked vessel. Reginald stayed close, bringing food he only sometimes touched.

By the turn of the year Thomas recovered enough to travel. He wrote one short letter and an exposition on freedom and foreknowledge for the monks at Monte Cassino, the words measured and clear as ever. Then the summons came for the council at Lyons. He set out with a small party, the roads still hard from frost.

Illness took him on the way. At the monastery of Fossanova the monks carried him inside. He lingered there through the last weeks of winter, speaking little. On the seventh day of March the brothers gathered around the bed. His breathing slowed until it stopped. The body that had seemed so large in life looked smaller against the plain sheet.