The Silence of the Angelic Doctor

Israel Centeno

The manuscript is said to be kept—some claim without conviction—in a secondary archive of the convent of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. It consists of three sheets of aged vellum, barely legible, attributed to one Brother Bartholomew of Altomonte, a Dominican friar of the 13th century, believed to have served as confessor to Thomas Aquinas in his final months. The document is alluded to, cryptically, in a private letter penned by a Discalced Carmelite nun to Sister Magdalena of Saint Louis, dated 1673.

The letter reads:

“Daughter, are you familiar with the case of the learned Dominican who fell silent after touching the Word? I speak of the Angelic Doctor, who, after dictating the section on the Eucharist in the Tertia Pars, laid down his pen and wrote no more. Historians suggest exhaustion, or a sudden vision. But I have been told—and I confide it here from soul to soul—that Thomas’s silence was not born of failure, but of fullness. It was willed by Heaven.”

Tradition holds—though repeated more out of reverence than certainty—that Aquinas experienced a vision while celebrating Mass in the Chapel of Saint Nicholas in Naples. Thereafter, he is said to have declared: “All that I have written seems to me like straw,” and never wrote again.

Brother Bartholomew, in the fragile parchment attributed to him, offers a deeper and more terrible suggestion:

“It was not a vision. It was a Word. Not like the voice heard at the Jordan, nor the one that thundered on Mount Tabor. It was another Word, one which cannot be pronounced. Thomas did not see; he was spoken.”

What was said to him, according to the account, was not new knowledge. It was the suspension of all contingent knowing. For three days, Thomas lay prostrate, repeating only one verse with quiet insistence:

“In Thy light shall we see light.”

The last witness—if one believes these inherited whispers—was a young lay brother who found the Master seated in silence, eyes wide but unseeing, the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite lying open on his desk, and a single phrase, handwritten in unsteady ink, in the margin:

“What lies beyond being is not the opposite of being. It is God.”

Thomas’s silence was not resignation. It was obedience. A final assent: to fall silent where the true Word begins.

The manuscript was lost, then copied, then lost again. Some believe fragments were woven, years later, into the prose of John of the Cross. Others whisper that it passed through the hands of Edith Stein before she penned the closing section of Finite and Eternal Being.

What is certain is this: Thomas’s silence did not end with his death. It continues—as an echo without voice—in every reader who reaches the end of the Summa and discovers that the essential cannot be concluded