Thomas Aquinas was born near Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily and joined the Dominicans as a young man, against the wishes of a family who had expected something grander of him. He studied under Albert the Great at Cologne, taught at Paris and in Italy, and wrote at a rate that still seems implausible.
His great work, the Summa Theologiae, was left unfinished. Late in 1273, after an experience at Mass he never explained, he stopped writing altogether; asked why, he is said to have answered that everything he had written seemed to him like straw. He died a few months later on the road to the Council of Lyon. The Summa remains the most sustained attempt in Christian thought to show that reason and revelation cannot finally contradict each other, and the Church names him a Doctor.