TOMMASO di GESÙ (DE ANDRADA). - Augustinian mystic, b. in Lisbon to the Alvarez de Andrada family ca. 1530, d. in Morocco on 17 Apr. 1582; he took his vows in his native convent in 1548, studied at the University of Coimbra, and distinguished himself, Montoya (v.), by his spirit of penance and prayer.
Chaplain in the ill-fated African expedition of King Sebastiano, he was wounded and taken prisoner in the defeat at Alcazar Quivir (4 Aug. 1578). He assigned to others the ransom received from the Countess of Linhares, his sister; he remained among his companions in misfortune in order to preserve the prisoners in the faith and convert those who had apostatized. During his captivity he wrote several catechetical pamphlets and Os trabalhos de Jesus (part 1, Lisbon 1602; part 2, ibid. 1609), moving meditations on the “sufferings of Jesus,” based on a careful exegetical study, without the aid of books, of the Passion in the Gospels. This monument of language and masterpiece of Portuguese mysticism was translated several times into Spanish (Madrid 1628, etc.), then into French, Italian (P. Li Fiori, Rome 1644), Latin, German, English, and Dutch.
TOMMASO of JESUS. - Missionologist and mystic, born Tomás Díaz Sánchez de Ávila in 1564 in Baeza (Andalusia), died on 24 May 1627 in Rome.
After graduating in philosophy and theology in 1583, he studied law in Salamanca. In April 1586, he entered the Carmelite Order and was ordained a priest in 1589. Initially, he followed the strictly contemplative tendency within the Order, though he declared himself ready for any task entrusted to him. Called to Rome in 1607 by Paul V, Tommaso was appointed superior of the Congo mission alongside Fr. Diego dell'Incarnazione, but he was unable to depart and remained in Rome. To prepare missionaries for a projected Carmelite Congregation of St. Paul, Fr. Tommaso wrote the Stimulus Missionum (Rome 1610), a preparatory work for a great manual of missionary science, for which he collected material in subsequent years from the Archives and Libraries of Rome and through conversations with converted schismatics and heretics. This project was interrupted when, in 1610, Tommaso was sent by order of Paul V to France and the Low Countries to found Carmelite convents according to the Teresian reform, of which he served as provincial until 1617, when he returned to Rome. In 1613, De procuranda salute omnium gentium was published in Antwerp, and in the same year, a simple reprint appeared under the changed title Thesaurus Sapientiae divinae in gentium omnium salute procuranda. In Book III of his Manual of Missionology, Tommaso develops the project of a Congregatio de Propaganda Fide for the central direction of all missionary activity of the Church. He thoroughly studied the Cartapacio of Fr. Pietro della Madre di Dio, which contains a Modus propagandi fidem catholicam presented, along with a petition from the Bishop of Tournai, Vendville (v.), to Sixtus V in 1589.
Tommaso of Jesus is renowned for his works on spiritual theology, particularly the Sumo y compendio de los grados de oración (Rome 1610), Tratado de la oración mental (ibid. 1610), Practica de la viva fe (Brussels 1613), Methodus examinandi ac discernendi spiritualem animae profectum (ibid. 1620), Divinae orationis... methodus, natura et gradus (Antwerp 1623), and De contemplatione divina (ibid. 1620), which were published and translated multiple times. With profound doctrinal insight and great erudition, Tommaso was the first in the Carmelite spiritual school to study the entirety of mystical problems in the light of scholastic theology. He is also celebrated as a popularizer of acquired contemplation (v. IV, 443), of which he was the first to treat systematically, both in De contemplatione divina (Book I, chaps. 1-3, 5) and in De contemplatione acquisita, which remained unpublished until recently (Milan 1922). The majority of his writings were collected in the Opera omnia in 2 volumes (Cologne, 1684). Other works intended to form a third volume remain in manuscript in the General Archive of the O.C.D. in Rome.
Valentino di Maria-Nicola Kowalski