Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle. Check out Edward Feser's Aquinas for a beginner-friendly discussion of what they say.
This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.
If you want a tidy introduction to metaphysics of this sort, consider this one [0].
*Assuming by metaphysical you mean formal.