On 7 March 1274, Friar Tommaso d’Aquino of the Order of Preachers died at the age of forty-nine at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova. He was on his way to the Second Council of Lyon. Less than fifty years later, he was canonised (1323). By the Council of Trent his doctrinal authority was so great that his masterwork, the Summa theologiae, was placed on the altar of the cathedral, along with the Bible and the Decretals. Not long after the conclusion of Trent, St. Pius V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church (1567). Ever since, the popes have continued to recommend the doctor communis as the most comprehensive guide to the Catholic doctrine.
To mark the 750th anniversary of St. Thomas’s death, this edition of Five Books for Catholics selects five books for those studying his works for the first time.
- Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work
by Jean-Pierre Torrell OP - Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master
by Jean-Pierre Torrell OP - Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings
edited and translated by Ralph McInerny - Commentary on the Gospel of John (vol. 1) (vol. 2) (vol. 3)
by St. Thomas Aquinas - Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae: A Guide and Commentary
by Brian Davies OP
Most Catholics of the Roman Rite have recited or listened to works of St. Thomas without even knowing it: during the Solemnity of Corpus Christi. Thomas wrote the liturgical texts for the feast, including the hymn Pange, lingua (Sing, my tongue, the Saviour’s glory). This hymn, or its last two verses (Tantum ergo sacramentum), is often sung during Eucharistic adoration and benediction.
These are probably the works of which St. Thomas is proudest. Throughout the world, the faithful sing his words to praise and adore Christ, present in the Blessed Sacrament.
Readers of the Catechism of the Catholic Church have also been exposed to his teaching without knowing it. Often, the Catechism summarises St. Thomas, especially in Part Two, on the sacraments, and Part Three, on the moral life. The same is true of many other papal and conciliar documents.
Still others will want to read his works and learn from the saint himself, just as successive popes have recommended.
“The Magisterium has repeatedly acclaimed the merits of Saint Thomas' thought and made him the guide and model for theological studies. This has not been in order to take a position on properly philosophical questions nor to demand adherence to particular theses. The Magisterium's intention has always been to show how Saint Thomas is an authentic model for all who seek the truth. In his thinking, the demands of reason and the power of faith found the most elevated synthesis ever attained by human thought, for he could defend the radical newness introduced by Revelation without ever demeaning the venture proper to reason.”
John Paul II, Fides et Ratio n. 78
New readers may not know where to start. Not only has Thomas left a vast body of writings. The literature on his thought is enormous and ever expanding. The five books selected here can help new readers find their way into his works.
Nevertheless, someone reading St. Thomas for the first time may find his writings more challenging and less exciting than expected. There are several reasons for this.
First, you do not go to Thomas for light reading but to study the truths of the faith and reflect more deeply upon them. If you are looking for entertainment, you go the theatre, not a university course. Of course, there are many novels and works of theatre that are deep and instructive. Thomas, however, is neither a novelist nor a dramaturge. He speaks from the pulpit and the university chair.
Second, St. Thomas wrote for readers whose schooling was very different from ours. He assumes that his reader is steeped in the liturgy and Scripture but also has a working knowledge of the Church Fathers and Aristotle. Generally, we have not been initiated into all these as thoroughly during our schooling. Unsurprisingly, someone reading the Summa theologiae for the first time may find it daunting at the beginning. Nevertheless, persistence will be rewarded. Reading St. Thomas is a sure way to both study philosophy and enter the patristic reading of Sacred Scripture.
Reading St. Thomas can also be daunting because it appears so detached from his life and the concerns of his day. There is none of the self-disclosure that one finds in St. Augustine’s Confessions, probably the most widely read piece of patristic literature, or St. Teresa of Ávila. Thomas never reads like an autobiographical novel. His voice is that of a preacher expounding the letter of Scripture or a professor explaining great works of philosophy that can help us understand God’s creation and articulate biblical teachings. Only in a couple of works, such as An Apology for the Religious Orders (Contra impugnantes), do we see him engage directly, not obliquely, in a social debate of the day. This does not mean that his other works are not concerned with issues of the day. All of them are, but Thomas often does not make this explicit. To see how each one addresses a pastoral or social problem of the day, however, we need to understand its historical context. That is where the first two recommended books come in.
Sometimes new readers also have difficulty in disentangling what St. Thomas really says from what they think he is saying. This challenge is not peculiar to his works. It arises with all great books written long ago, and in a milieu very different to our own. There is not just the labour of understanding subtle arguments about intrinsically difficult questions. Often, we misunderstand the argument, like a Latin student who misanalyses the grammar of a sentence and mistranslates it. Such misunderstandings arise whenever we assume that the great book is addressing the exact same questions, with the exact same suppositions, as modern authors.
Nor is it just the general reader who is prone to read St. Thomas with the assumptions of the modern mind. So are academics. During the twentieth century, there were various scholarly debates about his thought. In several of these debates, those on one side criticised the other for misrepresenting Thomas. The other side, they charged, was reading him through the lens of modern categories that were foreign to him. Étienne Gilson faulted nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neo-scholastics for supposing that Thomas philosophised along the same lines as Descartes, with his methodological doubt, or Kant, with his critical philosophy. Cornelio Fabro criticised the classic commentators for failing to recognise the originality of St. Thomas’s theology of creation or metaphysics. In their interpretation of Thomas, Fabro argued, the most fundamental intrinsic principle of a substance is its essence, which is then brought into existence. They were in the thrall of Aristotle, Scotus, or Suárez. They failed to appreciate that for Thomas, the most fundamental intrinsic principle is the act of being (esse) by which the creature participates in God (ipsum esse subsistens). Henri de Lubac faulted many theologians for reading Thomas’s teaching on our ultimate end through the lens of Dionysius the Carthusian and Cajetan (though some find faults in de Lubac’s reading too). More recently, Gilles Emery and others have criticised Karl Rahner for misrepresenting St. Thomas’s Trinitarian theology by reading it through the prism of dubious modern assumptions.
But wait a minute! If highly trained top-ranking scholars can get the wrong end of the stick, what chances do we newcomers have of understanding a work of St. Thomas. These misadventures in modern scholarship should not discourage us. They are a healthy reminder that it takes time, patience, and various careful readings to understand the great books properly.
1.
As St. Thomas can be challenging for new readers, it might be worth starting with an introduction to his works rather than one of his writings itself. There are plenty of these. Some of the best known include Chesterton’s The Dumb Ox, Jacques Maritain’s The Angelic Doctor, Étienne Gilson’s The Chiristian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas , and Marie-Dominque Chenu’s Toward Understanding St. Thomas. These are all instructive. However, there are several drawbacks to them. Except for Chenu’s, they focus more on his philosophy than his theology. Furthermore, these were all written during the first half of the twentieth century. They do not reflect the most recent scholarship. The current leading biography of St. Thomas, on the other hand, does incorporate the latest scholarly findings and is centred on the spiritual and theological dimension of his works.
At present, the leading biography is Fr Jean-Pierre Torrell OP’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, which was originally published in French in 1993 (orig. Initiation à saint Thomas d’Aquin : sa personne e son oeuvre).
Fr Torrell served on the Leonine Commission, the body of Dominican scholars and their associates that prepares the ongoing critical edition of St. Thomas’s works. Consequently, he is well versed in the latest historical research on St. Thomas life and works.
This book and its companion volume grew out of Torrell’s entry on St. Thomas for the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, Ascétique et Mystique. In writing the article, he drew on the advances made in scholarship by members of the Leonine Comission and other academics. As a result, he realised that the best biography then available, James Weishepl’s Friar Thomas d’Aquino, was outdated. He expanded the first part of the article into Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work and the second part into Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (Saint Thomas d'Aquin, maître spirituel), the next entry on this list.
Throughout the work, Torrell stresses the theological, spiritual, and pastoral dimension of St. Thomas’s writings. He also stresses the importance of the biblical commentaries (see Chapters Two and Five of the latest edition from 2022). Thomas’s main task as a lecturer was to comment on Sacred Scripture.
The volume ends with a title “Brief Catalogue of the Works of Saint Thomas Aquinas.” Ironically, the latest edition is over fifty pages long. However, like the rest of the volume, it is an indispensable instrument for anyone intent upon studying Thomas seriously. It classifies his works according to genres, lists them, describes each one briefly and summarises the scholarship on its date. It also indicates the best available editions and English translations.
2.
The second volume of Torrell’s introduction is Saint Thomas
Aquinas: Spiritual Master. As the author notes, some might find it unusual that he focuses not on the saint as a spiritual master rather than a systematic theologian.
“For anyone who knows Saint Thomas Aquinas only by hearsay, it may be surprising to see him presented as a spiritual master. The author of the Summa Theologiae is certainly well known as a first-class intellectual, but not as a mystic.”
Torrell goes on to point out that.
“In the tradition of Saint John the Evangelist and the Fathers of the Church, Thomas Aquinas’s theology is clearly oriented towards contemplation and is as deeply spiritual as it is doctrinal. One could say, I believe, that it is even more spiritual than rigorously doctrinal. The very clarity of his intellectual, philosophical, and theological commitments is immediately reflected in a religious attitude that has no equivalent except that of a mystic wholly consumed by love of the absolute.”
One reason why we are unaccustomed to think of Thomas as a spiritual master is that his writing do not seem to fit our conception what counts as spirituality. Torrell addresses this problem in the opening chapter. First, for Thomas theology is itself a spiritual exercise. It is participation in God’s knowledge through faith and other divinely infused dispositions. Furthermore, Thomas’s works do contain a teaching about the spiritual life. However, unlike the better-known schools of spirituality, it is more contemplative that practical. The more practical spiritualities are an expression of the saint's experience, whereas Thomas's spirituality is expressed in his reflection on God, the principle and end of all things.
Torrell breaks his survey into two parts: the first on Thomas’ Trinitarian spirituality, the second on man’s relation to God in this world. In this survey, Torrell gives an excellent overview of many of Thomas’s main teachings. As a result, this study does an excellent job at giving one a sense of what Thomas is all about. He is not a dry academic in the ivory tower. He is a saint who contemplates the Triune God and cooperates with the Lord in handing on what he has contemplated to us, so that we too may partake of God’s life and blessedness.
3.
Torrell’s two volumes give an excellent introduction to the life, works, teaching, and spirituality of St. Thomas. However, they are merely preparatory aids to the reading and study of his writings.
There are many places where one could start. The Summa contra Gentiles or his most comprehensive and important work, the Summa theologiae. Nevertheless, each of these is very long and intricate. For this reason, it may be advisable to start instead with a good, comprehensive anthology.
A comprehensive anthology is not a compilation of Aquinas’s writings on just one subject, such as political philosophy or philosophy in general. It should cover the full range of his teachings.
The one edited by Ralph McInerny (1929-2010) comes closest to doing so.
McInerny was a professor of philosophy for over fifty years at the University of Notre Dame. According to his colleague, Alasdair MacIntyre, he was the most important philosopher to ever teach there. A leading scholar and proponent of Thomas’s thought, he authored important studies on the saint’s account of analogical predication, human action, and his commentaries on Boethius. He was also a successful novelist and one of the founders of Crisis Magazine.
McInerny’s anthology arranges the selected texts in chronological order. It includes the full texts of two of St. Thomas’s early philosophical works: The Principles of Nature (De principiis naturae) and On Being and Essence (De ente et essentia). Though brief, each of these essays summarises a great deal of Thomas’s philosophy of nature and being. They are good places to start for those interested in his philosophical thought.
If there is a criticism, it is that McInerny privileges philosophical texts over theological ones. For example, there is little on Christ and nothing on the distinction of the three divine persons. There are texts on conscience, virtue in general, and natural law. Thomas writes on these as a theologian. Nevertheless, moral philosophers will also find his discussion of these topics of interest. They are likely to find his treatment of the theological virtues or the gifts of the Holy Spirit less interesting and outside their remit. Indeed, McInerny’s anthology does not include any of Thomas’s texts on these last two subjects. This is significant. While it surveys a broader range of Thomas’s theology than other comparable anthologies, it is not a rich and representative in this regard as it could be and probably should. It needs to be supplemented. That is where the next book comes in.
4.
From Thomas, we have commentaries on various books of the Bible: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, the first fifty-four Psalms, Matthew, John, and the Pauline corpus (including Hebrews).
There is also his Continuous Gloss on the Gospels (Glossa continua super Evangelia), better known as the Catena aurea (The Golden Chain). It is an impressive compilation of passages from the Church Fathers, arranged verse by verse so as to constitute a Continuous Gloss: a patristic commentary on the four Gospels. Putting it together, when books were copied out by hand, expensive, scarce, and there were no complete editions of patristic writings available, must have involved an immense amount of patient work. The Catena aurea reveals the depth with which Thomas venerated the Fathers, studied them, and followed their principles of biblical exegesis.
His devotion to the Fathers is apparent in all his biblical commentaries, where he cites them throughout. This commitment to patristic biblical exegesis is particularly apparent in his Commentary on the Gospel of John.
He delivered his Commentary on the Gospel of John (Lectura super Ioannem) at the University of Paris between 1270 and 1272. For Torrell, it is “among the most profound and fully finished” of Thomas’s extant biblical commentaries.
It is all the more notable as he delivered it amid an immense workload. Not only was he dictating his commentaries on Aristotle’s works. He was also writing the third and final part of the Summa theologiae. Indeed, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel, the one which stresses Christ’s divinity and Incarnation most explicitly, Thomas may have been doing groundwork for this last project. The Tertia Pars of the Summa is on Christ and his works, including the sacraments. However, like the rest of the Summa theologiae, it is meant to be a guide to reading Scripture. It gives an organic overview of the truths that Scripture declares in a different order and across many occasional writings. In many ways, the Tertia Pars is a guide to reading the fourth Gospel and points us towards it. Conversely, reading the Commentary on the Gospel of John helps us appreciate that the Tertia Pars, along with the rest of St. Thomas writings, are works of biblical theology. Thomas only ever writes as a preacher and lecturer of Scripture (magister sacrae paginae).
That is why it is necessary to include one of his biblical commentaries in this list of recommended readings. The one recommended here is the Commentary on the Gospel of John. More than the others, it dwells upon the mystery of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Not only are these the central themes of his teaching and any Chrisitan theology. As Thomas states repeatedly, all there is to know about the Christian faith boils down to two truths: the divinity of the Trinity and the humanity of Christ.
5.
St. Thomas wrote many great works of enduring value. The most comprehensive of these is his unfinished Summa theologiae.
Thomas worked on it during the last six years of his life and almost brought it to completion. He did not manage to write the sections on the anointing of the sick, marriage, holy orders, and the last things.
It was not the first summation of sacred teaching that Thomas had written. There is also his rudimentary Compendium of Theology and his early Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Scriptum in IV libros Sententiarum). From the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, Peter Lombard’s Sentences was the textbook used in faculties of theology. Junior lecturers taught by commenting on it. St. Bonaventure and Blessed John Duns Scotus are just a couple of the other medieval theologians who have left their commentaries on it. Moreover, these commentaries were their major academic works.
St. Thomas appears to have been dissatisfied with the way in which the Sentences arranged the subject-matter and questions. At the beginning of the Summa theologiae, he complains that students of theology are taught not by following the order of the discipline but ‘according to what the commentary of the books requires.’ The Sentences is likely one of the books to which he is referring. His Summa theologiae, on the other hand, proposes to follow, not the order of the Sentences, but the order in which sacred teaching is meant to be taught and learnt.
Moreover, St. Thomas probably wrote it, not for undergrads in the faculties of theology or seminarians, but for the priests of Dominican priories. It was a textbook of ongoing formation for priests and their ministry. It is far broader in scope than the books that were normally used for this purpose. They focussed on a narrow range of issues in the administration of the sacraments and moral theology. They were practical or pastoral, in a reductive sense of the terms. The Summa theologiae addresses all the same issues and in far more depth. At the same time, it shows that we can understand them adequately only by contemplating the source and end of all things: the Triune God. That at least is the upshot of the evidence marshalled by Leonard Boyle OP.
Although Thomas always writes with incomparable clarity and concision, reading the Summa theologiae can be challenging. It is a book for disciplined study, not light reading. Moreover, Thomas identifies and addresses each of the specific questions that need to be solved to answer a more general question. This makes his teaching exact and systematic. The danger is that one may no longer see the forest for the trees. When reading the Summa theologiae, therefore, it is important to keep one eye on the big picture and the other on detail.
The only way to keep an eye on the detail is to read the Summa theologiae carefully. However, the commentary and guide of Fr. Brian Davies OP can give help the reader track the big picture by giving an arial view in advance.
Another guide is Torrell’s Aquinas’s Summa: Background, Structure, and Reception. However, it gives a far more general overview of the work. Davies, on the other hand, outlines the main arguments of each section with both philosophical and theological acumen. He does a better job of bridging the big picture and the detail of the individual articles. He has also written a guide and commentary to St. Thomas Summa contra Gentiles.
If you are thinking about reading St. Thomas in earnest, hopefully these recommendations will encourage you and help you become his student and apprentice.
Sancte Thoma de Aquino, ora pro nobis.
