How to read the Summa Theologiae
The Summa Theologiae is St Thomas Aquinas's great work of theology, written between about 1265 and 1274 and left unfinished at his death. Aquinas wrote it, as he says in the prologue, for beginners. It is not read like a modern book. It is read one article at a time.
How the Summa is built
- Three parts. The First Part concerns God and creation. The Second Part, itself divided into two, concerns the moral life and the return of the rational creature to God. The Third Part concerns Christ and the sacraments, and was completed after his death in the Supplement, compiled by his followers.
- Each part is divided into questions, and each question into articles.
- Each article asks one precise question, beginning "Whether..." (Utrum).
How a single article works
Every article follows the form of the scholastic disputation.
- Objections: Aquinas first states the arguments against the position he will hold, fairly and often strongly.
- Sed contra ("On the contrary"): an appeal to an authority, often Scripture, a Father of the Church or Aristotle, showing that the opposite view has standing.
- Respondeo ("I answer that"): the body of the article, where Aquinas makes his distinctions and gives his own reasoning.
- Replies to objections: each objection is answered in turn, often by showing what it gets right and where it goes wrong.
Reading one article well
- Read the question first and say in your own words what is being asked.
- Read the objections as real arguments, not straw men.
- Read the respondeo slowly. Mark each distinction.
- Return to each objection with the distinction in hand, then read the reply.
- Note which authorities are cited, and in what order they bear on the question.
Common mistakes
- Quoting an objection as if it were Aquinas's own view.
- Reading the sed contra as the whole argument. The argument is in the respondeo.
- Skipping the distinctions. Aquinas usually resolves a question by distinguishing senses of a term.
- Reading an article cut off from the questions around it.
Reading with Aquinian
Aquinian helps by training you to read an article as Thomas built it, and by refusing to let a translation, a later system, or a memorable sentence stand in for his determination. It is a guide to the text, not its author, and it has no teaching authority. The reading remains yours.
Thomas wrote the Summa for beginners in sacred doctrine. In the prologue he named the faults he meant the form to cure: a multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments; teaching what novices need not according to the order of the discipline (ordo disciplinae) but according to the exposition of books or the chance of a disputation; and repetition that wearies and confuses. He then tried to set out what belongs to sacred doctrine as briefly and clearly as the matter allows. The article is that remedy. If you learn its voices, most of the famous difficulties shrink.
The unit of reading
Bring a place, not a topic in the air: part, question, article, and the translation in your hands. If a clause is doubtful, bring the Latin.
An article has a precise question, usually utrum, “whether.” The objections are real difficulties, often drawn from authorities; they are not Thomas’s position. The sed contra is commonly a brief pointer the other way, not the argument. The determination is the respondeo. The replies then show how each objection failed: by a distinction, by a false premise, or by a truth conceded only in a limited sense.
Before the articles, read the short prologue of the question. Thomas often puts the order of the inquiry there. Skip it, and the articles look like a pile of opinions.
His own plan of the whole work, stated at the opening of the Prima Pars, question 2, is three movements: first God; then the movement of the rational creature toward God; then Christ, who as man is our way of tending toward God. Later readers often call this exitus and reditus. The likeness is real. The phrase is not his, and it misleads if the third part is reduced to a mere return and Christ is no longer the way. The Supplement is not his finished text; he died with the Tertia Pars incomplete, and that material was drawn from his commentary on the Sentences.
What Aquinian will do with a page
It will fix what is actually being asked, which is often narrower than the title suggests to a modern reader. It will separate Thomas’s determination from the objections, from a conclusion merely compatible with him, and from later Thomistic opinion. It will say which of those it is giving.
Where an English word flattens the Latin, it will give the term and a gloss. Ordo disciplinae is already an example: “order of the subject-matter” is weaker than “order of the discipline.” Ens and esse, habit and act, law as ordinance and law as mere pattern, are others. It will not decorate a plain article with metaphysics it does not use.
It will locate the article in the question, and the question in the part, and supply the principle an isolated article presupposes. A virtue in the Secunda Secundae is not intelligible apart from the account of human acts, habits, and the last end in the Prima Secundae. It will not pretend that it is.
Then it will ask you to restate the determination in your own words, in two or three sentences, without his vocabulary. If that restatement survives, the article has been understood. If it does not, the failure usually shows exactly where the reading slipped.
What Aquinian will interrupt
It will not let an objection be quoted as “Aquinas says.” It will not let a later controversy—physical premotion, a particular account of the real distinction, a school’s reading of law or grace—be read back into a text that does not contain it, unless you ask for that later development and it is labelled as later. It will not replace the page with a summary you can repeat without having read it. And it will not treat sacred doctrine as a philosophical system that happens to cite Scripture. In this work, philosophy is used; it is not the principle of the science.
How to begin a session
Send four things:
- The place: for example, I-II, q. 94, a. 2.
- The translation, and the Latin of any sentence you distrust.
- One sentence on what you think he concludes.
- The sentence that still resists you.
Aquinian will answer in that order: the question asked, the determination, the point of resistance, then whatever the article does not settle.
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