How to Read the Summa Theologica

How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners by Joseph Anthony

This is a short, easily-accessible book about a far longer, far less accessible book. The latter book is the Summa Theologica (the “ST”) written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century.

As someone who has read the ST proper (i.e., through the close of Part III), I can see that author Joseph Anthony's book is a good roadmap for tackling the longer project. Anthony provides a 10,000 foot survey of the four parts of the ST, offering a sketch of its organization and a survey of its parts. After twenty years of reading the text, I don't think I quite understood the organization, which Anthony describes as having an “exitus-reditus” structure:

The Big Picture of the Summa Theologica forms what John of St. Thomas (a 17th-century Dominican theologian) called the “golden circle of theology.”

What did he mean?

It's simple.

The Summa is ordered to show us how all things — especially the human person — come from God, and how all things — especially the human person — return to God.

In philosophical language, this is called the exitus-reditus structure. In English, that would be translated as “exit-return.”

This structure was used by ancient Greek philosophy to show how all things emanate from (exitus) the source of all being, and how all things return (reditus) to the source of all being. In fact, most primitive religions believed that things come from a creator-god, and that all things eventually return to the creator-god.

Anthony, Joseph. How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners (p. 65). Kindle Edition.

Thus, the first part discusses that from which men come, i.e., God. The last three parts – the two parts of part II and part III – discuss how man can return to God. Anthony explains:

I'm not sure too many people nowadays think of our moral life as a journey toward — or away from — God.

But for St. Thomas — as well as for Catholic moral thought in general — our moral life is the road we must travel to reach God.

How?

Our actions change us. Our good actions make us better, and our bad actions make us worse. To use language that perhaps we're more familiar with, our good actions keep us in a state of grace, while our bad actions lead us toward the state of mortal sin.

If to be in a state of grace is to be with God, and to be in mortal sin is to be away from God, our actions are how we move toward or away from God.

St. Thomas organizes the Prima Secundae in this way: He begins by asking, What is the goal — or end — of human existence? and then he spends the rest of the Prima Secundae answering how we achieve that end.

Our end is complete happiness with God, and we achieve this end by living a moral life devoted to doing good and avoiding evil.

Anthony, Joseph. How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners (pp. 74-75). Kindle Edition.

I don't think most Christians think this way anymore. I suspect that the belief that prevails today has the return to God turn on a mental state of faith and trust in God, in having a relationship in the modern idiom.

Anthony explains the genre of Summas and provides a brief description of how various Summas came to be in the academic culture of medieval Europe. He also offers a tip that took me a while to learn:

Here's an important key to reading the Summa: St. Thomas always begins with the “no” side of the argument, and his own position is always on the “yes” side. By stating the “no” side first, St. Thomas clues you in on his own position. In the article we're studying, the “no” side argues there's no need for a teaching beyond philosophy. Therefore, we know St. Thomas is going to argue why a teaching beyond philosophy (i.e., sacred doctrine, or theology) is needed. Once you realize that St. Thomas always follows this structure, reading the Summa becomes much easier, because once you read the first sentence of an article, you know St. Thomas is going to take the opposite position.

Anthony, Joseph. How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners (pp. 40-41). Kindle Edition.

I don't think this is totally accurate. There are occasions when the answer to a question is “yes.” For example, when he asks whether something is “fitting,” such as “Is it fitting that God be called the Father?” However, the first objection will tell you the answer he will take, such as a statement that starts “It would seem that it is not fitting that God be called the Father.”

Bingo! At that point you know that the opposite is Aquinas's position.

As the reader can see, this book is written in plain and clear language. It takes maybe thirty minutes to read. If you are going to approach the Summa, it is not a bad introduction and survey to start with.