about
A little about me and how I got started on all this, about reading
Aquinas, and some other Aquinas sources.
the author
I'm a baby boomer Roman Catholic, raised on
the South Side of Chicago, where in the old days there was a
church about every four blocks complete with bells and smells
and a permeating sense of sacred space. I was educated
by the Adrian Dominicans in grade school, the
School
Sisters
of
Notre
Dame in high school, and the Jesuits
at Loyola University. I later picked up an MBA at Northwestern
(no religious orders involved with that one). I've spent most
of my adult life working with computer software, both
as
a software
developer
and manager and later
as a technology writer. I still live in
Chicago, even though I have emmigrated to the North Side.
how I got started on Aquinas
I landed on Aquinas via an odd path. When John Kerry
was running for President in 2004, a small number of bishops
opined that he should not be allowed to receive Holy
Communion
because
of
his position on whether abortion should be criminalized. Hearing
that struck me as questionable theology, from the memories I
had from grade
school
and
the
Baltimore
Catechism (every Catholic of a certain age had to memorize
the Baltimore Catechism in grade school). This led to me digging
up a copy of it on Amazon and set off a long trip
down memory lane and a somewhat random
attempt to figure out exactly what Catholics actually believe
in these days.
And it seemed that everywhere I looked,
Aquinas popped up. He's all over the current Catechism
of the Catholic Church, he's one of thirty three Doctors of the
Church
(i.e., people in the
2000-year-old
tradition who have most influenced it intellectually or spiritually),
his work has been identified as official Catholic
teaching, and
he was
the most quoted theologian of Vatican II. So I figured
that if I wanted to really know Catholicism, I was going
to have to
do
Aquinas. And I thought, well, I'd just go to the text and
see what the guy had to say. Right.
You can buy the Summa Theologica (his own summary of his thought)
for about $150 for the five volume set or for about $100 for
the
paperbacks. Or there's the sixty one volume Oxford Blackfriars
edition, with the full Latin text on the left-facing page and
the English translation on the right-facing page, to be republished
in early 2007 with a pricetag of $1800.
Not wanting to plunk down that kind of money and wanting to
start with one rather than five or sixty one volumes, I settled
on the Brian
Davies book The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (see below).
This is still the best summary I've seen, rigorous but readable,
and the one that I think brings you closest to the sense of the
text of the Summa itself. The Summa Theologiae, A Concise
Translation,
has also been a key resource, as it is the text of the Summa
itself (abridged)
in a somewhat perkier translation.
reading aquinas
Reading Aquinas takes a certain amount of endurance.
He's a tough guy to get your head around. There's a lot of
text, it
was written
around 750 years ago, and he covers his topics debate style,
laying out and demolishing opposing points of view as well as
stating
his own, which makes for an intellectually rigorous but not
very flowing format. Aquinas
also comes with his own baggage. He's had a cyclical popularity
in
the Church
and
apparently
these days his stock is at a rather low ebb. (From what I can
gather, for the past hundred years or so the Church has been
ramming
the hair-splitting, tedious bits of him down the throats of
every Catholic priest and nun on the planet; the mention of Aquinas
to a nun or priest of a certain age these days often brings on
a fearful shudder.) The broad, lovely, and often insubordinate
sweep
of
the heart of his thought seems somehow to have gotten lost.
why I did the blog
I think the Summa is a work that a lot of people today would
drink up if it were more accessible. While I'm theologically
naive (or as theologically naive as one can be after 16 years
of Catholic education) and can't really
compare Aquinas properly to the other great theologians, he totally
blew me away. I love his view of creation as thoroughly good,
his common sense, his hope, and the breadth of his thought (e.g.,
the Theory of Everything). And I love that he sounds like he
was happy and sane. And more personally, it tickled me that he
sounded like an engineer. Being a propeller-head myself, I've
spent most of my adult life around computer systems people and
engineers, and his careful precision is very familiar. The Summa,
when you get to the guts of it, has a really tight design; it
has low complexity in each of its parts and an extremely high
coherence between the parts. Like all great information systems,
the beauty is in the connections.
And so
much of it was a surprise to me! Religion being about happiness?
God thinking the universe into existence? The Trinity as the
self-knowledge
/
self-awareness
of God? Grace as starting with healing? Morality as the rules
for turning into who you're supposed to turn into? Amazing stuff.
His
ideas are grand, logical, based on the evidence and common
sense. I think of it as theology for the
sane: using reason in its fullest sense to seek happiness in
its deepest
sense.
So why is an amateur taking a crack at explaining Aquinas? Because
I can! It's interesting! It's gloriously systematic! It resonates
with a scientific view of the world! If Star Trek had a theologian,
it would have to be Aquinas. And it makes me happy, so it might
make you happy too. Aquinas saw the world as a joyous, flourishing,
rationally coherent place, and despite the fact that he is separated
from
us in time, it is still the same world. There's a lot to be learned
in his vision of it, so I'm happy to describe it as clearly
as
I can.
- Jeanne Follman, Chicago, IL
Some Books
Here are a few books and links that I've found useful. And of
course, there's Google; googling
Aquinas variously returns between five and ten million
hits.
The
Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Brian Davies
Aquinas,
Brian Davies
Thomas
Aquinas Theologian, Thomas O'Meara
Aquinas
and His Role in Theology, M-D Chenu
Happiness
and Contemplation, Josef Pieper
The
Silence of St. Thomas, Josef Pieper
Saint
Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, Jean-Pierre Torrell
Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, G.K. Chesterton
God
Matters, Herbert McCabe (not specifically on Aquinas
but definitely informed by him)
Summa
Theologiae, A Concise Translation, Timothy McDermott
editor; check out the Table
of Contents for a nice outline of the Summa
Summa
Theologica, Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fathers of
the English Dominican Province, 5 Volume Set. This is the
big one.
Text of the Summa
Theologica
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