St. Thomas wrote a very short preface to his very long (4,000-page) Summa Theologiae. In it he says he wrote his Summa “for beginners”! I too will give you a fairly short preface (though not as short as his) to tell you why I wrote this fairly long book (though not as long as his), and why “beginners” should read it.
In a lifetime of browsing through Aquinas, my amazement has continually increased not only at his theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity but equally at his personal, practical wisdom, his “existential bite”.
Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other. I wrote this book to help bring that sun out from its eclipse.
Since I already wrote an annotated anthology of St. Thomas’ purely rational, philosophical wisdom, Summa of the Summa, extracting it from its larger theological context of faith and divine revelation.
I here try to redress the balance with an easily digestible sample of his much larger distinctively religious wisdom. Here are 358 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas’ masterpiece the Summa, which are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain “the one thing needful”, the summum bonum or “greatest good”, the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life, which has many names but which is the same reality.
Three of its names are “being a saint”, “beatitude” (supreme happiness) and “union with God”. That was my principle for choosing which passages to use: do they help you to attain your ultimate end, i.e., sanctity, happiness, union with God? St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint.
This is the same thing as attaining true happiness. St. Thomas, like Aristotle, meant by “happiness” not merely “subjective contentment” but “real perfection”, attaining the end or “final cause” or purpose of your very existence.
This is the same thing as union with God, the source of all holiness and all happiness. St. Thomas knew that union with God begins not after death but now.
If this real union does not begin now, as a seed if you are not “born again of the Spirit” then that life cannot and will not grow, as a flower, in eternity. This book is a selection of St. Thomas’ fertilizers to make that seed grow. There are four kinds of fertilizer.
They are the four dimensions of every religion. The word “religion” (from religare) means “a binding-back relationship”, a “tying-to”; and there are four ways every religion ties us to God, or something like God. (These four ways are also the four parts of The Catechism of the Catholic Church.)
They are (1) theology,
(2) morality,
(3) public liturgy, and
(4) private prayer
. Condensing the last two into one,
they are (1) creed,
(2) code, and (3) cult; or
(1) words,
(2) works, an
d (3) worship; or
(1) the spiritually true,
(2) the spiritually good, and (
3) the spiritually beautiful.
They are the three ways to become a saint, the three highways to Heaven, and they all begin in the heart, for “in the heart are the highways to Zion (Heaven)” (Ps 84:5).
St. Thomas was a master of all three. The ultimate reason we must become holy is that that is the only way to become real.
For becoming holy is becoming what reality ultimately is, i.e., what God, the ultimate reality and the touchstone for all reality, is: true, good, and beautiful; real, loving, and joyful. “You must be holy because I the Lord your God am holy” was His ultimate explanation of His law to His chosen people, who were His collective prophet to the world.
Attaining this end depends on the will the will to attain it, the will’s choice to believe God, to hope in God, and above all, to love God and that which God is (truth, goodness, beauty). But the will depends on the mind.
Each truth about God known by the mind is a new motive for loving Him with the will. It also works the other way around: the more you love any person (human or divine), the more you want to know him (or Him) better, and the more you do.
And this always causes deep joy. But we simply can’t jump-start our will by a simple command: “Go to now, love God more!” When we give this command to ourselves, we immediately find, like St. Augustine in the Confessions, that the very same self that commands sanctity also disobeys its own commandment! We have divided selves.
The self that wants above all things to be forever bound to God and His will in eternity also wants to be free from Him at the present moment to do its own will. Our wills are divided. We love our Father in Heaven, yet we are rebellious kids. We are stubborn, silly, stupid, selfish, and sinful.
That is the “bad news”. Without it the “good news” makes no sense. A free heart transplant is not good news unless your old heart is in bad shape. “Sin” means our hearts are in bad shape-“Sin” means “separation” from God and from our neighbors and even from our deepest selves.
We need the mind to educate and enlighten the will, as a traveler needs a map. No one in history has ever supplied that map more brilliantly and profoundly than St. Thomas. Therefore, reading St. Thomas is a powerful aid to happiness, to sanctity.
It has been that to me. I have found more personal spiritual nourishment, more motivation to be holy, in the dry, abstract pages of the Summa than in most other “spiritual” writers.
But reading the Summa all by yourself is difficult, unless someone makes it easy. It’s not likely that you will read all 4,000 pages of the Summa, so I give you here a kind of Reader’s Digest version.
By chopping up the meat into small, bite-sized pieces, as Mommy does for Baby or, to change the image to something less insulting,
I do the preliminary work of going down into the 4,000-page tunnels of this labyrinth, as into a deep mine, extract a few choice gold nuggets from this rich lode, bring them to the surface, and give them to you to wear as jewelry.
I tried to type the next sentence “The Summa is a gold mine”, and it came out “The Summa is a gold mind.” I think this was my guardian angel playing a providential joke on me.
The typo is the truth. Here are 358 gold nuggets that have helped me enormously in the struggle of real life, the struggle to live in the real world, to be sane, or in the words of the classic Anglican prayer, “to know Thee more clearly, to love Thee more dearly, and to follow Thee more nearly”.
They will help you too. This is St. Thomas’ book, not mine. I am only one hungry, homeless bum calling to my friends: “Look! Free steak dinners over there!” He supplies the steak, I supply only the sauces. Thus his words are in boldface type, mine are not.
My comments that follow each quotation do not mean to add to what St. Thomas says but only (1) explain it, (2) apply it, and (3) festoon it, like a Christmas tree. Or, better, they unwrap the Christmas presents St. Thomas gives us.
They are not scholarly theological commentaries but more like what the Jews call midrash: spiritual commentaries: practical, personal, existential, “livable” thoughts.
I have formatted these readings as answers to questions that real people actually ask their spiritual directors. I used the old, literal, faithful Dominican Blackfriars translation. The style is old-fashioned, like the King James Bible, i.e., arresting and formal and proper. It gets your attention.
It is memorable. It is “different”, because the subject matter is different. It is about the most important thing in the world, not about advertisements or news reports or gossip; so since it is more important, it deserves a style that sounds more important.
The style of the translation is also literal. It tells you exactly what Aquinas actually wrote, word for word, rather than what some translator thinks he would have written if he had to write in twenty first century American vernacular. Yet it is totally clear: you don’t have to be a scholar to understand it.
Whenever there is a technical term that means something different in Aquinas than it does in contemporary English, I added the contemporary translation or explanation in parentheses.
The numerical references after each quotation tell you three things: first, the “part” of the Summa (I, I-II, II-II, III, or S [supplement]), then the number of the “Question”, then the number of the “Article”.
For an account of how the Summa as a whole is organized (it’s a mirror image of how all reality is organized!) and how each part of each “Article” functions (it’s the five most basic and necessary steps in a complete logical analysis), see the Introduction to my Summa of the Summa. I follow the order of the Summa. Often,
I treat and repeat the same point two or three times, in a somewhat different way, or a different context, because that is what St. Thomas did; and the justification for both of us doing that is the intrinsic importance of these issues.
