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The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas (Five Volumes)
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Most Pleasant Surprise
I recently inherited my uncle's book collection and going through the boxes, I found this stack of 5 books and once I realized what it was I couldn't control my excitement!! I've made no attempt to read straight through but each night I pick up a volume and read about he all the Doctor says concerning the Trinity, the Eucharist, the Immaculate Conception (though he is not entirely accurate on that point), Passions, Virtues, and more!! This is truly one of the greatest additions to my library.
Rating: - Summa Theologicae of Aquinas
The clarity and insight of the Summa is unrivaled in philosophical theology. St. Thomas is dedicated to finding the truth and attaining happiness. He pursues the truth with formal logic and applies Aristotle, Scriptures, Church Fathers et alia to reach solid conclusions which make perfect sense. Like Euclid, Aquinas requires some postulates, i.e. the existence of God and God's revelation of Himself. Positing these, he builds a solid invulnerable theology which must convince any intelligent reader.
Rating: - The classic, what did you expect? :-)
This is the definitive work of Catholic theology and is still studied in all the divinity schools. I had the two-volume set included in the Great Books of the Western World. It isn't the sort of work one goes to for a little light reading, obviously, but as an exercise in applied classical logic as well as theology, it is one of the most important ever written.
Thomas is important to both mystical and non-mystical traditions within Christianity, and for me the most interesting aspects of the work are where he attempts to deduce the various aspects and attributes of God. This was a popular exercise in the area of natural philosophy, and even mathematicians with a religious bent, such as Newton and Leibnitz, had a go at it, Newton referring to God in his Principia (his mathematical theory of universal gravitation) as "...an infinite and elastic spirit." And of course Leibnitz is famous for the ontological argument for God's existence.
In addition, Thomas was also concerned with everyday life and ethics and morality, with a person's natural and supernatural life, countering heretical thinking, and the nature of beauty. He influenced early Renaissance artists such as Fra Angelica, who followed Thomas's three canons of beauty: immaterial purity of form, luminous clarity of color, and harmonious beauty of proportions, and Angelica's paintings are really meditations upon these three principles, in some ways not so different from the way Perugino's paintings (Leonardo's teacher) were sometimes meditations on spatial geometry.
Finally, you may know the story that when Thomas was in school, he was very quiet in class and so his fellow students thought him dull. But at the conclusion of one class when the teacher gave the final exam, he was the only one with the right answer. Sort of reminds me of those stories about Einstein. :-) All of which just goes to show you that you can't judge a book by its cover--nor the Summa Theologica, too, I might add.
Rating: - A great resource for theological research
I purchased this Five-volume set after taking a couple of philosophy courses, which I feel like I should recommend to anyone starting to dive into this hefty text. If you don't feel like taking a class, perhaps some of the secondary texts written by philosophers about Aquinas will help in reading this fantastic set of info.
Aquinas forms his arguments in a way that is almost flawless. I am not Catholic, yet I find this to be an explanation of Catholic doctrine that makes me almost want to convert. For anyone from the atheist to the devout catholic, this text is a window into one of the greateast natural and revealed theologians to ever document his thoughts. Footnotes are aplenty to send you on your way to other documents, especially Augistine, so be prepared for an obsession.
Mike Yandell
Rating: - Summa is supreme
Probably the best sys theo work ever. Oh, that more fellow Protestants would pour over this text!
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