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Lives of Great Religious Books Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae McGinn.indb 1 2/26/14 8:05 AM Lives of Great Religious Books Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty The I Ching, Richard J. Smith The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, David Gordon White Augustine’s Confessions, Garry Wills Forthcoming: The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal Confucius’s Analects, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence Josephus’s Jewish War, Martin Goodman John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon The Lotus Sutra, Donald S. Lopez, Jr. C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, George Marsden The Greatest Translations of All Time: The Septuagint and the Vulgate, Jack Miles The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa Ochs The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes The Daode Jing, James Robson Rumi’s Masnavi, Omid Safi The Talmud, Barry Wimpfheimer McGinn.indb 2 2/26/14 8:05 AM Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae A Biography Bernard McGinn PRIn CETOn UnIVERSIT y PRESS Princeton and Oxford McGinn.indb 3 2/26/14 8:05 AM Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, new Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas over Heretics by Filippino Lippi (ca. 1457– 1504), fresco, Basilica of Saint Mary Above Minerva, Carafa Chapel, Rome, 1489– 1492 / De Agostini Picture Library / V. Pirozzi / Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library. The scene shows Thomas seated on a throne between personifications of Philosophy and Theology on his right and Dialectic and Grammar on his left, with the figure of vanquished Evil under his feet. In the foreground groups of the heretics refuted by Thomas in the Summa theologiae are escorted to Thomas by a papal official on our left and a Dominican on the right. All Rights Reserved ISBn 978- 0- 691- 15426- 8 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro Printed on acid- free paper. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 McGinn.indb 4 2/26/14 8:05 AM To my classmates at the north American College Class of 1963 Ad multos annos, gloriosque annos, vivas! McGinn.indb 5 2/26/14 8:05 AM McGinn.indb 6 2/26/14 8:05 AM Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The World That Made Thomas Aquinas 7 Chapter 2 Creating the Summa theologiae 19 Chapter 3 A Tour of the Summa theologiae 74 Chapter 4 The Tides of Thomism, 1275– 1850 117 Chapter 5 The Rise and Fall of neothomism 163 Epilogue 210 vii McGinn.indb 7 2/26/14 8:05 AM Abbreviations for Thomas’s Works 215 Notes 217 Bibliography 245 Translations of the Summa theologiae 245 General Books on Thomas and His Thought 246 Particular Studies of Thomas’s Thought Relating to the Summa 247 Histories of Thomism 247 Online Resources 248 Indexes name and Title Index 249 Subject Index 254 viii contents McGinn.indb 8 2/26/14 8:05 AM Preface This book owes its origin to the polite persistence of Fred Appel of Princeton University Press, who kept asking me to think of contributing something to a new series, Lives of Great Religious Books. I consid- ered composing a short book on a mystical classic, such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, but the more I thought about the possibili- ties the more I was drawn to the scary idea of writing a book on Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, one of the longest works in the canon of religious clas- sics and one of the most studied. I am not a card- carrying member of any Thomist party and I’ve writ- ten only a few things on Thomas over my academic career. never theless, I’ve been reading Thomas for almost sixty years and teaching him for over forty. When I was studying a dry- as- dust version of neo- thomist philosophy from 1957 to 1959, I was rescued from despair by reading the works of Etienne Gilson, especially his Being and Some Philosophers. Doing theology at the Gregorian University in Rome ix McGinn.indb 9 2/26/14 8:05 AM