ST II-II, q. 23, a. 1: "We desire wine and horses, but it would be absurd to call them friends." (Fact check: true)
So I've read a fair amount of AquiST II-II, q. 23, a. 1: "We desire wine and horses, but it would be absurd to call them friends." (Fact check: true)
So I've read a fair amount of Aquinas over the years, mostly in grad school; I worked through most of the Prima Pars (ST I) piecemeal in coursework and for papers etc., then bits of ST I-II, II-II, and III here and there, along with the De ente, De malo, some of the political/ethical writings, a few other texts . . . nothing super-serious, and prior to restarting the Summa I hadn't sat down to read a work by Aquinas for maybe 15 years. Oddly enough I've actually edited many books on Aquinas, perhaps 25 over the past decade (mostly written by young Dominicans trying to get tenure).
Anyway I remember being mostly impressed by Aquinas, years ago, but I was a bit skeptical when approaching the complete Summa (mostly working with McDermott's superlative concise translation, but also reading the full text for the most important articles), perhaps due to meeting far too many mildly annoying Thomists at philosophy conferences who were always ready to condescendingly interject with "well, ackshually, Aquinas has the correct position on [the topic under discussion], because he's right about everything ever." Somehow, despite the fact that there were a hundred very talented theologians at the University of Paris in the 1100s-1300s (Roger Bacon, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, Matthew of Aquasparta, Guillaume de Champeaux, Roger Marston . . .), this one theologian is supposedly the greatest, on every topic? Or at least this is what you hear in Catholic circles. I often wondered if these folks realized that present-day Thomism is essentially a Romantic/modern revival movement (which started under Pope Leo XIII); before about 1810, Aquinas was just another medieval theologian, until a handful of Italian bishops and intellectuals suddenly became deeply invested in his work. The vagaries of intellectual history are really something else . . . if these same four or five people had suddenly become obsessed with, say, Bonaventure, then I guess I would have been running into mildly annoying Bonaventurians instead! In short, there's a general lack of critical thinking, here, including at philosophy conferences (oddly enough); folks aren't reading all the medievals and coming to their own conclusions, but rather going along with the herd.
This is admittedly a tangent, but a related pet peeve of mine is the general perception of Shakespeare as the greatest writer in the English language, where I feel like we perhaps shouldn't accept the critical consensus here. Shakespeare is obviously very talented, but for a couple centuries after his death, similar to Aquinas, he was known as one of many talented authors of his era; as one of the better Elizabethan playwrights, and probably the best Elizabethan poet, but WS was not held in anything even remotely resembling his current cult/godlike status. The primary reason that everyone reveres Shakespeare so deeply today is that a few British Romantic poets in the early 1800s were simply obsessed with the guy, and infected everyone else with their fanboy enthusiasm. But similar to our doctrinaire Thomist philosopher, who could just as easily have been a doctrinaire Bonaventurian philosopher, most of the folks praising Shakespeare today could just as easily have been praising Marlowe, or Jonson, or Middleton, or Webster. Again: the critical consensus on 'greatness' is highly arbitrary, and I recommend making up your own mind. (Another example can be found in fine art photography, where John Szarkowski, at MoMA, somehow convinced everyone that Eggleston, Arbus, and Winogrand were geniuses; or Sylvia Wolf at the Whitney, with Dash Snow's work; etc. etc.)
Anyway after spending six weeks working through the Summa, it turns out that Aquinas is, in fact, a genius! Those nineteenth-century Italian bishops were correct. This guy just has it, the mind-boggling amount of raw talent that we find in maybe 15-20 philosophers, ever; the Summa mainly reminded me of Hegel, in a good way . . . he has Hegel's vibes and talent for abstraction. The greatness of Aquinas makes it even more tragic, in retrospect, that the majority of Thomists are frankly kind of lame/boring; Aquinas is very unlucky in his fanbase. It's as if Deleuze scholars were a bunch of accountants.
I'm less in love with ST II/III (more on that below), but the Prima Pars is just completely, absurdly, off-the-charts amazing. You can sense a perfect confluence/alignment of Thomas's mind and the topic/method at hand; awe-inspiring virtuosity, an absolutely pure run through all of the traditional theological problems with what were, to him, brand-new Aristotelian tools (similar to Hume using Newtonian method, Schelling using Kant's critical philosophy, Marx using Hegelian dialectic . . .). The first 73 questions of the Prima Pars are an ecstatic work of art, simply put.
I was also fascinated by Aquinas's overreliance on (rather than just an application of) Aristotle, an overreliance which reaches almost performance-art levels; there's never any sense that another approach would be possible or preferable, never any doubt that Aristotle is correct on everything that could possibly align with Catholic doctrine (simliar to how Plotinus treated all previous philosophy, or how Iamblichus treated Plato's dialogues), and all you need is a hermeneutical effort to make it all align, somehow. (In this, Aquinas is reminiscent of Solovyov, Cusa, or, again, Plotinus; a perhaps excessive tendency toward systematicity).
My absolute favorite point in this process was ST I, q. 31, when I saw that he was really out here trying to rationally explain the Trinity (?!), to crack the antinomy; it was kind of bananas and not too convincing, but not wrong exactly? It was more just amazing to see that he was really going to do it, like I'm reading the preamble and throat-clearing and just thinking "there's literally no way that this guy tries to explain the Trinity with some Aristotelian logic b.s., that would be too crazy, even for him," and then he just Leeroy Jenkins his way right in there . . . completely gangster.
Aquinas's work also serves as an interesting unintentional overcorrection to the excessive Platonism of some of the Greek Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, who goes similarly overboard in taking a Platonist approach to every theological topic (some scholars actually argue that he was a Platonist philosopher who pretended to be Christian!, which is false, but technically plausible). Gregory is similarly brilliant, and he and Aquinas are the antipodes of Aristotelianism and Platonism in traditional Christian theology; both show the strengths and weaknesses of going a bit overboard, in that sense.
While ST I is amazing, unfortunately ST I-II, II-II, and III are rather boring; don't get me wrong, they're still very good, and it probably doesn't help that I have relatively little interest in moral theology, legal theory, or systematic theology (with some exceptions) . . . I dunno. ST I-II is probably the slowest going; still brilliant in various ways, still worth reading, but it's basically = a painstakingly repetitive recapitulation of Aristotle's moral philosophy in the context of Scripture and the Fathers. ST III is a similarly dry but impressive summary of the Fathers on anthropology, Christology, ecclesiology, heresies, etc. (plus Aristotle!). These passages are valuable if you're unfamiliar with the first thousand years of Christian theology, but perhaps less valuable otherwise. (It's also worth noting that most of these Fathers were newly available to Thomas, so his approach was more innovative at the time.) Aquinas provides the first truly great summary of the Patristic consensus, but there are better summaries now available, imo; Thomas's own brilliance isn't especially evident in the later parts of the Summa, and you can tell that his real genius is in philosophy (rather than systematic theology).
In terms of editions, not sure if it's showing up as the reviewed edition but I mainly used ; I cannot possibly recommend McDermott's concise translation strongly enough. Truly nothing of value is lost; it's an absolutely brilliant edition. For any questions/passages that you have a particular interest in, you should of course always read through the full text (see ), but it was just incredible, any time that I turned to the full text I would always marvel at McDermott's ability to concisely translate the articles such that nothing of value was left out. The full Summa is 1.5 million words, and the condensed version is perhaps 350,000 words; but I promise you that you're only missing about 5-10% of the actual content, none of which appears to be essential. 'A concise translation' is precisely correct; this is not a condensed translation, but rather, concise. The first half of McDermott's job was easy; due to the conventions of Aquinas's style (notably, most medieval writing did not have the elaborate formal q. / art. / obj. / ad. formatting; he borrows the structure from Averroes, for some reason), half the prose is purely repetitive and can be skipped without losing any content; in short, you could reduce the 1.5m words to 750k with very little work. McDermott's further concision of getting from 750k down to 350k is the truly impressive part.
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The most notable highlights imo:
ST I, qq. 1 to 73, esp. q. 12, q. 14, q. 15, q. 19, q. 20, q. 22, q. 23, qq. 29-43, q. 46, qq. 50-51. Also q. 76 (on the embodied mind), q. 89 (separated soul's knowledge), q. 96, q. 103.
ST II-II, q. 2, q. 10, q. 32, qq. 92-93 (on 'overdoing religion'), q. 97 (on the virtue of religion)
ST III, qq. 27-30 (on Mary), q. 46 (on Christ's suffering), q. 52 (Christ's descent into hell), and q. 59 (contra universalism)...more
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