Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae

by Bernard McGinn

  Sacred teaching mediates the transformation of the pictorial language of the Bible into an intelligible scientific account through biblical interpretation. Thomas briefly discusses this in article 10,56 where he notes the traditional four ways of reading the biblical text, the literal (i.e., what God intended by these words), and the three spiritual senses built upon the letter (the allegorical concerning Christ and the church, the moral concerning human action, and the anagogical pertaining to heaven). He insists that the key to reading a text is the “intention of the author” (intentio auctoris). But God is a unique author, because God alone can write on two levels. The words he communicates through the human author as instrument have a literal meaning, and, insists Thomas, the “letter” of the text is often a metaphor that needs to be decoded (e.g., when the Bible refers to “God’s arm” it is signifying his power). But the spiritual meanings are also part of God’s intention because only God, who controls history, can bring it about that certain things (events, persons, etc.) described in the Bible have meanings that indicate other realities. Nevertheless, Thomas insists that in the practice of sacra doctrina arguments (in the true, deductively necessary sense) should be drawn only from the literal sense. This should not be treated as a kind of exegetical straightjacket, because it is clear that Thomas maintained that because human meanings cannot exhaust the divine truth, at least some biblical passages could have a number of literal meanings. Furthermore, Thomas’s “literalism” does not preclude all use of spiritual readings in sacra doctrina, and he employs a number of spiritual interpretations throughout the Summa. Strictly speaking, it seems that such citations should be considered arguments from fittingness (ex convenientia), not from necessary deduction.

  The modern reader of the Summa will be hard put to think of the book as scriptural, because Thomas’s use of the Bible is far from our own way of interpreting scripture. However, the Dominican cites scripture more than any other source over the course of the Summa, not only in the authorities quoted in the sed contra sections of the articles that are the basis for his arguments, but also in his explanations, arguments, and responses. Thomas did his theology with the Bible at hand (or in his head), and he insisted that the Bible be read ecclesially: “Faith inheres in all the articles of belief because of one mediation, namely because of the First Truth proposed to us in the scriptures understood according to the church’s correct teaching” (IIaIIae, q. 5.3, ad 2). When we turn to his biblical commentaries for further elucidation of his hermeneutical practice, once again we enter a foreign world, because Thomas is little concerned with the narrative or rhetorical structure of the scriptural books the way that modern biblical scholars are. Rather, he seeks to bring out the doctrinal intelligibility of the revealed message (the propositum) by organizing the chapters of the biblical books into comprehensive patterns, especially through what he called “the division of the text,” which teased out (some might say “imposed”) a scientific structure on the biblical narrative. This process of making the stories and metaphors of the Bible scientifically clear, more evident in some commentaries than others, is foreign to modern exegesis, but it reveals three essential principles for understanding Thomas’s view of sacra doctrina. The first is that holy teaching is always fundamentally biblical. The second is that the nature of the Bible as God’s words directed to humanity must be narrative and metaphorical. The third (the one that we do not share today) is that the role of the magister in sacra pagina is to transform biblical narrative and metaphor into a form of articulated scientific discourse to reveal its intelligibility. Thomas’s notion of sacra doctrina is paradoxically always both scientific and scriptural. As he put it in his Quodlibetal Question VII.6.1, “Sacred scripture was divinely handed on for this purpose: so that through it the truth necessary for salvation might be made manifest to us.”

  What, then, is the order of the sapiential teaching of sacra doctrina set forth in the Summa theologiae? This is a question that looks easy to answer, given the linear and carefully articulated structure of the work, but it is one that has proven to be a bone of contention.57 The issue is important, however, because both the order of what is to be taught (ordo doctrinae) and the order of how to teach and learn it (ordo disciplinae) were crucial to Thomas’s decision to write a new theological textbook. The two forms of ordering are in reality two sides of the same coin.

  In thinking about the ordering of the Summa, it is helpful to distinguish between what have been called the “micro-structures” and the “macro-structures” of the work.58 The ordering of the Summa is evident on both levels, that is, on the micro-level in how Aquinas marshals axioms, principles, definitions, distinctions, divisions, reasons, causes, and questions to attain conclusions that are the starting points, or principles, for further explorations. One of the dominant features of the work is the constant internal cross-referencing by which Thomas builds later arguments on earlier conclusions.59 The relationship of principles to arguments and conclusions, inherent in the logic of the scholastic quaestio, reached a culmination in the Summa. “Each question,” says Bernard Lonergan, “called for a statement of principles of solution and for the application of the principles to each of the authorities invoked. But a series of questions on a single topic, such as De Veritate, De Potentia, De Malo, demanded a coherent set of principles for all solutions on that topic, while a Summa needed a single set relevant to every question that might be raised.”60 Hence, the inherent ordering of the smallest micro-structures shapes the articles that are grouped into questions, and questions clustered into topics, or what have been called treatises (Thomas did not use this term), such as the “Treatise on Law,” or the “Treatise on Christology.”

  This sapiential ordering is also evident on the level of the most general “macro-structure,” that is, the overall plan that Thomas had in mind, especially in dividing the Summa into three parts. In 1939 Marie-Dominique Chenu proposed a solution to how the work is structured that has a good textual foundation in the Summa.61 At the beginning of question 2, Thomas says that “the principle intention of this sacred teaching” involves not only God as he is in himself, but also as the beginning and end of creatures, especially rational creatures. Therefore, “with a view to laying out this teaching we will first treat of God; second, of the movement of the rational creature to God; third, of Christ, who, as man, is the way for us in journeying to God.” This description of the three parts reflects the model of exitus-reditus, that is, the flowing out of all things from God and their eventual return to him, a model Thomas had already appealed to in his Writing on the Sentences.62 Actually, by speaking first of “how God is in himself,” and then how God is both the source and the goal of all things, Thomas seems to be implying a threefold, originally Neoplatonic, model that he would have known through the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, comprising (1) God in God-self; (2) the exitus, or procession of creatures from God; and finally (3) the reditus, or the return of creatures to God. Both God in himself and the procession of creatures from God are found primarily in the Prima Pars, while the return of all things to God is spread over the Secunda Pars and Tertia Pars. This view has won considerable acceptance, although it has had its critics.63 However, it should not be applied in a rigid fashion. First of all, God’s creative power and his role as the end of all things are found throughout the Summa. Furthermore, the exitus-reditus model does not preclude the presence of other structuring themes at work in the book, such as the various kinds of causality, the role of Divine Goodness, the notion of exemplar and image, and the forms of grace. In sum, we might say that several overlapping structural principles are at work in the Summa, each providing insight into the mind of Thomas.

  The organization of the Summa has been criticized, notably by those who question whether the triple paradigm threatens to reduce sacra doctrina to an abstract philosophical account having little contact with the history of salvation revealed in the Bible. Other critiques come from those who note that the Secunda Pars with its great length see
ms almost to submerge the other parts, as well as from those who have wondered if Thomas’s teaching about Christ, the core of Christian theology, appears to be a kind of afterthought to the basic structure. Nevertheless, understanding the Summa as based on the cycle of emanation and return helps tie much of Thomas’s theological work together, from the Writing on the Sentences to the Summa. In his earliest synthesis Thomas had already referred to the coming forth from and return of all things to God as a key theological principle, but the structure of the Lombard’s work did not allow him to use this great circle (circulatio vel regiratio) as a structuring principle.64 Thomas also refers to the exitus-reditus model in other works.65 The Summa contra Gentiles seems to depend on it, though in a less evolved way than the later Summa.66

  For Thomas this circular motion reveals God’s sapiential ordering on the most universal level. To think of the exitus-reditus model as primarily philosophical and Neoplatonic, as some have argued, is a modern view that Thomas would not have shared. What else does scripture teach but how all things were created by God and are directed back to him as their final goal? What else does Christ mean in the Apocalypse when he says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Apoc. 22:13)? Furthermore, the Dionysian Divine Names that Thomas was teaching at the same time he was writing the Prima Pars was the foremost Christian, quasi-apostolic, source for the triple pattern of (1) God in God-self, (2) God as producing all things from his Goodness (exitus), and (3) God as the universal goal of reditus.67 Thus, the exitus-reditus model had a good scriptural and Dionysian pedigree that would have recommended it to Thomas.

  What about the history of salvation and the role of Christ? Once again, we must beware of anachronism or of importing our problems into Thomas’s world. Just because the Dominican chose not to follow the mode of presenting Christian faith according to a narrative historical paradigm, such as that of the “work of creation/work of restoration” (opus creationis/opus recreationis), does not mean that he thought the order of sacra doctrina excluded an integral role for sacred history. Rather, it has been argued that the exitus-reditus schema in its inner structure is by definition open to history, even determinative thereof.68 For Thomas, there was no conflict between the best mode of teaching (ordo disciplinae) and the ordo rerum, or structure of saving history. Both were expressions of divine sapientia, and both were integral to the fabric of the Summa. Aristotle’s view of scientia excluded temporal events; Thomas’s sacra doctrina necessarily included the events of the course of salvation as recounted in the Old and the New Testaments, though historical events revealed their scientific intelligibility only in the light of revelation. This is why the argument ex convenientia, that is, from fittingness, plays such a large role in the Summa, especially in the treatment of Christ and the sacraments.69 The free events that constitute the history of salvation do not proceed from necessary causes, but when God brings them about, we can see how fitting they are in the light of sacra doctrina.

  This perspective may also help us in responding to two of the other questions addressed to the structure of the Summa noted above: Why is the Secunda Pars so quantitatively dominant? And why is Christology, the teaching about Christ, placed at the end, instead of being foregrounded? We need not agree with Thomas’s decisions here, but we can at least appreciate the reasons he had for making them. The moral interpretation of the Summa answers the first question by noting Thomas’s intent to train preachers and confessors, but this need not exclude a deeper view. For Thomas, the historical situation within which we are called to participate in the sacra doctrina necessary for salvation is the present time in which we must practice virtue and avoid vice as we direct our lives toward the goal of human existence, the beatific vision. Despite its length, its intricacy, and its at times numbing detail about many issues no longer relevant, the Secunda Pars is a treatise on how to live and how to guide others in living. How far we might want to adopt Thomas’s structure for living today, or to replace it with something new, are valid questions, but these do not affect why Thomas put so much effort into the Secunda Pars.

  In the case of Christology, Thomas would probably have been surprised at objections to his placing Christ in the Tertia Pars. As he says in the Prologue, “Because our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ, … showed the way of truth to us in his very self through which we might attain the happiness of eternal life by our rising again, it is necessary that as the fulfillment of the whole business of theology (ad consummationem totius theologici negotii), after the consideration of the final end of human life and the virtues and vices, our treatment of the Savior himself and his gifts to the human race should follow.”70 Thus, Thomas clearly thought that the Tertia Pars was a culmination, not an afterthought. The immense Secunda Pars about attaining the final goal of human living would mean nothing without Christ, who makes it all possible. The last part is the best part, in Thomas’s view.

  A Tour of the Summa theologiae

  CHAPTER 3

  The basic structure of the three parts of the Summa theologiae has been laid out in chapter 2. The present chapter is, in essence, a guided tour of its contents. No survey of the Summa can pretend to convey the richness of Thomas’s exposition and the wealth of the distinctions, qualifications, insights, arguments, and conclusions he brings to the thousands of theological issues and problems he treats. In what follows I try to give a sense of the range of doctrines considered and to sample a few of the important sections in some detail. This chart gives an initial overview of Thomas’s sacra doctrina and a sense of the sequential arrangement of each of the parts.

  The Structure of the Summa theologiae

  Prima Pars, Ia (1266–68)

  1. Introduction: sacra doctrina (q. 1)

  2. Proving God’s existence (q. 2)

  3. How God exists (qq. 3–13)

  a. Essential attributes (qq. 3–11)

  b. How God is known (q. 12)

  c. How God is named (q. 13)

  4. Divine operations (qq. 14–26)

  a. God’s knowledge (qq. 14–18)

  b. God’s will (qq. 19–24)

  c. God’s power (q. 25)

  d. God’s beatitude (q. 26)

  5. The Trinity (qq. 27–43)

  a. The procession of the divine persons (q. 27)

  b. The divine relations (q. 28)

  c. The three persons (qq. 29–43)

  — Persons in general (qq. 29–32)

  — Persons in particular: Father, Son, and Spirit (qq. 33–38)

  — Comparisons of the persons (qq. 39–43)

  6. The production of creatures from God (exitus) (qq. 44–119)

  a. The notion of creation (qq. 44–46)

  b. The various kinds of creatures (qq. 47–102)

  — Creatures in general (q. 47)

  — Creatures in particular (qq. 48–102)

  * Good and evil (qq. 48–49)

  * Spiritual creatures, or angels (qq. 50–64)

  * Corporeal creatures (qq. 65–74)

  * Mixed corporeal and spiritual creatures, i.e., humans (qq. 75–102)

  c. Providence (qq. 103–19)

  Secunda Pars, IIa (1268–72).

  The return of creatures to God

  Prima Secundae, IaIIae.

  Human acts in general in the return process

  1. Introduction: Beatitude as the goal of humanity (qq. 1–5)

  2. Human acts in themselves (qq. 6–48)

  a. Acts peculiar to humans (qq. 6–21)

  b. Acts common to humans and other animals, i.e., passions (qq. 22–48)

  3. The principles of acts (qq. 49–114)

  a. Intrinsic principles: Powers and habits

  — Habits in general (qq. 49–54)

  — Habits in particular (qq. 55–89)

  * Good habits, i.e., virtues (qq. 55–70)

  * Bad habits, i.e., vices (qq. 71–89)

  b. Extrinsic principles: God as

  — Instructing man through Law (qq. 90�
�108)

  — Aiding man by Grace (qq. 109–14)

  Secunda Secundae, IIaIIae.

  Human acts in particular in the return process

  1. Acts pertaining to all conditions of humanity (qq. 1–170)

  a. Theological virtues

  — Pertaining to the intellect: Faith (qq. 1–16)

  — Pertaining to the will: Hope (qq. 17–22) and charity (qq. 23–46)

  b. Cardinal virtues

  — Prudence (qq. 47–56)

  — Justice (qq. 57–122)

  — Fortitude (qq. 123–40)

  — Temperance (qq. 141–70)

  2. Acts pertaining to some or given in a special manner (qq. 171–89)