Market research presumably confirms that the Summa Theologiae attracts readers, a difficult text, for which guidance is needed. Cambridge University Press has republished (in paperback) the 60‐volume Blackfriars edition that was created by Thomas Gilby with the help of T.C. O'Brien. Six excellent single‐handed introductions are currently available: Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt (Brazos 2005); Jean‐Pierre Torrell (CUA Press 2005); Stephen J. Loughlin (T&T Clark 2010); Bernard McGinn (Princeton 2014); Brian Davies (OUP 2014) and Jason T. Eberl (Routledge 2015), as well as essays by old hands reprinted by Brian Davies (Rowman & Littlefield 2006). Now comes this Companion, by twenty‐four authors, in gestation for years, since it includes ‘Eternity’ by Herbert McCabe (died 2001).
Curricula in seminaries and universities in the United Kingdom do not show the Summa much studied, whatever happens elsewhere. For that matter, we do not know how the ‘beginners’ whom Thomas sought to save from ‘boredom and muddle’ used the text. Since Leonard Boyle's classic essay (1982) on the ‘setting’, it has been clear that the Summa was created for Dominican students, not for a university audience. (Indeed, so the story goes, the Summa became a university text only early in the sixteenth century, when the Flemish Dominican Peter Crockaert introduced it at Paris.) In 1265 Thomas was teaching a select group of friars at Santa Sabina in Rome, taking Peter Lombard's Sentences as the basic text. After a year he abandoned that and started the Summa, which he continued to write during his three years unexpectedly back in Paris, then for the one year home in Naples until he stopped (‘straw in comparison with what I have seen’). We do not even know how he used the text himself. He probably worked on it privately in Paris while lecturing on Matthew and John (one of his greatest works), as well as engaging in tricky philosophical disputes. Maybe he read the prima pars with the friars at Santa Sabina; but at what stage of their training were these friars? Four of the Companion's authors in Part I, F.C. Bauerschmidt, Timothy Radcliffe, Mark D. Jordan, and John Marenbon, respectively on the difficulty of the Summa, the Dominican context, the structure, and the method, favour Fr Boyle's view that Thomas wrote for the fratres communes, ordinary run‐of‐the‐mill friars, destined to preach and hear confessions in their native region. Dr Marenbon airs the suggestion by John I. Jenkins (1997), but rejecting it, that these incipientes were high‐flyers, beginning advanced studies, expected to inherit the university chairs held by the Order. More playfully, Marie –Dominique Chenu wondered whether, like many professors, Thomas just over‐estimated his audience. He was apparently the sole faculty member, however, and the Santa Sabina project closed when he left, which might support the theory that the students for whom he invented the Summa were very special.
Also in Part I, Pim Valkenberg discusses the place of Scripture in the Summa (not historical‐critical exegesis of course, but something like ‘scriptural reasoning’); while Karen Kilby tackles the question of how philosophical the Summa is (no extractable ‘system’, just confidence in reasoning).
Part II takes us through the Summa thematically, sometimes surveying the ground from a great height, not often expounding the text in much detail. Commentary on the prima pars unrolls as follows: Brian Davies on ‘Aquinas’ philosophy of God’; McCabe on eternity (‘not intelligible to us’); Eugene F. Rogers Jr on the Trinity (‘perfect love’); Gilles Emery on the Holy Spirit (‘spread throughout all the major treatises’, no separate pneumatology); Kathryn Tanner on creation (‘an emanation account’); David Burrell on providence (remember Pieper); and Denys Turner on the human person (no immortality for me without resurrection).
Moving to the secunda pars: Jean Porter tackles happiness (‘an account of beatitude in many ways unattractive’); James F. Keenan virtues (against the ‘sin manuals’); and Philip McCosker grace (leaving us maddeningly with his judgement that, in the (in)famous quarrel over natura pura in Thomas, both Henri de Lubac and his ‘fierce neo‐Thomist detractors’ are both right and wrong, not spelling out how).
As for the tertia pars, Sarah Oakley examines the metaphysics of the Incarnation; Paul Gondreau discusses the mysteries of Christ's life (Questions 38–45); Nicholas M. Healy deals with Redemption (46‐52) and Olivier‐Thomas Venard treats the sacraments (60‐90).
In Part III Paul J. Griffiths traces the aftermath from the condemnations in 1277 of views associated with Thomas and the Franciscan correctoria, which seem finally to rouse Dominican interest, all the way to Anthony Kenny's account of Thomism at the Gregorian University in Rome (1949‐1952), in A Path from Rome (1986). The volume concludes with Andrew Louth's account of how Orthodox theologians have received Thomas, Reformed theologians by Christoph Schwöbel, and Jewish and Muslim thinkers by Francis X. Clooney.
Every chapter is well worth reading. Of course there are gaps. The secunda pars gets less attention than it deserves: it takes thirty‐one of the sixty Blackfriars volumes, and has been plausibly described as what motivated Thomas to invent the Summa in the first place. Then interests fade: not so long ago the doctrine of analogy would have required pages on end but here only Professor Louth and Professor Schwöbel pay it much attention.
Nothing happens about the angels, the biggest gap, the bulkiest Blackfriars volume (done by Kenelm Foster). Karl Barth concludes that ‘the Thomistic doctrine of angels is only the attempt at a gigantic self‐projection of the anthropos or the ego into an objectivity in which it thinks to find in the angel its desired and in the demon its dreaded superior alter ego, i.e. itself supremely magnified’ (Church Dogmatics III/3: 390–401). That might have provoked a riposte. Anyway, with David Albert Jones (2011) and Angels and Demons (2016) by Serge‐Thomas Bonino, Dean of Philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome, and one of the leading Aquinas scholars of our day, there is a good deal of interest currently in Christian angelology. But one can never have everything: the Companion does more than enough to stir old hands to get the Summa down again, and to encourage incipientes to read what is, after all, one of the half dozen greatest works in Christian thought.
