SOURCE: "Patterns in the Summa theologiae" in Thomas Aquinas, Theologian, University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 41-86.

[In the following excerpt, O 'Meara discusses some of the patterns and structures Aquinas used in his consideration of Christian theology.]

All beautiful attributes showered throughout the world in separate drops flow together whole and complete, and move toward the font of goodness. When we are drawn to the graciousness, beauty, and goodness of creatures, we ought to be borne away to the One in whom all these little streams commingle and flow.

Summa contra gentiles (2, 2)

Every project, every plan or enterprise, no matter how modest or how great, presupposes some seminal idea, some unfolding pattern. Nature reveals patterns, structures which join together the bones of the body or which link ecologically creatures along a seashore. In human creations, models arrange into order numerous, disparate entities. Data, facts, bytes are interesting and valuable but thin and partial: they await some further relationship and vitalization. In the arts it is not only color and sound but the variety and repetition within forms which give pleasure. This chapter on Aquinas' theology looks for the patterns he used in thinking about and expressing God and creation, Jesus and the human being. Even a few insights into the complexity of nature or into the project of a human life within God's presence are worth human pursuit. Aquinas thought he was fortunate to be able to spend his life thinking and teaching about realities which were gifts of divine truth. Science, psychology, theology, physics, music are finite expressions of divine intelligence.

Aquinas wrote well over twenty commentaries on the Bible and the works of Aristotle, and a dozen more theological works of broad synthesis or specialized investigation. The chapters of this book, however, are focusing on one of his works, the Summa theologiae. [ST]. That distinguished product of his mature genius is his most successful work of comprehension and synthesis.

The opening of a masterpiece is important. The first lines of an epic poem state its theme, or a symphony's first notes may hold the tonality of the entire work. The opening lines of the ST are notsimply an affirmation of God or a reverence toward Christ; they are a statement of the subject of the entire theological work, the reality which its many pages will study. In the first article of the ST Aquinas repeats four times the subject of Christian theology. Theology's theme is not the existence of God, nor God as an unfathomable deity. The ST is exploring a further, special, divine realm and power. A "sacred teaching" from God presents men and women with a special knowledge about the plan and empowerment from God for intelligent creatures—this will lead them to a destiny beyond biological life, to a supernatural and healing life and destiny given by God. "It was necessary for human salvation that there be a certain teaching revealed by God" (I, 1,1).

Movement and activity, reaching from origin to goal, link God and creatures. Trinity, creation, predestination, the Christian life, incarnation, and the future—these flow out from and mark the divine presence inspiring men and women in their life and destiny. The ST is a plan of human life, a physics of God's presence, a psychology of grace.¹

What makes a creative work attractive and profound is its form, its exposition of order. When we speak of patterns in Aquinas' thought we do not mean only the Aristotelian syllogism or the grammar of medieval Latin but structures which order, highlight, and explain Christianity. Ordo was a significant interest of medieval culture. There is order in the universe and a further order of grace. It belongs to the university professor or the wise person to see and to unfold the realms which make up the world and life. M. D. Chenu wrote:

Thomas extols the virtue of wisdom. Sapientis est ordinare ('The task of wisdom is to give order.'): the philosopher seeks to penetrate to the ultimate sources of reality, to understand the why and wherefore, and to rest only when necessity has been found. The word intelligere, Aquinas likes to think, is derived from intus legere (to read within). The world is for him intelligible; let it then render an account of itself.²

Aquinas prized the ability of the human mind to reach reality, to find through outward and inward exploration the forms of each being in lucid patterns. Order only enhanced diversity. Each being would stand forth as itself, as the loved gift of divine wisdom. It would give "an account of itself."

Standing forth, existing, being in contact with other beings—this ultimately is truth. Reality gives access to truth and invites knowing. The realm which wise teachers enter and meditate upon is truth.³ Corresponding to being as the dynamic gift of God, truth is the satisfaction of the intellect, the joy of the mind. If truth means God, this is no pious invocation, because God is "first truth," not as an intellectual principle but as the prior reality planning and causing all realities. Christ, the Word in a human being, is truth as a living pattern in historical life. Order is important for itself but also because it enhances reality and thereby draws forth truth.

Data, contingent truths about ichthyology or cuisine are valuable, but the best knowledge, even though sparse, expresses truths about God and about ourselves, "a kind of impression of what God knows" (I, 1,3, 2). Theology is a search for truth, and truth's realms, creation and grace, result when God puts divine truth into action. Truth is mentioned in the opening words of Aquinas' two systematic masterpieces: in the "Prologue" of the ST, and in the first pages of the Summa contra gentiles. Faithtoo gives access to truth because faith is a kind of knowing, a dark seeing, a reception of information supported not by the senses but by the commitment of the will to the revealed word of God. The truth of faith is not a substitute world but an insight into the real world of grace and sin in which each person exists. Theology is a kind of knowing, a knowing dependent upon and expressive of faith. The Dominican's theological personality was marked by an appetite for knowing, for contemplating realities seen and unseen. Order and truth were served by the harmony between knowing and being, between truth and reality, between personality and grace. The follower of Aquinas is the person courageous enough to see the truth, that is, to see what something is and what it is not—and to accept the insights of science and faith concerning the deeper realms of truth, even of Truth itself.

I. A Composer of Summae

Thomas wrote four comprehensive works in theology: a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1252-1256), the Summa contra gentiles (1259-1265), a Compendium theologiae (1269-1273), and the Summa theologiae (1266-1273). The last three works one might call summae. Overviews of creation and revelation, they explain the major truths of Christian revelation through philosophy. The affluent Middle Ages and the new universities provided the background for Aquinas' writings while the communities of friars provided teams of scholars seeking out and translating the ideas of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Arabic thinkers. A pioneer of medieval studies Martin Grabmann wrote: "The works of Aristotle, only now accessible, powerfully widened and re-enforced the philosophical substructure of theological speculation, while at the same time enriching the doctrinal structure of theology with new architectonic motives."⁴ Aquinas expounded the messages of the Scripture and of secular knowledge, and with an inborn gift for synthesis, he gathered the insights of science, philosophy, and law to unfold Christian faith. He fashioned a theology which neither piously distorted belief nor confused mathematics or psychology with revelation; he affirmed both grace and being by highlighting the power and the distinctiveness of each. The reader of Aquinas does not find in his writings an eclecticism, despite the citation of so many sources, but rather an extraordinary gift of assimilation. Using the forms and language of the Bible and Greek philosophy, his writings treat traditional problems but also issues in his age which were quite new. Grabmann concluded:

The great scientific life-work of Thomas is the independent penetration and appropriation of Aristotelian philosophy, and it is the organic linking in a scientific mode of that philosophy with the worldview of Christianity offered by Augustine and earlier scholasticism. In short, [this is] the creation of a Christian Aristotelianism in philosophy and the construction of a speculative theology with the means and forms of this adapted Aristotelian philosophy without abandoning the great lines of the traditions of church and theology.⁵

Through the centuries various schools and disciples have advocated the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but few have understood the structure of his theology. Too often, Aquinas has been presented in a digest of texts, in boring summaries, or in authoritarian lists of conclusions—and often they offered a static Aristotelianism rather than a vital Christianity. One consequence of the past exposition of Thomism as a philosophy is that the thought of Aquinas became abstract and remote. But his theology illustrates the gospel of Christ, precisely because the gospel is the truth about a real realm, the kingdom of God, a supernatural order to which life points and which revelation expresses.

Order, existence, reality, truth—these are architectonic motifs in Thomas Aquinas' theology.

II. Medieval Culture and the Summa theologiae

Ordo attracted artists and lawyers, theologians and architects. What was more exciting or profound than order—subtle or bold—drawing a diversity of motifs and media into a harmonious whole? From the twelfth century on there had been a search for patterns wherein a myriad of elements could achieve an effect greater than their parts. The churches of St. Denis or Chartres displayed large pictorial windows or ensembles of sculpture which presented in theological and artistic patterns biblical stories and lives of saints. In elaborate but coherent iconographic plans the images offered their narrative.

The society was delighted by its awakened capacity for creativity, and a desire for masterful arrangement was enkindled. In art the medieval mind selected a central theme of magnitude: for instance, salvation-history prior to Mary and Jesus, or kingship from Melchisedech to Christ crowned with thorns and further on to Louis IX. Hundreds of scenes with countless figures were arranged in logical and religious patterns. The same quest for multiplicity and unity appeared in the sciences subsumed under philosophy. Music in the thirteenth century expressed a novel multiplicity in the motion of independent parts. Polyphony did not begin at Notre Dame after 1160, but it did find there an acceptance of innovation. Above a sustaining line of Gregorian chant, sung at a slowed tempo, improvisations were added, the tropes of other melismatic vocal lines. Tonal diversity was organized; musical intricacy emerged from a desire for simultaneous variety, and soon the motet was at hand.⁶

That world, intrigued with unity and diversity, manifested forms and figures in the facade, the rose window, the tympanum, the disputation, the summa, and the hymn. History and law also sought a summa-like format. Experiencing multiplicity in arrangement, the direction of the master theologian or of the master architect was to ensure that the whole would enhance and be greater than its pieces. Through patterns, elements should stand out even as they support and integrate the total fabric. In formal organization the summa of the thirteenth century went beyond the less comprehensive and less successfully organized collections (Lombard's Sentences) and so expressed the energetic breadth of the age.

Imaginative orders arrange forms to achieve a transcendent effect. The sight of a Gothic cathedral would impress the minds of the thirteenth century not only by the stonework of a large building, but by its soaring structural lines intimating transcendental longings from reason and faith. Otto von Simson wrote: "The Middle Ages was the age of the cathedrals. This extraordinary structure owes its emergence to the conviction that metaphysical truth could become transparent in the beautiful."⁷ The particular world of the cathedral cannot be taken in from one position or glance but must be explored, walked through, contemplated from different perspectives. Art historians note how in Gothic buildings the individual enters into a larger world where a religious aesthetic draws the human spirit upwards and beyond. It is difficult to imagine the effect these sacral castles of colored light made upon those walking into them in the thirteenth century. Most men, women, and children lived in constricted areas (every inch of space was valuable), having few openings to the outside and filled with the smoke and smells of the living quarters. The cathedrals, sponsored by civic initiative and by religious and business interests, were themselves a kind of summa: an order giving to many mediaan arrangement according to theological and iconographical plans. Amold Hauser's view of Gothic art recalls the role played by integral arrangement as well as by the motif of journey in the ST:

The basic form of Gothic art is juxtaposition … [drawing on] the principle of expansion and not of concentration, or co-ordination and not of subordination, of the open sequence and not of the close geometric form.… The beholder is, as it were, led through the states and stations of a journey. …Gothic art leads the onlooker from one detail to another and causes him, as has been well said, to "unravel" the successive parts of the work one after another.⁸

The Middle Ages fashioned summae in stone and stained glass as well as in theology. In the twelfth century a new architecture (what would later be called pejoratively "Gothic" in contrast to the earlier "Roman" style) produced a building out of freedom and synthesis. Sharp arches pointed toward heaven and, since the arches could sustain more weight, the wallspace was free. Some creative personality suggested filling it with windows of red and blue, yellow and green glass. Colored light poured in. The artists with their theological consultants faced in the rose windows of the cathedrals the same questions of multiplicity and order as did the university professors in planning their summary works of theology. Just as light comes from the sun and pours into the church through colored windows, so God passing through the events of salvation-history pours grace into the individual spirit. It was, Chenu observed, an age of energetic creativity.

The men who built the cathedrals could hardly become bogged down in the writing of commentaries. They built summas, but … imitation of the Ancients did not snuff out inspiration, especially religious inspiration. The medieval rebirth and the Gospel movement were creative movements, within the renovatio temporis of which Francis of Assisi and Thomas of Aquino became the masters.… Whether the Medievals did little thinking about their own dynamic qualities, and if they might have been wanting in historical sense, nevertheless, at times they had astonishing strong foresight about the progressive elements that tend to stir up the successive generations of humanity.⁹

Gothic architecture through a system of skeletal supports—ribs, buttresses, arches, and vaults—freed wall space for light. Two aspects of Gothic are without precedent and parallel: the unique relationship between structure and appearance and the use of light. Gothic lines direct light into the church and then draw the light, and the human spirit, upwards and outwards. In the interplay of light and glass and stone we see a parallel with Aquinas' theology of grace enhancing the human. "Grace is caused in people by the presence of the divinity as light in the atmosphere by the presence of the sun" (III, 7, 12). The technique of stained glass rose to the occasion, providing shimmering pictures where pieces of glass outlined dozens of figures, stories, and symbols in one window. By the year 1200 the colors had been deepened, and naturalness and realism had touched the figures. If the impetus to expand the use of stained glass came from Arab technology and Aristotelian realism, the theology behind it was a neo-Platonism coming from the royal abbey of St. Denis or from the Parisian center of St. Victor.¹⁰ The stained glass windows of the Gothic, replacing the frescoed walls of Romanesque architecture, not only opened the walls to admit light but held patterns and pictures. Suger, the abbot of St. Denis who furthered the building of the first church in Gothic style, described the effect of the windows:

When out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God, the loveliness of the many-coloredgems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect on the diversity of the sacred virtues by transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, then it seems to me … that by the grace of God I am transported from this inferior world to that higher one.…¹¹

A century later, the walls of brilliant windows at the Sainte-Chapelle brought a climax to this style of image in light. Thus in form and image theology found an aesthetic counterpart, and art an incamational content.

Aquinas, as he composed the ST, drew the content of the gospel into the forms of Greek philosophy just as the structures and colors of a Gothic rose window, set alight by the sun, presented a history of God's salvation on earth. History and culture provide the unavoidable context of a thinker's creation. Chenu observed:

To analyze the historical and social conditions of Aquinas' work is the best way of observing the truth of his teaching in relationship to its place in civilization and in the course of theological development. We find this realism again today as we understand better how the Word of God is incarnate in the history of humanity, in the worlds of space and time. Theology should not be a closed chapel set apart from people but a faithful experience and elaboration of the Word of God in a mature faith. To accomplisl this was the genius of Thomas Aquinas.¹²

As order progressed in architecture and the arts, theology developed from arranged collections of opinions to the synthetic summa. Before Aquinas, William of Auxerre and Alexander of Hales had written summae, as had the Dominicans John of Treviso and Roland of Cremona. Seeking to find the breadth and order which would fashion a successful summa, Albert the Great and his Dominican pupil, Ulrich of Strassburg, as well as Henry of Ghent wrote comprehensive theologies. Von Simson noticed similarities between architecture, science, and theology in the age of cathedrals.

In gothic architecture, the wonderful precision with which every single block was shaped in the vault (leaving no ragged joints that it was necessary to conceal) suggests a new esthetic appreciation of the dignity of structural perfection. This tectonic system is never concealed but rather underscored by Gothic wall painting. Even the stained glass windows submit, in composition and design, increasingly to the pattern of stone and metal armature in which they are set. The esthetic function of these windows is not only the creation of a new luminosity; the light they admit dramatically underscores the web of tracery, ribs, and shafts.¹³

Erwin Panofsky also described how the development of the summa-form paralleled the structure of the cathedral. The organizational spirit of medieval culture aimed at "manifestatio." This manifestation required: (1) totality of treatment, (2) arrangement of equal parts, as well as (3) distinction and interrelation.¹⁴ To walk into a Gothic church is then to see that each of the members of the ensemble of the arts has a role, and to grasp that together they compose a summa as an event of art and theology.

Medievalists have referred to the thirteenth century as a century of "spirituality full of light."¹⁵ Light playing on stone might have set Aquinas' intellect and imagination in motion, for act and light becamemotifs for his explanation of God and world. Divine light in grace and revelation enlivens the figures and events which are the sacraments or the jeweled images of salvation-history. The biblical narratives are real, just as the window's designs are real, and without them we would not see light. Both Gothic architecture and Aquinas' theology pass through the three dimensions of time. The past is prominent in the prophets, apostles, and philosophers whose thought is symbolized in their statues. The present moment is one of contemplation, of the application of the art's symbols and narratives to oneself. The future exists ahead and above: not as the continuation of the line of history but as a world beyond time and as a fulfillment of the present. Anyone entering a Gothic cathedral also encounters incarnation: spirit in stone, color in glass and air. Gothic space is both sacral realism and sublime activity, while medieval theology presented the Holy Trinity active on earth. Outpourings of color and light lead the believer in the church to return spiritually to the One, the Source, the Godhead. Yet, the goal of religious history and of the window is not the figurative events, but human contact with the Mystery of God.

The Summa is not an encyclopedia. There were anticipations of encyclopedias at this time, and they too illustrate the medieval interest in the accumulation of information. During the twelfth century Gratian produced a systematic compendium of patristic sources, and of conciliar and papal pronouncements upon which he commented and which became a theoretical introduction and pattern for canon law. Abelard's Sic et Non began the theological style of the schools which debated real problems with arguments on both sides. Those collections initiated a struggle for the professors to find a suitable theological arrangement. "Summa" in the language of the twelfth century stood for a collection of topics and opinions by revered experts, and, as Chenu noted, it was "no longer a simple compilation of the testimonies of the Fathers and of the ancient writers … but an organized and elaborate assemblage of materials, although it still remained very close to the texts which it collected and arranged."¹⁶ Abelard called the Apostles Creed a "summa," but his own arrangement for theological issues was the awkward triad of faith, charity, and sacrament. "In the thirteenth century … the word summa designates a literary work undertaken with a threefold purpose: first, to expound, in a concise and abridged manner, the whole of a given field of knowledge (this is the original meaning of summa); second, to organize, beyond piecemeal analysis, the objects of this field of knowledge in a synthetic way; finally, to realize this aim so that the product be for teaching students."¹⁷ So in the decades just before Aquinas intellectual pursuits in the new world of the universities sought multiplicity and comprehension. Richard Heinzmann concluded: "The systematic works of scholasticism give access not just to one work or to one writer but, when we are considering a thinker of some importance, they open to our understanding an entire epoch."¹⁸

Aquinas saw how the architect supervised on the Isle de Paris amid the lumber, stones, and pulleys of a construction site the totality of the medieval building being built. Supervisor of all the arts ranging from planning towers to selecting themes for sculpture, he was like a "master," he was a professor among the stone masons and sculptors. He was like the teacher of theology whose activity involved being the director of several fields and whose wisdom sought the causal forces which were most sublime and most extensive (I, 1, 6).¹⁹ God, of course, was the architect of the universe, but human beings too, as they engaged in wisdom and art, could fashion materials into new forms.

III. A Textbook for Dominicans

It was long thought that the Summa theologiae was written for university students, for those who had finished their studies in liberal arts, had some philosophy, and were beginning theology ("Prologue" to the ST). Leonard Boyle, however, has argued that the ST was written not in Paris but at the studium of the Dominican Order at Santa Sabina in Rome. Moreover, this summa was originally conceived as a work on moral theology (hence its lengthy Second Part) for the Dominican theological students in Rome preparing for the proper Dominican ministry of preaching and hearing confessions.²⁰

In 1259 Aquinas worked with Albert on a commission (de studiis) which was composing a plan of education for Dominicans. In late 1261 Aquinas came to Orvieto where he lectured on Scripture in the Dominican priory and where he might have offered his views on moral issues of the time during public discussions. Then, as we saw, Aquinas was asked in 1265 to set up a school, a studium at the priory of Santa Sabina on Rome's Aventine hill where he remained for three years until he returned to Paris in 1268.

At all events, the studium at Santa Sabina probably was no more than an attempt by the Roman Province to allow select students to prepare themselves under a single Master, Thomas, for the priesthood and the Dominican apostolate. Basically the course there would have had the same pastoral orientation as that in which we presume Thomas to have been engaged for the previous four years at Orvieto.²¹

In his first year in Rome he lectured on the Sentences. His experience teaching Dominicans through courses employing practical guides for preaching and hearing confessions written by early Dominicans like Raymond of Penafort convinced him that pastoral ministry needed a deeper foundation, a work which was more than a handbook on moral problems. Boyle suggests that Aquinas' creativity as a theologian was stimulated by the influx of new texts, by his experience as an educator in various settings, and by his contact with preachers and confessors who were being challenged by new ethical issues. All this led him to give to "practical," i.e., moral, theology an original and broader setting. "By prefacing the Secunda or moral part with a Prima pars on God, Trinity and Creation, and then rounding it off with a Tertia pars on the Son of God, Incarnation and the Sacraments, Thomas put practical theology, the study of Christian man, his virtues and vices, in a full theological context."²²

A philosophy might conclude that God is the source of rational creatures in a metaphorical or a metaphysical sense, but Aquinas was describing the human situation in light of God's revelation and as known by faith. The human life of moral decision was enabled by grace and destined for a future in the kingdom of God. A higher mode of divine contact furthered a life surviving death in resurrection. "First we shall treat of God, secondly of the movement of the rational creature towards God, and thirdly of Christ who—as a human being—is the way for us of tending towards God" (1, 2). Virtue was not an exercise in self-control, and moral theology was not confessional casuistry: both were grounded in the dynamics of vita and gratia reaching from God to the individual Christian.

Christian morality, once for all, was shown to be something more than a question of straight ethical teaching of vices and virtues in isolation. Inasmuch as man was an intelligent being who was master of himself and possessed of freedom of choice, he was in the image of God. To study human action is therefore to study the image of God and to operate on a theological plane. To study humanaction on a theological plane is to study it in relation to its beginning and end, God, and to the bridge between, Christ and his sacraments.²³

Aquinas worked for seven years, in Rome, Paris, and Naples, on his masterpiece while at the same time writing commentaries on nine works of Aristotle.…

Although the Bible and Aristotle nourished the sections of the speculative ST, how difficult it must have been for Aquinas to find time from varied occupations to conceive and write out his own original theological system. Boyle concludes: "This persistence at least suggests that for Thomas the Summa theologiae was something out of the ordinary, and, indeed, meant much to him. It was, one may suggest, his legacy as a Dominican to his Order and to its system of educating the brethren in priories all over Europe."²⁵

IV. Structures in the Summa theologiae

There are various patterns in the ST, and they exist at different levels. Of course there is a general interest in the meaning and usage of words, in the combination of words with their ideas in the dialectic of discussion, and in the roles assigned to opinions and authorities. There are organizational patterns (the parts, the questions, the articles), and there are intrinsic patterns like theocentricity, nature and existence, or being and fulfillment. There are Aristotelian patterns of nature and action and neo-Platonic ones of participation. There are influences from sources, e.g., Origen or Gratian, and biblical patterns either from an individual book (the Gospel according to-John) or from one scriptural theme (Word, faith). Finally there are theological motifs like law, grace, or light. Albert Patfoort begins his book on the keys to Aquinas' theology with these words: "It is not a question of composing a list of themes or of major points in the large theological works of Thomas. Rather we will try to discover the organization, the subject of deep reflection, which, full of wisdom, has been given to the ideas … to offer a key needed to enter into this monument of Christian thought, the theology of him who has been called the 'Common Doctor' of the church."²⁶ The structures of the ST are like the arches and vaulted ceilings of Gothic buildings: they sustain basic ideas and principles. They present the lines by which the work arranges and vivifies the topics of faith and life, of theology and philosophy. Patfoort writes: "If there is a practical conclusion to be drawn from the dynamic development we have observed, it is clearly that one must avoid at any price presenting the Summa in a linear and abstract way, remaining content with a static and isolated reading of its different parts. Rather we must always be sensitive to the ceaseless and multiple connections between the different areas."²⁷

Aquinas' great summa begins with several general preludes: a prologue for the readers, a discussion of the nature of theology, proofs for the existence of God, and a consideration of the divine being leading on to a higher world of Trinity and grace. The opening "Prologue" announces that the text would present "those things that pertain to the Christian religion in a manner befitting the education of beginners." There were obstacles facing students beginning theology in a medieval school, whether university or priory. The works of theology they might consult were verbose, detailed, and repetitious. The order of treating Christianity was unsystematic: first because the Sentences of Peter Lombard was based upon the concatenation of articles in the creed, and second because the Bible lacks a logical order and repeats its great themes.

Which pattern was to give order to a summa? There was a tension between an approach from the biblical history of salvation (Hugh of St. Victor) and an approach based upon pedagogy (Abelard). Aquinas chose a format which combined the two. He brought into his ST all the information he could gather—the Scriptures and particularly Paul, the canonists, the Greek Fathers and especially John Damascene, the Latin Fathers and Augustine, Platonists and Aristotle, biological and astronomical works—but he also searched for the right arrangement.²⁸ To see the form which guides all this material, one should first look at Aquinas' own words introducing the major sections. Following the etymology of theology, the opening of each of the four parts is about God, but they are clearly about the God who is sharing a life deeper than biological existence with men and women. These prologues are about the nature and telos of humanity. "After we have treated the exemplary cause, God and those things which proceed from divine power and decision, now we should consider God's image, the human being, as endowed with free will and power for activities, the source of its own enterprises" (I-II, "Prologue"). They are all, in a sense, about incarnation, that is, about a special presence of God in us, and, par excellence, in the Word incarnate in Jesus. First and foremost, the ST is an ordered presentation of God-in-act. Beings emerge in the glory of their capacities for act and in the aura of their destinies. In plan and creation, through the missions of revelation and grace, the Trinity reaches men and women in their concrete world, the world studied by scientists, philosophers, religious prophets, and theologians. Consequently, a basic theological pattern is that of being-in-action: natures, whether this species of hawk or that sculptor, sustain their being and manifest themselves through their proper activities. One can see in the three parts on God, humanity, and Christ traces of patterns of being, activity, and process.

Confident that human reason and faith can soar to heights of exploration, and that the God who is the source of all being and truth is intelligible and good, Aquinas set out to compose a new way of looking at Christianity in which a multitude of sources were summoned to explain revelation in Christ. What is evidently important for Aquinas is that his work pursue a pedagogical order, a unified and systematic organization of what pertains to Christian faith. The chosen order is not that of canon law or that of the author of the Gospel according to Mark but the order of a teacher. Aquinas employed in the ST various patterns, logical, philosophical, and theological. Later we will look at inner patterns of themes and sources, but first we need to become acquainted with the two basic structures which organize an immensity of theological data: the overarching pattern and the structure of the basic unit.

A. The Macro-Structure

Dozens of works, large and small, have been written as guides, expositions, or summaries of the ST. Some are bland; many are dull. Not a few are a thin summary or an overly logical paraphrase of pieces of a theology. Many studies of value have been written, ranging from the commentary of Cardinal Cajetan in the sixteenth century to those of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange in the twentieth, but remarkably most have left undiscovered the patterns in the ST. Most Thomists from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries paid little attention to the missions of the Trinity, the New Law of grace, or the life of Jesus, since, too interested in logic and metaphysics, they neglected the theological vein. Chenu uncovered a basic structure within the ST, and, although scholars have suggested elaborations and modifications, his study remains important.

In order, therefore, to understand the Summa theologiae as well as the purpose of its author, it is important to perceive the ordo disciplinae that is worked out in it—not only the logical plan of the work, with its divisions and subdivisions, but also that inner flow of movement giving life to the structure after having created it … the scientific reasons that govern the whole arrangement, the intellectual options by means of which it was decided, here and there, to lay stress on this or that part, or to locate it just there.²⁹

Is Aquinas' theology, in its form, a tower, a mosaic, a chain? What could join all the authorities and topics in the thousands of segments? Which pattern of patterns would bring harmony out of the old theologies and the new sciences and give unity-in-diversity with clarity and organization? Curiously, Aquinas turned not to Aristotle but to a neo-Platonic way of viewing the world.³⁰

For Chenu one grand organizing pattern joined the three parts of the ST: this structure gave an ordo which was methodological, pedagogical, and aesthetic. Beyond the building blocks of Aristotelian science, Aquinas drew upon the theme of emergence and return. The young theologian teaching the Sentences had already employed the pattern of the procession outwards of creatures from the first principle and their movement toward fulfillment in their ultimate cause.³¹ In theology all things are studied in their relationships to God. Production and destiny, every being, and every action could be located and known in the lines of process God has set in motion. The pattern is Christian as well as neo-Platonic: a divine creation and process on to fulfillment might also have been planted in Aquinas' mind by Augustine or Pseudo-Dionysius. The monastic writers used this pattern to describe prayer, and Bonaventure employed it for his journey of consciousness to God.

Exit and retum, procession and fulfillment. This pattern implies movement and life. The telos, the ever-attracting goal in the future, need not, however, be conceived as a "retum," a backward move. The emergent being does not exist only to collapse backwards or be absorbed in the original birth which is now a death. The process can be a drawing forward; creation can become history. We might best imagine the course of the ST not as circular return but as upward spiral. Aquinas said that this was the approach of Pseudo-Dionysius to divine realities: to circle them in contemplation.³² The human being moves toward its destiny through a kind of spiral (a perfect figure) manifesting the movement of eternal love, from good and toward good. This dynamic movement can be seen in the creation of the universe but also in human life, and even in the Incamation. "The totality of the divine work finds its fulfillment in the fact that the human being, the last creature created, retums to its source by a kind of circle in such a way that with the work of the Incamation it finds union with the very source of all things."³³ The goals of being and grace draw creatures not backward but upward and forward. Aquinas spoke not of a return but of a journey, a way. "Before God one journeys not with steps but with the … activities of the mind."³⁴

Aristotle's science certainly supported the pattern of movement. Beings by their nature and existence are in motion toward future realization. The movement outward of beings through their forms and toward their goals includes even God in a Trinity of active persons, giving and receiving eternally. For all things God is the term of their procession and retum—but in different ways. Creation continues but individual beings pass away as the procession mirrors and moves forward toward God.³⁵ From revelation we learn that parallel to the degrees of being is a history of grace, missions of Wordand Spirit to men and women. Thus the pattern of procession-toward-destiny is a cord of several threads, matter and spirit, cosmic forces and human history, nature and grace. "There is a double 'procession from God': one according to the gifts of nature, and one according to the gifts of grace and salvation. In both cases, the creative action of God continues in divine government."³⁶

If the ST intends to give order to realities in creation and grace (and so pedagogically to help the theology student), nonetheless, this approach does not completely eliminate history. It is not simply a neo-Platonic emanation but includes the history of salvation. Men and women are offered a share in God's life described in the preaching of the Incamate Word Jesus, and so the human being, set forth in nature and grace at the end of the First Part, does not in the Second Part turn back but moves forward to its destiny. According to Max Seckler,

If according to the Bible all things proceed from the hand of God according to his plan and work of salvation, and then return to the one who is Alpha and Omega, so the theologian according to the demands of that science treats reality in relationship to God, as origin and goal. But in a surprising way the source and goal of history, the source and completion of being, the first and last cause of understanding all have a close correspondence with each other, so that theology is not only a "science" of salvation history but bears the history of salvation in its basic plan.³⁷

The ST is an interpretation of salvation-history as well as being a physics of being and a psychology of grace.

The ST is not studying God as only the creator of the universe but mainly as the author of a higher order for men and women, grace perceived by faith, a supernatural order: the reign of God preached by Jesus Christ and the life in the Spirit described by Paul. Congar observes: "Medieval theologians, Thomas in particular, loved to locate human realities within a general order which revealed in various ways analogous structures. If the world is the work of the Word-Wisdom of God, still a further order will enter, that of supernatural life."³⁸ After treating God and creation, the history of salvation with its biblical events does not at first continue in the Second Part, but the ST continues a theology of the created images of God, every man and woman, on the journey to their destiny. This journey assumes again something of a historical course in the Third Part with Jesus Christ.

Consequently, one cannot describe this theology with the chain of terms, "One God-Trinity-Creation-Anthropology-Christology;" not with "nature-grace-Christ" nor "God and Trinity, Creation and Covenant and Incarnation." Nor can one compare it with the order of logic or the structure of mathematics, for the new presences of the Trinity, the individuality of men and women, and the dynamics of creation and grace are always moving through the work. The structure of the ST is multi-layered. God is always present as the bestower of both natural and supernatural being; the human is always present touched by one form or another of creation and incarnation. Ultimately the theology of the entire ST is a history of graced beings and not a metaphysics, although just as creation is the place of grace, metaphysics offers a framework for theology. The salvation described is not Christology alone, although all grace flows from the Word through Jesus Christ; theology is not retelling the narratives of the Bible but presents the life of the Spirit to which all of the Bible points.

In the "First Part" of the ST all things move outward from the Triune God in a diversity of beings—suns, bacteria, persons, cacti, snakes—and in creation's climax, the human person. Men and women exist as finite beings but also as knowing and loving images of God who out of their animality and spirit are called to a deeper life which is an intense gift of God.

The "Second Part" concerns the human personality on that journey which is life and which leads to a destiny enabled by a special life-force, grace. Its topics are not mainly figures like Moses or Jesus, or the church. The "First Part of the Second Part" describes the psychological principles (human and divine) of a life-journey with choices, emotions, faculties, intuitions, accomplishments, and misdirections: and next, God's help of grace. How will we reach a destiny beyond us? Aquinas responded by considering at length two principles: psychological life and the grace of God.

The "Second Part of the Second Part" brings together two forces: human personality and God's grace. The human is the place of grace. The framework for this detailed psychology of grace is the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) and the four moral virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude). Under each is arranged subvirtues (and countering vices), a Beatitude from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and complementary gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The "Third Part" of the ST presents Jesus Christ as the model for the journey; he is the living portrait of God's wisdom. We learn in the First Part that missions of the Trinity found a concrete expression in the historical man Jesus of Nazareth who is the incarnation of the Word of God, and in his Spirit active in human lives. The Third Part gives a presentation of the being, life, and work of Jesus; second, of the Incarnation continuing after Jesus' departure in the sacraments; and finally, of life beyond death. Just as Jesus' work on earth will be completed by his second coming, so the graced life of the Christian finds beyond death the triumph of grace as resurrection and vision. (The final sections of the Third Part, however, Aquinas never wrote, since death interrupted him in the midst of treating the sacraments.)

All three parts of the ST have a similar structure. What is at first general and basic becomes concrete: the theology of God is followed by the world of creatures; the human person in psychology, law, and grace leads into the virtues of graced life; the Incarnation of the Word is a life, a teaching, and a redemption.³⁹ Similarly one can find themes which appear in all three parts: for instance, divine procession and mission, image of God, love, or teleological desire.⁴⁰

The macro-structure of emergence and destiny is, then, a line of activity reaching from the missions of the Trinity through creation, human history, and incarnation to the eschaton. Moving forward, or circling upward, empowered by God, this teleological process orders hundreds of "questions" and thousands of "articles;" they are the building blocks of the areas of theology illumined and joined by the patterns and principles.

B. The Micro-Structure

The ST' s parts are made up of "questions" containing "articles." The questions are arranged into clusters of questions (about thirty-eight) like divine knowledge, sacraments, or a particular virtue like hope. The microstructure of the ST is the question with its articles; a question treats a larger orsmaller topic through articles which are the basic investigative units of the work. The four parts are made up of 611 questions with well over four thousand articles.

Aquinas followed Aristotle's methodology by arranging his inquiries into Christian faith around four basic questions: Does something exist? (Or in theology, Why is it suitable or helpful for it to exist?) How does it exist? Are there different kinds of this reality? What is its nature? What are some of its special characteristics or properties? The articles of this summa combine the dialectical method of the universities going back to Abelard—the discussion of both sides of a theological issue—with Aristotle's questions pursuing science. Chenu wrote:

The medieval lectio, in like manner, was to give rise to quaestiones that went beyond the mere explaining of the texts, the latter, however, stilf fumishing the substance with which they dealt. In these quaestiones, together with the resources of the ancient dialectic and latter of demonstrative logic, came into play with the great complex of problems instigated during the thirteenth century by the entrance of Aristotle and the new surge of inquisitiveness in theological matters. With the "questions" scholasticism reached the peak of its development. In them, it found the literary medium best answering its creative inspiration in philosophy as in theology.⁴¹

The scholastic approach of the new universities was precisely not an approach of authority or piety but one of scientific investigation. Abelard, not content with devotional symbolism, had inquired into the real reasons and causes of things. The contemporaries of Albert and Bonaventure referred to university professors as "dialecticians," because they were discussing both sides of an issue. Aristotelian science sought the causes of each thing, and to find causes is the goal of the questioning inquiry in the ST. How do the characteristics of a human emotion correspond to its purpose? How does Jesus' death save? Can a sacrament cause grace? To explain a reality and to further basic scientific study, Aristotle spotlighted four causes:

• the material out of which something exists;
• the form ("essence" or "nature" or "species") which is the principle of a particular nature realized as an individual in matter;
• the efficient cause bringing this being into existence;
• its final cause, a goal or destiny.

Distinctions, reasons, divisions, definitions, questions, causes—this was the scholastic method.

The structure of each of the thousands of articles is the same.

First, there is a statement of the question to be discussed followed by a number of objections (about two to eight) which ordinarily support positions opposite to the one Aquinas will take. Between the objections offering fundamental problems and the treatment of the topic a line from an authority (a passage from Scripture, a sentence from Ambrose, a quote from Canon Law, or an axiom from a philosopher) challenges the direction of the objections. This countering opinion, it was long thought, is simply an authority rather indifferently selected to balance the negative tone of the objections, but now experts think that one can find indications not only of argument but of structure in those citations from Aristotle (frequent in the questions on God) or Augustine (frequent in those on the Trinity); they suggest subtle directions appearing in Aquinas' own theology. Then there follows the body of the article, the "response," where Aquinas gave his own views. There he first attended to the insight and weight of other opinions and then offered his own reasoned and creative presentation of the topic under consideration. Finally, he answered the objections, finding some truth in seemingly opposed positions.

The articles unfold the question. Each article depends upon its place in the question and in a cluster of questions. Previous topics provide the context and perspectives which will illumine what follows. Grabmann advised: "If we were to sketch a method of interpreting St. Thomas, and especially the ST, it would be necessary for us first to consider the systematic study of that work, a method by which one researches under all its aspects the meaning, the idea of each article in order to understand in a basic way all of the teaching contained in the entire span of the work."⁴² The disputation, the public scholastic exercise in dialectic, was an important, if sometimes occasional, exercise for the professor, and its format and spirit were prominent in Aquinas' mind. The articles of the ST are micro-disputations: they are composed in a pointed but tranquil style of argumentation, of question and resolution. Aquinas' style, reflecting intellectual changes in the Middle Ages, calls into question opinions on creation and revelation not to remove their intellectual foundations or with the hope of finding a comfortable agnosticism or nihilism, but to spotlight important issues. The objections allow further issues to be treated. Amazingly these almost 10,000 or more difficulties with their responses are not random problems, but they focus on significant issues in a specific topic. In a spirit far from any inquisitorial mentality, Aquinas brought in other opinions, mustered not as errors but as stimuli for research into truth (truth, for him, is difficult to enclose and also difficult to escape). The meeting with a different opinion occurs within the atmosphere of dialogue and research. Other views are never fully rejected, because they too can have intimations of truth and can make contributions not only to discussion but to conclusion.

This theology proceeds:

• from the general to the specific;
• from unity to diversity;
• from how something behaves to what it is (from its activities to its nature);
• from the reality of something to our words, concepts, and symbols representing that reality;
• from the world of natures to the being and activity of God; and from nature to grace, a grace which essentially is God, incamationally in Jesus of Nazareth, and is participatively in human beings.

In its relentless logic, unalterable format, and abstract language, the ST can bring fatigue or feed compulsion. It is helpful when pursuing a topic like "salvation" or "hierarchy" to read more widely than one article or question, and to use a concordance to the ST. Staying with terminology is to dallywith a mechanical and positivist approach, one alien to this theology. To look closely at a set of articles is to see that Aquinas was not constrained by his structure but used arrangement to include much material in brief units. He was interested in logic, linguistics, or methodology only as helps to gain insight into faith. Combining observation and speculation, he pursued an intellectual approach of disclosure, revealing, setting forth, and unfolding, while avoiding both exaggerations and overly subtle questions. His spirit was never dogmatic or ideological; appeals to absolute authority are rare. "Two things should be avoided: asserting something which is false and opposed to the truth of faith. And, it is also not permissible to take whatever one might think is true and to assert at once that it belongs to the truth of faith: for then the truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among non-believers … asserting something to be a truth of faith which most certain research and documentation shows to be false."⁴³

V. A Biblical Theology

If the medieval teacher was interested in books and ideas, he treasured them because they gave access to reality, to worlds visible and invisible. In the thirteenth century books were being written in quicker scripts and were being produced more cheaply, copied not for a wealthy elite but for the growing class of scholars. Texts opened up networks of nature or that subtle realm of grace which faith affirmed to be "a new way of the divine existing in intelligent beings" (I, 43, 3). A university teacher of theology commented on Scripture. Hugh of Saint Victor wrote: "The cathedral of the professor is Sacred Scripture."⁴⁴ The composer of the summa's panorama was also the teacher of the Bible. Exegesis was work required by an academic position but it was subsequently a source of theological reflection. No matter how attractive and important the writings of philosophers and theologians, the scriptual text and the reality to which the text witnessed gave theology's first foundation and inspiration. Aquinas lectured on a number of biblical books. One of the signs that we love God, he said, is that we enjoy hearing God's word.⁴⁵

In his two magisterial inaugurations—as a young professor and as a magister—Aquinas treated the theme of Scripture. Religious teaching should teach, delight, and inspire. The gospels are fulfillment, the Hebrew writings are revelation and anticipation (the frequently cited Psalms are a kind of bridge), and the epistles are theology and pastoral application. "The New Testament, ordered to eternal life, has not only precepts but the gifts of grace. The gospels give us the origin of grace; the letters of Paul give us the power of grace, while the other books give us the realization of grace."⁴⁶ How could those texts of revelation and wisdom be imparted to people? Aquinas stressed that the Bible used metaphors and analogies, mysterious links between the highest of teachings and the world of creation and humanity. "God communicates [this biblical wisdom] through a proper divine power … but teachers communicate it as ministers of this teaching."⁴⁷ His theology of the biblical text pays attention to how different writings explored the same word and the same theme, and experts see here signs of his employment of a concordance.⁴⁸

The university teacher led students through particular books of the Bible. Theology presents a sacred teaching, a revelation, which is concretely proposed in the Bible, in those "pages which are sacred." As Aquinas was lecturing on the Bible and engaging in public disputations, he was also composing synthetic works offering his personal theology of God's revelation. The presence of Greek philosophy in them is evident, but how is the Bible present? Its role is formally discussed at the opening of ST—it is a privileged written witness—but its words are on every page. If theology should illumine biblical meanings and metaphors (I, 1, 8), the subject matter of Aquinas' theology, however, is not so much biblical phrases as the realities (this reflects the realism of Aristotle) to which they point: God active in history, covenant and incarnation, grace and life.

The "Prologue" to the ST indicates that Aquinas sought a less repetitive format than that found in commentaries on the Bible. In his systematic arrangement, order would illumine inspired writings. Research during the twentieth century has shown that medieval theology was hardly waiting for the Reformation's liberation of the Bible, and that Aquinas is not just decorating metaphysics with biblical citations. Similarly certain books of the Bible exercise an influence on particular areas of theology. We can see the role the Psalms play in moral theology, or the influence of the Gospel according to John in the theology of the Incarnation. His commentary on Romans illumines the centrality given to grace in the structure of the ST. All the Pauline letters, Aquinas says, have as their subject God's grace, but Romans is about grace "in itself," and the eighth chapter, its climax, describes how offspring and heirs of God act in the Spirit.⁴⁹ Research has still not sketched sufficiently how biblical themes appear in clusters of questions or how they inform broad structures of the ST. Aquinas' commentaries divide the text into its major and minor areas of teaching, elucidate the major theological points, and, with the help of earlier commentators, respond to difficulties about either the literal text or its implied theology. But Otto Pesch notes:

The biblical commentaries of Thomas are quite often rather tiresome to read. The text is divided in minute detail, and this sometimes results in a stark analysis which pursues the grammatical and logical connections. Often this is expanded by the exposition of various possible interpretations among which Aquinas does not always decide. Sometimes the commentary becomes a mini-question or an article (as in the Si). Nevertheless, the faculty and the students saw this method as a decisive scientific progress beyond the meditative exegesis of Scripture in the cloisters of the ancient monastic orders.⁵⁰

With some perseverance the reader needs to draw out the underlying arrangement in sections of commentary, to see how exegetical exposition aims at a theological clarification or expansion.⁵¹

Aquinas followed his analysis of the different senses in Scripture. There was, first and foremost, the literal sense, the meaning intended by the author writing the book. There was also one or more spiritual senses in which allegory and metaphor might offer to an individual reader a personal application, a meaning stimulated by the text but not placed there, except seminally, by the original author.⁵² Particularly in theology, the tensions between words and meanings, and even more, between words and the divine realms, are significant. "Spiritual things are always hidden. Therefore, through the realities of time they cannot be fully manifest, and so they need a diversity of presentations."⁵³ Any reality is always richer than any verbal presentation; truth is always greater than the words of its expression. Fundamental to this theology is that words do not collapse in upon themselves, caught in their limitations and uncertainties. Rather, words, although they are arbitrary signs of things, tend dynamically toward the realities they would express. Is there a key for finding the sense of a biblical author, for finding the first meaning beneath later interpretations? One key lay in the actions of Jesus Christ. In him the plan of the Trinity has its culminating point; to him the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures lead; in him men and women find the teacher of the reign of God, the icon and norm of thelife of grace, the source of church and sacraments. "Whatever pertains to Christ or is about Christ—that is called gospel."⁵⁴ The ST in its theory and practice of scriptural interpretation holds exegesis, theological reflection, and ecclesial life together. M. A. Reyero notes:

What results from a study of Aquinas' exegesis is that behind his teaching on the meanings of Scripture stand various but complementary ways of thinking which are used by Thomas to explain the basic truths of Christianity. This exegesis … is a many-sided totality whose individual parts can be distinguished by their philosophical, theological, moral, and mystical elements. And yet they do not introduce a strict separation between exegesis and theology, interpretation and pastoral life, exegesis and moral theology.⁵⁵

For instance, the commentary on the Psalms from 1272 had the goal of making intelligible God's theology of covenant and Messiah, and of explaining the poems to Aquinas' Dominican brothers who recited them several times a day in choral prayer. In a prologue to this commentary he explored how the many songs first celebrate the universality and diversity of God's work in creation and redemption. Second, God's work historically expressed in other writings of the Hebrews is here developed poetically. Finally, the Psalms exist to inspire, to lift up the human spirit. "Whatever is said in other books [of the Bible] in various genres is here expressed in the mode of praise and prayer."⁵⁶

Exegesis and theology go together. The words of the Bible are not verbal celestial magic but exemplifications of the interplay of the created and the graced. Not confusing literary forms, Aquinas within the limitations of his time sought to understand in the text an inspired meaning and then its relationship to science and life. Four gospels are needed because of an "overflowing richness in the works of Christ." And yet, "infinite human words do not explain one word of God."⁵⁷ Significantly, while God is an artist for Aquinas, he is not a poet. God's creation is a product, not a simile; salvation-history is not a novel. Pesch observes:

He could have admired the "poetic art" of God in his quite personal word, Holy Scripture, revealed as it is in such imaginative ways. But Thomas does not do that. Despite a rather agnostic element in his teaching on the analogous discourse of God … here he accentuates the few aspects of similarity within analogy … and emphasizes that analogy is highest when one can, even with only weak understanding, peer into the highest things. And so God is not a poet.⁵⁸

Although he analyzed the metaphorical and the symbolic, Aquinas always sought to draw the diverse scriptural texts toward reality, divine or human but he did not always demand or produce a simple resolution to every exegetical problem. He pursued exegesis in light of how other great theologians had explained this or that text.⁵⁹

To return to the ST, the Bible was important not only in providing a multitude of citations but in its structure. Biblical motifs and theologies are latent in this work like threads joining expositions and sections: Genesis' creation, the Johannine Word and missions, the law of the Jews, the life of grace, the love of God, the salvation of Jesus.

VI. Some Principles in Thomas Aquinas' Theology

We have been sketching theological patterns in the ST. Other kinds of organizing forces play an influential role throughout the work. We call them principles. They are themes or axioms, fundamental orientations or ways of grasping reality. Some principles of Aquinas' thought are philosophical and some are theological. Principles are philosophical when they give general perspectives on being; they are theological when they come from revelation. The ST is, of course, not a theological system in the modern sense of an elaboration of a basic principle begetting every facet of Christianity. But it is systematic in its organization and organic interdependence. Some of the following principles come first from the Aristotelian science which Aquinas drew into his theology to explain "divine realities," but they influence perspectives on both creation and grace.

Let us look at a few important theological and philosophical principles which are at work throughout this theology. They typify Aquinas' thinking, and as underlying motifs they serve to link areas and to vitalize their theology.

A. The Force of Things

God is a powerful and mysterious cause, the sovereign cause of all. A truly divine being is not jealous of creatures and their capabilities. Everything has a basic form, a specific principle of what it is. Its nature makes a chemical element or a bird to be itself. First and foremost, nature is the source and enabler of activities proper to the species. Creatures exist to act and to live, and the permanent intrinsic source of all that they do is the basic form of each. A nature gives the proper range of activities or the mode of life to each being, and then individuals realize that form through their unique existence. Actual existence is the highest gift of being, and each existent has an inner fecundity and energy, even its own generosity in sharing itself with others. The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins captured this in his poem, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire":

Each mortal thing does one thing and the
same;
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and
spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."

For Aquinas not only the intricacy and order of creation but the individual being and prowess of each creature, no matter how tiny or transitory, glorify God. To this Aristotelian reality is added a neo-Platonic idealism. These frogs or those palm trees in their temporality and limitations, in their specific form and individuality, realize God's ideas and wisdom.

God delights in giving beings life and existence and also in enabling them to be causes. A creature by action and by causality imitates the endlessly active reality which is God.⁶⁰ Consequently it is not preternatural tricks or natural disasters which suggest the divine power but the glory of the lioness and her cubs, or the whale in the ocean. To look in nature for the un-natural is to misunderstand God entirely. God is more glorified by nature's powers (and by the graced life of millions of men and women) than by visions and magic. The wasps' community, the spider's web trapping gnats, or even the bacteria whose own life-sustaining actions can make men and women ill are in their quest for existence and in pursuit of the goals of their natures manifesting God's intelligence and love.

B. The Goals of Beings

Aristotle was originally a biologist and his realistic thought was thoroughly teleological. Some goal fulfills this particular form and a goal motivates this being into activity. We learn about beings from their activities: a run from potentiality to form, a flight to completion. Seeds are equipped, even disguised, to survive being eaten, and to float for miles in order to reach the right kind of earth so they can sprout as a plant. Bees have intricate guidance capabilities enabling them to find flowers' nectar in order to nourish the queen and to store honey for workers who will live in the hive through the threatening winter. For Aquinas the power and beauty of creation and of creation's God are to be found in the ordinariness of activity-to-a-goal. "Causa finalis, causa causarum"—"The final cause is the cause of all the other causes." Each being's nature (a bee is not a coal miner; a human body is not a tank or a church) finds its glory in activity, in activity specified by a goal. So the efficient, formal, and final causes will be similar; for instance, the bee's efficient cause is the queen, while its bee's nature gathers pollen and nectar for the over-riding survival of the hive.

The pattern of color in the dogwood flower is not formed by God for the purpose of depicting the nails of Jesus' cross but to attract insects. What piety might see as a trace of the divine, as when God is imagined to be directing birds to form a "cross" in flight, is for Aquinas an accident, chance. God plans nature's success, individually and overall, but an ecosystem is not the stage for a show of religious eccentrics.

Aquinas saw teleology as fundamental to beings. "In everything known by the human intellect order reigns" (I-II, 94, 2). The human being too lives and acts for a goal. But which goals satisfy human beings? What can exercise the strongest claim on us—wealth, fame, sensuality? Aquinas thought that only a destiny of some depth can satisfy the unquenchable search of humans for pleasure and joy. Jesus' revelation proclaims a special "reign of God," a deeper life for humanity. That is why Aquinas began the ST not with the crucifixion of Jesus or the authority of the church but with a statement that God has revealed a special world and destiny, one that is above nature but which also elevates and fulfills nature. Because the Kingdom of God exists as a supernatural future, men and women need to have a "form," a somewhat lasting source of activities, a life-principle to live now and in the future beyond death. The large Second Part of the ST does not retell Jesus' life but describes the two powers which will enable us to live within and for our destiny: the human personality and the life-principle called "grace."

Aquinas' principles are not opposed to the views of astrophysicists, paleontologists, or theologians who accept evolution in nature. Becoming does seem to dominate galaxies of gas and heat as well as biological life on earth. Aquinas stressed being, but, although he had little inkling of a world shot through with development and evolution, his theology nevertheless entertains stages in human life and history. Precisely his understanding of causality would have led him to appreciate a mature but delicate Power permitting worlds to unfold out of their inner capabilities. God is more glorified by an independent world of finite beings intricately emerging in time than by a planet where beings enter fully dressed like characters ready to act out a play.

C. The Dignity of Being a Cause

That creatures are endowed with powers is a fundamental principle of Aquinas. God loves into existence the capabilities of every nature, whether it be the panda or the shark. He gives to creatures a wonderful endowment: the gift of being a cause. "On account of the abundance of his goodness (but not as a defect in his power), God has communicated to creatures the dignity of causality" (I, 22, 3). Causal creatures, whether young muskrats or radio waves, contribute to a world both stable and in movement. God's own causality possesses degrees which are so powerful as to permit the creature to be and to act. "It is not out of God's incompleteness or weakness that he gives to creatures causal power but out of the perfect fullness which is sufficient to share itself with all."⁶¹ Not surprisingly, one of Aquinas' illustrations for independent causality was teaching: "For a professor does not just want his students to be knowledgeable but to be the teachers of others" (I, 103, 6).

There is only one "primary" or ultimate cause: that is God. But creatures—inevitably "secondary causes"—are not puppets. They are real agents, fashioning out of their nature's active forms this existence. A star burns, a tanager builds a nest. The power of God is revealed in the variety of creatures who are all proper causes of their actions. God appears supreme not by miraculously replacing them with unnatural displays of power but by endowing them with their own modes of activity. God gives independence to creatures "not by a lack of power but by an immensity of goodness; he has wished to communicate to things a resemblance to him in that they would not only exist but be the cause of others."⁶² The Primary Cause is not glorified by interfering often in the course of its creation. In our world deadly viruses or multicolored sunsets are not produced on the spot solely by a distant but powerful deity. The divine source gives not only existence but causality and both summon up the image of God. Creation proceeds from and by proper, proximate causes. Who causes eagles? Other eagles, eagles feeding and training young eagles. Investigations can find the ordinary factors which influenced a car being hit by a truck or the production of a calf by a cow; the activity of God is not the proximate cause of most things. Aquinas' theology of causal interplays in nature and grace pervades his theology. "The one and the same effect is produced by the subordinate cause and by God, directly by both, though in a different way" (III, 70). To ignore the distinction between "primary" and "secondary" causality is to confuse the causalities of Creator and creatures, and to risk replacing God by a creature or the creature by God. When religion sets aside secondary causality, the modest activity of the creature, a fundamentalism enters to control miraculous divine activities. To some this appears to honor God but it in fact detracts from the divine plan and turns creation into a puppet show. On the other hand, atheism and an ideology of science reject any presence of the primary cause and any supra-natural empowerment of people, and affirm only what instruments can measure.

Aquinas dared to analyze the presence of grace in human life in terms of causes. The causal source of supernatural life could only be God. Formally, however, grace is a special principle of life by which men and women share in the life of God. Its matter is an individual personality, and its finality is heaven. For a theology of the reign of God the axiom of the three similar causes (efficient, formal, and final) holds: the cause of grace is the Logos in Jesus and his Spirit present in the world of people, and this deeper sharing in the life of God called grace, has, as its future, resurrection and eschaton. Aquinas' thought, refusing to choose secularism or fundamentalism, sets up a psychology of faith and grace which is an interplay of causalities where each is free to act and to relate with other causes.

D. Being and Knowing

Among the many intricate natures of earth and the universe a particularly high form of existence is one that can know. Hawks, despite their volatile ingenuity, are quite determined and have capabilities for only a few enterprises. But members of a string quartet have a great deal of psychic space for choices. The higher the being, the more open is its field of action—a cocker-spaniel is more adaptable (and more interesting) than a worm. Knowing is the highest form of activity, for it can itself become all that exists. For that reason, freedom accompanies knowing.

Aristotle was a researcher for whom activities disclosed the essence of something living or inanimate. To watch a snake on a summer day is to see the species act and succeed. In a sermon Aquinas observed: "When Aristotle was asked where and how he had learned something, he replied: in things-they do not know how to lie."⁶³ Knowledge moves from the empirical to the intellectual, from the visible to the invisible. Whatever is in our mind somehow has entered through our senses. But knowing, calculating, or believing do not end with the data of the senses, or with ideas or sentences. The mind by employing concepts and language reaches the realities themselves. Knowing receives beings into our awareness as a mind represents intimately what lies outside. A. D. Sertillanges observed:

Thomas explains that we understand by the impression which things make upon us. This impression the to gauges their intelligibility and our intelligence. It is the subject or the object which sets the limits as the case may be. The conditions of knowledge make us realize that the objects of experience are not entirely intelligible, and that we ourselves are not pure intelligence.⁶⁴

Two consequences are unacceptable from the point of view of human experience: the denial of what is objective, and the evaporating of differences between the true and the false. Although error and misapprehension are not infrequent, what we know does reflect something of what exists outside our minds. There is an attention to subjectivity in Aquinas but it never replaces or competes with objectivity. To say I see or I think this or that is to say at the same time, beings exist.

Human consciousness, however, is active as well as receptive. The human intellect receives the impressions of the senses, but it also forms them through arrangements, insights, abstractions, and fantasies. Aristotle and Aquinas thought the mind was fashioning what the senses brought to it. Knowing, reasoning, and insight are dynamic as they touch the world of objects and forces. With various and complex ways of knowing, human beings can devise imaginary animals on exotic planets, or ponder the near and distant future. A poet can be struck by something about this particular orchid, and a scientist can aspire to know the primal moment when the universe exploded.

How do we know God? Certainly we do not know what our senses do not, cannot contact. The human way to know the transcendent and the supernatural is called "analogical" knowing. This knowledge, more a form of not-knowing than knowing, lies between the extremes of agnosticism, affirming nothing about the immaterial, and anthropomorphism, affirming God as human or material. Analogical knowing is grounded in divine activity in the universe. Beings are the faint but accurate traces in the world of God's creative power. They presume in a real but very slight way that God originally caused the world. That act producing all things, despite an immense (indeed, an infinite) transcendence, leaves in creatures slight resemblances to the divine cause. Yet whatever similarity there is between earth's beings and God's being is faint, more filled with dissimilarity than similarity.

Knowing and loving can even touch the realm of the divine presence called grace. The human spirit can not only affirm metaphysical ideas about God but accept in faith the revelation of the Incarnate Word and the indwelling of the Spirit, a revelation expressed in human languages. Revelation is distinct from human life, but faith and revelation do not introduce the special effects of a Hollywood film portraying the Bible or science fiction. Christianity is not an assembly of hard truths and curious miracles turning creation topsy-turvy. The events of Jesus' preaching and ministry occurring long ago can be understood by people today: his triumph of life over death tell us of a further reality and future for men and women. The choices made by Peter and Mary Magdalen are not unlike our own quests for meaning. When the gospel parables speak of God's love we understand that love through the moments of human love we have enjoyed. Modern philosophers imitating empirical science and some modern Protestant theologians guarding divine transcendence affirm an unpassable abyss between human knowledge and divine being. Aquinas' view is very different: he retained the faint traces between Creator and creation, traces that glorify God. Then, revelation uses ordinary human experience to speak of what is even more sublime. If God transcends enormously the things we know, still they bear witness to creation's being, goodness, and activity which flow from that of the divine cause, despite or because of the infinite difference between God and creature.

Faith and theology, like all knowledge, can move beyond propositions in a particular language to attain the reality expressed (II-II, 1, 2, 2). Belief and love have a vital movement tending toward God. While God, the source and ground of all truths, is the first truth, this subsisting and originating truth is also personal and loving and wise. Dynamic knowing, analogy, insight as well as reason, an apprehension and formation of what is objective and real—these are characteristics of Aquinas' philosophy. The modes of being in the created world mirror faintly the being and activity of God in a reserved and analogous way, and the revelation of Jesus has communicated to minds elevated and empowered by grace God's plan for the human race (I, 12, 13).

E. God As Mind and Love

Aquinas viewed God not first as a will but as an intellect. Not from uncharted freedom, adolescent caprice, or the desire to dazzle does God create but out of wisdom. In the divine intellect are countless ideas, species, individuals, and scenarios. Some are to be realized; some will never exist except in the divine archive of unselected choices. The decision to create, the selection of billions of suns with perhaps endlessly varied planets and moons, the differences among plants and animals—these exist from out of millions of options (some, like gold and pink muskrats or very small giraffes, will not exist). All that is comes from free choices born of sublime intelligence. Through its relentless teleology, the universe points to a plan. God is well-depicted as an artist whose genial ideas impelled outwards by love find realization outside of imagination. "God is the cause of things through his intellect and will just as an artist is the cause of things made. The artist works through an idea conceived in the intellect and through the love of his or her will related to something; so God the Father works in creatures through his Word, the Son, and through his love which is the Holy Spirit" (I, 45, 6). Certainly God is not a failure who does not know the course of a galaxy or is incapable of influencing human history.

The choices to create intelligent creatures and, furthermore, to offer them a share in the divine life flow from freedom and love. Whatever exists outside of God is the result of love impelling divineplans into reality. The intelligent and free creature is particularly loved; the graced creature even more so. When it was time for the ST to treat creation and then incarnation, Aquinas spotlighted the motivating power of divine generosity. Love desires to produce what it loves. Goodness diffuses itself: love expresses itself by sparking into existence untold numbers of creatures, and then God became one of them. Unlike ourselves, however, God's activity, flowing from an infinite intellect and imagination and out of complete freedom, fashions rather than seeks out its objects. A divine action bestows the appropriate, loved degree of reality—and a being is.

F. Grace In Life and Destiny

Grace is a share in the divine life as a new presence in human life. This religious realm does not stand over against creation to disdain or condemn it. There is only one God, Creator and Redeemer, and as God is one, so the divine works have a harmony. Creation began with the goodness of being, and it remains good despite sin. A wedding, a mural, a family are not inevitably ugly or secretly rebellious. Loving distinction, God placed the natural and supernatural orders in clarity, but those two orders are not only distinct but harmonious. "Since the human being is destined for a supernatural happiness, it is necessary for humans to attain to higher realms.… The gift of grace does not proceed from the light of nature but is added to it, bestowing a higher modality" (II-II, 8,1,1 & 2). Since Christian theology's source is incarnation, it seeks a synthetic understanding of humanity and grace. Aquinas and his time saw a single world comprehended by ontology and science and by a dialectic between grace and evil. The entry of Aristotle's realism did not set up dual worlds but its active realism served a theology of grace.

Through the centuries many Thomists have seen in the axiom, "grace brings nature to completion" (I, 1, 8), the guiding principle of Aquinas' way of thinking. The Spirit of Jesus brings a deeper life but people retain their own personalities. The supernatural is not deduced from nature, but nature is capable of receiving the revelation of God. Two realms compose one existence for human beings; creation and grace are distinct but not separate. Aquinas intended them to meet and live in intimacy.⁶⁵

Grace leading human nature to its destiny includes theologically other Thomistic principles like those sketched above: active powers, the draw of teleology, one creation and one Creator, a harmony and synthesis between human nature and divine grace. This principle colors the span of Aquinas' insights. To give an example, in religious conversion human acceptance of faith is not usually a dramatic shift from a hideous life of sin to the acceptance of frequent miracles, but, rather, it is a movement from a human nature wounded by original sin to an individual human life which through grace expands and deepens. "To have faith does not lie within human nature but what is within human nature is that the human mind is not opposed to the interior instinct [of faith] and to the exterior truth of preaching" (II, 10, 1, 1). Even after a dramatic conversion the personality does not change drastically but is liberated and enabled for itself. Grace does not disdain psychological processes or political forms as evil, nor suspect the arts as seductive. The kingdom of God works within lives and cultures. The divine presence does not just tolerate but motivates human efforts, even as it retains a critique of persons and groups when they depart from the standards of the gospel. Later (in chapter five) we will see how worship, holiness, ministry, and politics unfold within grace building upon nature. This principle enables the incarnation to continue and the Christian faith to bring its message and sacrament to peoples and cultures; it is at work in the lay leader or bishop who dies for a more humanform of economy, and it shines forth during the Easter Vigil as the Easter candle is ignited in the dark (symbolizing the human journey) and then is plunged into the water for baptism to sanctify it.

We have looked at the two overarching formats for the ST, the macro- and micro-structure, and then at principles which inform the entire work. It remains to suggest briefly some other organizing forms which await further exploration.

VII. Patterns

Today there are different kinds of maps. Some not only reproduce the geography of a place but indicate through colors the place's degree of heat. We lack and need maps of the theological themes and thought-forms of the ST. Chenu complained of a void in his neo-Thomist education: "How often, in the interpretation of the II Pars in particular, I was shocked by the rigid and systematic way in which the Aristotelian structures present in the text were commented upon in detail, while the sap of biblical and patristic spirituality supplying life to these otherwise dead branches was ignored or glossed over."⁶⁶ What would these theological maps be like? One might trace how a particular theologian or philosopher influences Christology or sacramentology, or how great Christian themes appear in their proper questions and in other areas. Chenu encouraged students of Aquinas to write up their own plans of the ST. "The student, however, will find great profit in establishing on his own a plan of the Summa, whether of the whole or of a section of it, bringing all the while his effort to bear on the discovery beneath divisions and subdivisions of the internal unfolding of problems, the sources from which they spring and the manner in which they are brought up."⁶⁷ This is valuable advice. But unfortunately Chenu's project has rarely been pursued.

In the sweep of the ST there are lines linking different sections (Trinitarian missions lead to Jesus). There are anticipations and realizations (the material world prior to the sacraments), theme and variations (angelic psychology, human psychology and the psychology of the believer), and sources (this Greek or Latin theologian on the being of Jesus). The future understanding of Aquinas' theology should seek out the architecture in the large theological works.

The following are only an initial suggestion of patterns.

1. One pattern begins and pervades the ST: it is the activity of God. Beyond the Godhead as subsistent activity and source of Trinitarian processions, God creates through wise planning, execution, and providential ordering. Plans for free creatures and for a life of grace are put into effect. Then the missions of Word and Spirit, extending into the psyche and history of creatures, become concrete through the incarnate Word, Jesus of Nazareth. Through the Spirit of the Risen Christ, God is actively present to beings in spirit, sacrament, grace, and church. Thereby the divine power extends in various ways into existence, nature, and love. Lafont concluded: "This seems to us to be the goal of the movement of the entire ST: the vision of God in God's self and of creation in God as it comes from the hands of the Creator and as it achieves the free participation of human beings in Christ. This dynamic seems to be animated by one grand Christian inspiration and at the same time to have a marked simplicity of line."⁶⁸ In a variety of modes, exerting divine influence but respecting each nature and each freedom, God is all in all.
2. Aquinas' works are explorations by a Christian theology of that horizon of reality called the "supernatural order." The ST's opening lines announce a higher ordination, i.e., a plan and destiny for people. The entire work and each article are engaged by a teleology of the supernatural ordo. A divine plan (predestination) and a presence (Trinitarian mission) unfold that ordo in a new mode of existence, grace. The Word and Spirit of God come to people, live with them to summon forth and enable a special life and destiny under the leadership of Christ, the head of the new human race. Salvation is not ideas meriting a paradise or a transitory divine power warding off a devil but a deeper dimension silently offered to human life. Patfoort writes of three intensifications of the Spirit in the ST, of three "pneumatophanies" or "three zones of great pneumatological concentration: gifts, New Law, and grace."⁶⁹ The ST at its depth and in every moment is a theology of being and grace.
3. One can always ponder anew in this theology the interplay between Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism. It is also challenging to see how the patterns of Greek philosophy are joined to history. How does a psychology of grace fit into a history of salvation? Edward Schillebeeckx thinks that Aquinas struggled to integrate the process of creation and a history of salvation with the liberation and self-realization of a graced psychology and ethics. "Here the tradition of the Greek Fathers of 'paideiatou Christou' ('education in Christ'), where the accent is placed upon the history of salvation in the world (where God liberates the image of God, the human being, from the darkness due to sin), is joined by Thomas to the vertical theology and interior subjectivity of Augustine. In other words, for Aquinas grace is always composed essentially from two realities: a 'grace which is external' in correlation with 'a grace which is internal."'⁷⁰ Pesch pursues this same theme.

   Thomas sketched in the first two books of the ST that underlying structure of salvation history which influences every human existence. This pattern always has a reference to Christ, but Aquinas sketches it to some extent in the purity of its emergence at creation, with the fact of sin and the special details of salvation-history bracketed. In this plan grace has the lofty assignment of being an ultimate, encompassing principle of activity whereby the human being through a radical interplay of inner activity and divine grace is brought to the level of divine life and therein is first made capable of that definitive determination which God has given to the human being from the beginning.…⁷¹

4. One form for the entire theology is incarnation. Incarnation, the most intense and concrete expression of God active within human nature, does not enter only with the Third Part. The Word's incarnation has various modes of presence. Introduced by the missions of the Word in history and with its climax in the being and person of Jesus Christ, incarnation animates the life and ministry of the savior. It becomes dominant in his headship, participative and unique, exemplary and causal, a headship of the human race redeemed. This union of the divine and the created does not cease with the end of the historical life of Jesus but reaches on through history in the new race, Christ's Body, and in its liturgy of sacraments. Finally the lengthy analysis of personality and grace in the Second Part contributes to an understanding of its cause and model, Jesus.
5. In the treatments of grace or incarnation one can see an approach which might be called that of a crescendo. Issues more general, more proper to nature or the human personality or to philosophical analysis begin a section, and the specific, grace-filled activity concludes a cluster of questions. Then a new development begins, slowly leading to another climax: for instance, the one God leads to the activities of the Trinity in human history; creation leads to the image of God constituted in grace; apsychology of the personality moves toward the conclusion of the First Part of the Second Part in the justification and merit of grace.
6. An individual theologian or philosopher can be traced through varying degrees of influence in different clusters of questions, e.g., Augustine in grace, John Damascene in Christology. The opening questions of the Third Part exemplify this. The "Prologue" cites only the infancy narrative in the Gospel according to Matthew, but the subsequent question on the suitability of the Incarnation cites this Gospel and that of John as well as the letters to the Romans and to Timothy. In terms of theological sources, Augustine is almost the sole theological source for the question on the suitability of the Incarnation. However, with the following questions on this union of natures and person a different selection of sources appears: there is Aristotle to explain "nature" and the Council of Chalcedon and contemporary theologians like Cyril and Gregory to offer the great conciliar sources for this mystery. Thus the selection of theologians and philosophers indicates the direction of the questions and articles. Sometimes one and the same authority links different sections of the work.
7. One could also explore with indexes and concordances how key terms, biblical or theological, are employed in different theological areas. For instance, the linguistic and epistemological presentations of "word" are countless, but they illumine each other. The divine ideas are words from which creation emerges, and Jesus is the Word of God. Other themes are "finality," "wisdom," "sacrament," or "connaturality." "Light" with its overtones from physics or medieval aesthetics would uncover relationships of sources and power. Creation begins in light; the power of knowing is a kind of light; faith is a dark light for knowing; grace is a light. Both biblical inspiration and the dawn of the eschaton appear as kinds of light. Seeing is the ultimate power, particularly in its intellectual form, so light has a priority, a universality in theology.
8. Broad theological motifs too are important. A theological area can be well understood only through its sources and relationships: for instance, the image of God in the human person, the shift in Christology due to more contact with Greek sources. There is the rich theme of "law" which begins as the divine intellect, finds realizations in natural law and the Jewish covenant, and then reaches a high point with a law which is no less than the Spirit of God.
9. These patterns lie within a system which itself undergoes some development in the career of Aquinas. Do his views change? How? In the area of grace, when we contrast it with early writings, the ST emphasizes more the divine causality of grace and less the initiative of the human person.⁷² The traditional virtues in the human being move from the rather general religious and Roman presentation of the time of Ambrose and Augustine toward greater realism and activity under the influence of Aristotelian psychology. It seems that Aquinas would mention a theological orientation, and then in later questions draw out its implications or complexity. His terse observation that God is not really related to creatures (I, 13, 7), understandable in a certain metaphysics of creation, is certainly modified or complemented by the missions of Word and Spirit (III, 7, 13).

Ghislain Lafont, author of a valuable structural study of the ST, writes: "The Christian reality is too complex, in some ways even too unexpected for one simple outline. In this sense the ST is a difficultwork and resembles the great churches of the Middle Ages. Its architectural perfection appears at once, but then with close observation it also reveals a richness of invention and adaptation, both in totality and in detail."⁷³ In general, Aquinas' genius gave to Augustinian teaching an expansion through Aristotelian psychology and metaphysics, but this theology was not the work of a short time, nor of a young and inexperienced mind but was the result of research and contemplation and insight. Sertillanges described the ST as a coherent reality, even as something living where every element under the influence of a guiding idea receives an orientation from and contributes to the entire work.⁷⁴ Chenu thought that with Thomas Aquinas dialectic reveals special creativity. "It is necessary then to pursue within a slow and tenacious maturing the grand intellectual perspectives in that work's constructions, and not to remain with anatomical analyses, no matter how precise."⁷⁵

Patterns await exploration, and it is time to move from forms to ideas. The following chapter, surveying the theology of the ST, presents the important areas of Thomas Aquinas' theology and shows the above principles at work. Along the broad, neo-Platonic dynamic line serving a Christian theology but within a Aristotelian and scholastic methodology, his basic principles arrange a thousand or more topics in theology, with sources in hundreds of Roman, Greek, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers, into a coherent world-view.

Notes

¹ "The guiding intuition which directs the plan of the Summa theologiae wants to lead us to place human reason at the very heart of religious reality" (A.-I. Mennessier, Saint Thomas d'Aquin, L'Homme chrétien [Paris, 1965], 25).

² M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas (Chicago, 1964), p. 46; see B. Coffey, "The Notion of Order according to St. Thomas Aquinas," The Modern Schoolman 27 (1949): If. The opening of the SCG (1,1) holds a counterpoint of three themes: the wise person discerning and ordering; the artist directing through art good beings to their goals; order and goodness in the universe as resulting from truth, from divine Truth.

³SCG 1, 1.

⁴ Martin Grabmann, Introduction to the Theological Summa of St. Thomas (St. Louis, 1930), p. 7.

⁵ Martin Grabmann, Die Kulturphilosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquin (Augsburg, 1925), p. 23.

⁶ Around 1260, at S. Jacques in Paris, another Dominican, Jerome of Moravia, was teaching music, and writing a "summula" on the musical theory of his time. He noted that new texts were needed because the multiplicity of forms was engendering confusion and boredom among students; see A. Gastoue, "Un Dominican professeur de musique au XIIIe siècle. Fr. Jérome de Moravie et son oeuvre," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 2 (1932): 232.

⁷ Otto von Simson, "Die Kunst des Hohen Mittelalters. 'Lichtvolle Geistigkeit'," Das Mittelalter II. Das Hohe Mittelalter, Propylaen Kunstgeschichte 6 (Berlin, 1972), p. 11.

⁸ Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 10f.

⁹ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 67. Jacques Maritain observed: "… In Gothic architecture's times, and especially after St. Francis of Assisi—mystery discloses its more human depths. This is the age of Duccio, Giotto, Angelico … Art is still dominated by sacred inspiration, and Christ is still at the center. But this time it is Christ in his humanity, in his torment and redeeming passion … and all the saints with their individual features and adventures, and mankind with all the characters who play their part in human life, and all nature reconciled with man in the grace of the Gospel. The human soul gleams everywhere through the barred windows of the objective world, the human self is more and more present on the stage" (Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry [New York, 1953], p. 22).

¹⁰ See G. A. Zinn, Jr., "Suger, Theology, and the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition," in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium (New York, 1986), p. 33f.

¹¹ Suger, De Rebus administratione sua gestis in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis, ed. E. Panofsky (Princeton, 1946), pp. 63, 65.

¹² M.-D. Chenu, Preface to H. Petitot, Life and Spirit of Thomas Aquinas (Chicago, 1966), p. 6.

¹³ Otto von Simson, "The Gothic Cathedral. Design and Meaning," in Change in Medieval Society, ed. S. Thrupp (New York, 1964), p. 169. Von Simson stressed the "functionalism" of this art; the teleology of Aquinas is a kind of functionalism.

¹⁴ E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1957), p. 29 "Is Panofsky's problematic about a possible connection between gothic architecture and scholasticism illegitimate? Not at all, for certainly a century like the unusual thirteenth raises the issue of the inner dependence and mutual relationships of so many cultural streams and innovations" (A. Speer, "Thomas von Aquin und die Kunst," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 72 [1990]: 343.) "Manifestation" is a significant word in Aquinas. Light manifests itself and other things; creation and grace manifest the Trinity, Jesus makes the Logos manifest. Words are manifested in emotions, and each existent manifests the Creator and the act of creation. See "manifestatio," Index Thomisticus 13 (Stuttgart, 1974), p. 421f.

¹⁵ J. Le Goff cited in von Simson, "Die Kunst des hohen Mittelalters. 'Lichtvolle Geistigkeit'," p. 11.

¹⁶ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 298. R. A. Gauthier observes that a summa is a manual which should be both a summary and a complete overview (Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Somme contre les Gentils [Paris, 1993], p. 146).

¹⁷ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 299.

¹⁸ Richard Heinzmann, "Die Theologie auf dem Weg zur Wissenschaft," Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 25 (1974): 6; see De Veritate, 8, 10. See N. Senger, "Der Begriff 'architector' bei Thomas von Aquin," in Mittelalterliches Kunsterleben nach Quellen des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. A. Speer (Stuttgart, 1993), p. 208f.

¹⁹ See Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Christopher Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York, 1990), 141. A. D. Sertillanges found an aesthetic side of order: "There is a real musical symmetry about the Summa, not because of some artifice in the distribution of its materials, but in its very structure: it has emerged like a Gothic cathedral; a lyric of pure thought" (St. Thomas Aquinas and His Work [London, 1932], p. 113). "In St. Thomas, doctrine has become harmonious after the manner of a symphony. It vibrates freely in all its parts and undulates from end to end, without any of those intermissions which falsify the key and break the harmony, without unresolved discords or any but expressive silences, by which I mean mysteries. Mysteries are not empty voids. They are more full of meaning than anything else, and it is their depth that makes them unfathomable.… Their purpose in a synthesis is to give unity and strength, and indeed, beauty to the whole" (ibid.).

²⁰ Leonard Boyle, The Setting of the "Summa theologiae" of Thomas Aquinas (Toronto, 1982), pp. 17f.; see L. Boyle, "Notes on the Education of the Fratres Communes in the Dominican Order in the Thirteenth Century," in Xenia Medii Aevi Historiam Illustrantia, ed. R. Creytens and P. Künzle (Rome, 1978), p. 249f.

²¹ Boyle, The Setting, 11.

²² Ibid., 16.

²³ Ibid. Boyle notes that the Second Part of the ST with its theology of the Christian life, theoretical and practical, was widely circulated on its own apart from the two parts which framed it. It might have been that his confreres and colleagues did not fully appreciate Aquinas' broader accomplishment within the ST (ibid., 23).…

²⁵ Boyle, The Setting, p. 14.

²⁶ A. Patfoort, Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Les clefs d'une théologie (Paris, 1983), p. 12.

²⁷ Ibid., 64.

²⁸ On Aquinas' diverse sources, see Ceslao Pera, Le Fonti del pensiero di S. Tommaso d'Aquino nella Somma teologica (Turin, 1979).

²⁹ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 301. To look at the charts by J. J. Berthier or G. Q. Friel (see Bibliography) is to see static divisions and clusters divorced from their Aristotelian and Thomist vitality.

³⁰ Aquinas' theology contained no small amount of Platonism coming not only from newly accessible neo-Platonic writings but from Greek theologies and from Augustine; cf. R. J. Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism (The Hague, 1956), and the writings of L. Hödl. A pattern of emergence and return had been a popular one from Christian theologians like Origen to German idealists like Schelling.

³¹In 1 Sent., d. 14, q. 2, a. 2.

³²In Librum beati Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus expositio, bk 4, lect. 11 (Turin, 1950), p. 148; In 3 Sent. d. 2, q. 1., a. 1.

³³Compendium theologiae, #201.

³⁴De Perfectione Vitae Spiritualis, Opuscula theologica 2 (Turin, 1954), p. 116.

³⁵ See 0. Pesch, "Um den Plan der Summa Theologiae des hl. Thomas von Aquin," in Thomas von Aquin ed. K. Bernath (Darmstadt, 1978) 1, p. 128f.; A. Patfoort, "L'unité de Ia Pars et le mouvement interne de la Somme théologique de s. Thomas d'Aquin," Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 47 (1963): 514f.

³⁶ Y. Congar, "Tradition et sacra doctrina chez Saint Thomas d'Aquin," in Thomas d'Aquin: Sa vision de théologie et de l'église (London, 1964) 2, p. 164.

³⁷ M. Seckler, Das Heil in der Geschichte (Munich, 1964), p. 35.; see Otto Pesch, Thomas von Aquin. Grenze und Grösse einer mitelalterlichen Theologie: Eine Einführung (Mainz, 1988), p. 390f.

³⁸ Congar, "Traditio et sacra doctrina," p. 162.

³⁹ G. Lafont, Structures et méthode dans la Somme théologique de Saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris, 1961), p. 435.

⁴⁰ "The prologue to the first part of the Second Part in the ST—a passage which begins the entire Second Part—recalls intentionally the anthropology of the First Part (q. 93), the human being made in the image of God" (Y. Congar, "Le sens de 'l'économie' salutaire de S. Thomas d'Aquin [Somme theologique]," in Glaube und Geschichte 2, ed. E. Iserloh [Baden-Baden, 1957], p. 105).

⁴¹ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 86.

⁴² Grabmann, Introduction to the Summa, p. 139.

⁴³De Potentia (Turin, 1949), 4, 1, p. 104.

⁴⁴Miscellanea 1, 75 cited in Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 259.

⁴⁵The Sermon-Conferences of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Apostles' Creed, ed. N. Ayo (Notre Dame, Ind., 1988), 4, p. 51.

⁴⁶Principium Fratris Thomae de Commendatione et Partitione Sacrae Scripturae, p. 439.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 443.

⁴⁸ On Aquinas and Scripture, see Torrell, Initiation á saint Thomas d'Aquin, p. 49f.

⁴⁹ "Prologus," Super Epistolas S. Pauli lectura (Turin, 1953), 1, p. 3, Super Epistolam ad Romanos lectura (Turin, 1953) p. 116f. "Roughly speaking, the Summa contains three sections wherein there is a direct elaboration of Holy Scripture: of Genesis, in the treatise on creation (Ia Pars, qq. 65-74), of the books on the Law … (I-IIa, qq. 98-105), and finally of the gospels in the treatise on the life of Christ (IIIa Pars, qq. 27-59)" (Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 259).

⁵⁰ Pesch, Thomas von Aquin, p. 88.

⁵¹ Aquinas at the beginning of a commentary might generally expound its structure in terms of the four Aristotelian causes, but Henri de Lubac also points to his use of an ancient theological triad of shadow, image, and true reality ("Le 'Nouveauté' de Saint Thomas," Exégèse médiévale II [Paris, 1964], p. 286f.).

⁵² See B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1983). "Just as Aristotelianism refused to dissect soul from body, so it refused a dichotomy between the spirit and the letter. The spiritual sense was not to be studied separately from the literal as if it were superimposed, but through and in the literal" (R. Brown, The "Sensus Plenior" of Sacred Scripture [Baltimore, 1955], p. 61); see P. Benoit, Inspiration in the Bible (New York, 1965).

⁵³Super Evangelium S. Matthaei Lectura [3:1] (Turin, 1951), ch. 3, lect. 1, p. 171.

⁵⁴Super Epistolam Primam ad Corinthios Lectura [5: 1] (Turin, 1953), ch. 15, lect. 1, p. 405.

⁵⁵ M. A. Reyero, Thomas von Aquin als Exeget (Einsiedeln, 1971), p. 247f.

⁵⁶ "Preface," In Psalmos, Opera Omnia 6, p. 48.

⁵⁷Super Evangelium S. Johannis Lectura [21: 6], c. 21, lect. 6 (Turin, 1952), p. 488.

⁵⁸ Pesch, Thomas von Aquin, p. 345.

⁵⁹ See W. G. M. B. Valkenberg, Did Not Our Heart Burn! Place and Function of Holy Scripture in the Theology of Aquinas (Utrecht, 1990). Ceslaus Spicq's opinion was that in textual criticism and its theory Aquinas was inferior to some of his contemporaries, and that his subjections of the biblical text to countless, logical divisions can appear excessive ("Thomas d'Aquin," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique [Paris, 1946], 15:1, 708).

⁶⁰ "By the very fact of being a cause, a being has a certain likeness to God" (SCG 3, 75).

⁶¹De Spiritualibus Creaturis 1, q. 10, ad 16 in Quaestiones Disputatae 2 (Turin, 1911), p. 1, 411.

⁶²SCG 3, 70. "If… [God] communicates to others his likeness in terms of being it would follow that he would give a likeness in terms of action, so that created things would have their proper actions" (SCG 3, 69).

⁶³ Thomas Aquinas, a sermnon for the Second Sunday of Advent, cited in Chenu, St Thomas d'Aquin, p. 74.

⁶⁴ Sertillanges, Saint Thomas Aquinas and His Work, p. 37.

⁶⁵ Cf. Y. Congar, "Le moment 'économique' et le moment 'ontologique' dans la sacra doctrina," in Mélanges offerts à M. D. Chenu (Paris, 1967), p. 135f. U. Horst, "Uber die Frage einer heilsökonomischen Theologie bei Thomas von Aquin," in Thomas von Aquin, ed. K. Bernath, 1, p. 373f. "Thomas sees the ordo salutis in a radical way as salvation-history: salvation is realized in an event, and too, every event between heaven and earth is either salvation-history or its opposite" (M. Seckler, Das Heil in der Geschichte [Munich, 1964], p. 121).

⁶⁶ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 309.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 319.

⁶⁸ Lafont, Structures et méthode, p. 483.

⁶⁹ Patfoort, Saint Thomas d'Aquin, p. 87.

⁷⁰ E. Schillebeekx, "Salut, Redemption et Émancipation," Problemi di Teologia, Tommaso d'Aquino nelsuo settimo centenario 4 (Naples, 1974), p. 276.

⁷¹ O. Pesch and A. Peters, Einführung in die Lehre von Gnade und Rechtfertigung (Darmstadt, 1981), p. 79.

⁷² For the axiom, "to the one doing what is within his powers God gives grace," compare the interpretation in the Commentary on the Sentences (II Sent. 5, 2, 2, 28, 1, 4) with that of the ST (I-II, 109, 6) which teaches that any act leading to or deepening grace is itself possible only under the influence of grace.

⁷³ Lafont, Structures et méthode, p. 469.

⁷⁴ A. D. Sertillanges, Saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris, 1925) 2, p. 327.

⁷⁵ Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, p. 167f.