Summa Theologica, Volume 1

St Thomas Aquinas

Jan 2013 · Cosimo, Inc.

About this ebook

"The Summa Theologica is the best-known work of Italian philosopher, scholar, and Dominican friar SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (1225 1274), widely considered the Catholic Church s greatest theologian. Famously consulted (immediately after the Bible) on religious questions at the Council of Trent, Aquinas s masterpiece has been considered a summary of official Church philosophy ever since. Aquinas considers approximately 10,000 questions on Church doctrine covering the roles and nature of God, man, and Jesus, then lays out objections to Church teachings and systematically confronts each, using Biblical verses, theologians, and philosophers to bolster his arguments. In Volume I, Aquinas addresses: the existence and perfection of God the justice and mercy of God predestination the cause of evil the union of body and soul free will and fate and much more. This massive work of scholarship, spanning five volumes, addresses just about every possible query or argument that any believer or atheist could have, and remains essential, more than seven hundred years after it was written, for clergy, religious historians, and serious students of Catholic thought."

About the author

Thomas Aquinas, the most noted philosopher of the Middle Ages, was born near Naples, Italy, to the Count of Aquino and Theodora of Naples. As a young man he determined, in spite of family opposition to enter the new Order of Saint Dominic. He did so in 1244. Thomas Aquinas was a fairly radical Aristotelian. He rejected any form of special illumination from God in ordinary intellectual knowledge. He stated that the soul is the form of the body, the body having no form independent of that provided by the soul itself. He held that the intellect was sufficient to abstract the form of a natural object from its sensory representations and thus the intellect was sufficient in itself for natural knowledge without God's special illumination. He rejected the Averroist notion that natural reason might lead individuals correctly to conclusions that would turn out false when one takes revealed doctrine into account. Aquinas wrote more than sixty important works. The Summa Theologica is considered his greatest work. It is the doctrinal foundation for all teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.