Every civilization has classic expressions. There are some cultural artifacts that come to sum up a period and a style while also becoming part of the common patrimony of human society. In European civilization Shakespeare’s plays not only epitomize Elizabethan England, but continue to be read around the world. The same is true of the art of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the music of Bach and Beethoven, the writings of Cervantes and Goethe. In terms of the long Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500 C.E.), when Catholic Christianity was a dominant force, it is not surprising that many of the most famous...

The intimate relation between culture and religion in the Middle Ages is helpful for understanding Thomas Aquinas. As Bernard Lonergan once put it, “Besides being a theologian and a philosopher St. Thomas was a man of his time meeting the challenge of his time. What he was concerned to do may be considered as a theological or philosophical synthesis but, if considered more concretely, it turns out to be a mighty contribution towards the medieval cultural synthesis.”¹ In order to comprehend the significance of Thomas’s synthesis, it is helpful to consider three contexts that formed Thomas’s life and work: first,...

We know a fair amount about the life of Thomas, and several good biographies have appeared over the past half century.¹ While we have considerable information about the details of Thomas’s career, given the objective character of his writings, we have almost nothing from him that reveals his inner reflections and feelings. We also need to note that many of the stories about him come from the materials put together for his canonization process,² and since hagiography has a different purpose from biography, these need to be used with circumspection. Still, there is much of historical worth in the sources....

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

The influence of the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the more than seven centuries since his death is not just a question of the reception of theSumma theologiae, although reading and commentating on theSummahas been central to the story of Thomism (the wordThomismusappears as early as the fourteenth century). It would also be a mistake to restrict the story of theSummaonly to those who are usually identified as Thomists (Thomistae). Some of the most significant moments in the history of the reception of the book concern readers who either attacked the work, misunderstood...

Neothomism is the name given to the papally supported form of Thomism that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century The movement needs to be seen as a political event as much as it was an intellectual one.¹ The triumph of Enlightenment philosophy and its claim that theology should be based on reason restricted what Thomism there was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the intellectual ghetto of Catholic schools and seminaries. Political support for this world, however, remained strong until the French Revolution and Napoleon’s meteoric career overturned the Old Regime and convulsed Europe for...

It would take a long chapter to try to do justice to the varieties of Thomism and the forms of reception of theSumma theologiaethat have proliferated since the anniversary of Thomas’s death in 1974. Though Neothomism seems dead, many other forms of Thomism are alive and well, as Neothomism’s end sparked a new generation of historical, philosophical, and theological retrievals of theSumma, so varied as to defy generalization. Thus, Fergus Kerr recently referred to “the diversity and incommensurability of the available interpretations of Thomas’s work” as a characteristic of our time.¹

In the decades since 1974 the...