@summatheologiae has set out to post an abridged version of St Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae via Twitter. He explains:The goal: 1 article per weekday, broken up into a few tweets. I'll do my best to be brief & funny and inspire you to look up the original.That is not at all as daft as it might sound. Even following a summary of the Summa in this way would be very beneficial; and as the fellow says, it should prompt you to look up the original.
There are plenty of sites with an English translation of the Summa. Out of habit, I have always used the New Advent site which is helpfully laid out. @summatheologiae points to a Dominican site with nice printable pdfs of the Summa in the 1920 Dominican translation so you can print out a particular question (or article) to take with you on the train.
For those who know Latin, there is the monumental Corpus Thomisticum which has all the works of St Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin, as well as several other useful resources.
Posting an article a day on Twitter is a long-term project, of course. I just did a quick estimate assuming an average of 5 articles per question. On that reckoning, it would take over seven years. But someone may have some statistics and be able to tell us exactly how many articles there are.
UPDATE: Gregory the Eremite has supplied the information that there are 2669 articles in the Summa which is an average of 5.21 articles per question. I'm rather chuffed that my estimate was quite close!
See also Gregory's blog Reading the Summa which is written in support of the York Aquinas Reading Group which is working through the Summa.
7 comments:
Father,
May I slip in an advert for our site "Reading the Summa"? It's at
http://readingthesumma.blogspot.com
We're slowly reading our way through the great work and producing summaries of each question, together with background material on metaphysics, anthropology and the rest.
We're hoping to develop it as a useful resource for all those approaching St. Thomas. The first treatise (on the one God) should be complete before the start of the next academic year!
According to the text of the Holy Father's recent general audiences on St. Thomas, the summa contains 512 questions with 2,669 articles. (I think this doesn't include the supplement!)
Many thanks, Gregory. I'll put a link into the post with your site.
(My estimate was not bad as it turns out - there is an average of 5.21 articles per question!)
Fr Tim, I can't find @summatheologiae on Twitter - maybe he's not started tweeting yet?
Ed - sorry, there was a mistake in the link. It's corrected now.
(Also you can find him on twitter by searching for "summatheologiae")
Many years ago I bought the 5-volume edition (1948) translated by the English Dominicans. I was amused to read in St. Thomas' prologue:
"Because the Master of Catholic Truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners...we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian Religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners..."
So St. Thomas considered the Summa to be "Theology Light" or a Shorter Catechism...!!!
One shudders to think what the 'complete version' would have been like!
Thanks for the link. Very interesting.
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