The Summa in My Pocket

Thank God for the printing press.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiæ is notorious in the theological world for being massive and complex.  Between today and the foundations of Western thought, Aquinas is the middle of the hourglass in that he synthesized ancient philosophy (Aristotle, Plato, Cicero), non-Christian philosophy (Ibn Sina, Ibn Roschd, Maimonades), Greek Fathers (Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene, Origen), Latin Fathers (Augustine, Ambrose, Boethius) within an astounding biblical background.  Besides being a 4-volume Mount Everest of theology, the Summa is also a challenge for some due to its dialectic form.  The quaestio form of the Summa is that each topic is approached with questions, which have arguments and conclusions posited and Aquinas replying to and correcting those positions. While the quaestio form underscores the profundity with which Aquinas considered the theological problems disputed within the Summa, it can also be as dizzying and exhausting as trying to decipher Aquinas' unintelligible handwriting.

My Way of Life was a book written by Frs. Walter Farrell and Martin J. Healy (1952) intended to be a pocket-sized version of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiæ.  My Way of Life helps translate the Summa into a linear form, while also offering allowing the reader to reflectively enter Aquinas' theological thought.  What emerges is not a laborious work of erudition, but rather an approachable, lively and organic work that carries Aquinas' breadth of spirit, being both mystical and poetic.  This little volume's beauty is not a merely pleasant sprinkling on the Summa's aridity, but rather gives the average reader some insight into the explosive spring of spiritual richness in Aquinas' thought, which has been refreshing theology ever since it was written. 

I've read modern Thomistic scholarship and have a sense of the renaissance in Thomistic theology and the recovery of Thomas' mysticism, sense of beauty and lively dynamism that is thankfully occuring.  But I have to say, these scholars would've gotten it sooner, had they read this little pocket book.  It's a powerhouse and should probably be on every budding theologian's shelf.  The best way to describe this book is a distillation of the Summa.  My Way of Life gets the spirit of the original and like most distilled spirits, what is condensed is potent as Hell (or Heaven in this case).  Don't believe me? Check out the first couple pages and tell me they don't knock you on your ass . . .

CHAPTER I

The One God

THE ROAD THAT STRETCHES before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs.  Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our blindness, secure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weakness, gaily in love for all the pressure on our hearts.


IN THAT DARKNESS beyond the world, we can begin to know the world and ourselves, though we see through the eyes of Another.  We begin to understand that a man was not made to pace out his life behind the prison walls of nature, but to walk into the arms of God on a road that nature could never build.


LIFE MUST BE LIVED, even by those who cannot find the courage to face it.  In the living of it, every mind must meet the rebuff of mystery.  To some men, this will be an exultant challenge: that so much can be known and truth not be exhausted, that so much is still to be sought, that truth is an ocean not to be contained in the pool of a human mind.  To others, this is a humiliation not to be borne; for it marks out sharply the limits of our proud minds.  In the living of life, every mind must face the unyielding rock of reality, of a truth that does not bend to our whim or fantasy, of the rule that measures the life and mind of a man.

IN THE LIVING OF LIFE, every human heart must see problems awful with finality.  There are the obvious problems of death, marriage, the priesthood, religious vows; all unutterably final.  But there are, too, the day to day, or rather moment to moment choices of heaven or hell.  Before every human heart that has ever beat out its allotted measures, the dare of goals as high as God Himself was tossed down: to be accepted, or to be fled from in terror.


GOD HAS SAID SO LITTLE, that yet means so much for our living. To have said more would mean less of reverence by God for the splendor of His image in us.  Our knowing and loving, He insists, must be our own; the truth ours because we have accepted it; the love ours because we have given it.  We are made in His image.  Our Maker will be the last to smudge that image in the name of security, or by way of easing the hazards of the nobility of man.


THE GREAT TRUTHS that must flood the mind of man with light are the limitless perfection of God and the perfectibility of man.  The enticements that must captivate the heart of man are the divine goodness of God and man's gratuitously given capacity to share that divine life, to begin to possess that divine goodness even as he walks among the things of earth.  The truths are not less certain because they are too clear for our eyes.  The task before our heart is not to hold a fickle love but to spend itself.


WITHOUT THESE TRUTHS, and the others that fill out the pattern of a man's days, we are underfed weaklings, starving waifs, paralyzed in our living not only by lack of strength but even more by lack of light.  To live a man must move by the steps of his heart; and how can he move until he can see and be drawn by the beauty of Goodness and Truth?

So much glory, SPF 50 should be recommended.

Buy My Way of Life