We live in an age of excellent short introductions to Thomas Aquinas, with three—McGinn's new volume, J.-P. Torrell's Aquinas's Summa: Background, Structure, & Reception (Catholic University of America Press, 2005), and Fergus Kerr's Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009)—keyed directly to the Summa theologiae. All three reflect the impact of M.-D. Chenu and the school at Le Saulchoir on the study of Thomas's thought in the 20th century. This means treating Aquinas primarily as a Dominican theologian in a tumultuous European century, committed to the clear and consistent presentation of Christian doctrine for use in the pastoral work of his order and of the church as a whole.
McGinn sets the life of the Summa theologiae in the world of the Gregorian reform and its key books: The Glossa Ordinaria, Gratian's Decretum, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Given these resources, how should “itinerant priests practicing apostolic poverty” meet the needs of the church in a dangerous world (17)? Chapter 2 responds to this challenge with a brief life of Thomas, highlighting the mendicant's conflict with the secular masters at Paris (25–26), the debate over Aristotle (29–36), and “the break” Thomas “was making from standard pedagogy” in undertaking the Summa (48). The chapter ends with an important account of sacra doctrina as the object of study and exposition (68). The following chapter illustrates Thomas's thought and style with readings from each part, emphasizing the “sapiential ordering to the whole of sacra doctrina” (116).
From here on the life of the Summa takes over and McGinn's writing becomes even livelier. Thomas failed “to replace the unwieldy Sentences” (119), and his work provoked criticism, condemnation, and dispute (134). Nonetheless, the Summa was translated into Greek, Armenian, and Middle High German. The Secunda secundae, always the most popular part, was printed in Strassburg in 1463, less than a decade after Gutenberg's Bible (143). But the Summa fell on hard times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the recently converted Newman being told, in 1846, that Aristotle and St. Thomas “are out of favor here and throughout Italy” (162).
And then came Pius IX. Returned to Rome after a popular uprising, Pius set about “constructing a ‘fortress Catholicism’ against the political and intellectual threats of the modern world” (166). Jesuits and Dominicans throughout Europe worked to establish the Summa theologiae as a breakwater against modern liberalism, culminating in Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris, of 1879, “the most important document in the history of the official reception of the Summa theologiae” (169). Not only did Leo proclaim the primacy of Thomas, but he went on to establish a commission dedicated to editing his works, though the urgency of the task led, as McGinn notes, to a version of the Summa “defective in its first half, somewhat better in the second” (177).
Not surprisingly, the Neothomism of Pius, Leo, and their successors provoked first the battle with “Modernism,” (184–188) but also what McGinn calls “Revived Thomism,” with Chenu as a “central figure” (189). Trained by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange—the “sacred monster of Thomism” (241, nn.23–24)—Chenu rebelled, hoping to retrieve “the significance of Thomas's theology as a resource for contemporary thinking” (189). His 1937 pamphlet “criticizing the `Baroque Scholasticism” of Garrigou-Lagrange” led to a “donnybrook” (190), which resulted in his removal as rector of Le Saulchoir. Despite his travails, Chenu and his coworkers persisted, and saw the “historical-theological approach to Thomas vindicated by ongoing research” (191). This approach persists not only in Torrell, but in the Americans Weisheipl and Wippel (192). Lonergan, Rahner, and von Balthasar—McGinn's representative theologians of the recent past—each dealt with the Summa in ways freed from the constraints of neo-Thomism. While “Paleo-,” sometimes “Taliban-Thomism” (213), persists, it is no longer the institutional bully of the past.
The Summa theologiae lives on, and so this biography remains unfinished. Some of its recent life is recounted in Torrell (chapter 6) and, in more technical detail, in Kerr's After Aquinas (Blackwell, 2002). But McGinn's biography, with its flair for storytelling, is now the place to start.
