Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas

by St. Thomas Aquinas & Anton Pegis [ed.]

690 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1948

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not particularly easy reading and challenges one to complete. I probably would not have read this if not trapped in a hospital bed for ages with few choices of reading material. Staff provided me this though, and so I took it on if only to mitigate the pain and boredom.

I'm not particularly religious, so I did find the attempts by St. Thomas Aquinas to address common challenges and questions about God a suitable topic as I myself had made these challenges before, albeit with no one famous answering them. The challenges were well laid out, logical in presentation, and each answered in order. The answers were often times extremely convoluted and unsupported with many times some sort of statement of fact made such as "infinity is perfect" or so on that really was an unacceptable response. It felt like at times the goalposts were moved to fit the Biblical narrative a bit, but this was expected and tied in the Bible rather well to his arguments even if the original objections were not truly addressed.

I liked how the reader is "spoken to" as if you are an audience in a debate. This appealed to me greatly as surely the best arguments are often in debates. Aquinas tended to refer to ancient Greek philosophers too often for my tastes as it felt out of context and misquoting perhaps to try and use common sources of objections to God against themselves. Not saying the tactic was bad per se, just that anyone with knowledge of the Greeks and their writings would know the misuse and cause harm to Aquinas' argument. Sometimes he hit the mark though.

The best sections of the Summa Theologica are written in the first half directly responding to challenges to the existence of God. Things start to go downhill after that with a lot of theological niche topics that really are lesser and detract from the main debate.

I gave this read a 3 Star since it did spark a lot of thought and the writing is pretty well done. While I'm fairly certain it did not move the needle for me much on my worldviews, it did help me consider how I relate with God and the world around me.

[Ronald Bunavicz Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest of reads for some perhaps but essential for the history of theology.