Studia Superiora Thomistica

The course

The course is a commentary on the Summa Theologica. It is catechesis in the school of St. Thomas: scholastic, scriptural, and answerable to the magisterium.

Commentary

Each question is read as Thomas wrote it. The objections are real difficulties. The sed contra locates the Church’s judgment. The respondeo gives the reason. The replies do not discard the objections; they place them. The commentary stays inside that order.

Three lights

The reading keeps to the magisterial tradition, so the commentary does not invent a private Thomas. It keeps the phronema of the Fathers, the mind with which they received the same faith. And it keeps the principles of biblical exegesis, because sacred doctrine is argued from Holy Scripture.

Order

The Summa is already a curriculum. Students begin where Thomas begins, with sacred doctrine itself, and they proceed part by part. Nothing is assigned as an isolated quotation.

Exercise

Understanding is tested. Homework asks the student to reconstruct an argument, answer an objection in Thomas’s terms, and say what the article does and does not claim. The point is possession of the doctrine, not recognition of a paragraph.

Resources

Beside the article stand the sources it uses and the tradition that received it: the sacred page, the Fathers, the councils and catechisms, and the commentators who taught the Summa in the schools of the Church.