Teaching Bodies

This book is an original reading of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. It reads the main parts of the Summa backwards, starting from the conclusion, to discover Thomas’s purpose: the unification of persuasive Christian wisdom in a pattern of ongoing moral formation. The book is not another “synthesis” of Thomistic ethics. It argues instead that the Summa offers a series of exercises in evaluating the theological traditions that grew up around the original scenes of instruction: the incarnation, the Gospels, and the sacraments. God provided those scenes so that human beings might learn the most important moral lessons in ways they would find most compelling. The task of writing theology, as Thomas understands it, is to open a path through the inherited languages so that divine pedagogy can have its effect on the reader—in a memory of the original scenes but also in their present repetition. This understanding of moral formation determines the structure of the third part of the Summa, which moves from God’s choice of incarnation through the scriptural retelling of the life of Christ to the events of Christian sacraments. It also determines the structure of the Summa’s second part, which begins and ends with claims on the reader’s life.