To do this, he set to work charting a course of studies for the students of this new studium. As the assigned leader of this project, Aquinas was in charge of creating the program of theological formation that would be implemented at this new theological center. Select friars from throughout the Province would be sent to study there, with the hope that they would spread the intellectual zeal from this one house to the province’s other Dominican priories when these friars were sent out for further missions. Thomas with founding a center of studies at its Roman headquarters-Santa Sabina. Despite years of exhortations and commands from the Dominican powers-that-be, the friars had been unable to do anything to remedy the situation. As a result, the preaching of the friars was beginning to run theologically dry, lacking the robust doctrinal character appropriate to the Dominican charism. Regrettably, many of them had forsaken the reading of sacred books. Its intellectual life was in a sad state because the Roman friars had lost their ardor for study. Rather, he intended to meet a specific need of his own era (see Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, 142–145).ĭuring the 1260s, the Roman Province of the Dominican Order had a problem. Thomas began his work on the Summa Theologiae, he did not set out to write a timeless classic.
You probably have heard of the Summa, but do you know why Aquinas wrote it? With an import that is vast and perennial, the Summa has become one of the most important texts of Christian literature. This work has fed the minds of over 700 years of Catholic thinkers, and at least two popes have written laws to enshrine it within the syllabi of seminary professors (see the Code of Canon Law, can.
If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably heard of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theological masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae.
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