Embracing Wisdom: The Summa Theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy

That the exercise of our intellectual powers in the service of the Gospel can prove life-transforming is a principle that both informs the writings of Thomas Aquinas and, at the same time, marks the horizon of his thought. Yet the contemporary interpretation of Aquinas? thought, with a few notable exceptions, continues to suffer from the modern divorce between systematic theology and spirituality. Even among those studies that link Aquinas? systematic and spiritual purposes, few have asked how Aquinas sets about composing his text in such a way that it orders spiritual operations of memory, affect, imagination, understanding, judgment, and decision to each other and to the purpose of Christian spiritual development.

"Embracing Wisdom" proposes a theological interpretation of the "Summa theologiae" as a spiritual pedagogy ordered to the growth in wisdom, and thus in holiness, of preachers and confessors in the late thirteenth century. It proceeds along two unequal trajectories. The first proceeds by examining the social and cultural transformations of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the spiritual crisis they occasioned for the Church, a crisis which called for the creation of a new kind of pastoral agent to take responsibility for the preaching of the Gospel. The analysis that follows develops a picture of the socio-cultural role of the theologian and preacher and brings to light the rhetorical means Aquinas deploys to promote the formation of wise preachers who can mediate the Gospel by means of new cultural forms.

Successive chapters then present the pedagogical structure and spiritual dynamic of the "Summa theologiae" in light of these rhetorical principles, showing how it climaxes in the Christology of the "tertia pars." This Christology is shown to promote communion with and conforming of the whole person to Wisdom Incarnate, transforming the student into an agent of Divine Wisdom in the world.