The Ultimate Sign of His Nature
- Benjamin Block
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On this Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, The Aquinas Institute is pleased to announce the release of the second book of St. Thomas’s earliest work, his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, now available for the first time in English translation.
“One person is said to teach another inasmuch as, by signs, he manifests to that other the reasoning process which he himself goes through by his own natural reason” (De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1). St. Thomas’s Commentary on the Sentences is no mere line-by-line analysis of the Lombard’s text, but rather, it is the product of lively classroom discussion and debate. Here the angelic doctor enjoys the liberty to take up any inquiry inspired by the text, treating topics not found anywhere else in his many works. While the purpose of the Summa Theologiae was to offer a streamlined and tightly organized exposition of theology, here St. Thomas writes freely and expansively of divine mysteries and metaphysical subtleties with all the zest and zeal of youthful genius. Students new to the Scriptum will feel that they have discovered a new continent.
The second book of the Sentences as a whole deals with questions revolving around the topic of creation, showing how all creation flows from God and reflects Him. This is fitting, for as Thomas himself writes in his Prologue to this book: “the divine goodness diffuses its rays, that is, participations in itself, in order to create things.” But while every creature bears the mark of its Maker, it is the intellectual creature alone who can come to know and love the One from whom all things proceed. In d. 16 of book 2 of the Sentences, St. Thomas explains that man is said to be created “in the image of God” not indeed because his nature is the same, but instead because man is the ultimate sign of God’s very nature, inasmuch as “the intellectual creature finds its ultimate happiness in the same activity in which the happiness of God consists, namely, intellective contemplation” (Sent. II, d. 16, q. 1, a. 2). The life of wisdom that St. Thomas pursued so earnestly only allowed him to glimpse God imperfectly in this life, but yet, as his reward for writing well of Him, St. Thomas at last received what he so arduously sought; through his intercession, may he also help us to attain the happiness he now enjoys.
Volume 3 treats creation most generally, thinking about the creation of the angels and of men. Here Aquinas considers the great questions that occupied the medieval mind: How did God bring forth creatures from nothing? What is the nature of angelic knowledge? How ought we to understand the days of creation recounted in Genesis?
Volume 4 deals more particularly with the fall of man and thus the nature of sin. This second volume of Book II takes up the thorny questions surrounding original sin, the transmission of guilt, and the state of man after the fall. Students of theology will find here Aquinas’s most expansive treatment of these mysteries—questions which, as in so many cases, he never returned to with such detail in his later works.
The chief translator of these two volumes, Dr. Christopher Decaen, working together with the expertise of Fr. Dylan Schrader and Dr. Beth Mortensen, brings the same careful attention to St. Thomas’s Latin that distinguished his work on Book I. As always, the text itself is presented in the Opera Omnia series’ signature format: side-by-side Latin and English, in beautiful hardcover volumes, distinguished for both beauty and practicality. The Latin text, derived initially from the Mandonnet edition, has been corrected against the not-yet-released critical edition of the Leonine Commission, with whom the Aquinas Institute is collaborating. That feature will make these volumes the best Latin editions as well as the only English editions.
We continue this jubilee year celebrating 800 years of St. Thomas with these latest volumes of his earliest major work. “The whole of our life bears fruit and comes to its end in the knowledge of the Trinity,” Thomas wrote in the first book of his Sentences (In I Sent., d. 2, exp.). And indeed, these reflections of the young Aquinas are themselves the fruit of a life of prayer and study, whose sole aim was only the knowledge of, and union with, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—through whom all things were made.
Both volumes of Book II of The Commentary on the Sentences are available now for pre-order: