Bernard McGinn on St. Thomas and the *Summa*

The actual title is Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: A Biography.  I enjoyed this book and learned a good deal from it, here is one excerpt:

…understanding the Summa as based on the cycle of emanation and return helps tie much of Thomas’s theological work together, from the Writing on the Sentences to the Summa.  In his earliest synthesis Thomas had already referred to the coming forth from and return of all things to God as a key theological principle…

For Thomas this circular motion reveals god’s sapiential ordering on the most universal level.  To think of the exitus-reditus model as primarily philosophical and Neoplatonic, as some have argued, is a modern view that Thomas would not have shared.  What else does scripture teach but how all things were created by God and are directed back to him as their final goal?

You can order the book here.