Review: Summa Obscura
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 16, 2013
Summa Theologica by St. Thomas AquinasThe Summa has been the gold standard for Catholic thinking and teaching for over 800 years.  It is said that St. Thomas "baptized Aristotle", that is took his pagan philosophy and put a Christian spin on it.  Since I know little of Aristotelian philosophy and the accompanying vocabulary, I frequently had difficulties following many of the more obtuse presentations.  In general, Thomas would take a subject, eg. Angels, dissect in into a number of subparts, and present it in a series of questions.  A "straw man" would answer the question and then Thomas would prove the straw man answers were incorrect.Many of Thomas' medieval assumptions seem quaint to the modern reader.  For example, there are only four elements:  fire, water, air, and earth.  Some of his literal interpretation of the Bible flies in the face of modern biblical scholarship.  Thomas asserts that man has seven souls, each with a function such as intellect, digestion, locomotion, control of the senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc), memory, and maybe a few functions I can't recall.While I originally bought this book as a possible source of spiritual inspiration, I am afraid that a more contemporary work would do better.