New releases

The Aquinas Institute is pleased to announce the release of three new volumes: The Supplement to the Tertia Pars of the Summa Theologiae in two volumes, and the first volume of the Commentary on the Sentences, Book IV.

We are particularly excited to announce the release of Book IV, Distinctions 1-13 of St. Thomas Aquinas‘s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard in a bilingual edition. Apart from selections from the questions on love and charity, this is the only significant portion of the Scriptum super sententias ever to be published in English—and it is only the first volume in a series that will eventually cover the entire work.   In advance of the physical book, we have made the text available along with other works by Aquinas at  aquinas.cc.

Until now, the Scriptum has been hard to find even in a good Latin text.   The best Latin edition available, the 1944 edition of Moos, is out of print, rare, and stops halfway through Book IV.   By the gracious permission of the Leonine Commission, the Aquinas Institute edition has benefited from corrections based on a provisional critical text.   It also has the obvious benefit of being in print and inexpensive.

Students new to the Scriptum will feel that they have discovered a new continent. While there is considerable overlap between the content of the Scriptum and Aquinas‘s Summae, there are also striking differences.   Often Aquinas treats a subject more fully in the Scriptum than in other works, and sometimes he takes up questions he never writes about elsewhere.  While the purpose of the Summa Theologiae was to offer a streamlined and tightly organized exposition of theology, in the Scriptum he writes freely and expansively of divine mysteries and metaphysical subtleties with all the zest and zeal of youthful genius.

Teachers long familiar with the Scriptum will be glad to have an affordable edition suitable for classroom use.   Where Aquinas refers to other authors, we have provided footnotes to modern editions, using critical editions where available, and substituting CCSL citations for the PL and PG citations in Mandonnet and Moos.   While acknowledging the limitations of the notion of a “parallel text,” we have also included notes at the beginning of many articles indicating the loca parallela as often found in Latin editions of Aquinas‘s works.

Amazon is now taking pre-orders for these three volumes. Please stop by to have a look, and share the news!