Greetings on this feast that celebrates all the varied and astonishing saints of the Church! We are thrilled that available for pre-order today is one of the most delightful and remarkable volumes that the Aquinas Institute has ever had the privilege of publishing. Opuscula IV: Prayers & Hymns, Office of Corpus Christi, Sermons contains not only all of St. Thomas’s sermons and sermon fragments, but also the two offices of Corpus Christi that he lovingly composed, as well as all of his prayers and hymns.
Here we find what all Aquinas’s philosophy and theology were in service of. Here we see where his heart was. Those who may have mistaken Thomas Aquinas for a cold academic will read here in his prayers and sermons the warm love that informed Thomas’s study.
His prayers are less known, but in Fr. Paul Murray’s gentle and fresh translation, Thomas’s prayers are formatted to allow each phrase its own impact, shining forth as the poetry that they are. St. Thomas would pray these prayers at the elevation of the host with tears in his eyes, when he attended a second daily Mass for the sake of adoration. Also included in this volume are Thomas’s foundational hymns to the Eucharist, which will give new life to your meditations. Thomas’s hymns and prayers reveal a heart bursting with love for the Eucharist, especially. After years of steeping himself in Scripture, Scriptural imagery now pours forth in luminous words of praise. His mastery of abstraction seems to have been leading all along to the metaphors on which he builds his hymns. It’s as if he has opened the floodgates of what he has seen in his metaphysics, and it courses forth in love poetry. In these devotions, we see another side of Thomas—a side which, to be sure, we always knew was there. After all, in his “Adoro te, devote,” he taught us to sing about the poor humble slave who eats the Master.
As the Church strives to bring about a Eucharistic revival, the Aquinas Institute is delighted to contribute in this volume also a new publication of the Office of Corpus Christi, composed by a mature Aquinas at the behest of Pope Urban IV for the celebration of the new feast of Corpus Christi. As always, the text is presented in side-by-side Latin and English. In addition to the texts of the Office, the music for the chants themselves that Aquinas indicated should be sung for the Office are also included here.
Finally, this volume is the first complete collection of all of Aquinas’s sermons and sermon fragments. Thomas’s sermons remind us that before he was a university professor, he was a member of the Order of Preachers, having committed his life to the endeavor of bringing others closer to Christ through his preaching. As the translator of these sermons, the Very Rev. Mark-Robin Hoogland notes: “Thomas’s language in these sermons is strikingly plain and simple; he did not want to show off, it seems, as some of his contemporaries did. He may well have taken St. Paul’s words to heart, that Christ sent him ‘to preach the Gospel, and not with the wisdom of human eloquence, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning’ (1 Cor 1.17). The sermons are presented here in order of the liturgical year, so that the reader can find the meditation appropriate to any given season or feast.
Today’s feast, for example, brought forth this fine reminder from Friar Thomas: "Now, people who live together, in the sense that they have the same end, must share with one another what they are doing in such a way that those who have not yet reached the end are led to it. And therefore, we, the ones on the way to happiness, are led into it by words and examples. Whereas the ones who have already achieved the end help others to achieve it. And this is the reason why we celebrate the feasts of the saints who have already attained happiness, so that we may be helped by their favors and may be built up by their examples and stimulated by their rewards."
We are delighted to be able to share with all of you the words and example of this remarkable friend we have in heaven.
This volume is a devotional treasure that you will want to keep on your bedside table or bring with you to the chapel for your holy hour. In a way, this volume brings us the closest to what we set out to do in publishing the Opera Omnia. Here we find the intellectual giant who still at the end of his life prayed with such childlike simplicity, “Non nisi te, Domine.”
Opuscula IV can be pre-ordered here and should arrive in time for Christmas.
St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!