Understanding st. Thomas

honestly why i'm looking forward to heaven.

it's hilarious how you also call one of the most influential philosophers of all time to be trash tier. it's clearly cause you are an ortholarper (it's hilarious how much you're projecting - like literally how was aquinas larping? sorry ol ex-protty, you'll always be a larper), and you have to come to terms that all of western civilization was built from the cat church (meow) that you were raised since a wee protty to hate. God gave you a bit of a brain to realize that being a protty is beyond stupid but you still hate the one true church and decided to LARP, and you feel insecure that no post schism "saint" that the ortholarp church has anywhere of the influence and respect of st. thomas aquinas, the ANGELIC DOCTOR.

How about you read the Scriptures and the pre-schism Fathers instead?

And you have the audacity to call that user a LARPer.

he wants to read summa he didnt say the church fathers. So many butthurt orthodox and dyer shills in this thread

he is 100% a prot convert LARPer, are you one too?
Gods Justice is beautiful and perfect. Just as being in the communion of saints. If God's Justice was not perfect and delightful, he wouldn't be God.

ortholarpers are deep down still baptists

agreed. they're sad they don't have a philosophical giant that's actually respected around the world and even in secular philosophy like st. thomas aquinas. their so called church is virtually unknown in the west, no influence whatsoever. virtually every world leader meets with the pope. ortholarpers are just jelly.

Sure, then it went apostate. That's why things moved leaps and bounds after the protestant reformation and, then, likewise, mainstream protestantism went apostate.

It's almost like institutions keep failing and the faith has to be renewed by actual followers through new methods and that institutions don't represent God…

If you want to get direct exposure to the Summa but are still intimidated, A Shorter Summa, (edited) by Peter Kreeft is pretty solid. Essential questions, so you can get used to St. Aquinas's format for the Summa, and copious footnotes as well. Then you can begin on the whole of the Summa. If you're still intimidated by the sheer volume of the Summa Theologiae, you can try the Summa Contra Gentiles aka On the Truth of the Catholic Faith and work your way through that first; bear in mind that SCG is aimed at missionaries trying to spread the faith as opposed to the Summa's "seminary manual for brainlets" aim. Hope this helps, and God be with ye on your endeavor! :)

Going into the Summa without a solid understanding of Aristotelian metaphysics and physics is simply not smart. Sure, you can understand a good part of the book just by deductive logic alone, but you miss out on crucial things.

Oh wow, some child of Our Heavenly Father you are.

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When posting on the board, please remember to abide by rule 2:

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It's a good book for philosophy but not for theology.
The book wouldn't change a single its main message if he had never heard of Christ. If you want good philosophical foundations read Plato instead.

Do you truly believe that?

It's challenging but not impossible.
Study a basic description of aristotelic terminology (substance, essence, being, actus, enetelechy)
Then start from here catholictheology.info/summa-theologica/
At this link you find the Summa in synthesis plus explanations. You can easily read and understand a topic every day, studying it in less than two months.

then you can go deeper by downloading the Summa and reading the full explanations

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It is sad and dishonest that you cherrypick from a book you obviously never read just for the sake of partisan polemics.
And you called larper a Saint. I'd do an exam of conscience if I were you.

read the first part of the summa contra gentiles, where he speak of the use of philosophy for theology and its limit.
Then spit in your face for speaking in ignorance.

Are you asking because you want to really get deep into Thomas Aquinas and the world of medieval philosophy, or are you looking for more casual knowledge? If the latter, I can second the recommendation for Edward Feser's Aquinas as a good starting point. Otherwise, if you really want to "fully" understand Thomas Aquinas (or any other such author), you will need to go deeper into their world. This blog post has a suggested progression to get into medieval philosophy and Thomas Aquinas' philosophy.

lyfaber.blogspot.com/2014/06/how-to-learn-metaphysics.html

And also start learning Latin now. The sooner the better, because developing Latin proficiency takes time. I like the Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata (Orberg) series, and I think there's another post on the same blog where the author recommends it as well.

You're right to some degree, that it is, as the preface states, for beginners, but beginners that already have a background in medieval philosophy. If you approach the Summa like that, there will be very much that you don't understand or misunderstand. The same applies to any technical work in any discipline. You don't know what you don't know.

Here's a copy-and-paste of the Latin recommendations I was thinking of.
lyfaber.blogspot.com/2012/11/voluntarism-again.html

Lee FaberDecember 1, 2012 at 1:54 AM
Regarding Latin, I think one just needs to suck it up and start to learn. One shouldn't read just Aquinas and/or Scotus anyway. There's Bonaventure, Ockham, and a host of others. My coblogger Michael taught himself in grad school and his latin is now better than mine (and I'm currently teaching it).

So little Scotus has actually been translated that to really understand what his 'vision' is, you need to read more than Wolter's thin selections. And the Wolter-Bychkov Reportatio should not be touched. It is shameful it was ever published.

Credo, regarding your comment, I suppose it depends on what you intend to do: presumably continue on into philosophy Phd? If you plan on having a medieval AOS, you should have some latin.

Also, who is your best friend? There are so few Scotists, after all… I wonder if I know him.

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Michael SullivanDecember 1, 2012 at 3:01 AM
I agree with Faber that, even if you're largely reading in English, if you have a serious interest in medieval philosophy or in medieval anything - or in western civilization at all - then at least some Latin is a necessity.There is simply no way around it.

Learning Latin is neither has hard nor as easy as some people make it out. What it really takes is commitment. It's true that I never had a formal course in Latin and am as self-taught as one can be. Faber says I taught myself in grad school but I began as a sophomore in college. I got a bare-bones grammar, stumbled through it a little, and bought a Vulgate. Using the King James Bible as a constant reference I inched my way line by line through the gospels. I had by that time had two years of ancient Greek so with a Greek/Latin New Testament I stumbled my way through some more, using the more familiar Greek grammar and the more familiar Latin vocabulary to balance each other out. In my college library I took down the Leonine edition of St Thomas' Summa Contra Gentiles and read it using the English translation as a crib.

Then I began to realize more formal study was necessary if my knowledge was going to be better than ad hoc. After graduating with my B.A. I set myself to study latin in the summer before grad school (I was also on my honeymoon). I worked through Wheelock, which I hated, then discovered Henle, and in the next six months to a year while doing graduate coursework and working my part-time job I worked through the four volumes of Henle, which I thought was much better and under whom I felt like I was starting to get a handle on the language. For some years I did the Liturgy of the Hours (or a lot of it anyway) in Latin, which helped a great deal. I bought a bunch of Bolchazy-Carducci readers and worked my through a number of them. When I wrote my M.A. thesis on Scotus' Questions on the Metaphysics I was able to correct the Wolter/Etzkorn translation against the critical edition.

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Continued…

Michael SullivanDecember 1, 2012 at 3:02 AM
If I knew then what I know now I would advise a learner to skip over Wheelock and all his ilk, and buy Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina series, with the supplemental readers, maybe a little extra grammatical practice, and go for it. It is by far the best approach, and I've worked through most of the course twice. After that I would advise finding an old copy of Beeson's A Primer of Medieval Latin, read as much of the Vulgate as you can stand, then get hold of Deferrari's Dictionary of St Thomas Aquinas and read some St Thomas. At that point reading almost any scholastic will be pretty easy (understanding him might be another matter). Through all this I would also recommend using your downtime to listen to Evan Millner's Latinum recordings. They used to be available as a free podcast but now I think you have to buy them on mp3 cds or direct downloads. But they're cheap, there are hundreds of hours of them, and Mr Millner has a complete audio-only course, similar to but better than Pimsleur, beginning with the absolute basics, a complete survey of grammar and conversational Latin, and working up to continuous readings from the classics and many other Latin texts. I've read a very great many Latin textbooks but I think someone could do very well with the Lingua Latina books and the Latinum recordings.

If one follows a program like this one learns far more Latin than is or seems strictly necessary to read the scholastics, but that's a good thing. I like being able to read - not translate - Virgil and Cicero on sight without a dictionary. But the other thing is, unless your Latin is solid you won't really read the scholastics, you'll translate them and consult them. Decoding a sentence or two of Aquinas is one thing. Reading hundreds or thousands of pages of Sentences commentaries is another and requires comfort and familiarity with the language. But it takes a commitment to the project. For myself I greatly regret my wasted childhood. In better days one would, if intending to be a scholar, graduate high school or its equivalent having a better mastery of Latin than I have now, but no more, alas. There was no one to teach me.

However, not wanting to scare off the more casual leaner, even being able to decode a few sentences with effort is vastly better than being totally reliant on the mercy of a translator. One can reach that kind of basic familiarity with Latin in a few dedicated months.

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A lot could be said about Latin. If you look on the Latin subreddit (forgive me), there is a Discord server invite stickied. The #resources channel has a lot of good files posted, including the majority of the Orberg series I recommended. I do strongly recommend buying the print copies as possible, however.

reddit.com/r/latin/

hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata-series

If anyone's interested in more Latin resources, let me know. Otherwise, I'll just leave it at that.

You know two things prier to Thomas Aquarius, A.) Aristotle' categories that's the philosophical model Aquarius had to use to fight with the Islamic cultural clash, but I'm warning it's tedious as a jog in hell.
B.) the pseudo-isidorian decretals, Aquarius believed in a few forged documents to support his claims. There's no need for you to follow the same errors.

I'm a former Roman Catholic, in fact.
But hey, every Orthodox on this board just has to be an ex-protestant, right?
I agree that God's justice is perfect, but I don't think I'd divert my attention from God Almighty to get smug over the damned.