Parts of Parts of Aquinas about Parts and Types of Parts

Thomas Aquinas gets the largest number of pages in the Britannica Great Books set. Only he and Shakespeare get two volumes, and the Domenican Ox’s volumes are quite a bit larger than the Bard’s. (Thanks to Aquinas, I now know that calling Shakespeare “the Bard” is a figure of speech known as antonomasia. Antonomastically, Aristotle is “the Philosopher” for Aquinas, and Irene Adler is “the Woman” for Sherlock Holmes.) Still, the whole of Aquinas’s monumental Summa Theologica doesn’t quite fit in all those pages. What another Adler – Mortimer, the driving force behind the Britannica collection – left out of the Britannica set were a supplement that may not have been written by Aquinas himself and parts of the Second Part of the Second Part. Yes, that is Aquinas’s own designation for his very medieval organizational scheme: the Summa as a whole is in three parts, and the second part itself has two parts.

For 2020 and 2021, I assigned myself to read large portions of the part excised from the Britannica set, and it has become clear to me why, if something had to be left out, it was these passages. The bulk of II-II (as A. abbreviates it) focuses on the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. I fell in love with Aquinas several years ago primarily because of his clear, balanced mode of presentation, but also because in laying out Christian theology he actually gives me good, practical advice on how to live in a manner befitting a Christian. And I had hoped that these pages on the virtues would run over with wholesome instruction.

But, alas, St. Thomas is more interested here in analyzing and categorizing the virtues than in exhorting his readers to embody them. His primary method of analysis is to divide each virtue into . . . wait for it . . . parts. He even tells us that there are three different kinds of parts, so each cardinal virtue gets divided three ways. Then he asks such questions as whether martyrdom is a part of charity. Well, the answer goes, all virtues come from charity, but martyrdom is primarily a part of fortitude because it involves facing evil for the sake of a higher good.

Still, Aquinas made many interesting and useful points in the passages I read this year (on fortitude and temperance). Here’s a sample:

• Fear is sometimes quite rational.

• One can be humble proudly.

• All virtue in anyone whatsoever comes by the grace of God. (Not all grace is sanctifying grace.)

• "Insensibility," the denial of pleasures themselves, is a sin because pleasure in necessary things is part of the natural order.

• There is a good pride (happiness in the gifts of God) and a bad pride (essentially, the belief that oneself is more deserving of God than others).

• Pride is even more principal than the capital (i.e. “deadly”) sins, since they all flow from pride. The pride in the list of seven capital sins is actually “vainglory”: the desire for outward show of excellence and recognition of one’s special status.

• Knowledge of the truth is good in itself, but the virtue of studiousness can become the vice of curiosity when done to take pride in the acquired knowledge, to discover faults in others for the pleasure of knowing them, etc.

Given the subject, I’ll be medieval and leave that list at a wholesome, round seven points. May you use them to live more virtuously today!