Summa Theologiae: A Concise Tr. This item is unavailable.Summa Theologiae: A Concise Tr

Read St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica in an accessible one-volume edition for today’s Catholic reader.

For more than seven centuries, Catholics have turned to St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica―one of the greatest works of Christian theology―to explore life’s most important questions: Does God exist? Why does evil exist if God is good? What makes an action right or wrong? How can we know and love God more deeply?

Originally written as a theology textbook, the Summa Theologica draws on philosophy and theology in a highly structured format that can be challenging for modern readers. Spanning five volumes, it contains 38 treatises, 613 questions, and more than 3,000 articles, each presented through a series of objections and responses.

The Concise Summa Theologica offers an ideal intermediate step between reading the complete Summa and relying on commentaries or study guides. This Christian Classics edition features

• Aquinas’s own words in a faithful, concise translation―not a commentary or study guide;
• an intermediate-level approach that distills the original Summa Theologica to about one-sixth its length while preserving its essential insights;
• clear, nontechnical language that makes Aquinas’s theology accessible to today’s Catholic reader;
• an easy-to-read paragraph format instead of the original objection-and-response structure; and
• a practical introduction to Catholic theology for anyone reading St. Thomas Aquinas for the first time or returning to the Summa with fresh eyes.

This Christian Classics edition is an excellent choice for Catholics, theology students, seminarians, clergy, OCIA participants, and anyone seeking a trustworthy introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas. Whether you’re reading Aquinas for the first time, deepening your understanding of Catholic theology, or returning to the Summa Theologica, this one-volume edition offers a practical and approachable way to engage one of Christianity’s greatest theological classics.

St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) was a Catholic priest in the Dominican order and one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians. A prolific writer of more than sixty works, Aquinas’s masterpiece is the Summa Theologica (Summary Treatise of Theology), written between 1265 and 1273.

Born in approximately 1225 to a noble family, Aquinas joined the Dominicans of Naples in 1243. After making his profession at Naples, he studied at the University of Cologne under the celebrated St. Albert the Great. After ordination, Aquinas received his doctoral degree at the University of Paris. He was canonized in 1323 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567 by Pope Pius V.

Aquinas is the patron saint of all universities and students, and his feast day is January 28.

Timothy McDermott (1926–2014) was born in St. Helens, Lancashire, England. He studied science at the universities of Liverpool and Cambridge. In 1947, he joined the Dominican Order, and after studying philosophy and theology at the University of Oxford, he taught theology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. During this time, he collaborated in the sixty-volume translation of the Summa Theologica published in the 1960s, editing the volume on God’s nature and existence. He wrote many theological articles as well as a book on the Apostles’ Creed.

From 1970 to 1986, McDermott taught and researched the theory of computer languages and artificial intelligence at the universities of London, Cape Town, and Tasmania.

While working on The Concise Summa Theologica, he was a visiting fellow at St. Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge and served as a visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.