On prayer and the contemplative life
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 3 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~75,400 words · 358 passages
Cite this work
- APAThomas Aquinas. (n.d.). On prayer and the contemplative life. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-aquinas/on-prayer-and-the-contemplative-life
- MLAThomas Aquinas. "On prayer and the contemplative life." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-aquinas/on-prayer-and-the-contemplative-life.
- ChicagoThomas Aquinas. On prayer and the contemplative life. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-aquinas/on-prayer-and-the-contemplative-life.
What it is about
On prayer and the contemplative life, in English translation.
Context and history
A selection of questions from the Summa on the active and contemplative lives, under an editor's title. At the end of his life Aquinas stopped writing, saying that all he had done seemed straw compared with what he had seen; these pages are the closest he came to explaining it. A note on the edition: **this is a part of the Summa theologiae**, not an independent work. The title is the English editor's, who published the treatises separately. For citation, the Summa with its question and article number.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The present generation in the fervour of its repentance is like to cast off too much. So many false principles and hasty deductions have been offered to its parents and grandparents in the name of science that it is becoming unduly suspicious of the scientific method. A century ago men's minds were sick unto death from too much science and too little mysticism. To-day the danger is that even the drawing-rooms are scented with a mysticism that anathematizes science. At no time since the days of S. Thomas was the saint's scientific method more lacking. Everywhere there is need for a mystic doctrine, which in itself is neither hypnotism nor hysteria, and in its expression is neither superlative nor apostrophic, lest the hungered minds of men die of surfeit following on starvation. The message and method of S. Thomas are part of that strange rigidity of the thirteenth century which is one of the startling paradoxes of the ages of faith. It is surely a consolation that these ages of a faith which moved mountains, or at least essayed to remove the Turk, were minded to express their beliefs in the coat of mail of human reason! The giants of those days, who in th
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