Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~510,000 words · 2,405 passages
Cite this work
- APAThomas Aquinas. (n.d.). Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-aquinas/summa-theologica-part-i-prima-pars
- MLAThomas Aquinas. "Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-aquinas/summa-theologica-part-i-prima-pars.
- ChicagoThomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-aquinas/summa-theologica-part-i-prima-pars.
What it is about
God, creation and human nature: the first part of the Summa, where Aquinas sets out the Five Ways and everything that follows from them.
Context and history
Written around 1265-68 for theology students whom Aquinas thought poorly served by the textbooks of his day. It proceeds by questions, and each question by articles that open with the objections against: the form is a scholastic disputation put into writing. The Prima Pars treats God, the Trinity, the angels and the human soul, and it is where the Five Ways for demonstrating God's existence are found.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The text of this electronic edition was originally produced by Sandra K. Perry, Perrysburg, Ohio, and made available through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library <http://www.ccel.org>. I have eliminated unnecessary formatting in the text, corrected some errors in transcription, and added the dedication, tables of contents, Prologue, and the numbers of the questions and articles, as they appeared in the printed translation published by Benziger Brothers. Each article is now designated by part, question number, and article number in brackets, like this: > SECOND ARTICLE [I, Q. 49, Art. 2] > Whether the Supreme Good, God, Is the Cause of Evil? In a few places, where obvious errors appeared in the Benziger Brothers edition, I have corrected them by reference to a Latin text of the _Summa._ These corrections are indicated by English text in brackets. For example, in Part I, Question 45, Article 2, the first sentence in the Benziger Brothers edition begins: "Not only is it impossible that anything should be created by God...." By reference to the Latin, "non solum _non_ est impossibile a Deo aliquid creari" (emphasis added), this has been corrected to "Not only is it [not] impossible that anything should be created by God...." This electronic edition also differs from the Benziger Brothers edition in the following details (as well as the obvious lack of the original page numbers and headers): * The repetitive expression "We proceed thus to the [next] Article" does not appear directly below the title of each article. * Italics are represented by underscores at the beginning and end, _like this._ Quotations and othe
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