Practical Thomism

Peter Kreeft’s Practical Theology isn’t quite an introduction to Thomas’s Summa. It’s too repetitive, too selective, to be that. It functions better as an introduction to Thomas—a mystical, jolly Thomas not unlike Chesterton’s. Most of all, it’s just what Kreeft says it is, a tour through the Summa that highlights the practical spiritual guidance one can draw from this greatest of scholastic achievements.

Kreeft quotes at length from 350+ sections of the Summa, and adds his own explanatory, applicatory glosses. The result is a clever, practical, wise overview of the expected topics of a book on practical theology (God, sin, Christ, salvation, sacraments) but also on many unexpected topics like games, jokes, and the goodness of mosquitoes. Kreeft’s breezy, easy style shouldn’t be mistaken for fluffiness. His comments are as tough-minded as the passages from Thomas on which he comments.

We get pithy proverbs like this, describing how sinful desire is desire for something good: “Every sin is a desire for some forbidden fruit, some invitingly fat, wiggly worm that the devil puts on his hook. If the fruit, or the worm, had no goodness, we would not desire it. Even stupid fish don’t bite bare hooks” (8).

On God’s presence in all things: “Since God causes creatures, He must touch them. . . . creatures touch creatures only externally, from without. God touches creatures internally, at their ultimate center: their act of existing. He ‘turns them all on’ from within” (13). Being Being, God “gives being. And therefore we can find Him in every being, in every grain of sand” (13).

Kreeft knows Aquinas is an Augustinian, and he makes the Augustinianism glow: “Everything, including your reading of this book at this very moment, is designed and planned by God. Trust Him absolutely and totally with every detail; He is the storyteller and you are one of His beloved characters in His story” (49).

On the love that moves the sun and stars: “Physical gravity is a physical form of love. That little rock is falling because it is in love with the big rock called the earth. . . . That little electron, with its negative charge, is in love with the positive charge on the proton that it’s orbiting around, like a man circling around a woman. . . . Of course rocks and electrons don’t know what they’re doing. . . . But God knew what He was doing when He designed them. Infinite love created many finite versions of love” (92).

Christ, Kreeft says, is “the Father’s eternal ecstasy. The Incarnation practices this to us. We practice it to each other by unselfconscious love and by self-sacrifice” (95).

There’s some Catholic apologetics in the book, at the expected places: Mary, relics, sacraments. Large tracts of the book, like most of Thomas, is generically, edifyingly Christian. If Practical Theology isn’t a thorough introduction to the Summa, it would still be a good place to start to get the feel, and marvel at the profundity and beauty, of Thomas’s work.