Doctrina sacra

Doctrina sacra January 8, 2016

The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas has a clear surface structure. A first part, two parts of the second part, and a third part. But that obvious structure doesn’t tell the whole story.

Thomas explains the structure of the treatise at the outset (1, 2): “Because the chief aim of sacred doctrine is to teach the knowledge of God, not only as He is in Himself, but also as He is the beginning of things and their last end, and especially of rational creatures, as is clear from what has been already said, therefore, in our endeavour to expound this science, we shall treat: (1) Of God; (2) Of the rational creature’s advance toward God; (3) of Christ, who as man, is our way to God.”

Fergus Kerr glosses this as a “narrative” theology concerned with the journey of rational creatures from God and back to him: “Thomas’s theology is entirely dominated by the promise of human participation in God’s own blessedness. Thus, “the plan is clear – to treat the moral life as a journey to beatitude (secunda pars) in the middle of the treatment of God as beginning and end of all things (prima pars) and the treatment of the God-man Christ as the beginning of the new creation (tertia pars). The exposition of sacred doctrine, then, has the narrative structure of a journey from God as created to God as beatifying in raising the dead – from creation to beatitude.”

Yves Congar saw this as a fundamentally ecclesiological structure. Even though Thomas included no treatise on the church, the whole is about the return of humanity to God through Christ. The church is this return.

Kerr has described the structure as an “eschatological foundationalism.” Sacred doctrine is founded on axioms, but they are not arrived at by some process of autonomous reflection. They are given by revelation.

Thomas says that every science proceeds from principles of a higher science. Sacra doctrina is a science and thus must receive its axioms from something higher than itself. As science, there is nothing higher; neither philosophy nor mathematics nor sociology can provide the founding principles. Rather, the founding principles proceed from the scientia Dei, the only science higher than the scientia that is sacred doctrine.

When Thomas sums this up, he introduces another factor that justifies Kerr’s characterization: “because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed. Hence, just as the musician accepts on authority the principles taught him by the mathematician, so sacred science is established on principles revealed by God.” The phrase is “and the blessed.” The higher scientia is not only from God but from those who have full knowledge of God in the beatific vision.

We cannot know this science of the blessed without revelation, so in a sense nothing is really added by the addition of this phrase. Yet the addition tilts the whole Summa eschatologically. All the saints will one day have the knowledge of the blessed. We do not yet have it, and yet that knowledge is the higher science that establishes the principles of theology. Our principles come from knowledge we don’t yet have. It is science by faith, our foundation in the subject of things not yet seen.


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