Prima Pars

Tradition:
Scholastic Christian
Author:
Thomas Aquinas
Form:
scholastic summa (Part I)
Approx. date:
c. 1266 CE

Pars I of the Summa Theologiae. 119 Quaestiones on God in himself, the procession of creatures, the angels, the six days, and man. English from the Dominican Fathers (1920s); Latin from the Vivès edition (Paris 1871-1880).

Source context· Greco-Christian stream · Greco-Latin cultural age
Stream
Greco-Christian
Cultural age
Greco-Latin (4th post-Atlantean cultural age)
Composed
c. 1266 CE
Soul-faculty
Intellectual Soul

What this work carries

Pars I gathers the patristic and Aristotelian inheritance into a systematic treatise on God in himself, the procession of creatures, the angelic hierarchies, the hexaemeron, and man. It transmits the late-antique angelology of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Aristotelian doctrine of substance, form, and intellect into a Christian dogmatic frame.

Language frame

The work is composed as a scholastic summa: each quaestio proceeds by articles, objections, sed contra, respondeo, and replies, in technical Latin designed for disputation. The form enforces sharp conceptual distinction between essence and existence, substance and accident, intellect and will.

Steiner’s engagement

  • GA 108, 1908-03-14Steiner describes scholastic philosophy as a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought, defending it against modern condemnation and noting that absorbing its concepts requires a keen and finely distinguishing mind.
  • GA 35Steiner characterizes the scholastic method as a technique of thinking suited to rationally elaborate the material of sense-observation and to press a stage further toward spiritual truth.
  • GA 246, 1908-08-17Steiner notes that the scholastic regards the technique of thought as suitable both for rationally processing empirical science and for penetrating a limited way upward into spiritual truth.
  • GA 176, 1917-09-11Steiner names Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) within the karmic stream of medieval thought whose later inversion contributes to the karma of materialism.
  • GA 213, 1922-07-09Steiner identifies modern scientific thinking as a straightforward continuation of scholastic thinking, indicating a deep structural continuity between Thomas's logic and post-Cartesian natural science.
  • GA 213, 1922-07-15Steiner treats the sundering of scholasticism's unified knowledge of God, world, and man as the inception of the modern spiritual crisis, and praises the sharpness of scholastic thinking as a discipline modern science has lost.
  • GA 220, 1923-01-27Steiner situates the Prima Pars within the medieval realism-nominalism dispute, where Thomas's moderate realism holds that universals are real in the divine intellect and in things, against the later nominalist dissolution.

Cross-tradition congruence

  • Aristotelian metaphysicsPars I christianizes Aristotle's doctrine of act and potency, form and matter, and the unmoved mover, recasting the Prime Mover as the God whose essence is to be (ipsum esse subsistens).
  • Pseudo-Dionysian angelologyThe treatise on the angels (QQ 50-64) inherits the nine hierarchies of the Celestial Hierarchy and structures them as pure separated intelligences, each its own species.
  • Islamic falsafa (Avicenna, Averroes)Thomas's essence/existence distinction and his treatment of the agent intellect engage and modify Avicennian and Averroist formulations transmitted through twelfth-century Latin translations.

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