“Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars: with the Commentary of Cardinal Cajetan” (Catholic University of America Press, 2024)
Author: William Marshner was a founding faculty member of Christendom College in Front Royal, where he helped design the theology and philosophy curriculum. Now retired, he is a longtime parishioner of Holy Transfiguration Melkite Greek Catholic Church in McLean. He and his wife, Connie, have five children.
Why did you write this book? When I was teaching theology at Christendom College, I realized that my students needed more help than they could get from the existing English translations of St. Thomas Aquinas. This book is my new translation of the Summa Theologiae along with the first-ever translation of Cardinal Thomas Cajetan’s commentary on it.
The Summa is a monumental encyclopedia of answers to theological questions that have been asked from the early days of the church fathers down to the 1200s when Aquinas was writing, and ever since then. All the questions about God as one and God as three and also about the free creation of creatures are in the first part of the Summa, the Prima Pars, for which I have made a brand-new translation.
I also translated Cajetan’s commentaries on the Summa.
The author of the commentary was a man from Gaeta, Italy, named Thomas deVio. His commentary was first published in 1511. Because of his town of origin, he is known as “Cajetan.”
Although Aquinas himself had been translated many times, his most important commentator, Cajetan, has never before been translated into any modern language. Pope Leo XIII thought that Cajetan’s commentary was so important and helpful that he commanded its text be included with that of the Summa in his definitive critical edition of all Aquinas’ works.
Students (and seminarians) limited to English or another vernacular have been deprived of these insights until now.
People today imagine Aquinas’ work was received immediately with reverence by other theologians and by the church’s leadership. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aquinas’ text disappeared under a cloud of critics from the day he laid down his pen, until Cajetan’s brilliant commentary vindicated him 150 years later. Subsequently many popes recommended or even enjoined that the thought of St. Thomas should be the foundation of Catholic seminary education.
Synopsis: In 1879, in his encyclical, “Aeterni Patris,” (“Of the Eternal Father”), Pope Leo XIII stipulated that Thomism, the system of Aquinas, should be the foundation of Catholic philosophy, and that it should be studied in conjunction with Cajetan’s commentaries. This book makes that study possible in English.
What should the average Catholic know about this book? Today, seminarians don’t know any more Latin than the average man in the pew, but both need to understand the brilliant theology of Aquinas. With this translation of the Summa in modern language and the commentary of Cajetan, all can access the education Leo XIII recommended.
