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Companion to the Summa Theologica Vol. II
It is not hard to admire St. Thomas Aquinas immovably caught in the splendor of a stained-glass window; it is easy to pay tribute to his Summa Theologica as long as it remains high on a bookshelf giving character to a library. Under these circumstances, we of the twenty first century can read about them both, talk about them enthusiastically, but pretty much leave them both alone. To have Thomas walking among us, his book opened on our desks for serious study, now that is altogether something else.
Aquinas is one who regardless of your placement on your spiritual journey. Aquinas is the basis for so much of what we have come to regard as dogma. This work is essential to not only understanding Aquinas’s other works, but also our own journey. These issues, which he presents are not only fundamental, for many they are stumbling blocks, for others, they tend to be work around issues. These writings are the basics and yet essential works out of the plethora of works Aquinas has written. These are by no means the end all of him. They are merely the tip of a large glacier, which seems to forever be moving us forward.
A Locksmith
In time, much of this topic, enquiry and understanding will be relegated to the immortals as we plunged into the Dark Ages. It will not reemerge into the fore front until the likes of an equal intellectual Titan begins to bellow. This is none other than Thomas Aquinas, a prodigy, under the tutelage of Albert Magnus, a.k.a. Albert the Great, of the Cologne University. Aquinas is one of the few, who not only undertake this extraordinary issue to task, but will also bear fruit in this endeavor. Walter Farrell in the early 1900’s attempts to reignite and reintroduce this leviathan into modern day verbiage and into their hands opening their minds with a cool calculated formulary, which remains unrivaled.
Aquinas is one who regardless of your placement on your spiritual journey. Aquinas is the basis for so much of what we have come to regard as dogma. This work is essential to not only understanding Aquinas’s other works, but also our own journey. These issues, which he presents are not only fundamental, for many they are stumbling blocks, for others, they tend to be work around issues. These writings are the basics and yet essential works out of the plethora of works Aquinas has written. These are by no means the end all of him. They are merely the tip of a large glacier, which seems to forever be moving us forward.
A Locksmith
In time, much of this topic, enquiry and understanding will be relegated to the immortals as we plunged into the Dark Ages. It will not reemerge into the fore front until the likes of an equal intellectual Titan begins to bellow. This is none other than Thomas Aquinas, a prodigy, under the tutelage of Albert Magnus, a.k.a. Albert the Great, of the Cologne University. Aquinas is one of the few, who not only undertake this extraordinary issue to task, but will also bear fruit in this endeavor. Walter Farrell in the early 1900’s attempts to reignite and reintroduce this leviathan into modern day verbiage and into their hands opening their minds with a cool calculated formulary, which remains unrivaled.
- GenresTheology
365 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1974
6 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
Walter Farrell
39 books1 followerFather Walter Farrell OP., STD., STM., was a prominent Moral Theologian of the Dominican Central Province.
He was editor of the "Dominicana" during his time as a Student Brother at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. He later joined the Province of St. Albert the Great after its foundation in 1939. He helped to launch "The Thomist", a quarterly speculative review, in April 1939.
Father Farrell passed away at River Forest, Illinois, at the age of 49.
He was editor of the "Dominicana" during his time as a Student Brother at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. He later joined the Province of St. Albert the Great after its foundation in 1939. He helped to launch "The Thomist", a quarterly speculative review, in April 1939.
Father Farrell passed away at River Forest, Illinois, at the age of 49.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 17, 2022
Walter Farrell's series of four books explaining the concepts contained in St. Thomas' "Summa Theologica" is as ambitious as the Summa itself, as it takes the metaphysical reasoning of Aquinas and presents it in 20th Century language for better accessibility to more modern audiences. My own copy of the Summa is two volumes, but they are massive, with double-columned pages of text in very small print. It took me two months just to get through half of the first volume, and that was years ago. So the Companion seems like a reasonable condensation. However, I may have to go back and reread some of the actual Summa with regard to the subjects covered in this section of the Companion.
The second volume of the Companion regards human happiness, a worthwhile discussion for anyone of any faith. Yet Farrell goes a little overboard with his modern analogies here. Normally, when a teacher can apply ideas that are centuries old to contemporary problems, this really helps to drive home the timeless work of the original author. Not always so here. Volume 2 reads like a series of loose associations weakly tied to the original outline of logic spelled out by Thomas Aquinas. Often, it seemed the thread of the Summa was forgotten all together. Therefore, it reads more like a series of Farrell's own preachings from the pulpit. When he does get back to Aquinas, it feels like he is trying either too hard to relate the Summa to everyday experience.
"One goat may butt into another, looking very much like one football player butting into another; but the acts are quite different, for one is human, the other is the act of a goat. One was placed in view of the end; the other was not. One has a moral object, while the other has not."
What?! Passages like this don't serve to illustrate anything. Two linebackers clashing on the 20-yard line have a moral object? I guess the point was that behaviors can look the same but have very different objectives. But it is not clear, and the point of these "Companions" to the Summa was to clarify. Instead, Farrell seems to frequently derail.
I am not saying this is a bad book at all. In fact, it is infinitely highlightable and full of practical wisdom. It also does a fantastic job explaining the moral, theological, and intellectual virtues, as well as the complex systems in which these virtues interact throughout a person's life. And just as we are prepared for movement of reason by the virtues, we are prepared for the movement of God by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the person of the Trinity by which most who study Christian theology are both fascinated and baffled. Here, Farrell gives a passionate explanation of what the Holy Spirit does in the lives of human beings.
But the main point of the book is that our actions are what provide us with happiness, that in the moral realm quantity is measured by degrees of perfection, and that good habits in the practice of the virtues take away much of the redundancies and inefficient effort to reach that perfection. This reminds me of a person in addiction recovery. The more they practice recovery, the more they practice healthy habits, interpersonal effectiveness, and temperance, the easier it is to stay sober. In fact, the more success one finds in their practice, the harder it is to go back to older bad habits. Conversely, unhealthy habits are hard to break. If you spend all your time reading celebrity gossip or watching brainless TV, you don't make room for things that will help you grow. Garbage in, garbage out. The ultimate lofty goal of human action is the ultimate perfection, namely God, and thus the ultimate source of happiness is God.
Perhaps one of the more interesting elements of the book came toward the end, when discussing Law, but I didn't feel I gained any insights from the promising discussion. I had a hard time parsing out if Farrell was advocating for no division between church and state, though I think his point was that the best governmental laws are those that support the law of nations, which is a kind of global human law based on reason and the common good. However, he does not address the conflict we have today where people create laws believing they are for the common good that appear to go against the law of nations. For example, one group feels justified in censuring speech deemed harmful because it is misinformation, but so much of what is labeled misinformation turns out later to have been true. So the censorship turned out not to be for the common good, and should not have been followed or endorsed. But people supported such censorship truly believing they had the moral authority. So the difference between good law and bad law is not as clear cut as Farrell seems to think. The advice would Farrell/St. Thomas proposes to help us avoid these mistakes seems a lackluster.
I also was fascinated by his distinction between the Old Law as laid out by the Old Testament and the New Law laid out by Jesus. This was something that I never understood, nor does the non-Christian world. He essentially says that the Old Law was for a civilization in it's infancy to prepare the Jewish people for bringing forth the Messiah, while the New Law was for perfection. Well, if you've read the laws spelled out in books like Leviticus, you still may be scratching your head after reading Farrell. Bottom line, something still didn't add up for me.
Overall, I just found this book falls short of the first volume. If the first had any faults, it was that it wasn't easy for Farrell to translate medieval concepts of pure thought into language easier to grasp for readers who are not metaphysical philosophers or logicians. Here, he took his objective too far, and translated ideas that didn't need much translation. Therefore, both volumes falter on getting points across without the reader putting in twice the work at times to refer back to the source material and meditate on the information. Not that doing so would be a bad thing. This is, after all, a Companion to the Summa. But by this second volume, Farrell either gained way too much confidence in his ability to make the Summa relatable, or his work on the first volume scared him so much that he felt he had to work overtime to get points across.
Thomas Aquinas was using philosophical proofs to get to the existence of God. Centuries later, Kant would touch on these very proofs in his "Critique of Pure Reason" when he talked of antinomies in the Transcendental Dialectic section of that famous book. Though Kant does not cite Aquinas in the Critique, he goes through the same process as Aquinas. He presents a thesis that if every action in the universe has a cause, then at some point in space and time there had to be a necessary first cause, as infinity is a series of measurements that can never be finished, and thus can't be applied backwards so that there never was a beginning or first cause. Of course, Kant pulled a slick move and also proved the antithesis as well, thus saying that reason creates a conflict when it comes to understanding things outside our experience because our brains are not equipped that way. Therefore, Kant says that it is possible that God could be real (noumena), but like radio waves, our reason cannot deduce anything about him beyond our limited way we sense and interpret the universe. Aquinas, on the other hand, refused to go where Kant eventually did, and so he stopped at the thesis. Aquinas felt that reason dictated without error that there had to be a prime, immovable mover, and that mover is what is known as God.
This volume of Farrell's Companion does capture some of this essence of the Summa. Granted, the focus of this work was on particular questions in the Summa regarding happiness, not the existence of God. Yet, throughout the Summa, the point was to show how reason can take things we know from experience and work them back to God. Thus, all of Farrell's meanderings about football players and kings does essentially what St. Thomas was doing--deducing from a posteriori empirical knowledge that happiness comes from a loving God.
This is definitely a work that some people will get a lot out of. They will appreciate that Farrell is able to synthesize practical advice for modern life based on religious principles extracted from source material that is otherwise a very analytic and cerebral work of metaphysics. Other readers will be frustrated by how it seems to constantly stray from St. Thomas and become a bit of a sermon rather than a work of theology. The book is actually more cohesive than what may be initially apparent, as it is building layers of a case. But I do recognize the difficulty some may have with this one.
So while Volume One gets a solid four stars from me, Volume Two drops down to three.
The second volume of the Companion regards human happiness, a worthwhile discussion for anyone of any faith. Yet Farrell goes a little overboard with his modern analogies here. Normally, when a teacher can apply ideas that are centuries old to contemporary problems, this really helps to drive home the timeless work of the original author. Not always so here. Volume 2 reads like a series of loose associations weakly tied to the original outline of logic spelled out by Thomas Aquinas. Often, it seemed the thread of the Summa was forgotten all together. Therefore, it reads more like a series of Farrell's own preachings from the pulpit. When he does get back to Aquinas, it feels like he is trying either too hard to relate the Summa to everyday experience.
"One goat may butt into another, looking very much like one football player butting into another; but the acts are quite different, for one is human, the other is the act of a goat. One was placed in view of the end; the other was not. One has a moral object, while the other has not."
What?! Passages like this don't serve to illustrate anything. Two linebackers clashing on the 20-yard line have a moral object? I guess the point was that behaviors can look the same but have very different objectives. But it is not clear, and the point of these "Companions" to the Summa was to clarify. Instead, Farrell seems to frequently derail.
I am not saying this is a bad book at all. In fact, it is infinitely highlightable and full of practical wisdom. It also does a fantastic job explaining the moral, theological, and intellectual virtues, as well as the complex systems in which these virtues interact throughout a person's life. And just as we are prepared for movement of reason by the virtues, we are prepared for the movement of God by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the person of the Trinity by which most who study Christian theology are both fascinated and baffled. Here, Farrell gives a passionate explanation of what the Holy Spirit does in the lives of human beings.
But the main point of the book is that our actions are what provide us with happiness, that in the moral realm quantity is measured by degrees of perfection, and that good habits in the practice of the virtues take away much of the redundancies and inefficient effort to reach that perfection. This reminds me of a person in addiction recovery. The more they practice recovery, the more they practice healthy habits, interpersonal effectiveness, and temperance, the easier it is to stay sober. In fact, the more success one finds in their practice, the harder it is to go back to older bad habits. Conversely, unhealthy habits are hard to break. If you spend all your time reading celebrity gossip or watching brainless TV, you don't make room for things that will help you grow. Garbage in, garbage out. The ultimate lofty goal of human action is the ultimate perfection, namely God, and thus the ultimate source of happiness is God.
Perhaps one of the more interesting elements of the book came toward the end, when discussing Law, but I didn't feel I gained any insights from the promising discussion. I had a hard time parsing out if Farrell was advocating for no division between church and state, though I think his point was that the best governmental laws are those that support the law of nations, which is a kind of global human law based on reason and the common good. However, he does not address the conflict we have today where people create laws believing they are for the common good that appear to go against the law of nations. For example, one group feels justified in censuring speech deemed harmful because it is misinformation, but so much of what is labeled misinformation turns out later to have been true. So the censorship turned out not to be for the common good, and should not have been followed or endorsed. But people supported such censorship truly believing they had the moral authority. So the difference between good law and bad law is not as clear cut as Farrell seems to think. The advice would Farrell/St. Thomas proposes to help us avoid these mistakes seems a lackluster.
I also was fascinated by his distinction between the Old Law as laid out by the Old Testament and the New Law laid out by Jesus. This was something that I never understood, nor does the non-Christian world. He essentially says that the Old Law was for a civilization in it's infancy to prepare the Jewish people for bringing forth the Messiah, while the New Law was for perfection. Well, if you've read the laws spelled out in books like Leviticus, you still may be scratching your head after reading Farrell. Bottom line, something still didn't add up for me.
Overall, I just found this book falls short of the first volume. If the first had any faults, it was that it wasn't easy for Farrell to translate medieval concepts of pure thought into language easier to grasp for readers who are not metaphysical philosophers or logicians. Here, he took his objective too far, and translated ideas that didn't need much translation. Therefore, both volumes falter on getting points across without the reader putting in twice the work at times to refer back to the source material and meditate on the information. Not that doing so would be a bad thing. This is, after all, a Companion to the Summa. But by this second volume, Farrell either gained way too much confidence in his ability to make the Summa relatable, or his work on the first volume scared him so much that he felt he had to work overtime to get points across.
Thomas Aquinas was using philosophical proofs to get to the existence of God. Centuries later, Kant would touch on these very proofs in his "Critique of Pure Reason" when he talked of antinomies in the Transcendental Dialectic section of that famous book. Though Kant does not cite Aquinas in the Critique, he goes through the same process as Aquinas. He presents a thesis that if every action in the universe has a cause, then at some point in space and time there had to be a necessary first cause, as infinity is a series of measurements that can never be finished, and thus can't be applied backwards so that there never was a beginning or first cause. Of course, Kant pulled a slick move and also proved the antithesis as well, thus saying that reason creates a conflict when it comes to understanding things outside our experience because our brains are not equipped that way. Therefore, Kant says that it is possible that God could be real (noumena), but like radio waves, our reason cannot deduce anything about him beyond our limited way we sense and interpret the universe. Aquinas, on the other hand, refused to go where Kant eventually did, and so he stopped at the thesis. Aquinas felt that reason dictated without error that there had to be a prime, immovable mover, and that mover is what is known as God.
This volume of Farrell's Companion does capture some of this essence of the Summa. Granted, the focus of this work was on particular questions in the Summa regarding happiness, not the existence of God. Yet, throughout the Summa, the point was to show how reason can take things we know from experience and work them back to God. Thus, all of Farrell's meanderings about football players and kings does essentially what St. Thomas was doing--deducing from a posteriori empirical knowledge that happiness comes from a loving God.
This is definitely a work that some people will get a lot out of. They will appreciate that Farrell is able to synthesize practical advice for modern life based on religious principles extracted from source material that is otherwise a very analytic and cerebral work of metaphysics. Other readers will be frustrated by how it seems to constantly stray from St. Thomas and become a bit of a sermon rather than a work of theology. The book is actually more cohesive than what may be initially apparent, as it is building layers of a case. But I do recognize the difficulty some may have with this one.
So while Volume One gets a solid four stars from me, Volume Two drops down to three.
April 17, 2021
Walter Farrell wrote an extraordinary companion to the Summa in Vol 2.
Here are my thoughts:
1. Farrell had an exceptional ability to give modern examples to what Aquinas' teachings were.
2. I found myself completely drawn into Farrell's writings because I felt as though I was seeing reality more clearly and becoming a better human being.
3. I think my favorite part about this book was the section on how the devil has been making mistakes ever since the beginning. In the same way a football coach who trains and disciplines a player he does not like by putting the athlete through the most challenging practices and drills; at the end of the day the athlete comes out stronger and faster. Farrell says that is how God uses the devil. God uses the devil to strengthen us through temptations upon which virtue can build, grow, and develop.
4. The virtues are taught well in this book. I can recall feeling as though I was learning the virtues and Farrell provided numerous examples by painting portraits of persons to help understand these virtues.
5. Another thought that stuck with me was on how a person who does not have their intellect (reason) informing the passions (belly) through the heart (virtues) is having an interior civil war going on.
6. Also, the thought of the passions being ruled in a similar way that a king rules his empire was astounding to me. Farrell provides the following thought: basically a king governs the entire nation. However, villages may rise up in revolting behavior and need to be disciplined. The king (reason) tells a governor of the region (the will) to go straighten up the revolting village (the passions). That made sense to me.
7. The final thought is that Farrell makes it convincing that true happiness can only be had with loving God.
8. The final thought I have is that of a reflection Farrell gives. He likens life to walking from a stream in the mountains all the way to the ocean. In time the terrain shifts, the birds change, the vegetation changes, the smells become more ocean-like, and the soil changes to sand. On this side of heaven we never make it to the "ocean." However, Farrell makes the claim that even though we can't make it to the ocean (that we can't make it to heaven on earth) it is still worth it because of the glimpses, smells, sights, and sounds that are of heaven. He ends this reflection with how it will be easier and quicker to enter heaven in already walking with God on this side of heaven.
Here are my thoughts:
1. Farrell had an exceptional ability to give modern examples to what Aquinas' teachings were.
2. I found myself completely drawn into Farrell's writings because I felt as though I was seeing reality more clearly and becoming a better human being.
3. I think my favorite part about this book was the section on how the devil has been making mistakes ever since the beginning. In the same way a football coach who trains and disciplines a player he does not like by putting the athlete through the most challenging practices and drills; at the end of the day the athlete comes out stronger and faster. Farrell says that is how God uses the devil. God uses the devil to strengthen us through temptations upon which virtue can build, grow, and develop.
4. The virtues are taught well in this book. I can recall feeling as though I was learning the virtues and Farrell provided numerous examples by painting portraits of persons to help understand these virtues.
5. Another thought that stuck with me was on how a person who does not have their intellect (reason) informing the passions (belly) through the heart (virtues) is having an interior civil war going on.
6. Also, the thought of the passions being ruled in a similar way that a king rules his empire was astounding to me. Farrell provides the following thought: basically a king governs the entire nation. However, villages may rise up in revolting behavior and need to be disciplined. The king (reason) tells a governor of the region (the will) to go straighten up the revolting village (the passions). That made sense to me.
7. The final thought is that Farrell makes it convincing that true happiness can only be had with loving God.
8. The final thought I have is that of a reflection Farrell gives. He likens life to walking from a stream in the mountains all the way to the ocean. In time the terrain shifts, the birds change, the vegetation changes, the smells become more ocean-like, and the soil changes to sand. On this side of heaven we never make it to the "ocean." However, Farrell makes the claim that even though we can't make it to the ocean (that we can't make it to heaven on earth) it is still worth it because of the glimpses, smells, sights, and sounds that are of heaven. He ends this reflection with how it will be easier and quicker to enter heaven in already walking with God on this side of heaven.
March 13, 2025
Not sure how useful it is as a companion to the Summa—more so just a long essay inspired by the Summa growing from natural happiness to the nature of virtue to sin to moral law to grace.
October 1, 2016
This is volume two of Fr. Walter Farrell's classic "Companion to the Summa", a commentary on St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theological. Farrell wrote this volume in the 1930s, and some of the cultural and historical references in it are dated to that era, but it is still very applicable to today's reader. The work is an attempt to make the thought of St. Thomas understandable to the everyday Christian, and in this effort it is largely successful. It is very readable and understandable to the average reader, and it opens up the thought of St. Thomas to people who are not familiar with the thought of the ancient and medieval philosophers or the Church Fathers upon whom St. Thomas so meticulously builds his philosophy.
Volume 2 corresponds to Part 2A of the Summa with deals with the ultimate end of religion and ultimately of life. All values, beliefs and acts of man direct him to his ultimate end, and this book goes into the vast universe of such things and how they direct man toward his end. Unlike volume 1, which deals with God and religion in general, volume 2 deals with man and his interaction with God. This is the real meat of the faith, because it is the reality of how man lives his life in accord with the faith. Because of this, this volume is really an important help for anyone who wants to use the thought of St. Thomas to live a deeper Christian life.
Although this work is not a technical commentary on St. Thomas, I believe that it is useful, not just to the lay Catholic, but to the scholar as well. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Volume 2 corresponds to Part 2A of the Summa with deals with the ultimate end of religion and ultimately of life. All values, beliefs and acts of man direct him to his ultimate end, and this book goes into the vast universe of such things and how they direct man toward his end. Unlike volume 1, which deals with God and religion in general, volume 2 deals with man and his interaction with God. This is the real meat of the faith, because it is the reality of how man lives his life in accord with the faith. Because of this, this volume is really an important help for anyone who wants to use the thought of St. Thomas to live a deeper Christian life.
Although this work is not a technical commentary on St. Thomas, I believe that it is useful, not just to the lay Catholic, but to the scholar as well. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.
August 6, 2009
This is an excellent choice to bring back to the reading community
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews