Page:AManualOfCatholicTheology.djvu/31

 which is a condensed Summa containing the quintessence of the theology of his age. Whilst the Breviloquium derives all things from God, his Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum proceeds in the opposite direction, bringing all things back to their Supreme End. In another work, the Centiloquium, he sketched out a new book of Sentences, containing a rich collection of passages from the Fathers, but in a strange though ingenious order.

The Dominican school was founded by Albert the Great (1193–1280). His chief glory is that he introduced the study of Aristotle into the Christian schools, and that he was the master of St. Thomas Aquinas. His numerous works fill twenty-one folio volumes (Lyons, 1651). They consist of commentaries on the Gospels and the Prophets, homilies, ascetical writings, and commentaries on the Areopagite, on Aristotle, and on the Sentences. His Summa Theologica, of which the four intended parts were to correspond with the four books of the Lombard, was written in his advanced old age, after St. Thomas’s Summa, and goes no further than the end of the second part. He also composed a so-called Summa de Creaturis, partly answering to the Summa contra Gentiles of St. Thomas, and, like it, more philosophical than theological.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelical Doctor” (1225–1274), towers over all the theologians of his own or of any other age. He is unsurpassed in knowledge of Holy Scripture, the Fathers, and Aristotle, in the depth and clearness of his ideas, in perfection of method and expression, and in the variety and extent of his labours. He wrote on every subject treated by the Schoolmen, and in every form: on physics, ethics, metaphysics, psychology; on apologetic, dogmatic, moral and ascetical theology; in commentaries on Holy Scripture, on Aristotle, on the Areopagite and the Lombard; in monographs, compendia, and in two Summæ. His chief dogmatic writings are the following:—

1. The Commentary on the Sentences written in his early