Book Essentials
Now and again students—especially students just getting started in the study of Thomas —will come to me with the question: “What are the absolutely essential books to have about Thomas Aquinas that I can read in English?”
Of course no single book captures it all, but giving people a list of 50 books is of little help, too. So I let my thought-experiment be: “If I had to recommend ten books for someone starting out, what would they be?” The books listed below fit that bill for me; some of them are essential (e.g., Torrell’s two biographical books on Thomas), and others are reliable resources and introductions.
Clicking on the links below will bring you to a page on Amazon.com’s web site, where you can see a fuller description of the book, and buy it, should you like. If you do buy a book this way, you’ll be helping this website, which belongs to the Amazon.com associates program (giving us a sliver of the proceeds of sales through Amazon).
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This is Chenu’s little book. A fine ready, and very helpful for getting a sense of the saint.
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Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology
This is Gregory Rocca’s prize-winning book.
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This is Augustine Thompson’s fabulous new book on Italian religious life in the high middle ages. It is in every way an eye-opener. Get the book as soon as it comes out!
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The Pinckaers Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, edited by John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus. -
This is Robert Pasnau’s award-winning book on Thomas’s teaching on human nature. It won the APA (American Philosophical Association) Book Prize award in 2005.
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This book is an encyclopedic run through the Secunda pars of Thomas’s Summa theologiae. It’s very useful for an overview reading of the original texts. It also includes some helpful interpretive essays by Leonard Boyle and others.
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