The ‘Summa’ in the Sixties

Extract

St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.

To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.