Summa Theologiae

The Summa Theologiae is Thomas Aquinas's own thirteenth-century primary text, the foundational systematic statement of Catholic scholastic theology on the virtues, the vices and the doctrine of sin, composed through his own scholastic method of stating a question, weighing objections and arguing a resolution from authority and reason together. As a primary text it is authoritative for what Aquinas himself taught on a given topic, checkable directly against the text, not for whether every later Catholic theologian accepted a specific conclusion, since particular points remain debated within later scholastic and Thomistic scholarship. Use it to establish what Aquinas himself codified on virtue, vice or sin; a claim about a different Christian tradition's treatment of the same topic needs a source from that tradition, since the Summa speaks only for the scholastic Catholic position it argues.