Preface to Happiness. Vol. II. A Guidebook to the Summa by E. F. Smith, L. A. Ryan (review)

314 BOOK REVIEWS Preface to Happiness. Vol. II. A Guidebook to the Summa. By E. F. SMITH and L. A. RYAN. New York: Benziger, 1950. Pp. 301 with index. $4.00. Thanks greatly to the verve and the vision of the late Father Walter Farrell, the movement usually called " theology for laymen " has lit up a new fire in American Catholic life. In the wide background from business men to lay professors, from doctors and lawyers to college freshmen, there now glows a whole spectrum of interest in St. Thomas Aquinas not merely as a required seminary subject but as a living theologian with an assuring message for our times. In the foreword to the first volume that appeared in his Companion to the Summa-it stands as Volume II in the completed set-Father Farrell proposed his four works as " guidebooks," related to the Summa as a map to a city and designed to inspire a reading and study of the original. Yet by the gifts of his genius, Father Farrell managed to draw much more than a map and write much more than a guidebook. He wrote a layman's edition of the Summa. He wrote for the beginners of our day in the spirit in which St. Thomas wrote for the beginners of a thirteenth-century study of theology. Father Farrell left us a work that can be read and understood without consulting St. Thomas. Unlike a guidebook or a map, the Companion is a city in itself, modelled with twentieth-century words and images upon the great thirteenth-century capital which was the originaL One of the important extrinsic effects of the Companion was and is to arouse interest in the Summa, and it is to enlarge and orient this interest that confreres of St. Thomas and of Father Farrell are bringing out a new series, A Guidebook to the Summa. Preface to Happiness, Volume II of the whole series but the first to appear in print, is a welcome addition to the instruments for bringing St. Thomas to the laity. The present volume fully qualifies as a guidebook, a map, a direction-finder. The authors are tooling their series to capture the interest which Father Farrell aroused and to focus it boldly on the pages of St. Thomas. Unlike the Companion, the Guidebook can hardly be understood without the control of constant references to St. Thomas, and in this respect, the Guidebook is a mediator between the Companion and the Summa itself. Apart from Father Farrell's Companion, Preface to Happine88 has intrinsic merits that make it a genuine contribution to Catholic learning and Christian culture. The authors are emphatic about their purpose; they want to enkindle in laymen "the habit of thinking theologically," and they insist that such an objective is both desirable and practicaL To the arguments they propound to defend their aims they could even have added the twentieth-century call of the Holy See for " the participation of the laity in the work of the hierarchy." To answer this call, the laity needs a proper theological training. BOOK REVIEWS 315 The authors of the Preface wisely remark that a habit has parts, that the right order of the parts is essential to the habit, and that the best plan for the habit of theology is charted out in the Summa. The nine chapters of the present volume, therefore, parallel the Prima Secundae, like Volume IT of the Companion. The authors have written a useful nine-page general introduction on the nature of theology, the place and order of moral theology, and the distinctive character of Thomist moral science. Through their more than three hundred pages of writing, the authors have never forgotten that their's is a guidebook, and the result is a careful map to take discerning readers to a destiny in the Summa and even to points beyond. Each chapter opens with a pointed introduction to place the given topic in perspective and to weigh its doctrinal and historical importance. Then follows in each chapter a history of the question being treated. Not concerned to drag out dead doctrines with a view to understanding only the predecessors of St...