Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide by Randall B. Smith (review)

The appearance of the Leonine Commission's critical edition of Thomas Aquinas's sermons in 2014 fulfilled a great desideratum, affording access in the original Latin to a range of Aquinas's work that has perhaps received less attention than it deserves, namely, his preaching. In the introduction to his edition, Père Louis Bataillon understandably concentrated on issues of textual criticism and theology, leaving to one side any deeper exploration of the contexts within which Aquinas had actually delivered his sermons or the rhetorical forms employed in the pulpit in his day. We were thus left with another desideratum: a study that would bridge the gap between the theologians' appreciation of the content of Aquinas's preaching and an understanding of the peculiar homiletic form to which he was heir that those who study medieval sermon survivals would bring to a reading of his sermons. To provide that bridge is precisely the propositum of Randall B. Smith's Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide.

Smith organizes his material into five chapters, bookended by an Introduction and a sixth chapter of "Summary and Conclusions." A pair of appendices rounds out the volume. Appendix I offers outlines of the twenty-one formal sermons attributed to Aquinas, fifteen grouped together here as dominical sermons ordered according to the liturgical calendar, and the remaining six as feast-day sermons. Each is broken down into its component parts of theme and subdivisions according to the rules of sermon-making in Aquinas's day. These schemata are the book's most valuable contribution, a ready-reference to the content and form—the very exacting Scholastic form—of each of Aquinas's sermons. Appendix II then correlates the themata adopted in the sermons with the pericopes from the Dominican lectionary.

The Introduction touches lightly—perhaps too lightly—on several important preliminaries: the state of the question regarding the number and numbering of Aquinas's sermons; the audiences to which they were preached, including a quick lesson in the difference between sermons and collations (here called "sermon-conferences"); and the author's justification for the current study, occasioned by the belief that most modern readers will be unfamiliar with the Scholastic style of preaching that had evolved at the medieval universities, and are in need of a road map to its rhetorical conventions if they are to parse Aquinas's sermons.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to Aquinas's preaching style by looking closely at a single sermon, Ecce rex tuus. Here the author's approach is largely to define Aquinas's preaching by suggesting what it is not, in relation to modern expectations of what sermons should be or even when compared to what preaching became in the hands of Cardinal Newman and the great Protestant homilists. Smith remarks on the "oddity" of Aquinas's approach, asks whether he is guilty of "reading meaning into the Bible," and acknowledges that an educated medieval would have possessed an intimate familiarity with the texts, tropes, and cadences of Scripture that no longer obtains in the minds of modern Christians. Chapter 2 then works to acquaint the reader with the form of the sermo modernus as the template according to which Aquinas will construct his own sermons. Smith briefly describes what he calls the "homiletic revolution" of the thirteenth century that gave birth to the new Scholastic style of preaching, and devotes short sections to each of the key characteristics of the "modern" sermon. These are sermons built around a single line from Scripture known as the thema; the structure of a sermon emerges from a division, often a threefold division, of that line to suggest three main exegetical motifs (divisio), which are then developed with the help of a standard répertoire of rhetorical and textual techniques (dilatatio). Chapters 3 and 4 proceed to the analysis...