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Part III Christ
Quaestiones 1-59 the Incarnation
Quaestiones 60-72 the sacraments
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This monumental theological achievement, in some ways a European analogue to the Advaita Text, is introduced here by way of example. Parts of it are chosen for a selective reading, without any pretense that this selection follows that full reading and rereading which will be required to bring the present experiment in reading and rereading to completion. |
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Time spent in the reading of Advaita prompts us to reconceive of the Summa Theologiae as a ''Text," in the sense introduced at the end of Chapter 1 and explored in detail in Chapter 2: a series of (written) acts of language which are irreducible to any author's or authors' intention(s) or to the announced and practiced purposes of any particular later tradition, but which are read as intertextually composed into a larger whole comprised of a series of related texts: e.g., a text along with those which are inscribed in it by citation, and those which exist in the form of commentary upon it. It is this larger Text of the Summa Theologiae which is fruitfully read along with the Text composed in relation to the Uttara Mimamsa Sutras. |
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As mentioned above, we are already engaged in an important constructive activity when we construct this, or any other, particular comparison. The rereading process begins well before the act of comparing one or another part of the Summa Theologiae with one or another part of the Advaita Text, and much has been effected merely by our decision to read the Uttara Mimamsa Sutras and Summa Theologiae Texts together. The Summa is put to a new use, reconstituted by a reader who intends to look at it from a new angle, for new purposes. Instead of using it simply as an instance of medieval theology, or as a vantage point from which to assess a variety of issues related to medieval Christian thought in connection to Aristotelianism, Jewish and Islamic theology, etc., or as the text of Catholic theology, or as the best introduction to Christian theologyinstead of these (and other) traditional uses, the comparative theologian uses the Summa Theologiae to clarify the changes that occur in the Christian reader who has engaged seriously in the reading of Advaita. |
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