Those whose enthusiasm for exploring the interweaving of religion and literature has encouraged them to reconstruct the history of theology so that the great tradition runs from Jesus’ parables and the Gospels through, say, Justin’s tale of the old man on the beach and Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the ‘Dream of the Rood’ and the Grail Cycle, the novels of George Eliot and of Cardinal Wiseman, up to some manageable modern poet, have usually not found a place for the Schoolmen. Even those who content themselves with considerations of theologians as readers, and whose topics are illustrated by references to Paul’s reorganization of Menenius’ fable of the talking stomach, to Luther’s likening of the theologian to the literary critic who elucidates the Georgies, and to that most interesting and attractive of modern popes, John Paul I, writing fan letters to Mark Twain and Dickens as well as to Jesus, rarely bring even Aquinas into their conversation. The rest of us may pause at this. Willing enough, it may be, to get along without Albert and Biel, not feeling called to defend even Duns Scotus usque ad effusionem sanguinis, we would not think it respectable to surrender Aquinas.

It would be improper, certainly, to rummage in the Summa Theologiae for immediately modern answers to particular questions, but it must be in order to expect a theologian as methodically sensitive as Aquinas to have meditated on the general topic of the relation of the forms of a theological science to the literary forms he encountered in Scripture.