The Seba library treats Theological Summa in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Jung, Carl Gustav, Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael).
in 1266 he had begun the Summa and the De anima commentary. In 1268-72 he stayed for a second time in Paris.
Von Franz situates the composition of Aquinas's Summa within a biographical and psychological framework, treating it as the intellectual pole against which the visionary crisis of the Aurora must be understood.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis
Everything that I have written seems to me worthless in comparison with the things I have seen and which have been revealed to me.
Von Franz cites Aquinas's reported repudiation of his own written work — including the Summa — as evidence that a shattering numinous experience overwhelmed the scholastic enterprise and precipitated the visionary text of the Aurora.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis
Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, q. 44, art. 3 (Eng. edn., I, p. 231) ... 'Now in the Word of God from eternity there existed not only the forms of corporeal things, but likewise the forms of all spiritual creatures.'
Von Franz cites the Summa directly to establish the Thomistic doctrine of eternal forms as the scholastic background against which Aurora's feminine personification of the collective unconscious is to be read.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis
Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologica, I, xxxvi, art. 1): 'Non habet nomen proprium' ... 'St. Thomas emphasizes that prophetic revelation is, as such, independent of good morals' (De veritate, xii, 5; Summa theol., I–II, p. 172).
Jung invokes the Summa theologica twice — on the namelessness of the Holy Spirit and on the independence of prophetic revelation from personal sanctity — to ground psychological claims about the autonomy of numinous experience from moral consciousness.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
Thomas must have been a man in whom there was the greatest tension between feeling and intellect. Presumably, as I have said, he was an introverted thinking type.
Von Franz offers a psychological typology of Aquinas as an introverted thinker whose Summa-building intellect was in extreme tension with his undeveloped feeling function, creating the conditions for the compensatory visionary eruption the Aurora represents.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
Aquinas can still describe the highest goal of theology as 'the enjoyment of the contact with God' (Sum. Theol. II q19 a7) ... the scholastic demotion of philosophy to ancilla theologiae.
Sharpe argues that the scholastic summa form, despite its reputation as ancilla theologiae, retained a contemplative and transformative ambition continuous with ancient philosophical pedagogy.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
John of Damascus retains the same order as was adopted by Theodoret ... gathered together also the opinions of the holy Fathers, and produced a work marked with equal perspicuity and brevity, and forming an unexhausted storehouse of tradition.
The editorial prologue to John of Damascus's Exposition of the Orthodox Faith identifies it as an early prototype of the summa genre, synthesizing patristic tradition into a systematic theological compendium that influenced the later medieval form.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
St. Thomas, too, holds that the innermost instinct of every creature ... many philosophers supposed that every act of cognition was preceded by a kind of 'love' or 'natural appetition' of the knower for the object.
Von Franz draws on Thomistic teaching embedded in the Summa tradition to show that scholastic thought itself recognized an affective, desiderative substrate beneath rational cognition, a position she assimilates to depth-psychological claims about the libidinal orientation of unconscious processes.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966aside