Description and Objectives

A guided reading of a selection of the works of St Thomas Aquinas in Latin, with some readings of Thomas and of secondary scholarship in English.

Textbooks

Required: In Fall 2021 we will use a selection of readings from the Summa Theologica. These will be provided by the instructor.

Aquinas Course Packet updated 9/25/2021.

Recommended: Students of all advanced Latin classes are urged to acquire a dictionary that will be suitable for their high school and undergraduate years. There are several options, e.g. C. T. Lewis’s Elementary Latin Dictionary (Oxford) or Collins Latin Dictionary & Grammar (HarperCollins).

Course Requirements

• Students will be expected on most days to prepare a certain amount of Latin to translate in class, and will be given a grade on the thoroughness of written notes and on the accuracy of translation when called upon in class.

• Students will take the Morphology Exam, which is a 100-question multiple choice exam designed to test the student’s knowledge of declensions and conjugations (sc., of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, demonstratives, and verbs). The exam grade will be curved by the difference between the mean score on the exam and the mean grade for the class overall.

• Students will be asked to memorize and recite a small amount of Latin from the readings of the semester.

Successful Students

Successful students in LAT 445 will:

• practice Latin every day, at the very least reading out loud from the text that we are translating in class.
• do synopses and DANs to practice verb forms and noun/adjective declensions.
• talk to other students—not just classmates—about what works and what does not work.
• bring something—the fruits of some prolonged, uninterrupted, silent study—to contribute to every class meeting.

Additional Resources

• Synopsis (verbs extra credit): Latin Verb Synopses

• DANs (Demonstrative-Adjective-Noun extra credit): Latin DAN

• Logeion is a user-friendly website maintained by the University of Chicago. You can use it to search well-established Latin and Greek dictionaries. Simply type the first few letters and wait for the dropdown list to appear, the way you would look up a word in a codex.

• Corpus Thomisticum. Various resources for studying Thomas Aquinas, including the complete works available online.

• For Friday, 9/24. First Seminar Reading in English: STh. I.2

• For Friday, 10/8. Second Seminar Reading in English: STh. II-IIae.163

• For Friday, 10/15–Thursday 10/28. Catena Aurea packet (4 pages):

Catena for John Capter 21: “Feed my sheep.”

• For Friday, 11/12. Fourth Seminar Reading in English: Summa Theologiae I.64

•Adoro Te Devote text with glosses.

Recommended as possible recitation passages: the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses: 24 Thomistic Theses