Briefly Noted

A Brief Life of Thomas Aquinas:
The Theologian in His Context
by jean-pierre torrell
translated by benedict m. guevin
the catholic university of america, 192 pages, $24.95

There’s an old saw about G. K. Chesterton. Having been commissioned to write a follow-up to his life of St. Francis, he had his secretary run to the library to collect books on St. Thomas Aquinas. She came back with an intimidating stack. Chesterton paged through a book and, having gotten the gist of things, proceeded to dictate. Thomist Étienne Gilson called the slim volume Chesterton produced, “without possible comparison, the best book ever written on Saint Thomas.”

Gilson’s assessment aside, the recent biography of Aquinas by Fr. Torrell—his last book, published at ninety-seven—is no product of dilettantism. Unlike Chesterton, Torrell hit the stacks. On the occasion of Torrell’s death, his fellow Dominican Thomas Joseph White wrote for First Things that he “was famous for working twelve hours a day, every day, in the Albertinum priory.” Torrell translated great swaths of the Summa into French and wrote important syntheses of Aquinas’s work. There are few men more qualified to introduce Aquinas to the uninitiated. A Brief Life of Thomas Aquinas is fun, accessible, and ruthless in eliminating pious accretions while ­maintaining the appropriate respect for the Angelic Doctor.

—Jacob Akey