An Introduction for Modern Readers

These instructions were the last sermons St. Thomas Aquinas ever preached.

In the spring of 1273, in the city of Naples, the most learned theologian of the Christian West stepped down from his chair at the university and stood before ordinary working people — laborers, mothers, soldiers, merchants — to teach them the four foundations of the Christian life: the Creed, the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Hail Mary.

He died less than a year later. These sermons, transcribed by his listeners and gathered after his death by his secretaries, became one of the most beloved catechetical texts in the Latin Church.

If you have heard of Aquinas only as a forbidding intellectual presence — author of the Summa Theologiae, master of distinctions and syllogisms — you may be surprised by what follows. Here he speaks slowly. He uses ordinary stories. He answers the doubts a tired person at the back of the church might raise. He defends the faith of the vetula, the old woman who cannot read but who knows God better than the philosophers.

This is theology brought down to the height of the human heart, not lifted up to the ceiling of the academy. Read it slowly. One chapter at a time is enough. Stop where a sentence strikes you and let it stay.

The 1939 English translation by Joseph B. Collins is the foundation of this edition. We have modernized the Scripture citations into the familiar form your Bible app expects (so Hosea 2:20 rather than the older Osee, ii.20) and added internal section headings to a few of the longer chapters so a reader on a phone can find their place. The footnote apparatus has been preserved as Collins gave it. Aquinas's words otherwise come to you exactly as Collins gave them — and as Aquinas, in 1273 in Naples, gave them to the people he loved.

— The Ember editors