The Summa contra gentiles is perhaps the most peculiar work of
St. Thomas Aquinas, due to Thomas's decision to structure the work first
according to what humans can say about God without revelation and then
what humans can say about God once revelation is explicitly introduced.
Such an approach to the human pursuit of the divine is otherwise unheard
of in Thomas's own day, and this unusual structure has provided a
fertile seedbed for a wide range of interpretations.
Matthew
Kostelecky's book shows the integral relationship between the
conceptions of human nature and God operative throughout the Summa
contra gentiles such that the text is always in a twofold movement,
at once describing what humans can say about God while also reflecting
human nature back on itself by delineating its limits and capabilities
with respect to the possible human knowledge of God. As a result, the
Summa contra gentiles is presented as a mirror of human nature as
that nature is directed to its most noble object.