The Rocky Mountain Collegian

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Negligence, craftiness, guile, fraud, covetousness and injustice.

Was it chance that those were the topics at this year's Summa-thon?

Last Friday, on Jan. 28 (the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas), the Philosophy Club held its ninth-annual Summa-thon. It's a fun tradition at Saint Louis University.

You've heard of student groups holding dance marathons and walk-a-thons to raise money for charitable causes. Or how about a contest to see who can swallow the most goldfish?

In that spirit, the philosophy club at SLU has a tradition of reading each year from St. Thomas's "Summa Theologiae." Almost 200 people read aloud each year. While most read in English, many read in the original Latin, and other languages are heard throughout the day including Spanish, French, German and Italian. This year, we also had an interpretive dance and a Gregorian-style chant. (One year, we had a reading from Kermit the Frog.)

The Summa-thon isn't aimed at raising money. Rather, as students at the first Summa-thon in 1997 put it, "we're just trying to raise consciousness."

And after all, what else is a philosophy club going to do to have fun?

I'll admit that St. Thomas is even more old-fashioned than Shakespeare. But the "Summa" is still a great book. In the year 2000, USA Today named it the No. 1 book of the millennium.

Studying the thought of St. Thomas is familiar to most SLU students. The "Summa" is frequently required reading in philosophy or theology courses. It's always been that way at Jesuit schools. St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, was deeply drawn to the thought of St.Thomas, and one of the marks of Jesuit education is a strong dose of St. Thomas in the curriculum.

So, each of the last nine years, members of the philosophy club at SLU canvas the campus to recruit readers for the Jan 28 event.

The "Summa" is written in question and answer format, and each volunteer reads aloud one answer (or "article") from the "Summa." Most articles last about three minutes. Since the "Summa Theologiae" is of encyclopedic length, nine hours of reading barely puts a dent in this massive medieval masterpiece. Each year, the club picks up right where the reading left off the previous year.

The middle section of the "Summa Theologiae" deals with the virtues needed to live a good life. A few years ago, the reading focused on the theological virtues: faith, hope and love. Last year, the text turned to the cardinal virtues. Thomas begins with a medieval favorite, the virtue of prudence.

In our contemporary world, we almost never hear about developing the virtue of prudence. Instead, we hear about the need for "synergy," "core competencies," "effectiveness" and being "proactive." But talk of prudence seems, well, medieval.

At this year's Summa-thon, the day began with the part of the text where St. Thomas is thinking through the vices that mask the virtue of prudence. Thomas understands a virtue to be an excellent state of character that is developed by habit. For each good habit it is possible to have character traits that falsely resemble the virtue.

For the first hour of the event, reader after reader recited from the text describing vices that are formed when one falls short of the task of applying right reason to action. St. Thomas wrote of those who place too much emphasis on the goods of this life. He warns against developing the habit of undue desire for material items, especially when the desire to acquire seems more important than truth and honesty.

In his discussion of these vices, he uses words that have gone out of fashion: craftiness, guile and covetousness.

Craftiness involves using fictitious means to achieve one's purposes. It disguises itself as prudence, but in fact it is a counterfeit that involves cunning and deceit. Next, St. Thomas provides a philosopher's definition of guile and fraud.

It was sometime in the middle of this reading that whispers in the room began. "It sounds like the story on the front page of The University News." Quickly, the whispers became the talk of the room. As reported in the student newspaper, several student leaders on campus were involved in a case of apparent corruption. Reportedly, funds were diverted to purchase an iPod for personal use.

Suddenly, what St. Thomas had to say seemed thoroughly relevant. There were more than a few ironic smiles. Our world isn't so different from that of St. Thomas after all. Unfortunately, we still have reason to want to understand the difference between negligence and fraud.

We might learn from the advice that St. Thomas gives on how to properly order our desires so that we develop habits of excellence and well-formed characters.

After discussing the vices that mask prudence, St. Thomas turns to the virtue of justice. In fact, the rest of the day was spent on the virtue of justice. St. Thomas defines justice as the habit of perpetually giving each person his or her due. St. Thomas notes that there is a connection between the virtues. Practicing the virtue of prudence (applying right reason to action) helps make the habit of justice second-nature. Similarly, the various forms of imprudence (negligence, craftiness, guile, fraud and covetousness) all make it easier to slide into injustice.

No matter whose side of the "iPodgate" story you believe, it seems pretty plain that imprudence and injustice were involved.

A whole day listening to the text of St. Thomas makes it easier to notice differences between our contemporary tendencies and those of 13th-century Europe where St. Thomas was a professor at the University of Paris.

In a period like ours, which we might describe as an age of irony, there is a strong temptation to use a mocking smile when juxtaposing the Summa-thon and "iPodgate." After all, it is ironic that despite our efforts at teaching virtue, our students, even our outstanding student leaders, seem to have mastered guile or negligence more than justice.

But we might be able to move beyond irony and sarcasm to realize that each of us stands in need of a deeper education in the virtue of justice-some more than others.

Of course, no one thinks that reading and studying about justice (as philosophers do) will make us just. As St. Thomas teaches us, we acquire habits of justice by doing just acts, not from merely reading books. Still, reading and thinking about justice might help in developing that habit of character whereby one perpetually gives to each his or her due.

Gregory R. Beabout, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the department of philosophy. He is the faculty advisor to the philosophy club.