ABSTRACT
Thomas Aquinas is not so often read as brandished. He has become more emblem than author. It is very difficult to read Thomas as the medieval author of certain remarkable books. He is consulted as the guarantor of Catholic orthodoxy, say, or reviled as the ideologue of papal tyranny. What can be discovered about the origin of the Summa suggests that it was a masterful improvisation in the face of very particular circumstances for the teaching of Christian theology. Sodomy appears in Thomas's Summa theologiae within two questions on the vice of luxuria, which is to say, some considerable way into Thomas's rewriting of the confusion of theological instruction in morals. The use of Thomas's Summa as a quasi-legal system of moral theology did in fact prepare the way for the sterile systematization of moral theology in the past three centuries.
