ABSTRACT
Throughout his whole career as a Dominican professor in theology, working in the medieval academy during the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was occupied with the question of God.1 The principal theme and focus of his theological thought concerned the truth of that absolute reality which people name ‘God’. In this book we are going to follow Thomas in the way he, especially in his major work, the Summa theologiae, conceives of God and develops a metaphysical account of the divine as the prima causa of everything which exists. Since our aim is primarily to expound and explain Thomas’ analysis of the concept of God, with the accent on the way in which the ‘theological’ and the ‘philosophical’ are hereby interwoven, it may be useful to consider fi rst, by way of introduction, how the question of God is approached in his work, what his position is with regard to the tradition of Christian faith and its sacred writings, and what precisely it means to call his way of thought ‘theological’.
