summa

Read the Summa Theologica from your terminal.

4 Parts · 631 Questions · 3,125 Articles · Public Domain

A command-line tool for reading the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas — the masterwork of Catholic theology, structured as questions and articles with objections, sed contra, respondeo, and replies.

Built for Catholics who live in the terminal.

---

Quick Start

$ summa I q2 a3
══════════════════════════════════════
  FIRST PART — Question 2, Article 3
  Whether God exists?
══════════════════════════════════════

  Objection 1. It seems that God does not exist...

  On the contrary, It is said in the person of God:
  "I am Who am." (Exodus 3:14)

  I answer that, The existence of God can be proved
  in five ways...

Installation

git clone https://github.com/ecclesia-dev/summa.git
cd summa
make
sudo make install

To uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

Usage

summa <part> [q<N>] [a<N>]
summa search "<query>"

Parts

Argument	Part	Questions
I	Prima Pars (God, Creation, Angels, Man)	119
I-II	Prima Secundae (Happiness, Virtues, Law, Grace)	114
II-II	Secunda Secundae (Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice)	189
III	Tertia Pars (Christ, Sacraments)	90

Examples

$ summa I q2 a3              # "Whether God exists?" — the Five Ways
$ summa I-II q94 a2          # Natural law
$ summa II-II q23 a1         # Whether charity is friendship
$ summa III q75 a1           # Real Presence
$ summa I q1                 # List all articles in Question 1
$ summa search "natural law" # Search across all parts

Piping

summa I q2 a3 | grep "I answer"           # jump to respondeo
summa search "charity" | head -20          # first results

Build

Requires POSIX shell and awk. Source texts are the Project Gutenberg plain-text editions of the Summa Theologica.

build-data.sh parses the raw Gutenberg text files into summa.tsv. The Makefile bundles everything into a single self-extracting script — no external data files at runtime.

Related Projects

Tool	Description
drb	Douay-Rheims Bible
lectionary	TLM Daily Mass Readings
opus	Traditional Divine Office
pray	Catholic prayers (Rosary, Angelus, and more)

License

Public domain (CC0).

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.