Where is our Thomas Aquinas?

Last updated on: May 25, 2026 at 3:21 pm by Dan Peterson

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Where is our Thomas Aquinas? 2026-05-25T15:21:17-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The massacre at Haun’s Mill, depicted here in a nineteenth-century painting by C. C. A. Christensen, occurred on 30 October 1838, three days after Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, the so-called “Extermination Order,” in which he declared that “”the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.” (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

“Was Persecution in Missouri Inevitable?” The latest installment in our Becoming Brigham series is now available online (at, of course, no charge). This episode — the eighteenth — features the Latter-day Saint historian Dr. Matt Godfrey. We’re making every effort to interview premier authorities on the issues that we’re investigating, and to base the content of our series on their work.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in a fifteenth-century image by Carlo Crivelli (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Some years ago, I was irritated by a gratuitous insult to my faith in Thomas Cahill’s otherwise interesting book How the Irish Saved Civilization. While discussing the ancient Iranian-born religion of Manichaeism, now long gone but once (for a few centuries) a serious rival to Christianity, Cahill suddenly, out of the blue, compared it to “Mormonism,” which, he said, is a shallow and superficial faith, “full of assertions . . . but yield[ing] no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.”.

I would, of course, agree with Mr. Cahill that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hasn’t yet produced its equivalent of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica or his Summa Contra Gentiles. However, mainstream Christianity took twelve centuries to produce St. Thomas — he died in March 1274 — and the cultural tradition of the Restored Church, not yet two centuries old, doesn’t seem to me to be doing dramatically worse on the intellectual front than the early Christians were at roughly AD 226.

Moreover — although I admire Thomas a great deal; it isn’t coincidental that one of my children bears his name — for various reasons I’m not convinced that Mormonism should generate its own Summae. And St. Thomas himself might agree with me on that. The famous story is told of some sort of revelation that seems to have been given to him while he was celebrating mass on 6 December 1273, roughly four months prior to his death, in the Dominican monastery at Naples. Although he had been remarkably prolific to that point, St. Thomas never wrote another line thereafter; he dictated nothing more to his socius, Reginald of Piperno. When Reginald begged him to continue with his writing, Thomas replied “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me [mihi videtur ut palea].”

One genuine revelation outweighs all the speculation and commentary ever generated. One authentic historical theophany is worth more than many boatloads of theistic “proofs” or philosophical theology. On 9 October 1843, the Prophet Joseph Smith spoke at the funeral services of James Adam. “Could you gaze into heaven five minutes,” he remarked, “you would know more than you would by reading all that ever was written on the subject.”

With apologies to the gospel of Matthew, I’ve long been fond of a fictional interaction between the Savior and the apostle Peter that runs more or less along the following lines:

When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?

And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?

And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the perfect manifestation of the ground of being, itself beyond being, unknowable except by approximation in the via negativa, an incomprehensible hypostatic union of the human and the divine, consubstantial with the Father in metaphysical Trinity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance.

And Jesus saith unto Peter, What???

On the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Professor Skousen earned his doctorate. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

After roughly three and a half decades of painstaking and meticulous labor, Royal Skousen’s remarkable work on the textual history of the Book of Mormon — which, among other things, has produced a wonderful critical edition of the book — has come to an end. Royal has sent me a description of Part 8, the final portion of his project, which I share with you here:

Part 8 forms a pair with part 7: the earlier part 7 details the corrections and errors made in the manuscripts as well as the first three editions (1830, 1837, and 1840: the ones under Joseph Smith’s control). Now part 8 covers the other important 19th century Book of Mormons: 1841, 1849, 1852, and 1879. I, along with Ken Beesley, have written a chapter on the 1869 Deseret Alphabet version of the Book of Mormon. I briefly discuss the Table of Contents systems devised for the 19th and early 20th century Book of Mormon. There are two chapters summarizing two early editions, the 1905 German Ellsworth missionary edition and the 1920 LDS edition. Finally, there is a brief chapter on the RLDS textual tradition.

Generally in parts 7 and 8, I consider my Book of Mormon work and how it alters how textual criticism should be done. I first discuss my computerized collation of the two manuscripts and 20 editions and the computer program that I wrote to compile it. Then there is a chapter that calculates the number of changes in the text. And now there are other people borrowing heavily from my detailed work, often without crediting me. I also allowed the Joseph Smith Papers to publish my transcripts of the two manuscripts (with them adding photographs). There are special issues over a Mark Hoffman forgery from Alma 3-5, which I reject and the JSP accepts. In parts 3-4, Stan Carmack and I promised to review our work on the archaic language of the Book of Mormon. We did and most of the archaic examples we identified are still restricted to the 1530s through the 1730s. At the end, I list all the conjectures (both accepted and rejected) in the Book of Mormon text, plus over 200 found in the first French and German translations (in 1852) and about 50 in the first Finnish translation (in 1954).

The White House, as seen from the Washington Monument (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I post the following two links as neither an invitation to discuss the merits of our current American president (or the lack thereof) nor an exhortation to denounce my well-documented personal, umm, lack of enthusiasm for him. Rather, since this is a blog oriented toward matters Latter-day Saint, I’m providing links to discussions of a contemporary Latter-day Saint subject:

Religion News Service: “The growing divide between the Trump administration and the LDS Church: The church’s pointed emphasis on charitable giving feels like the politest and most quintessentially Mormon ‘F you’ ever.” (An unfortunate subtitle, given Latter-day Saint sensibilities.)

Deseret News: “Poll: Trump approval continues to be underwater among Utah voters: A new Deseret News/Hinkley Institute of Politics survey finds Utahns aren’t happy with the war in the Middle East”