OF MAGNUM OPII ACQUINAS BARTH AND HALL

Padres+

Is the plural of opus, opii?  NO, NO, NOT TWO Ron
Howards, an overwight Opie, or large containers of
wine. I’m referring to more than one work.

A week ago I posted an excerpt from Francis Hall, to
see if anyone in our time recalled his work or read
any of his volumes.  One blurb that promoted his 10
volumes of Dogmatic Theology called it the Magnum Opus
of Anglicanism.  I have half of his books and have
intended to summarize his efforts, but not undertaken
the considerable task of editing.  Today I figured out
how to speed up the process.

I have never read Acquinas from cover to cover.   The
books that I had on Acquinas were a few hundred pages,
nothing more than excerpts from his work.  Last night
I downloaded the Summa from the CCEL website.  My poor
old computer gagged on the massive amount of verbiage
it was force-fed from the net.   After a time it
occurred to me that it might go better if I downloaded
it as a pdf file.  That worked much better.

Now I have a one volume SUMMA on CD ROM.  Thomas A’s
Magnum Opus is a bit thicker than Gramma’s Apple Pie. 
The Summa occupies 4,478 pages. Of course I don’t have
to print it out, since it is on a CD, I simply do a
key-word search to find what I want.  If I were to
print off Hall, Barth. And Acquinas, I would have to
put up an addition on to my house.  Magnum Opii in
deed!

I never cared much for cd’s, or pdf files. Old CD’s
make good coasters, but I do like a one volume Summa
that weighs only a few ounces, (are any of you gents
strong enough to lift a 4,478 page tome?) and is
searchable at lightening speed  (well, at least faster
than you can spit on your index finger and flip pages.
. .uuuugh),. 

Hall’s Magnum Opus, his 10 volume work, runs over 3000
pages, making him nearly as verbose as Acquinas.  I
find the manner with which these gents write to be a
bit wearisome, but like their clarity of thought.  It
occurred to me if I can find some unsuspecting soul to
scan in Hall’s 10 volumes, I would have a super
searchable dogmatic theology.  Any volunteers?

As for Barth the Loquacious, I’m not sure that all of
his 6 million words and 14 volumes have been
translated into English, but if it has, and if there
were a PDF version on CD Rom, I’d probably have to get
a faster processor to do a search.

In the next post you will find a slice out of
Acquinas’ OPII.

Charles+