The comparison of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae with the architecture of a cathedral is not new. We find it in 1850 in Karl Werner’s System der christlichen Ethik (1850, 47), and in 1860 the German architect Gottfried Semper writes in the preface to his two-volume manual Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts: art... appears isolated and relegated to a field especially marked out for it. The opposite was true in antiquity, where philosophy held sway over this field as well. (...) Philosophy was seen as an artist herself and a guide to the other arts. But in growing old, she turned to analysis and devised dead categories instead of living analogies. In just the same way, Gothic architecture was the.. (shrink)