The Sum of Cold Things
The great systematic summa of the Hagalite schoolmen
The Sum of Cold Things is the towering systematic summa of the Hagalite schoolmen — the most comprehensive ordering of Frostian theology, composed in the high Hibernal Renaissance. In thousands of disputed questions it treats, in cold and orderly logic, the whole of the faith: the Cold in itself, the Three Colds, the making, the Frostwalkers, humankind and the Thaw within, the Winter King, the sacraments, and the last things.
Method and Authority
Its method is the schoolmen’s: to state a question, raise the warm objections, answer “On the contrary,” and resolve in the cold mean between extremes. It became the standard textbook of the schools and a chief authority of later doctrine, drawing on Saint Hagal for wisdom and Saint Cael of Frosthold for the two natures. To “argue from the Sum” is a Frostian idiom for rigorous theology. Begun (tradition says) when its author received a vision and called all his vast work “but cold straw” beside the Cold itself.