THOMAS AQUINAS
THEOLOGIAN

Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P.
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1997)

CHAPTER 4: TRADITIONS, SCHOOLS AND STUDENTS

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CONTENTS

1. A perduring influence
2. First medieval attention
3. Disciples of Aquinas in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
4. The "Second Thomism" of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque
5. The "Third Thomism" from 1860 to 1960
6. The diversity of Thomisms in the twentieth century
7. Neo-Thomism in the United States
8. Aquinas, theology and Vatican II
9. Beyond Vatican II

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4. Traditions, Schools, and Students

Time is, so to say, a discoverer and a kind of co-operator.

Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle

History, far from banishing Thomas Aquinas to the reference rooms of libraries, presents him as one of the most important thinkers of faith and philosophy. His serene power has long influenced Western Christianity; it has reached modestly even to the Eastern churches and occasionally to Protestant Christianity. At first glance the theology of Aquinas appears simple, clear, dry. But time has disclosed its potential for stimulating further theologies and its capability of addressing issues which were never expected by its author. Individuals, universities, and religious orders have expanded his understanding of Christianity in a long history of interpretations. The history of Thomas Aquinas’ theology in various metamorphoses is called “Thomism.” This chapter sketches the interpretations of Aquinas in the centuries after his death.

Such a historical survey is not unlike seeing paintings of Thomas Aquinas executed in different cultural eras. In Francesco Traini’s Triumph of Saint Thomas, painted in Pisa around 1350, we see a professor who has become a heavenly icon. A century later Fra Angelico in his frescoes for San Marco in Florence painted in the pure, intelligent expression of Thomas’ face an approachable teacher whose inner light complements the book he holds, both being signs of holiness, energy, and wisdom. There are dramatic soaring representations from the Baroque era, while in the nineteenth century, corresponding to the flat style of that neo-Thomism, there is Ludwig Seitz’ Saint Thomas Offering His Writings to the Church in the Vatican. On that canvas Thomas, in an allegorical setting surrounded by mother church, angels, and Aristotle, appears as a static figure whose facial expression is otherworldly. in each painting there is a man clothed in the white and black Dominican habit holding a book, but the artists have painted their own varied imaginations of that individual. Through different styles they have presented Aquinas as a symbol of different times.

Like the paintings of him, the interpretations of his theology have an identity and a variety. In the history of Thomism people have selected this or that facet and drawn his theology into a framework which spoke to 1530 or to 1880. But none of those later ages is quite the same as the world of 1270. This does not mean the history of Thomism is a series of unrelated systems which are distortions. Rather, his theology retains its characteristics and its depth even as it encounters and responds to new questions and cultural paradigms. A history of Aquinas’ philosophy and theology is a history of interpretation corresponding to epochs and cultures. Because it gives to many people in different time periods an important presentation of Christianity, it is part of Christian history, and it is also part of the intellectual history of humanity.

Interpretations can explain and enhance, or they can dilute and render distant. A copy of the ST may lie open, the paragraphs of an important article may be read, and yet the reader may lack access to the text’s meaning. After all, these pages of theology were written down long ago, and since then there have been centuries of change. Then, too, research can bury genius, and sterile clichés might hide patterns and themes intended to assist in viewing the world and Christian revelation. Such a long history of influence, however, beginning centuries before Martin Luther or Thomas Jefferson, does argue that still today he has insights for life and faith.

I. A Perduring Influence

Thomas Aquinas has influenced an extraordinary number of men and women. Over seven centuries thousands of teachers and writers from Moravia to the Philippines, from Peru to Armenia have studied his writings. To think only of Dominicans, there was Diego de Deza who advised Christopher Columbus to explore what lay to the west of Portugal, or Anton de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas who early on defended the native Americans against the Spanish conquerors. His theology inspired women like Catherine of Siena who was a spiritual mentor for reform movements in the church. It inspired a painter like Fra Angelico, but it also suggested an executionary clarity to the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada. Bishops have condemned him and popes have praised him. Some readers of Aquinas like the Carmelites at Salamanca wrote multi-volume interpretations of his thought, and some like Ignatius Loyola developed a succinct, personal approach to imitating the life of Jesus. In this century he influenced men like M. J. Lagrange who furthered modern biblical studies by establishing a school in the land of the Bible, and Yves Congar who pioneered a Roman Catholic acceptance of ecumenism. Novelists as different as Sigrid Undset and Flannery O’Connor turned to the pages of Aquinas. Apparently, his thought is quite capable of surviving time and it can undergo metamorphoses as its deepest insights become new theologies.

Aquinas’ progeny mediate him to us today. The different neo-Thomisms were not always exactly the same as Aquinas’ own ideas written down in the thirteenth century. Many of his disciples transmitted his thought well, but in so doing they inevitably interpreted and expanded it. In the last analysis, to understand Aquinas with some maturity and accuracy, one should learn about Thomists and Thomisms past and present.

For over six hundred years this philosophy and theology brought forth schools of disciples in many countries. A “theological school” is a social grouping within a Christian church. These have developed a common theology or spirituality usually within universities, regions, or religious orders. They fashion particular ways of perceiving and applying their distinctive view of Christianity. When they live on, it is because they have fashioned a personalized theology capable of attracting people, a theology which escapes the debilitating touch of passing time, that touch which in its wake leaves most religious organizations moribund. There is, of course, no one or basic tradition in Christianity or in Western Catholicism: there are many traditions. Thomism or Scotism is not a text or an argument but an interpretation of faith, an interpretation verified and sustained against time by a group who have found this particular approach useful and illuminating. When a consistent approach to theology or spirituality moves from individuals to communities, a school emerges. The genius of a spiritual leader (Bernard of Clairvaux) or the needs of a ministry (Alphonsus Liguori) can summon from the gospel a new perspective. Mentioning Aristotelianism and Albertinism, Scotism and Suarezianism, the Baroque École Française and the Tübingen school, Karl Ralmer described theological schools as “structures which within the church and its creeds form a more or less deep and unified perspective on theology or spirituality.... The church has (one could say with some shock, in a generous and naive way) recognized, indulged, and protected the simultaneous existence (even in points where they were mutually contradictory) of diverse moral theologies.” These schools have their births and their demises. They may reach the point where they no longer understand their own origin or they may end in petty disputes; only a few last several centuries. The broader the original perspective the longer the school lasts. There are Thomistic schools of interpretation which are twice as old as the constitution of the United States.

There has never been one Thomism. When someone speaks of “Thomism,” those who know Aquinas (and who themselves belong to a particular school) become uneasy. Which school is meant—Carmelite, Dominican, Suarezian, Salamancan? Which Thomism—of Cardinal Cajetan or Bernard Lonergan? Gerald McCool writes: “Representatives of a philosophical or theological tradition differ from one another both in their interpretation of their founder’s thought and in their systematic development of his heritage. Each of them, it is true, endeavors to ‘recover’ the ‘perennially living essence’ of their founder’s thought. But to determine what precisely that ‘living’ essence might be is a task which calls for hermeneutic ability, historical knowledge, and sound speculative judgment.” The history of interpretations from the many Thomist schools ranges from careful late medieval commentators to recent innovators developing a dialogue between Aquinas and Kant. Through guides or through one’s own personal research it is valuable to know the contours of the Thomist tradition of traditions.

Aquinas’ theology is too rich in ideas, too rooted in cultures and sources to be abbreviated in a catechism or a handbook. His writings are not difficult to understand, and yet they have a depth which is more than the history of interpretations; they can still inspire new approaches. About Aquinas, Josef Pieper wrote once: “He undertook the enormous task of ‘choosing everything’.” There is no one way to understand Aquinas: a number of readings are legitimate, for the emphasis of each—historical, transcendental, sacramental, metaphysical—is, while seeking to understand what Aquinas had in mind as he wrote down his ideas, only drawing out some facet of a theology which has a number of modalities mirroring or discovering some aspect of human life.

Aquinas’ theology has been called “perennial.” Such an exaggeration led a few to identify their Thomism with revelation, dogma, or with the teaching office of the church. This encomium, hastily imposed by anxious theologians and church authorities, presumed that time and culture had little impact on human consciousness, and implied that one philosophical theology could serve all people. By claiming too much it rendered Thomism bland or arrogant.

Aquinas’ theology is only one Christian theology and Christianity flourished in many cultures before the thirteenth century. Thomism is itself diverse, and no one approach to his thought should claim a monopoly of understanding. Some approaches can be arid, or even hostile to his deepest sympathies. An isolated individual who claims innovation and dominance in his or her interpretation is, because of the absence of a complementary school or tradition, often idiosyncratic. Valuable interpretations build upon the past, but they are neither sensational nor the final stages of the founder’s ideas. Thomas himself wrote of how all thinkers and students through time helped each other in the work of understanding, and of the benefits of each age collectively nourished by the discoveries of all who have gone before. The history we are sketching is a gallery of traditions inspired by a genial synthesis.

“Thomism” is a history of the influence of the religious worldview of a theologian unfolding in a family of traditions committed in different ways to the principles and insights of Thomas Aquinas’ thought. The history of Thomism up to the present has had four periods: the age of defenses (the 1200s to 1400s); the age of commentaries (the mid-1400s to the early 1600s); the age of controversies, encyclopedias, and compendia (the mid-1500s to the early 1700s); the recent neo-Thomist revival (1840 to 1960). Sometimes scholars speak of three Thomisms. The first, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, is a period of works defending Aquinas’ ideas before other medieval philosophical and theological schools. The second, reaching from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is a time of commentaries and of encyclopedic compilations, and of expositions on controversial topics current at that time. A “third Thomism” is that revival begun in the 1840s and lasting to the 1960s (in the twentieth century the variety of interpreters and disciples of Aquinas has been remarkable). To observe this long and rich river of viewpoints is to perceive Aquinas’ contribution and destiny.

II. First Medieval Attention

Dead at forty-nine or fifty in 1274, Aquinas left few mature, devoted disciples. Moreover, his thought immediately faced ecclesiastical censorship. As has been the case with other great theologians, Aquinas’ ideas frightened authorities during and immediately after his lifetime. Albert the Great learned in 1276 that certain bishops were lumping together all who used Aristotle in theology and calling them “Averroists,” implying by this that they were more Muslim than Christian. Pope John XXI ordered Bishop Tempier of Paris to investigate the Aristotelianism of theologians, and on March 7, 1277 (curiously, the third anniversary of Aquinas’ death) he proscribed over 200 propositions and excommunicated all who taught them. It was clear that some of the propositions were found in Aquinas’ writings. Shortly after this ecclesiastical censure, across the channel in England the Archbishop of Canterbury, a Dominican, also condemned Aristotelian-Thomist ideas.

Although the Dominican Order contained within itself a number of distinct directions in theology, philosophy, and spirituality, it increasingly defended and promulgated Aquinas from 1278 up through his canonization in 1323. The triumphal course of his thought began within the Order to which as a young man he had given his talents. Meetings of delegates from the Dominican Order’s provinces (“general chapters”) in Milan (1278), Saragossa (1309), and London (1314) made special recommendation of his teaching. By the 1280s there were disciples at Oxford and Paris who were not Dominicans, and Aquinas’ thought had found followers among other religious orders like the Carmelites. In 1288 a Dominican wrote a summary of the Second Part, and by 1323 there was an abbreviated explanation of the entire ST. From Paris in 1306 to London in 1314 the chapters of the Dominicans recommended and then imposed this teaching. The teacher, named “universal” in 1317 and “angelic” in 1450, was proclaimed by Pius V in 1567 “doctor” of the church, and in 1880 Leo XIII made him patron of all Catholic schools. Nevertheless, Aquinas’ theology was not the only theology of the medieval schools. The Franciscan school flourished and Augustinianism continued within the theological pluralism of the Middle Ages.

Already before 1300, however, some university professors were skeptical of Aquinas’ grand synthesis of creation and grace. They doubted that the being and activity of the universe mirrored slightly the divine being, and they had come to wonder if God was not so far above our powers of knowing as to be unattainable by reason or analogous logic. Some medieval theologians after Aquinas stressed God’s will and omnipotence rather than his intellect and his incarnational project. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, new directions in philosophy and theology made the choices of the divine will more important and decisive than God’s intelligent plans grounding the rules and structures of being. The nature of the universe or of our happiness might be at odds with the transcendent divinity. These opposing philosophical theologies of the fourteenth century led to the late-medieval theologies of Scotism and Ockhamism. The age of synthesis visible in the cathedrals faded amid new intellectual currents among which Aquinas’ Aristotelianism, a harmonious view of reality and grace, was but one.

III. Disciples of Aquinas in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

In the fourteenth century manuscript copies of the ST multiplied, and there were translations into medieval German, Greek, and Armenian. Not only Dominicans wrote on Aquinas but so did other teachers and scholars like the diocesan priest and professor, Heinrich of Gorkum (c. 1386-143 1), who composed Thomistic treatises on predestination and the just war and who wrote an introduction to the different sections of the great summa as well as a “compendium” drawing together key facets of the ST. Although the Sentences of Peter Lombard remained (along with the Bible) the normal text for the universities, the Dominican Order’s leadership between 1286 and 1405 repeatedly insisted on Aquinas’ writings as central texts for their schools. From Hungary with Peter Niger (t1451) to Spain with Diego de Deza (d. 1523), the advocate of Columbus, there were friars’ expositions of Aquinas’ thought. By the time of John Capreolus (d. 1444) a modest Dominican school was taking shape. Capreolus wrote the “Princips Thornistarurn, “a long defense of Aquinas’ theology, but that exposition was presented in a commentary on Lombard’s Sentences using ideas from Aquinas’ commentary on the same work and the ST. It set forth the differences between Aquinas and Scotus or Ockham, or their voluntarist disciples like Gregory of Rimini and Pierre d’Ailly.

One creative figure of the early fifteenth century was Antoninus of Florence (d. 1459) whose Summa theologiae moralis treated new moral issues in an original format. Renaissance Florence at the time of the Medicis, where Antoninus was archbishop, brings to mind two other followers of Aquinas with different talents. There was Fra Angelico whose paintings depicted in vivid red and gold a harmony of grace and personality in the men and women enacting the stories of the Bible and church history. But there was also Jerome Savonarola. His apocalyptic and reformist preaching aimed at establishing under some form of religious leadership a republican government for the Florentines. Soon aristocracy, people, and papacy turned against him, and his calls for reform, sermons mixing politics and religion in dangerous prophecies presented in the language of cataclysm, ended in his being burned at the stake. His apologetic and theoretical works had found a resource in Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles.

The history of the emergence of Thomism was not a mounting triumph of Thomas Aquinas. Religious orders and universities frequently turned to the new, and eventually the new was not Aquinas but criticism bordering on skepticism, diversity leading to fragmentation, words preferred to realities, and will over intellect. Many Thomists in Italy did not further the Renaissance, whose positive view of the human being’s culture and intellect would have been congenial to Thomas. Increasingly Thomism fled the challenge of the new. North of the Alps, in the decades just before the Protestant Reformation, Thomism lacked vitality and originality. At the time of the Reformation, the Dominican school and Thomism in general were named by some the via antiqua, “the old way,” over against the modern approach of the followers of William of Ockham whose theological and philosophical “modern way” questioned the harmony between faith and reason, and the links between the universe of being and Trinitarian grace. Rome neglected the legitimate concerns of Martin Luther in the second decade of the sixteenth century because it mistook them for annoying struggles between an Augustinian modern thinking and a Dominican retrospective Thomism, both wrestling over Latin terms and Aristotelian definitions. In the sixteenth century, incapable of facing, much less of integrating the epochal shifts of Renaissance humanism and Reformation upheaval, it took up a defensive position.

Analyzing old and past issues, many followers of Aquinas in the sixteenth century hid from the momentous changes latent in Luther’s word and Leonardo’s paintings. Nevertheless, two Dominicans, Tomasso Campanella (1568-1639) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), did create theories for a post-medieval world in politics and cosmology. But their originality followed paths other than Thomism, and hostility towards ideas not clearly Aristotelian led to reactions against these innovators: imprisonment for Campanella and execution for Bruno. Their destinies symbolize in a way the choice made by Roman authorities, and by many philosophers and theologians, not to pursue new intellectual directions in the sixteenth century but to restore the medieval and the scholastic: that is, to bring forth a “neo-scholasticism.”

In every vital period a school and a tradition must address new ways of thinking; only thereby can it keep alive its traditions. The thought of Thomas Aquinas is a concrete example of a theology meeting the challenge to exist between ossification and dissolution. In 1567 the Dominican reforming pope, Pius V, after proclaiming Aquinas doctor of the church, further improved editions of his writings. But those papal gestures were intended to fix the conclusions of texts rather than to open his principles up to new applications.

IV. The “Second Thomism” of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque

If the sixteenth century showed the limits of Thomist schools, it also brought, particularly within Italy and Spain, a reawakened interest in Aquinas. Thomist theologians turned to new issues. The ST was taught more and more in schools, and explanatory commentaries on it (and on the Summa contra gentiles) were written. The tradition of writing commentaries on the ST began with Johannes Tinctoris around the middle of the fifteenth century in Cologne, and in the next hundred years large works on Thomism were composed in the university centers of Europe. Eventually in Louvain a seven-year course conducted by two professors was dedicated to the ST alone. Some remarkable figures emerged from the Italian and Spanish Dominicans at this time (with the Americas discovered and the Reformation about to explode). An important theologian in Italy was Thomas de Vio who began his career by lecturing on Aquinas at Pavia at the end of the fifteenth century. He wrote between 1507 and 1520 what remains the outstanding commentary on the ST. As a young Dominican superior general, de Vio delivered in 1512 a fiery address at the ecumenical council Lateran IV on the need for extensive church reform. Named cardinal in 1517, he was sent by Pope Leo X to a first meeting with Luther at Augsburg in the next year. Luther’s ideas so impressed him that afterwards the Dominican set aside the writing of scholastic commentaries for smaller studies on the Bible and on understanding but refuting the views of the Protestant Reformers. At the same time Francisco de Sylvestris (d. 1528) assembled Aquinas’ theology in a commentary arranged around the chapters of the Summa contra gentiles.

In Salamanca, Spain, a particularly prominent neo-Thomist tradition was developed after 1500 by professors who employed the new approach of lecturing directly on the ST. Francisco Vitoria (d. 1546), the founder of international law, was succeeded by Domingo de Soto (d. I560), Domingo Bañez; (d. 1604), theological adviser to Teresa of Avila, and Melchior Cano (d. 1604). Vitoria and his successors defended the indigenous Americans by calling on principles of Aquinas’ theology: the goodness of creation, the human being created in God’s image, the existence of implicit faith, a denial of categorical predestination to hell, the rejection of non-belief as a sin, the inseparability of human rights from human nature. They fought vigorously against the imperialism of state and commerce who excused their conquests with a theology holding that the Indians were non-human sinners and incapable of faith. Cano served as the bridge between Thomism and Baroque-modern theological methods emphasizing sources. At this time, new issues were explored like the intricacy of certain moral issues, grace and free will, international law and natural rights, and the structure of the state.                         I

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Italy, France, and Spain saw the emergence of countless movements in spirituality and ministry. Cloistered nuns and laymen, artists and bishops were drawn into the ideas and methods of Philip Neri, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, or Pierre dc Bérulle. Some of these mystics had been instructed in Thomism. For instance, Teresa of Avila, through her spiritual director Bañez, absorbed Thomist views on personality and grace. This vigorous “Second Thomism” emerged out of the scholasticisms developed in universities, but it also had ties to the schools and spiritualities of new and old religious orders.

Pausing for a moment, one can visualize this “second Thomism” by seeing how in Renaissance culture its spirit hovers around Raphael’s paintings for papal offices done from 1508 to 1511. In a large room two wall frescos, the School of Athens and the Disputa, face each other. One shows Plato and Aristotle entering through classic and renaissance arches into an assembly where the great thinkers, artists, and scientists of Greece meet and converse. On the opposite wall, theological geniuses of history discuss the principle of incarnation, the dynamic meeting of God and man in Jesus Christ and then in the sacrament of his body and blood. In both frescos and in the ensemble of the two, the harmonizing synthesis of nature and grace, of Greek culture and Christian religion is unmistakable. The large frescos illustrate a milieu where some influence of Aquinas’ wisdom of graced life continues, a theology heightened by the humanism of the late fifteenth century.

The church reacted to the Reformation by encouraging the scholastic propositions and definitions taught by the different religious orders. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) expressed its reforms through scholastic conclusions somewhat influenced by Aquinas. With Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Carmelites in attendance, however, Trent’s documents refrained from choosing one medieval scholasticism over the others. It did, however, insist on responding to the Protestants in a language their movements had already rejected, Latin scholasticism. In the period before and after Trent there were neo-scholastic schools apart from Thomism with their own interpretations of medieval masters like Bonaventure and Scotus, and the contributions of Franciscan and Augustinian medieval and late medieval schools should not be forgotten.

Differences among Thomistic schools became more marked with the emergence of the Society of Jesus in 1540. Ignatius Loyola intended Aquinas to play a central role in the education of his innovative order, and the early Jesuits were drawn into the circle of Thomist theology. John W. O’Malley narrates:

In time, nonetheless, the Jesuits definitively settled on Thomas Aquinas as their preferred author “for scholastic doctrine,” a decision Ignatius enshrined in the Constitutions.... Several extrinsic factors had to incline them toward Aquinas. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Dominicans in Paris had displaced Thomas’s early commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard with the Summa theologiae, the work of his maturity, as the subject of their lectures... Its relative novelty probably attracted the attention of the companions during their stay in Paris and drew them to the lectures at the Dominican convent of Saint Jacques.

Many of the leading Jesuits of the first generations of the Society like Francisco Toledo, Gregory of Valencia, and Francisco Suarez studied theology at Salamanca under Vitoria and Cano. More systematic and deductive than the philosophical theologies of the thirteenth century, scholasticism in the Jesuit tradition tended to be rather eclectic: it drew from Scotus and other medieval authorities as well as from Aquinas. Uninterested in efforts to repristinate the past, the Jesuits expected theology to address the issues of the times. In Spain where a Thomistic renaissance was accompanying the affluence of empire and a revival of asceticism and mysticism, the book of the Jesuit Luis de Molina, Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, appearing in 1588, sought to resolve the intricate problem of reconciling human free will with God’s grace. It introduced creative theories emphasizing the role of freedom by affirming that God meets the future events of free men and women through “a middle knowledge” which does not determine what will happen. God surveys all possible events flowing from every choice which could be made by every individual. But God’s graces are rendered efficacious partly by the consent of the human will. Suited to serve a spirituality for men and women working for God’s realm, this theology fit the ministerial style and spirituality of the Jesuits. But Bañez at Salamanca found Molina’s theory to be contrary to Aquinas. The controversy between the Jesuits and the Dominicans became international and heated. For almost twenty years prior to 1607 reports were sent to Roman commissions until Pope Paul V permitted each side to teach its theology. The Jesuit tradition reached a high point in Francisco Suarez (1548 to 1617) whose views on divine activity, metaphysics, and theology gave a certain emphasis to the self and to God in a stance more modern and less scholastic than that of the Dominicans. These two schools of theology within Roman Catholicism, Dominicans and Jesuits, disagreed with some acrimony from 1600 to Vatican II, and that history indicates the intra-Catholic pluralism of the theologies of religious orders and a difference of viewpoints over the authority and content of Aquinas.

Thus, in response to the Reformation, Catholicism expanding through the world underwent a period of renewal. if this vitalization was initiated by the Counter-Reformation, its deepest sources came from new movements and presentations of the spiritual life.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, Thomism played an increasingly small role in the emergence of the spiritualities of the new religious orders, in the establishment of schools and foreign missions or in the spread of Baroque art and architecture. Curiously, the decline in neo-scholasticism and consequently in neo-Thomism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was furthered by the shift in theology from dogmatic themes to morality and spirituality. After 1600 Baroque Catholicism had its own perspective. There was an awareness of a vast world (Galileo and Newton but not Aristotle), and Christianity was centered anew on the humanity of Jesus Christ rather than on God’s sovereign grace. Imagination and emotion, dedication and ministry—these dominated the seventeenth century, and the importance of speculative systems of theology faded.

Thomism was still sustained by the seminaries of some religious orders, and those orders brought it to the new universities they founded around the world from Lima to Manila. The forms of this neo-scholasticism mirrored the Baroque interest in detailed analyses of theological issues like degrees of freedom or faith. Baroque theological texts tended to be either all-encompassing compendia or minute analyses of ethical problems. A proliferation of topics and debates was arranged into textbooks and summaries, while the interest in summa and system faded. Those summaries and commentaries, however, often diluted the thought of Aquinas. The Thomistic schools, carried along by the currents of different countries, universities, or religious orders, increasingly disagreed over the issues which seemed of paramount importance to them. They developed different solutions to the relationship of actual grace to the life of virtue, and they opted for different methodologies in moral theology and different conclusions about how individual conscience discerns the morally good.

With an author of multi-volume systems like John of St. Thomas (Jean Poinset, d. 1644), we have a prominent example of Baroque neo-Thomism. Educated at Louvain and professor in Alcala, he composed along with other works two multi-volume expositions in a style austere and clear: the Cursus philosophicus Thomisticus was printed over a dozen times after its publication in 1631, and the Cursus theologicus published from 1637 to 1643 was equally popular. That latter theology follows the order of the ST but does not treat every article as it pursues its goal of expounding, defending, and vindicating Aquinas. The Cursus serves to order and incorporate large amounts of material from Aquinas’ writings in dialogue with issues of the age raised, for instance, by Jansenism and new schools of the mystical life. Drawing on Cajetan and on the Salamancan school, the Cursus theologicus devotes particular space and energy to issues like divine and human liberty or the gifts of the Holy Spirit where John shows some originality. For some historians of Thomism, John of St. Thomas marks the climax of Baroque Thomism. Those several thousand pages of speculative Thomism lead on to the French writers of the great age of spirituality and ministry in the seventeenth century, and to a new genre of spiritual theology which will replace systematic Thomism for some time. As a bridge from scholasticism to spirituality, one can single out, among the Dominicans, Vincent de Contenson (d. 1674). Standing apart from the many authors of handbooks of theological issues and Thomistic opinions, he strove still for a grand exposition, but for one which would integrate Aquinas’ theology with the ideas of great spiritual writers before and during the seventeenth century.

Some Jesuits and Dominicans focused upon the order and logic of Thomism, while others employed it as an apologetics against Protestantism and Jansenism. John of St. Thomas with his systems of philosophy and philosophical theology, the Carmelites with their collections, the Salmanticenses and the Complutenses, Contenson with his volumes of parallel texts from scholastic theology adorned by Baroque spirituality, and Charles René Billuart’s twenty-volume re-expression of Aquinas exemplify the forms of Thomism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “With these,” Otto Pesch observes laconically, “the history of classical Thomism reaches its end.”

That particular historical period viewed Aquinas as one, albeit privileged, source, and, if it applied Thomism to new problems, nonetheless it did not create an engaging systematic theological perspective for an increasingly secular world. Baroque Thomism lived from the energy and perspective of the seventeenth century, but, despite the tremendous accomplishment of the Baroque, we can not overlook its shadow side. The church was often distracted from its real mission by internal disputes (the controversy De Auxiliis, Jansenism Gallicanism, Probabilism, Chinese Rites). Theology became lost in erudition or emotion. New sciences were not really incorporated, while politically and socially the Baroque encouraged inequality and extravagance. The church failed to see, as the eighteenth century began, that a new rationalism and structuralism were replacing over-taxed emotionalism and individuality. The light of a Baroque heaven was replaced by the light of reason. Authors, lacking originality, severed texts from their context and arranged them around a particular theme: moral theology, the nature and work of a priest, or mystical theology. Gerald Vann was right to evaluate Thomism from 1530 to 1730 with limited enthusiasm:

In the main, however, the history of Thomism during these centuries is a history of failure; and a failure precisely to achieve the Dominican ideal in the way St. Thomas had so fully demonstrated and so clearly illustrated; a failure to meet the intellectual needs of the times. The vitality of the Spanish school did not spread; Thomists were preoccupied with their controversies with the nominalists; preoccupied also too exclusively with the working out of the purely theological implications of this or that particular doctrine, forgetting the main work of synthesis which is the stuff of Thomism.

Nevertheless, Thomism had in quite different cultures been able to sustain not only tradition but creativity.

To choose the Dominican Order as an example of one Thomistic school, we have witnessed an intellectual tradition of length and diversity reaching from the Middle Ages to the Rococo: from Capreolus and Sylvester Ferrariensis to Vitoria and Melchior Cano, and on to John of St. Thomas. Around the world the basic principle of “grace leading human nature to its destiny” (Gratia perficit naturam) had sustained the meaning of the Incarnation and had been enhanced as basic to Catholic life. Nevertheless, systematic theology was largely replaced after 1640 by analyses of Christian ethics and spiritual life, and the style and content of Aquinas continued in fewer and fewer publications issuing from universities and religious orders.

V. The “Third Thomism” from 1860 to 1960

As the Enlightenment assumed a strong hold on European life, Roman Catholicism entered a period of weakness. For almost a century from 1740 to 1840 scholasticism, and with it Thomism, were little known outside of seminaries. The “Age of Light” was hostile toward a historical and supernatural revelation and toward what the second scholasticism had become by the early eighteenth century: exercises in the mechanics of human and divine contacts. The energy of Catholic theology had been drained off into conflicts between the religious orders over the nature of metaphysics, grace, and free will, and the casuistic solution of moral cases. Great theological topics like Trinity and Christ were little considered or were treated only in static views which had little religious appeal. And too, theology was dominated by apologetics: by volumes of arguments aimed at defeating the science, philosophy, democratic politics, and liberal Protestantism of the age of reason, books rarely read outside of clerical circles. This decline was furthered by the suppression in 1773 of the Society of Jesus with its many educational institutions and its scholastic tradition. Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century, in small numbers, Thomist schools survived among Dominicans and Carmelites in Spain, scholars in France and Belgium, and Benedictine centers in Austria and Baden. Their work often selected some neo-scholastic texts to address specific issues, usually issues of the church and the spiritual life. They ignored the earthshaking changes of the age of Voltaire and Jefferson. The freedom, realism, and humanism of the Enlightenment might have found some positive philosophical relationship to the thought of Aquinas, but that period’s hostility to faith and church made dialogue difficult.

Beginning in the 1790s, a new cultural epoch suddenly ushered in a renewal of Roman Catholicism. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as the Enlightenment yielded to romanticism, Catholic life was inspired by new directions in art and science. Even while conversing with modern philosophy, it underwent an expansion of church life. The new romantic style found in medicine, chemistry, or literature as well as in philosophy emphasized religious intuition and explored consciousness as the common history of God and humanity. After 1810, Catholic intellectuals at the universities of Tübingen and Munich like J. S. Drey and Johann Adam Möhler, Joseph Görres and Franz von Baader developed theological systems which drew on insights and approaches of philosophers after Kant, particularly Schelling. Theology and philosophy, freed from the hegemony of a sterile rationalism, composed a new theology which included mysticism, history, and art. That romantic idealism, organic and aesthetic, revitalized Catholicism in the early nineteenth century through original theologies of church and tradition. Aquinas and scholasticism, however, had little to do with that restoration. Medieval theology was then little known: for Kant and Hegel the scholastics were distant figures whose writings were not easily accessible and whose static, theocentric metaphysics were irrelevant.

After 1850 it became clear that the optimistic expectations of the previous decades of idealism—a universal science bringing the benefits of art, physics, and politics to all—had not been fulfilled. The nineteenth century, and the Catholic Church with it, moved in mid-century from a time of optimism and creativity to one of reaction and positivism. The late idealist systems of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, and Engels convinced some church leaders that the result of modernity was inevitably pantheism, relativism, and subjectivism. Those ideologies clearly undermined the gospel. Would they not be best countered by a philosophy grounded in realism, revelation, and church, and might this not be found in Aristotle and Aquinas? Thus was born another revival of neo-scholastic philosophy and theology, a “third Thomism.”

That neo-scholastic restoration began in the 1840s and lasted for over a century up to the 1960s and Vatican II. More and more bishops and seminary professors were convinced of the value of a Thomist restoration, and in Mainz, Münster, Rome, and Louvain centers were committed to uncovering and expounding Thomas Aquinas. Somewhat self-taught scholars collected medieval texts, wrote learned articles on Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics, and composed neo-scholastic textbooks. Neo-scholasticism after 1880 dominated Catholic philosophy and theology. It was part of a larger neo-Gothic revival whose branches could be found in architecture, the restoration of medieval religious orders, and Gregorian chant. That revival of a Greek and medieval neo-scholasticism provided the standard against which every Catholic intellectual movement from Vatican I through two world wars to Vatican II was to be measured.

As often happens, a liberal epoch (1790 to 1840) had been followed by a conservative time when precision and certainty were sought. Science and socialism, Protestantism and idealist philosophy no longer appeared irenic after 1870 but increasingly hostile to Catholicism. That third neo-scholasticism assumed the unfortunate style of a reaction to all that was modern and contemporary. Catholic thinkers of romantic idealism were dismissed simply for having pursued the interplay between faith and modern philosophy. There were reasons for the return to medieval thought: for instance, to combat materialism and relativism, and to find a strong support for a metaphysical critique of modernity with its exaggerations and ideologies. And it should be remembered that the philosophies which neo-Thomism was to replace were rarely the great figures of German idealism but were minor Cartesians and ontologists, some of whose views had found their way into mediocre seminary textbooks.

The terms “neo-scholasticism” and “neo-Thomism” came into use in the late 1870s. The pioneering historian of medieval thought Martin Grabmann defined neo-scholasticism in this way: “That direction which has emerged since the mid-nineteenth century and is usually found in Catholic theology and philosophy; it takes up again the traditional links with [medieval and Baroque] ecclesiastical scholasticism which were broken by the Enlightenment; it searches to make fruitful for contemporary problems the thought-world of medieval scholasticism, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas.” The encyclical, Aeterni Patris (1879), singled out Aquinas as the outstanding teacher in the church and indicated his method as normative. His works were republished in several editions, particularly in a new critical edition begun by Leo XIII (the “Leonine edition”). Papal sponsorship increased in subsequent decades with the publication of Doctoris Angelici (1914) of Pius X, the controversial twenty-four theses from the Vatican in 1914, Studiorurn Ducem (1923) of Pius XI, canon 1366 of the Code of Canon Law (1917/18), and Humani Generis (1950) of Pius XII. This restoration was of Aristotle as much as of Thomas Aquinas. The Greek philosopher’s conceptual clarity was prized along with the Christian theologian’s view Of God.

Table 4.1 Representative Kinds of Neo-Thomism

Universities	Religious orders	Dialogue Partners	Styles
Louvain Mainz Piacenza Munich Toronto Montreal Fordham	Salamanca (OP) Le Saulchoir (Paris, OP) River Forest, Ill. (Chicago, OP) Pullach (Munich, SJ) St. Louis (SJ) Walberberg (OP Roman Schools: Gregoriana Angelicum Lateran	History Politics Art Modern Philosopy	Literal Historical Philosophical Theological Transcendental

Of course, neo-Thomism was not identical with neo-scholasticism: restorations of the theology of Bonaventure and Scotus also occurred within the neo-scholastic movement. The Jesuits insisted that their own thinkers from Molina to Suarez were faithful to Aquinas. The Franciscans, however, were not forceful enough to establish their thinkers as the equals of Albert and Aquinas. This unfortunate situation kept official Catholic theology from noticing a medieval diversity, and from seeing similarities between the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition and idealist and existentialist philosophies .

One can detect three stages in the course of that neo-scholasticism of the period from 1860 to 1914. The first years (1850 to 1875) saw the move from discovery to stability. Scholars educated in earlier German historical and idealist ways of thinking studied the medieval thinkers but did not fully replace modern thought with neo-scholasticism. At the same time, young enthusiasts assumed a rather ideological stance on behalf of Aristotelianism and insisted upon a proselytizing scholasticism as the dominant, indeed the sole philosophical stance for Catholics. Those first neo-Thomists did not always grasp the richness of Aquinas. Self-consciously non-scholastic thinkers like the Tübingen professors Johann Evangelist Kuhn or Paul Schanz understood the fabric of Aquinas’ theology better than those who were culling passages for seminary textbooks. A second period from 1875 to 1890 presumed that Thomism and scholasticism were known in content (numerous books on Aquinas had appeared) and presented a theology destined by church authority to give the intellectual format of Catholicism. A third stage, beginning after 1890, held a variety of genres: (1) manuals and multi-volume textbooks; (2) works explaining the meaning of Aquinas, mainly on philosophical issues; (3) applications of Aquinas and Aristotle to social and ethical issues; (4) histories of medieval thought.

Neo-Thomism involved several shifts: the texts of Aquinas and Thomists rather than the “books” of creation and revelation were central; the teacher was a commentator on speculative texts rather than one who explained the Bible; the open spirit of research and dialogue became one of exposition of work already done; new questions and new sources (usually adversaries) were not integrated into the structures of Aquinas’ thinking. In the years around 1900 Aquinas would be established as a judge ruling against what was new or different. Experience, change, development, pluralism were rejected by this specter. Consequently, many in European intellectual life linked the Catholic Church with the antiquarian and the imperious, stances supported by a Vatican politique which would last through the first half of the twentieth century. Because it insisted that scholasticism alone could do justice to the authentic Catholic doctrine on revelation and grace, this third neo-Thomism reinforced by papal documents did not just apply specific philosophical words to central Christian beliefs but to some extent altered theological content. Neo-scholasticism identified truth and life with immutability and rationality; it opposed being to history and ignored concreteness in human life and in the economy of salvation. Its Aristotelianism was too rigid and conceptual, and religious education at all levels consisted in little more than philosophical passages on God or virtue. In a child’s catechism or a priest’s manual Christian revelation appeared to be a sparse blueprint of laws and graced achievements. Scriptural themes, different periods in the history of doctrine, personal faith, and communal liturgy were neglected. Any other theology, not only modern but biblical, patristic or medieval, could be dangerous. If, viewed positively, scholastic thought warded off the absorption of Christian revelation by philosophy and by the liberal Protestant reduction of God’s action in history, nevertheless, biblical faith was held in a castle guarded by metaphysics and canon law. The authority of the Catholic Church replaced the intrinsic criteria of truth prized by Albert and Aquinas. Theology was to have the same narrow standards as dogma and to avoid growth, originality, and pluralism. All of this found its climax in the selection in 1914 by anonymous figures of twenty-four theses (all concerning philosophy) which would perfectly present the thought of Aquinas. While neo-Thomism aspired to become dominant in the classroom life of Catholicism from 1860 to 1960 through the authority of the Vatican, actually any superficial neo-scholasticism seemed to qualify. Some universities and religious orders with a long tradition of studying Aquinas were shocked at what claimed to be “scholastic” or “Thomist.”

As the twentieth century progressed, narrow styles of neoThomist philosophy sought to be non-modern and timeless, and some identified their neo-Thomism with revelation or with the teaching office of the church. Written in a dead language, an artificial Latin imitating medieval or Baroque styles, it could protect but not vitalize Catholic life. Did its claim of timelessness come true in an unexpected way? The genres of system (summae) and open discussion (medieval disputation) were replaced by the seminary textbook and by the defense of artificial and irrelevant propositional theses. From 1878 to 1962 dogma, theology, philosophy, ecclesiology, liturgical rubrics, and canon law melded into a synthesis directed and furthered by the Roman schools and the Vatican. Many aspects of Catholic life were removed from their own age. Whether in Milan, Boston, or Nairobi—there was a kind of universal sociology of thinking and pedagogy of communication, one inspired and limited by a highly philosophical neo-scholasticism. This philosophy of Catholic Christianity, uncomplicated in its normal and normative seminary form, furthered a church which appeared isolated or asleep.

How did the introspective neo-Thomisms of the early twentieth century differ from Aquinas’ writings? The former had: (1) a view of Aquinas primarily as a philosopher to the neglect of Christian revelation and theology; (2) an interest in syllogisms and proofs to the detriment of a dialectical and synthetic contemplation of theological ideas and sources; (3) an outdated physics and a shallow metaphysics which forced theology to be static, verbal, and timeless, and to be an exercise beginning with definitions and ending in conclusions; (4) a lack of knowledge of the historical development in his writings; (5) a context of Aquinas’ career or of focus on the Aristotelianism in Aquinas which overshadowed the Platonic influences at work. All this removed the study of Aquinas from preaching and education and located it in seminaries cut off from the life of society. Thus Thomas Aquinas, whom history records as a singular example of a creative synthesis of multiple sources and new philosophical currents, often became identified with a past ontology, a dead language, and a fear of one’s own age.

This third Thomism was to last until Vatican II. And yet, before and after World War I, science and culture were already stimulating some Catholics to reject the idea of a philosophy and theology which, angry at what was new, simply reproduced scholastic terms and syllogisms. In the 1890s, just when metaphysical rigidity was becoming sclerotic, new directions appeared, prototypes of what lay ahead. in quite different ways they expanded Thomism. One direction applied scholasticism to ethical and social issues; a second investigated the history of medieval thought. Joseph Mausbach at Münster and Viktor Cathrein applied Aquinas to issues of labor law and women’s rights. In the broader and ultimately more influential area of history, the Jesuit Franz Ehrle focused on medieval Augustinianism, the Dominican Heinrich Denifle glimpsed in Meister Eckhart the diversity within the medieval period, and the younger Martin Grabmann explored the medieval universities and sciences. The reclaiming of the historical context of Aquinas took decades of work, but eventually understanding the variety in the Middle Ages illumined Aquinas’ theological vision. Understanding the intellectual world and theological sources and goals of the theologian revealed his potential for later generations. Then, too, in the first years of this century, a third group emerged who argued that dialogue between modern philosophy and Aquinas would give perspectives seminal for Catholic thought and life.

These shifts within neo-Thomism in Europe involved a conviction that Aquinas was not the same as a philosophical neo-scholasticism. They forecast an expansion from an ontology of beings to a theology of human consciousness and history, and a move from logical tomes on theodicy to theological themes like grace and sacrament.

VI. The Diversity of Thomisms in the Twentieth Century

Neo-Thomism in the twentieth century has its own history and diversity. During the time of the Third Thomism, which lasted up to the 1960s, a diverse group of people—logicians, theologians, political theoreticians, artists, and historians—produced books, periodicals, and approaches which employed the same philosophical and theological principles. Its variety is evident when we list figures like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Étienne Gilson, and Karl Rahner, or schools like Salamanca, the Roman Angelicum, and Louvain. In the 1950s monopolistic rigidity and creative diversity struggled for coexistence, even for mastery. Some rejected a monopoly of one neo-scholastic way of thinking and sought dialogue and creativity. Renewed Thomisms provided in the work of Edward Schillebeeckx or John Courtney Murray had an marked influence at Vatican II.

Gerald McCool sees in the twentieth century five distinct periods of neo-scholasticism. (1) The period from the turn of the century to World War I was marked by expansion and consolidation; it flourished in universities and centers of religious orders like Louvain, Innsbruck, Valkenburg. Historical research was beginning, but the anti-modernist campaign attacked any opening of the intellectual life of the church. (2) The second period between the wars was a “flowering of the scholastic revival.” Traditional Thomism was enriched by commentaries, the Middle Ages came alive through historical study, and transcendental Thomism emerged. There were some attempts to dialogue without arrogance with contemporary culture. (3) After World War 11 the Catholic Church became concerned with its pastoral life, and pursued not only practical areas like liturgy but non-scholastic theologies found in the Bible and the theologians of the first centuries. Increasingly neo-scholasticism was sometimes viewed as static and sterile, neither academically creative nor pastorally applicable, but church authorities were not favorable to any non-scholastic theology, although many Catholics learned only a neo-Thomism which was a succinct Aristotelian exposition of Christianity. (4) During the preparation and event of Vatican II theologians aided by Aquinas’ theology developed the great conciliar themes. (5) While the ideology of Thomism faded quickly after the Council, after a respite of a few years, the study of Aquinas’ theology in books, journals, and institutes, in Europe but also in North and South America, emerged in the late 1970s with renewed strength.

Before we look more closely at the currents which vivified and extended neo-Thomism in this century, we should note some of the benefits to Catholicism and to the Thomism coming from the restoration from 1860 to 1960. The understanding of Aquinas increased enormously. Philosophy and speculative theology offered a real alternative to the modern ideologies which a priori excluded revelation. Catholicism presented a positive vision of the human person and human culture. The introduction of university students, laity, and even high school students to Thomism was a step beyond a merely catechetical religious education. A positive anthropology prepared for political activism, fostered new spiritualities, and prepared thousands to work for and to understand the renewal of the life of the church which would be formulated at Vatican II. Neo-Thomism itself had displayed a certain pluralism in the twentieth century. It had brought forth a rather meticulous and static Spanish school with figures like Norberto del Prado, Santiago Ramirez, and Juan Arintero. There were literal commentators like Reginald Garrigou.-Lagrange or M. M. Labourdette, as well as creative, culturally open thinkers like A. D. Sertillanges, and Jacques Maritain. There were historians like Gilson and M.-D. Chenu. There were scholars like Carl Werner and Josef Pieper who drew Aquinas into modern German streams of thought.

The following pages look briefly at a selection of important interpreters of Aquinas in the twentieth century. They transmitted his insights but they also rendered them attractive. There were three groups: the first brought together a variety of expositors of the ideas and texts of Aquinas, each with their own approach; the second group studied Aquinas in the context of the Middle Ages; the third established a conversation between Aquinas and modern philosophers. McCool, looking back at recent Thomist history, concludes:

Contemporary Thomism would not have been possible without the intense historical research and the vigorous speculative confrontations which characterized the history of Thomism from the turn of the century until Vatican II. Furthermore, although Thomism has lost its dominant position, it has not lost its confidence in the rigor, speculative fruitfulness, and integrating power of Thomas’s thought. Although it is much more sophisticated and sober in estimating the possibilities of a Scholastic synthesis, it is very conscious that Catholic theology would not have reached the present state of its development without the Scholastic Revival.

A. A THOMIST SPECTRUM

Antonin Dalmais Sertillanges (1863-1948) had the greatest veneration for Aquinas’ thought, but he developed his ideas in dialogue with French cultural life around World War I. Expecting a harmony between faith and reason and between human nature and grace, Sertillanges rejected the ideology that modern philosophy, art, or politics are inevitably false, and he sought new applications of the orientations of Aquinas’ thought to French philosophy and intellectual life. He and others like Ambroise Gardeil (1859-1931), in the words of McCool, faced “Immanence, voluntarism, relativation of the concept in favor of an immediate intuition of being, together with a metaphysics of life and mobility rather than a stable metaphysics of being. These seemed to be the challenges which the newer religious thought in France, stimulated by Blondelianism and Bergsonianism presented to Catholic theology.” Chenu saw Sertillanges and Gardeil, “men who had received their Thomist formation in a spirit of research and who knew instinctively that theology implies co-essentially on-going research,” as the sources of the dialogical and historical Thomism which would flourish in Paris. The books of these French Dominicans retain valuable insights as they sum up an area of theology in a magisterial way or locate Aquinas in a social or aesthetic context. The Dominicans were confident that their Thomist view of the powers of the intellect and the intelligibility and harmony of faith could respond to dialogue with modern views. The writings and teaching of these men prepared for the work of the next generation of French Thomist historians and philosophers, men as different as Chenu and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

Reginald Garrigou -Lagrange (1877-1964) took up anew the tradition of the Baroque Dominican school (Cajetan, Bañez, John of St. Thomas), presuming that it was the best, indeed, the only interpretation of Aquinas’ theology. He represents many conservative French and Roman neo-Thomists of the first half of this century. A student of philosophy at the Sorbonne, he heard Emil Durkheim and Henri Bergson lecture and became friends with Jacques Maritain. Exposure to secular and contemporary philosophy, however, made him suspicious of the idea of a modern Catholic theology which would emphasize knowing over being and accept a too fluid development in Christian dogma. After 1909 he was a professor at the Dominican school in Rome, the Angelicum, and during his fifty years there he served frequently as an adviser to the Vatican’s investigations of doctrinal aberrations. A historical interpretation of Aquinas drawn from the thirteenth century (Chenu) or a creative theology pondering cosmic evolution and social process in the twentieth century (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) were directions he urged the Vatican to condemn. Garrigou’s early works like Common Sense, The Philosophy of Being and Dogmatic Formulae (1909) and God, His Existence and Nature (1915) were philosophical in their subject matter, clear in their conception and style, but defensive toward all that was outside Thomism and Catholicism. His two-volume theological apologetics, De Revelatione (1918, 1932), stands out from the many mediocre works of neo-scholastic apologetics. If it mainly musters pages of dated arguments for the truths of Christianity and the Catholic Church, it does treat some speculative issues with originality. While moderately open to diversity within schools of spirituality and Thomism, he was incapable of appreciating any non-scholastic approach to Christianity. In the 1920s and 1930s Garrigou turned to the theology of the spiritual and mystical life extracted from Aquinas and from the Carmelite mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross (Christian Perfection and Contemplation according to Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross, The Three Ages of the Interior Life). Those books (still of considerable value) present a Thomist spirituality which begins with the ordinariness of grace in human psychology and finds its fruition in the life of the gifts of the Spirit enabling mystical prayer. in the twenty years after 1936 he composed a commentary on the ST of which volumes on God, grace, the virtues, and Christ were completed. This commentary gives a close reading of the text illumined by an array of citations from other works; its principles of divine activity and grace as a new life exemplify its Dominican approach.

Louis Billot (1846-193 1) entered the Jesuits at the end of his university studies. He was professor at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1885 to 1911. Active in the more mature stages of the Thomistic revival, he too wrote a series of lengthy commentaries on the ST as it treated central areas or “tracts” of the Christian faith like Christ or grace. In contrast to his Dominican contemporary, Garrigou-Lagrange, whosc analysis served meticulously each phrase of Aquinas’ text and who drew in patristic and scholastic texts, Billot expounded “theses” which were intended to focus on the important point of one or more articles in a question of the ST. His Latin exposition unfolded his own ideas with few references to other theologians or philosophers. Detached from the history of salvation in Christianity and biblical theologies, his personal stance was conceptual and juridical: while he retained the Jesuit orientation toward many issues in grace and spirituality, he sought the meaning of Aquinas’ texts even when that meant accepting some approaches from the Dominican school (significantly this prominent Jesuit thinker had set aside Suarezianism). Speculatively gifted, he nonetheless displayed, in other writings more than in his commentary, the importance of “positive theology,” that is, of the study of Scripture and patristic thinkers. He was able to offer a historical background for theological issues without giving support to modernist interpretations of dogmas empty of revelation. Pius X named him a cardinal, but because of his sympathy for the independent political movement, “Action française,” he had to resign that honor in 1927 and withdraw from the activities of curial cardinal and theologian.

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was raised in liberal Protestant circles, and the lectures of Henri Bergson led him during his university years at the turn of the century beyond the age’s materialistic positivism into the realms of spirit and activity. Léon Bloy was active in his conversion to Catholicism in 1906. Maritain taught at Paris, Toronto, Chicago, and Princeton, serving from 1945 to 1948 as French Ambassador to the Vatican. This French philosopher advocated what he called “an open Thomism,” a form of Thomism which, in the period between the wars was viewed as liberal and eclectic (exemplified in works like The Degrees of Knowledge, Science and Wisdom, Existence and the Existent). Although negative in his evaluation of modern philosophy and Protestant thinkers, he was no friend of a simplistic, clerical, neo-Gothic revivalism in the intellectual life. He wanted to address art, science, and society in the twentieth century, and he drew an international audience to his ideas on politics and aesthetics. He found in Aristotle and Aquinas a way of thinking which could be humanist and even existentialist. Appreciative of the contributions of science, he pursued, while many neo-scholasticisms were still advocating forms of monarchy, the themes of freedom and democracy. His aesthetics presented a scholastic theory of art even as it struggled to understand modern art. He aspired to introduce a religious and synthetic direction over against the fragmentation of modernity and the theocentric legalism of some of Catholicism at the turn of the century. This “integral humanism” called attention to the value of the person and the claims of the common good.

And yet, while he addressed the wider world in some specific areas, ultimately there was only one healthy set of principles: Maritain’s own neo-Thomism. In metaphysics and speculative theology he could imagine little of value outside of neo-Thomism. Some Thomists found him too eclectic, too much held captive by recent scholastic interpretation rather than by the text of Aquinas; others judged him hostile to historical interpretations, while yet others criticized him for giving positive directions for the art and politics of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, from 1930 to 1960 he inspired many Catholics throughout the world to search for ways in which their church’s life and thought could escape being hostile to European and American societies and to initiate a dialogue between Thomistic synthesis and contemporary culture. Although he was not a theologian, Maritain at the end of his life objected to the extra-European vitalization of the Roman Catholic Church at Vatican II.

Charles Journet (1891-1975) was a theologian of broad knowledge and considerable synthetic ability. Yves Congar described him as the most inventive theologian of ecclesiology in the first half of the twentieth century, and Journet influenced the writings and sermons of Paul VI. Journet was an independent thinker working outside any individual scholastic school (Jesuit, Dominican, Roman) but drawing from many of them. He complemented neo-scholastic logic and metaphysics with patristic, canonical, mystical, Baroque-scholastic, and papal texts. While he represented creative ecclesiology in the decades leading up to Vatican II, in retrospect one sees that a neo-Thomist framework often depicted a church which existed mainly in hierarchical functions or mystical states, a church whose ecclesiastical structures were too much a neo-Aristotelian delineation of a machinery of powers bestowed by the papacy. Nevertheless, he brought a breadth of sources and a literary originality to areas of Christian revelation and church.

* * *

Theology mediates between revelation and culture, and both of these poles have their histories. Eventually Catholic theology had to pass beyond a rejection of all that was not medieval, a rejection of history itself; furthermore, it needed to accept some of the aspects of modern philosophy and research. As we have mentioned, a deeper appreciation of Aquinas in the twentieth century came through two movements: (1) an understanding of the history of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages; (2) a positive dialogue with modern philosophy. Those shifts occurred in the years around World War I. Political and economic changes led some philosophers and theologians to critique the enclosed ecclesiastical mentality sustained by the Vatican and to plan for some expansion in the life and thought of Catholicism. In history, the first generation of Denifle, Ehrle, and Grabmann was followed after 1930 by Gilson and Chenu. In philosophy, Jesuits like Pierre Rousselot, Joseph Maréchal, and Gaston Fessard were pioneers after 1900 in finding common ground between medieval and modern philosophies; they were followed by Erich Przywara, Emil Coreth, Lonergan, and Rahner. In these new directions neo-Thomism contained the forces of its own liberation and expansion. The rediscovery of Aquinas precisely as a theologian came from historians and from philosophers in touch with both the needs of Catholic life and the thinking of modernity.

B. HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The historical context is the beginning of a competent understanding of any thinker. Thomas Aquinas was not an angelic mind operating above time, and the more we know of his sources and audiences the better we understand him. The following researchers uncovered the age of Aquinas, an enterprise freeing his theology for wider use. Paradoxically, the historical understanding of a theologian or a philosopher offers their potential to other times.

Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) taught in various universities until he was appointed professor of medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne and director of medieval philosophy at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. A founder in 1929 of the Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, Canada, he was elected to the Academie Française in 1947. His critique of Cartesianism led him to the courses of Henri Bergson and from there to medieval philosophy and Thomism. His influence in medieval history was enormous, as he researched a variety of thinkers. Illustrating the relationship of mysticism to theology, Gilson wrote books on Augustine, Bonaventure, Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Duns Scotus. In 1955 he delivered in Washington, D. C., the Mellon lectures on art (as Jacques Maritain had done earlier). He experienced Catholic intellectual life in the first decades of this century as a shallow philosophy which was often ignorant of Aquinas’ writings, and as a metaphysics with few links to theology, medieval or otherwise. Gilson was uninformed about and excessively critical of modern philosophy. He rejected too vigorously attempts by Catholic thinkers to discuss the role of human subjectivity, the central point of philosophy after Kant. While his emphasis upon the theological dimension of medieval thought (and of any true scholasticism) was valuable, he fashioned a theological context (one never accepted) for metaphysics which was eccentric; he thought that insights on being were derived from the revelation on Sinai of “I am who am” (Exodus 3:14). Other Thomists objected to his beginning philosophy with ontology rather than natural philosophy. Nevertheless, after observing differences between Aquinas’ texts and Cajetan’s Thomism from the sixteenth century, he argued that one should not identify any neo-Thomism with its original source. His understanding of medieval and patristic thought and his transcendence of the logical textbooks of neo-Thomism made him an important influence.

M.-D. Chenu (1895-1990) wrote many important studies on theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and founded the bibliographical survey Bulletin Thomiste. Toward Understanding St. Thomas, which remains decades later an orientation of high value, located masterfully the man and the ST in the world of the thirteenth century. Building upon the French Dominican tradition of a scholarly but open consideration of Aquinas (exemplified in Gardeil and Sertillanges), Chenu based his work upon a sense of the vitality and sublimity of revelation, the personal but supernatural quality of faith, and the social conditions of a period. The science and culture of an age offer the forms for expressing faith; science, architecture, politics, philosophy, and theology often have a certain cultural unity. Philosophy is the “history of the human spirit in search of first truths,” and mature human reflection concerns itself not with logical games but with insight and understanding enhanced through history. Truth is eternal, but its eternity is accessible to us through temporality. Chenu directed his Dominican confreres at the school of Le Saulchoir outside Paris where they established a new approach to theology, a school devoted to historical context and to the contemporary life of the church. Theologians, not being archaeologists, should study history not solely to isolate and compare past ideas (this would imply that theology and Christianity were dead) but to discern their meaning for the present. The historian said he wanted to do for Aquinas’ theology what M.-J. Lagrange had done for biblical studies by establishing the École Biblique in Jerusalem, that is, let history bring vitality and contemporaneity. To ignore history is to search for one timeless philosophy and theology, to by-pass the reality of revelation and to minimize both human nature and grace in history. The incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ takes place within creation, and the presence of Jesus’ Spirit continues on in people: this gives the pattern for the Gospel and the church to be at work in history and culture. This way of thinking led the historian of the Middle Ages to be involved in the theological and pastoral renewal of France after 1945. He had written as early as 1931:

Those who enclose themselves in a scholastic Thomism hardened by generations of textbooks and manuals (and marginalized by the intrusion of a massive dose of Baroque scholasticism) oblige themselves thereby to summary condemnations of positions of which they are largely ignorant. This would certainly not be the path for the disciples of Thomas Aquinas. And less helpful is the way of those who, with a strange collusion of anti-modernism, hand over the great memory of the medieval Doctor to a positivist intellectualism and keep for themselves a Thomism which is only a paragon of their own pseudo-religious integrist position. But this exploitation of Thomism (which some naively view to be salutary) cannot hide the real intentions of others, penetrated with the spirit of Thomas and with the high demands of scientific or theological work. They meet honestly the problems legitimately posed by the philosophy of religion, biblical exegesis, and the history of dogma. Illumined by the experience of their teacher they know how to discern in new terrain the relationships of reason and faith. Precisely this is the intellectual regime of Catholicism.

This critique would be accepted thirty years after it was written. The historian was convinced that the study of history showed the depth and applicability of the great thinker. To underscore this belief, he cited a phrase of Gilson: “It is impossible to conserve without creating.”

Yves Congar (1904-1995), a student and a co-worker of Chenu, exemplifies how the historical study of Aquinas can have the most practical effects. Congar’s specialty was the history of the institutions and theologies of the church. He unfolded older and richer theologies of tradition and episcopacy, wrote the first theology of the laity, and introduced ecumenism to Roman Catholicism. His life’s work was a major preparation for Vatican II. Congar emphasized the history of salvation and the pastoral and missionary dimensions of the word of God over against a Roman hierarchical neo-scholasticism. “What do I owe to St. Thomas, that I have gone back to him so often? First of all, a certain structure within the world of the human spirit. That’s what makes him relevant even today. His ideas are well-ordered. There is too a sense of openness and even dialogue. Thomas, with his incredible dialectical power, spent all his life looking for new texts and having new translations made for himself.” Aided by his research into history and into the movements of his own age, Congar discovered a dynamic in Aquinas which reached out toward reality and empowered people. The historian of ecclesiology was critical of neo-Thomism as a monopoly, as an intellectual construct which mixed Aristotelian and neo-Platonic ontologies with a Baroque institutional politique, or as an ideology which brought homogeneity at almost any price. Beyond Aristotelian metaphysical logic, in the mid-twentieth century theologians had come to see an anthropocentricism, a history, and a Trinitarian salvation-history.

From his teacher Chenu, Congar learned to appreciate the role of history, a history which revealed that the church was both the same and different for various ages and cultures. Aquinas, Congar explained, understood the relationships between the secular and the spiritual as interplays of the human and the divine, and as the realm of the sacramental in the widest sense. The whole people of God (including the hierarchy) acts in faith and charity to serve the world.

Congar’s ecumenical work too was part of a larger vocation of the historical theologian. The separated churches, which had been born from particular theologies, might comp1emcnt each other. The division of theology into closed camps, neo-Thomism as a monopoly, the isolation of Rome from Eastern Orthodoxy, the rejection of new approaches for parishes, the narrow confines of a pyramidal ecclesiology—all of this was not the defense but the impoverishment of Catholicism. Congar’s ideas, contemporary and yet rooted in the history of the church, introduced the new. But that advocacy of renewal in the 1950s brought censorship. Removed from teaching and publishing by Vatican officials under Pius XII, the French Dominican was rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII who personally insisted that he be asked to serve on a commission preparing for Vatican II. There his ideas in an extraordinary way found fulfillment.

The careers of Chenu and Congar show how the revitalization of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians was part of a renewal of French Catholic life after World War II. When the French church accepted in 1945 the need for pastoral vitalization, one foreseen to be so extensive that France could truly be called a “missionary country,” it set in motion wide-reaching tremors touching liturgy and modern church art, religious education, and the study of the Bible. Church renewal then meant dialogue with social classes, priests and nuns as factory workers, Mass in the vernacular. The French in the 1950s took Aquinas’ thought out of libraries and put it into parishes, and factories; that employment exemplified the union of theory and practice as it had been affirmed by Aquinas at the opening of the ST (I, 1, 4).

C. DIALOGUE WITH MODERN PHILOSOPHERS

Running parallel to historical research was a conversation with modern philosophies. Was it possible that even Thomas Aquinas might offer insights for a theology of the person or for a morality of freedom? The Roman neo-Thomist establishment often responded negatively during the years from 1910 to 1960 to any positive evaluation of the cultural theories and institutions of the modern age. Nevertheless, in the first years of the twentieth century there began a struggle of philosophers and theologians (responsible to church authorities as priests and members of religious orders) to ask whether the medieval Dominican’s principles could be applied to contemporary philosophies and societies. Was Thomism merely an ancient metaphysics? Was it the only metaphysics? Of course, encyclicals of the popes had themselves already pursued the line of contemporary application in social questions. But a theology is only as vital as its thought-forms, and a living faith cannot avoid forever its own age.

Looking at the renewal of Thomism in the twentieth century, one can offer the generalization that the Dominicans pursued theologies in their historical context, while the Jesuits focused on modern philosophers. The Jesuits’ writings were concerned with ways through which consciousness shapes reality, with the “Copernican revolution” of Kant, that is, the shift to the active forms of the personality. They thought that Thomism should halt its ignorant carping and escape its isolation from every modern theory. They also thought that modern philosophy could learn from Aristotle and Aquinas.

Philosophers and theologians in Europe explored active subjectivity in knowing and belief by describing Aquinas’ psychology of an active light giving intellection, and of parallel lights of faith and mysticism. In France those efforts would influence the nature of faith, Christian existence, and spirituality. In Germany during the 1920s professors at universities and seminaries studied the relationship of Greek and medieval thinkers to the stages of modern philosophy. The phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler found disciples among young Catholics and recent converts. Martin Heidegger composed his doctorate on Scotist medieval thought, while his colleague, Edith Stein, brought together phenomenology and Aquinas. Romano Guardini wrote on Bonaventure. That dialogue with modern culture, intent on transcending neo-Thomism, would, despite ecclesiastical censors, grow and establish partnerships with biblical and historical theologies. Thereby it prepared for Vatican II and for the Council’s theologians.

Erich Przywara (1889-1972) was broadly educated and conversant with contemporary philosophies and theologies: he was an expositor and friend of Karl Barth and of Paul Tillich. The Jesuit heightened the essential message of Aquinas—divine grace was working in finite causalities—but he also showed in original ways how idealism and existentialism might converse with medieval theologians and Catholic mystics. “The method [of Catholic thought] cannot, precisely because it intends to remain authentically Catholic, consist in building as many walls as possible, strengthened by forbidding moats: rather, it should be a decisive and special way, able to seek out through obstruction and cacophony the illumination of the ‘Logos’ penetrating all.” Aquinas’ teaching of the harmony of nature and grace, particularly as it overflows into the activities of human beings represents a kind of inner law of the Catholic mind. Consequently Aquinas should not be held captive in the confines of Suarezianism nor should Thomism flee hysterically before Hegel or Dilthey. Some similarities between medieval and modern issues, for instance, in the relationships of the knowing subject to freedom and the objective world were being recognized. The modern shifts from the cosmos to subjectivity and from ontology to the historicity of knowing were accepted; being and the human subject were not opposed to each other.

The sovereign dignity of human action is preserved and enhanced in Aquinas’ theological axiom, “grace brings nature to completion.” Przywara wrote:

This basic proposition has a dual form, one concerning being and one consciousness: so it implies harmony both in the order of grace and of faith. While it is true that grace might seem to exist in order to serve the completion of nature, this is not true in terms of all of nature, of matter and atoms. Rather Aquinas wants to grasp the mystery of the world of grace somehow in the categories of being and nature... so questions are asked of the world of revelation as developed from philosophical categories.

The goal is not to have either a rationalized faith or a nature adorned by something called grace. “Grace does not extinguish nature, faith does not extinguish reason, but each becomes a new vital form of nature or reason. The creature appears not as perfect nature in itself but as something which one can designate in an unusual expression as the existing being of grace.” Philosophy is itself an approximate theology, the ultimate form of the obediential potency leading towards the mystery of the supernatural.

Joseph Maréchal (1878-1944), a Belgian Jesuit, wrote eloquently on the natural drive of the intellect toward being and truth. He argued that Aquinas too appreciated the activity of the personality, the intuition of the Infinite, and the judgment of what was concrete and experienced. Each being has its actualization, and every act has an innate drive to realize its identity and to seek a further good. Maréchal devoted his efforts to restoring what he saw to be Aquinas’ grounding of philosophy in the active teleology of the faculties. Aquinas’ epistemology was not the same as Aristotle’s: the former was open to the exploration of revelation and history. A Thomism which was not the static conceptuality of the Italian neo-Thomists might be both faithful to Aquinas and open to dialogue with approaches present in contemporary phenomenologies and neo-Kantians. “To have refused consistently to separate life and consciousness, activity and speculation, or, more generally, act and form (all unjustified separations)—this seems to me to be the main merit of Thomist epistemology and the secret of its lasting value.” Aquinas still had contributions to make.

Pierre Rousselot (1878-1915) received inspiration from Maréchal to pursue a vital and intellectualist understanding of Aquinas. This was possible, he began, only if one saw the sharp contrast between Aquinas and modern and medieval emphases upon the will. Sadly, voluntarist philosophies had crept even into neo-scholasticism. Rousselot was not so much concerned with the past, Kant and Hegel, as with the present in which Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel, philosophers of life, were emphasizing experience and temporality. Could topics like analogy and God’s being be examined through new approaches beyond those of an extrinsic physics and static ontology? His theology of faith offered an alternative to the unconvincing proofs or panoplies of cerebral apologetics which ended in fideism or in a confusion of knowing and believing. Faith, granted its unsupported darkness in this life and its bestowal by grace, was ultimately a knowing of the vision of God. The dynamic orientation toward eschatological fulfillment in the future had already begun on earth. A deeper reading of Aquinas showed how closely understanding and being, the dynamics of the mind and the goodness of being, were kept together; and how the finite personality was grounded in God. In Aquinas there is no conflict between thought and action. The intellect is not simply reason arranging sense-data but a knowing which grasps implicitly in every act the mystery of divine being. Rousselot’s lectures on faith and love at the Institut Catholique in Paris after 1909 exercised a broad influence. His approach, by bringing faith and theology closer to human experience, would revivify Catholic intellectual life. But in 1915 the Jesuit was killed in World War I.”

These thinkers were not inserting dangerous modern ideas into an alien medieval thought but were observing that an active transcendental subjectivity and freedom had been present in some scholastics. Moreover, dialogue went both ways: if Catholic philosophy and theology could be stimulated by the direction of modernity, haughty ideologies always in danger of being swept away by subjectivism and relativism could learn from Aquinas. Because they appreciated the transcendental (Kant’s term for the analysis of active human subjectivity), the philosophers of the conversation between idealism and Thomism—whether in Paris, Innsbruck, or Munich, became known as “transcendental Thomists.” McCool sums up: “Together Rousselot and Maréchal took Thomism a long way from the Scholasticism of their nineteenth-century confreres. Both were resolute Thomists in their metaphysics of man and being, but the Suarezian tradition represented by Liberatore and Kleutgen no longer had any part in their philosophy and theology... Both of them felt that, properly understood and consistently employed, Kant’s transcendental method could vindicate a Thomistic metaphysics of man and being.” It is important to see that they did not all mix or compromise Aquinas with Kant but explored a Thomism which had a transcendental direction actually rooted in Aquinas. An even more creative generation—one which included Max Miffler, Gustav Siewerth, Emil Coreth, J. B. Lotz, Bernhard Welte, and Rahner—followed Rousselot and Maréhal.

Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) was a Canadian Jesuit who taught most of his life in Rome. He pondered with a courageous originality the relationship of modern philosophy to Aquinas. His early works on grace and word in the Dominican theologian exemplified a more sophisticated approach to historical interpretation than what was found in the neo-scholastic textbooks of the time. Lonergan realized that beyond the reconstruction of a past theology there was the need to understand the dynamics of experience, understanding, judging, imagination, and decision which were at work in any theology. The important book Insight looked at the different ways in which people, who are inevitably yearning to know, understand: it studied the methods of human culture, the illumination and limitation of each knower and each object known, and then the paths in which human beings enter into the realm of religion. Subsequent writings elaborated a transcendental approach which was neither Cartesian nor Kantian but, nonetheless, modern, one which emphasized the active affirmation of judgments about things rather than a mental photograph. They offered an alternative method for Catholic theology, one which sought to keep a balance between the drive toward specialization and a deeper theological program. Lonergan, however, left to others the application of his important ideas to specific areas of revelation and theology.

Karl Rahner (1904-1984) emerged as the most important Catholic theologian after Vatican II (Yves Congar was the most important one prior to the Council). Rahner’s Jesuit education made him knowledgeable in the thought of Aquinas (his doctoral dissertation in philosophy Spirit in the World related a few articles in the ST to issues in modern philosophy). His studies with Maréchal and Heidegger exposed him to the latest directions within modern philosophy in this century. Of the attitude of young Germans in the 1930s he wrote: “We read the works of Thomas: we allowed him to alert us to certain problems, but ultimately we approached him with our own questions and problems. And so we didn’t really practice a Thomistic scholasticism but tried to maintain toward him a stance comparable to that toward Augustine, Origen, and other great thinkers... And I think that a similar relation to Thomas would be advisable also for the present generation of theologians.” Scholasticism (“school-theology”) meant to Rahner three things: (1) the theology taught in seminary classrooms from 1880 to 1960; (2) forms of neo-scholasticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; (3) the theology found in seminary textbooks after 1850. This boring, abstract, and static theology addressed no vital theoretical or pastoral issues. Rahner rejected the idea that there was only one way of looking at reality, a neo-scholastic way, or that the thought of Aquinas meant a war with the motifs of modernity. He wrote of new directions:

In the middle of the present century a profound change took place in Catholic theology. Neo-scholasticism had been dominant until that time; its mentality had an effect on the methods in the historical branches of theology as well as on exegesis and the writing of church history. It was essentially an ecclesiastical science which preferred to use Latin; by and large it had its established, clearly defined canon of topics and problems promulgated throughout the world. Neo-scholasticism resolutely worked within the framework of these topics but rarely considered that its methodology was questionable... One tried to live as far as possible in an ecclesial autarchy.

New theologies should replace the neo-scholasticism dominant between 1850 and 1950. “The new theology must not view neo-scholasticism as the defeated predecessor which it can simply leave behind. This past history is likewise a reality whose values are to be acquired anew.... On the other hand, despite spasmodic efforts, there can be no return to neo-scholasticism.” Rahner, however, went ahead; he did not just repeat Aquinas but employed some central theses of Aquinas’ theology to express Christianity in modern thought-forms and to address contemporary problems of society and church.

Rahner was first and foremost a theologian, a theologian of originality and expertise. He was also a gifted philosopher, a keen observer of the history of doctrine, and a masterful presenter of Christianity in terms of contemporary issues. A first book Hearers of the Word pondered the conditions in the individual-analogous discourse, personal contact, freedom, historicity, and openness to religion—which would both condition and enable a revelation from God. Catholicism can develop a theology in dialogue with modernity, and modern theology need not always be fashioned in a liberal Protestant mode where the forms absorb revelation’s message.

We must say that the epoch-making situation of today demands a framework and method which are transcendental and anthropological. Plato, Aristotle and Thomas will remain sources of our learning. But that does not change the fact (even if this fact has only been recognized by thinkers in the Catholic Church for about forty years) that philosophy and theology today cannot remain back before the transcendental-anthropological turn of modern philosophy... An inner ambiguity marks not just modern philosophy but human life (and so, philosophy) at all times. But this should not keep us from seeing how Christianity will relate to this historical epoch of modernity which is itself a moment in Christian philosophy and theology.

By 1964 the Jesuit was lecturing on and composing something new and exceptional for Catholic theology in this century: a modern systematic theology, modern in the sense of proceeding from a subject analyzed transcendentally, existentially, and historically. While the subject does not fashion revelation, he or she is the place where revelation speaks. The human person with a culture, language, and temporality is the grammar, as Rahner put it, for the word of God. What we call revelation and grace are a special presence, silent and unexpressed but real, of the divine Triune God in its “self-communication” to men and women. Rahner’s analysis of the individual man or woman is located in the midst of grace, grace as the divine life, as a personal subject who loves each individual in their temporality. The Trinity freely chooses to offer a deeper and future life, and for this goal enters history in God’s incarnation in Jesus’ Kingdom and Spirit. Revelation discloses, faith ponders, grace shares, and liturgy realizes God’s life, radical mystery in history. Reflecting Heidegger, Rahner understood how time brought to every form and idea a cultural context and how history enabled sacraments and theologies to emerge into the light of human encounter. Grace is the theme of Rahner’s theological system just as grace was an underlying theme of Aquinas’ ST. Rahner’s divine self-communication is not unrelated to Aquinas’ Trinitarian missions, while the concrete, intimate offer of grace to all in the depths of their conscious life (the “supernatural existential”) is a variation on the ST’s supernatural order selected by God. A transcendental approach to grace vivifying sacraments resembles Aquinas’ view of the new law of Christ as the Spirit of Jesus, as well as his theology of faith as a grasp of divine First Truth. In short, the idealist distinction of transcendental and categorical was central in Rahner’s theology, whether it was treating the essential message of Jesus’ reign of God among religious customs or the historical chain of liturgical and ecclesiastical forms.

Edward Schillebeeckx (1914- ) is a Belgian Dominican and longtime professor at Nijmegen in the Netherlands. in his years of philosophy in the Dominican studium he had as one of his teachers, Dominic de Petter. That Flemish philosopher had been working on a synthesis between Thomism and the phenomenology of Husserl, an enterprise which showed how theology could incorporate an anthropological dimension as well as taking into account the development of doctrine. At Le Saulchoir, Schillebeeckx “met the greats.... Under the guidance of Chenu I read St. Thomas from a historical perspective and not just literally, but in the context of the philosophy of the time. I learned to tackle a problem from a historical perspective.” In the milieu of Parisian Thomisms, he could attend the lectures of Gilson and write a doctorate under Chenu. Schillebeeckx found in Aquinas intuition as well as logic; a dynamic understanding of personality led to a comprehension of symbols as active; realism and the individual did not remain with the subject but moved into history. In 1957 he wrote an essay about aspects of the theology of the medieval Dominican which still has a particular relevance for today: for instance, the various meanings of authority and the role of past sources in reflection on revelation, faith as act as well as content, the affective side of theology. “It is always instructive to find out how great theologians went to work in their own time, not in order to imitate them, but so that we may also do independently in our own time what they did in theirs.” An important book from the period just before Vatican II described the sacraments as encounters with Jesus Christ, with the living God present in matter. Aquinas’ theology of sacrament implies that the first, primal sacrament is Jesus Christ. His incarnation continues the depth-sacramentality of the church and flows into specific sacraments and rites. Those ideas would appear in the conciliar documents. Phenomenology helped Schillebeeckx’ explain the humanity of Jesus as the presence of the Word of God. What the ancient metaphysics of “person” guarded for the Word did not deny what modern philosophies and psychologies would have described as the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. Serving the bishops at Vatican II as a theological adviser, Schillebeeckx spoke there on the relationship of theology to the Bible, on Aquinas as an important but not unique voice from tradition, on salvation-history, and on the nature of church authority. In recent years he has turned to an examination of topics in the theology of ministry today, and, in a multi-volume study of Jesus Christ and salvation, to a more direct confrontation between the New Testament and social issues. In this later theology, by his own admission one which leaves behind earlier Thomistic and phenomenological foundations, Schillebeeckx now incorporates insights from contemporary discussions on hermeneutics and critical theory.

VII. Neo-Thomism in the United States

What was the history of Thomism in North America from 1880 to 1960? It certainly had a dominant, almost monopolistic presence in the Catholic Church in the United States, while Canada was open to European, particularly French, developments. By 1930 Gilson had arrived in North America and institutes of medieval studies were underway in Toronto, Quebec, and Montreal. If it lacked any significant creative development, nevertheless, as McCool points out, in the years before 1960 neo-scholastic thought made a contribution to American Catholic education. Seminary professors were educated in Rome or at the Catholic University of America, and journals focusing on scholasticism were begun. Then, after World War II, as Catholic colleges and universities expanded, neo-Thomism’s positive, clear, and realistic world-view had an impact at schools like Fordham University, St. Louis University, the University of Notre Dame, Catholic University, and De Paul University in Chicago. A few professors were aware of the diversity of neo-Thomisms, and they welcomed the thought of a Gilson or a Maritain and had some knowledge of transcendental currents in Europe. Most schools, however, were obedient to the Vatican politique of not straying from the all too clearly marked borders of a general neo-scholastic philosophy. Seminaries (a great deal of philosophy and theology existed in seminaries), of course, had as their purpose not to be centers of intellectual life but to provide more and more priests for an expanding number of parishes. To be a priest in America was to minister to the sacramental and moral life of people and not to ponder American democracy or the culture of modernity. Seminaries and houses of studies of religious congregations cultivated a mechanical Aristotelianism isolated not only from the imagined threat of pantheism but from American social life. One can find a record of American neo-Thomism by looking at the contents of neo-scholastic journals of that time. They rarely touch on theology but reconsider aspects of Thomist and Aristotelian ethics or metaphysics. Thomist philosophy (but not theology) was seen by some as offering an integrating force for Catholic culture. Certainly its realism, dynamism, and positive view of humanity, as well as the inclusion of God offered a different perspective from those of the philosophy departments of secular universities. But the success of this cultural view, whose potential was great, could for several reasons only be quite limited. Its tone was apologetic and even arrogant; it seemed to be based on Vatican authority or on an antiquated logic and not on intellectual insight. Content with neo-scholastic problems, it rarely expressed philosophy’s relationship to Christianity or Catholicism in America.

Neo-Thomism by and large stayed a philosophical enterprise. Occasionally scholars employed Aquinas in some field beyond the issues of natures and causes, for instance, in social ethics, but the lack of education and the obedient stance of the American immigrant church prior to the late 1950s discouraged intellectual initiative. The Dominicans in a Chicago suburb established a center for the study of Aquinas and modern science, while the Jesuits in St. Louis pursued Aquinas and epistemology. Neither succeeded in contacting many in the worlds of education or science. Neo-scholasticism, however, did bring some benefits to this multi-national church whose interests were life rather than ontology. McCool notes: “Catholic philosophy, associated with the scholastic tradition of Thomas, gave Catholic schools a realistic, epistemology and a metaphysics of man and being which fostered the integration of knowledge which Catholic education often proposed as the aim justifying its institutional existence.” But this must be qualified by recognizing how few Catholic schools presented neo-Thomism rather than some neo-scholastic variation and how few found a pedagogy for this philosophy which was at all interesting.

In the 1950s American Catholicism, moving beyond its immigrant condition, developed a modest, alternative Catholic intellectual life. Magazines such as Commonweal and Jubilee gave some information on European thinkers like Romano Guardini and Jean Daniélou or on monastic liturgy and modern church art. Figures like John La Farge, Dorothy Day, Sister Madeleva, or Thomas Merton did not express themselves on American social issues in scholastic abstractions. Their success in reaching a broad audience flowed from their development of theologies in other keys. The few educated and culturally open directions in American Catholicism were evidently seeking ways around the neo-scholastic monopoly. The eve of Vatican II, then, found the American church conducting an industry of collegiate and clerical neo-scholasticisms which made no claim to influence parish or society, but also containing a small group of men and women with intimations of other approaches to Christianity.

Around the world, neo-Thomism was a spectrum of schools and opinions, drawn from different countries and cities, religious orders and universities. From Maynooth to Nairobi, it had made Aquinas’ thought known. The third neo-Thomism had lasted about a century, from 1860 to 1960. It attained its widest international audience just as the Council began. At that time Aquinas’ thought existed in five modes: (1) largely philosophical and isolationist neo-Thomisms; (2) historical research on Aquinas; (3) tentative applications of Thomism to ethical and political issues; (4) dialogues between Aquinas and post-Kantian philosophers; (5) reconsiderations of supernatural grace present in human history. This spectrum of offerings ranged from Chenu’s conviction that the historical context of Aquinas would reveal his genius, to Garrigou-Lagrange’s lack of interest in a historical context, from a neo-Thomist manual’s description of “idealism” as the denial of extra-subjective objects in knowledge, to Rousselot’s (and Heidegger’s) knowledgeable dialogue with Kant. McCool writes: “Neo-Thomism was not imposed on the church by the sheer exercise of power; it managed to win a good measure of legitimacy on its own merits. Nevertheless, like every intellectual movement, NeoThomism had a limited life span. Neo-Thomism was accused of blindness to the claims of history; and once the problems posed to the church by history became all-important, Neo-Thomism had to yield its place to the newer theologies which claimed that they could handle them.” Nevertheless, although little known in the English-speaking Catholic churches throughout the world, the European renewal, the extensive body of articles and books by historians like Grabmann and Chenu or by theologians like Congar or Rahner, was developing further implications of Aquinas. Thus the twentieth century produced a renewal of Thomism—one of unusual depth and breadth—but it was not the triumph of apologetics and ontology that many had expected. The Council would create an atmosphere in which theological education would rapidly extend to young and old, clergy, religious, and laity. Thereby it would expand the role of Aquinas through the pluralism of theologies active at Vatican II.

VIII. Aquinas, Theology, and Vatican II

Since Vatican II a number of German theologians have observed that passing beyond neo-scholasticism and going back to biblical and patristic sources and forward to theologies of history and personality was the most important challenge to the Catholic Church in the twentieth century. Karl Rahner expressed the shift in this way: “The new theology [of Vatican II] is conversant with modern philosophy since Descartes and Kant. it sees modern philosophies not simply as the enemy to be opposed, as they were for traditional neo-scholasticism, but rather—without compromising its own individuality or shunning critical dialogue with these philosophies—purely and simply as the index of that milieu in which a Christian must live and critically discern how to be a Christian. More than in the past the new theology is consciously affected by the concrete questions of the present-day individual...” For the neo-Thomists Aquinas had answered every question so rapidly that little by little there was no longer any need for inquiry. But for the historical and transcendental Thomists, Aquinas’ thought was challenged to disclose its depths, the depths of a theology which had lived through seven centuries and which might still respond to the problems and life-forms of the twentieth century. In the 1960s a new ecumenical direction stepped forth: studies appeared on Aquinas and Protestant figures, comparisons with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth showing similarities and differences. This ecumenical research dispelled many prejudices about a theologian often viewed as Pelagian or rationalist. But as the writings of Otto Pesch showed so well, the thought-form of Aquinas was quite different from that of Luther. An emphasis upon grace as a new life, the divine principle as intellect, a sacramental and dynamic approach to theology and religion, creation and predestination and incarnation as the overflow of goodness, the positive view of humanity even fallen, the knowability and goodness of creation, the absence of fideism and voluntarism, the distinction between divine presence in creation and in the supernatural order retained the distinctive Catholic incarnationalism. As thinkers from Erich Przywara to Karl Barth have observed, the original and permanent ecumenical issue is the relationship of divine grace to human nature.

Perhaps the very spirit of Aquinas was urging his followers to break out of their prison of dry interpretations and was prompting the historical and transcendental Thomists to go forward. Certainly the medieval Dominican’s own vision of divine wisdom, of analogous realms of universe and grace resembled that of the theologians who fashioned the documents of Vatican II which permitted the Catholic Church to live in its own age and on a scale which was international.

A human cultural movement is reaching its high point even as, unperceived, the cultural forces of its decline are already at work. The largest Gothic cathedrals were completed as their medieval era had passed its cultural climax. Similarly, the opening of Pope John XXIII’s ecumenical council in 1962 occurred within a church which on the surface was united through a monoform international network of canon law, neo-scholasticism, and papal centralism. But that was also a church in which dozens of creative minds were working to interpret the gospel anew. In 1946 Jean Daniélou surveyed the state of theology, and he concluded that the neo-scholastic monopoly gave “the impression of absence and unreality.” It avoided the challenge to treat God as God and did not speak to the modern person living in a world of science, nor did it describe meaningfully Christian life within the struggles of human existence and a free society. From this and from many other calls for biblical and pastoral theologies in the French church at this time a “new theology” was born. Theology rediscovered the Christian world-views of the early Eastern and Western churches, pursued biblical studies, accepted ecumenism, developed the schools of spirituality past and present, and conversed without hostility with modern and contemporary philosophies. Was Latin neo-Thomism to be the sole means of expression for a universal church in council in 1962? Otto Pesch speaks of neo-Thomism holding “Thomas Aquinas under house arrest” prior to 1962 and of the period around the Council as a reversal “from Thomism to Thomas.” Imbibing the spirit of Aquinas’ theology of grace in human spirit, the Council looked positively on the aspirations of the world, on the religions of humanity, and on the quests of all people of good will. The church again conversed with its religious past and its human future.

Did Aquinas contribute to the deliberations of the Council? A comparison between Vatican II and the two previous councils, Trent and Vatican 1, is illuminating. As we saw, remaining above the quarrels of theological schools, Trent borrowed fundamental ideas from the medieval schoolmen. Vatican I drew only on a general scholastic language to express its ideas on faith, revelation, and human reason. Vatican II, however, broke with both these approaches; it expressed its theology and pastoral renewal in biblical and modern theological terms. The Council of the 1960s showed the same attitude of selective employment toward Aquinas that it adopted vis-à-vis other theologies within that living tradition which is the church. By incorporating biblical, patristic, and liturgical sources, the Council professed a faith in the Spirit at work in each age. To renew the local church, however, the Council needed new plans, new languages, and new ideas. This obviously meant much more than neo-scholasticism. Nevertheless, in the conciliar years it was obvious that Aquinas had inspired the great theologians like Henri de Lubac, Chenu, Congar, John Courtney Murray, Rahner, and others.

The Brazilian theologian Jose Pinto de Oliveira holds that Vatican II gave Aquinas’ theology the opportunity to return to its basic principles and to reestablish a theological breadth. A positive view of humanity and an optimism toward God assisted the Council to lead the church into the world around it. “To connect Aquinas’ doctrine with all of tradition as a rallying point and not as a rapture, and to extol his method and his spirit as an incitement to research and to dialogue in the church within different forms of culture—this is essentially the practice and orientation of the Council.” The mission of the Spirit, the law of the Gospel, liberty at the heart of faith, the anticipation in justice of eschatology, the intuitive side of grace, Christ as the head of the human race—these were aspects of Aquinas’ theology which neo-Thomism had not much employed. They became productive, however, in that springtime which the Council initiated in the church and the world. In short, the role of the Spirit in the life of the church and in the history of peoples gave the principles of the ST a new vigor and put them to work. Gratia perficit naturam—Vatican II re-emphasized a grace active in society where humanity, church, and liturgy were sacramental under the aegis of the incarnate Word.

IX. Beyond Vatican II

The effect of the Second Vatican Council upon Thomism, however, seemed to be a disaster. The world-wide neo-scholastic monopoly collapsed after 1965. Aquinas’ influence was reduced, as contemporary or biblical theologies replaced neo-scholasticism. The theocentric order of his thought as well as the Aristotelian conceptuality pushed his writings into the background of a Catholic life intent upon experimentation and inculturation.

In 1974 Pope Paul VI, on the occasion of the seventh centenary of Aquinas’ death issued a commemorative letter. The pope spotlighted the realism and objectivity of his thought, a thought which both respects and reaches towards the mystery of God, a theology which stands between the false options of naturalism and fideism, which is “opposed to every exaggerated supernaturalism.” Aquinas was not an ideologue, the pope continued, and his theology was born out of the “conditions of his culture” and followed a “dialectical” method. He appreciated the distinctions between free speculative theology and the dogmas of the church. A suspicion of other theological traditions or of modernity is not the main reason for interest in Aquinas. The emphasis upon activity, freedom, and subjectivity furthers a mature understanding of God and of the human person. That anniversary year of 1974, coming less than ten years after the Council, displayed an interest in Aquinas which was beginning to reassert itself as evidenced in the number of congresses and multi-volume commemorative collections which appeared then. Centers of Thomism nourished by his theology more than by his Aristotelianism with their publications continued. If there was an understandable reaction, after a time of reservation interest in Aquinas has again been growing. One of the paradoxes of the post-conciliar period is that, despite the rapid decline which Vatican II brought to neo-scholasticism, from the 1970s on abundant new resources and studies have appeared. Recently a bibliography of works on Aquinas issued during only the last two decades has been published: it lists 3500 entries. These range from the many volumes of essays drawn from international congresses to the IBM Index Thomisticus. The last decades of the twentieth century have been marked by major studies by Ghislain Lafont, Albert Patfoort, Otto Pesch, and Jean-Pierre Torrell. Their works are a crown and a conclusion to the vast research into Aquinas’ thought in the twentieth century.

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Aquinas reaches us through centuries and civilizations, and through people and schools who understood and developed his ideas. To look back on the history of this theology is to be struck by its longevity and fecundity. Is this history of interpretations Thomism’s great accomplishment?

When one ponders this history threading its way through many cultures, it is clear that, first, there was no single Thomism, no one interpretation, but many. Second, this theology was not timeless but culturally fashioned: it flourished in Salamanca in the sixteenth century and in Paris in the twentieth century as it faced new questions and found new ways of expressing a medieval synthesis. Third, one cannot be a disciple of Aquinas and think that some major cultural periods are intrinsically or mainly evil, or hold that one culture or age has monopolized intellect and grace.

Genius and idea express themselves in history, and historians are still sketching the history of Thomism with its responses to issues as diverse as the morality of war or the rise of labor unions. if one does not know something of this history, the student mistakes a particular interpretation for the source itself. For us in the West, scholars in medieval studies still help us understand the richness of the past, while we await new reconsiderations of Aquinas coming from Africa and Asia. Because Aquinas’ thinking was a tireless dialogue with the largest number of resources, he would be awed and stimulated by today’s possibilities for preaching, holiness, insight, and ministry in a world growing closer and a church growing larger.