Courage to Engage the World: Thomism at 750
By R J Snell, Public Discourse.
It is 750 years since Thomas Aquinas died on March 7, 1274. Merely forty-nine at the time of his death and, despite a short writing career of only two decades, beset with many duties of teaching, preaching, and travel, his extant writings add up to more than eight million words—eight times those of Aristotle. These include his unfinished masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, at more than 1.5 million words. The Summa, as many have noted with chagrin, was written “to instruct beginners,” as when young children are given “milk to drink, not meat.”
Despite early condemnations of some of his teachings, Thomas was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567, one of only thirty-seven—and not just any doctor, but the Common Doctor, capable of serving the entire Church and its unity around a common truth, the deposit of faith. Philosophers and theologians have repeatedly returned to him for clarity, insight, and creativity, since “among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all [is] Thomas Aquinas who, as Cajetan observes, because ‘he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all,’” or so claimed Leo XIII when indicating paths for “the restoration of Christian philosophy.”
Giants of theology and philosophy consulted Thomas for guidance, including (among many others) Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Ignatius of Loyola, Charles Borromeo, Robert Bellarmine, Taparelli, Gilson, Maritain, Rousselot, Garrigou-Lagrange, Lonergan, Edith Stein, Wojtyla, MacIntyre, hosts of Dominicans, Jesuits, neoscholastics, neo-Thomists, existential Thomists, transcendental Thomists, analytical Thomists, postmodern Thomists, postliberal Thomists, and more. One can read Thomas backward and forward, so to speak, in conversation with Paul, Origen, or Irenaeus, and also Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. You can read Thomas on the Psalms, or his synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Denys the Areopagite, and Avicenna, just as you can read a Thomist on quantum physics, contemporary jurisprudence, or metaethics.
Not as admired by the Orthodox and with a somewhat mixed reception by Protestants, nonetheless Thomas served as a major source for the salutary and influential developments of the past half century within orthodox Protestant, Anglican, and evangelical philosophy, a development contributing significantly to the confident place of philosophy of religion within large swaths of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy.
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