This Friday, we celebrate the feast of the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, known as the intellectual powerhouse of the Catholic Church. Since the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, St Thomas has become the main source for Catholic intellectual inspiration in seminaries and schools. However, the intellectual endeavour of this angelic teacher should not blind us to the fact that he was canonised not for his thought, but for his virtuous life. Whilst St Thomas’s thought shows us a way of thinking, the strength of the Catholic tradition lies not in its uniformity but its widespread orthodoxy.
One of St Thomas’ contemporaries was St Bonaventure, who in the same encyclical of Pope Leo XIII is referred to as the ‘Seraphic Doctor.’ St Thomas was a Dominican, St Bonaventure a Franciscan. The two orders have developed their own intellectual traditions, often in competition with each other, but always with the intention of being loyal to the magisterial teachings of the Church. St Thomas, for example, denied the Immaculate Conception, which the Franciscans, especially Duns Scotus, championed. Later this was confirmed as a dogma, so St Thomas cannot be faulted for not adhering to a dogma that was as of yet undefined. However, one might ask if his premises preclude a belief in the Immaculate Conception? He found it difficult to defend Our Lord’s unique dignity if His mother was also free of original sin. The question of St Thomas’ exact position on this question is contested as he seems to have changed his mind several times, but his own differing views and the different views between the orders, show that the intellectual life of the Church is not static.
St Thomas was a student of Albert the Great, one of the first to reintroduce Aristotle in the Western curriculum. One of St Thomas’s fellow alumni was Meister Eckhart, who has received a poor reputation in the Church. Known as a mystic, a playful homilist and a master of imagery, Eckhart was soon put under suspicion and some of his pronouncements were deemed heretical. The custom at the time, though, was precisely to condemn certain aspects of a teaching, not the person per se. St Thomas himself fell under such a condemnation at the Universities of Paris and Oxford in 1277, and Aristotle’s work was forbidden to be taught and studied. Today, as evidenced by the papal encyclical of Leo XIII, the tide has turned and Aristotle serves as a rudiment for much Catholic thought.
At the time in which St Thomas was active, his work was rightly considered as daring. He engaged some of the greatest pagan, Muslim and Jewish philosophers in dialogue, and produced a corpus which serves as a model for how to approach theology. In fact, his Summa Theologica was meant as a handbook for students, although these students were already presumed to have been well acquainted with Aristotle’s work. In turn, the approach to St Thomas himself has varied over time: Pope Leo’s encyclical established a new orthodoxy which came to be known as ‘neo-Thomism’ and which was later challenged by those who came to be known as ‘Modernists.’ Yet, the Modernists also took St Thomas as their guiding light, claiming the neo-Thomists focused more on a pastiche than on the works of St Thomas. Ironically, contemporaries considered St Thomas very modern in his approach.
The Church has always had many varied schools of thought, such as the Augustinians more indebted to Plato. St Bonaventure the Franciscan argued for Divine Illumination, whereby we receive immutable truths directly from God. Duns Scotus refuted much of Aquinas’ ideas and with the Renaissance an entirely new approach was born; Christian Humanism. In our own day there are new strands of thought, such as phenomenology which seek to navigate the relationship between faith and reason anew. The relation is constantly being renegotiated, because while the times may change the deposit of the faith does not. The question cannot be how to change dogma, but rather how to express and better understand it in the contemporary vernacular without watering down the content.
Approaching the feast of St Thomas, we would do well in recalling his many and varied virtues: he was humble despite his great learning. He was very careful to safeguard his purity as a young man and had a firm faith in the God he so tirelessly attempted to write about in his magnum opus, the Summa. Whether we can pin down the authentic St Thomas as a thinker, on the other hand, is a continuous question. As one philosophy professor once replied when I asked him what St Thomas would think about a certain question: ‘which Thomas?’ There are many Thomists, but there is one St Thomas whom we can take as our model for virtuous life and a means of thinking with the Church. And beside this giant within the Church, there are many other minds we can turn to for inspiration.
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