Chapter 5 The Rise and Fall of Neothomism
The Rise and Fall of Neothomism
The Origins of Neothomism
Neothomism is the name given to the papally supported form of Thomism that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century The movement needs to be seen as a political event as much as it was an intellectual one. The triumph of Enlightenment philosophy and its claim that theology should be based on reason restricted what Thomism there was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the intellectual ghetto of Catholic schools and seminaries. Political support for this world, however, remained strong until the French Revolution and Napoleon’s meteoric career overturned the Old Regime and convulsed Europe for a quarter century (1789–1815). The reestablishment of something like the old political system at the Congress of Vienna of 1815 was a setback to the forces unleashed by the Revolution, one that resulted in the nineteenth-century struggles between revolutionary-reformist trends on the one hand and monarchical-restorationist resistance on the other. Pius VII (pope 1800–23), who had been imprisoned and browbeaten by Napoleon, played a role at Vienna and set an example for most of the nineteenth-century popes of a restorationist agenda, both politically and intellectually. Papal resistance to representative government, political liberalism, and the trappings of modernity (even the railroad) was strong under Pius’s successors, Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, elected Pope Pius IX in 1846, had a reputation for favoring liberal ideas. In 1848, however, Pius had to flee Rome amid a popular revolution. When he returned in 1850 with the aid of a French army sent by Napoleon III, he turned against liberal ideas, such as representative government, freedom of conscience, and a free press.
The struggle between modernity and what was seen as tradition was also evident in philosophy and theology. There were many issues under debate, but the relation between faith and reason was the nodal point. To what extent can the truths of faith be open to rational investigation, and on the basis of what kind of reasoning? What epistemology and theological method can best lead to a theology that will answer the Enlightenment critique of traditional Christianity? In the first half of the nineteenth century some Catholic thinkers, especially in Germany, turned to Critical, Romantic, and Idealist philosophies to try to present a coherent understanding of the relation of faith and reason for the modern era. Perhaps the most daring were the Catholic theologians at Tübingen, such as J. S. von Drey, J. A. Mohler, and J. E. Kuhn. Another influential figure in this camp was the priest Georg Hermes (1775–1831), who sought to reconcile Catholic theology with Kant’s critical philosophy. Hermes was posthumously condemned in 1835. Such condemnations were rather rare in the first half of the nineteenth century, perhaps because while the Roman authorities could agree on particular errors and what they deemed false approaches, they had as yet no systematic exposition of philosophical and theological truth to serve as a standard for judging error on a large scale. This is where Neothomism stepped into the picture.
The triumph of Neothomism was rapid, but, like most revolutions in thought, it had a significant, if hidden, period of gestation. The Dominicans played an important role, especially when the order was revived after the upheavals of the Revolution and Napoleonic period. Dominican houses in Spain and Italy (especially Rome and Naples) became centers of the teaching of Thomas. Also important for the return to the Angelic Doctor was the Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza, run by Vincentian priests. The Jesuit order as a whole was not sympathetic to Aquinas in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under pressure from unfriendly rulers, Clement XIV had suppressed the order in 1773, but it was restored by a decree of Pius VII in 1814. The Jesuit university in Rome, the Collegio Romano, was given back to the order in 1824. Among its first students was Count Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci (1810–1903), later elected pope Leo XIII in 1878. The first rector was Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862), a fervent student of Thomas Aquinas. D’Azeglio, however, met with resistance against Thomas by Jesuit professors wedded to Suarez and Descartes, so he had to resort to teaching Aquinas secretly to a group of enthusiastic students. Young Pecci seems to have found his love for Thomas while at the Collegio, for as early as 1828 he wrote home to ask for a copy of the Summa theologiae which he knew to be in the family library at Carpineto. In 1829 d’Azeglio was banished from Rome to the Jesuit house in Naples.
Pius IX’s agenda after his return to Rome was dedicated to constructing a “fortress Catholicism” against the political and intellectual threats of the modern world. In 1864 he issued his “Syllabus of Errors,” a list of eighty theses or pronouncements already condemned in other papal documents. Grouped under ten headings, these errors included pantheism, naturalism, rationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, and liberalism, as well as various errors on the church’s relation to civil society, marriage, and the temporal power of the papacy. (A number of the more extreme of these condemnations were reversed in the documents of Vatican II.) Pius’s main accomplishment, however, was the First Vatican Council of 1869–70, which issued two important documents defining truths central to the positions adopted in the Syllabus. The Constitution Pastor Aeternus affirmed the pope’s primacy of jurisdiction in the church, and, more important, defined his infallibility in matters of faith and morals, while a second Constitution, Dei Filius, defined the relationship between faith and reason in a way basically consistent with Thomas’s view as found in the Summa, though with less emphasis than Thomas on the radically apophatic nature of knowledge of God. The generally Neoscholastic and Neothomist tone of the document is not surprising. The original schema for the constitution was drawn up by the Jesuit J. B. Franzelin, who was not a member of the Jesuit Neothomists, but when this schema proved unwieldy, it was revised by Bishop Martin of Paderborn with the assistance of his classmate, the German Jesuit Johannes Kleutgen (1811–83). Kleutgen, known as “Thomas reborn” (Thomas redivivus), was to become an influential figure of the first generation of Neothomism.
The Neothomist wave grew in importance in the 1870s, not only in Rome, but throughout Europe in Spain, Paris, Louvain, and Vienna. Dominicans, such as the Spaniard Zeferino Gonzales and the Italian Tommaso Zigliara, were significant figures. In order to coalesce into a real force, however, central institutional support was necessary. This came with the accession of Gioacchino Pecci to the chair of Peter. Leo XIII remains a difficult figure to interpret. His social encyclicals, his condemnation of slavery, his opening the Vatican archives to research, and his outreach to some forms of democratic government witness a shift away from the intransigence of Pius IX. But Leo was scarcely a liberal. He had been closely involved with the drafting of the “Syllabus of Errors,” and his wholehearted embrace of Neothomism was designed to create a systematic, militant, and uncompromising bulwark against modern thought. To quote James Hennessy, “What he wanted was to realize ultramontane goals unrealized under Pius IX by intellectualizing the combat with modernity. … He would not come to terms with the modern values; rather, he would restore in the world an objective and immutable order, with the church as its most effective guardian.” Neothomism was Leo’s agent for this ambitious program, which was fundamentally a response to the philosophical and theological errors of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment world. Leo’s program, however, also had a positive component, because he hoped that a renewed Thomism would serve as an integrating force both in the intellectual and social realms. Despite its eventual collapse, Neothomism was one of the most important initiatives of modern Catholicism and is central to the story of the Summa theologiae.
Pope Leo moved quickly to make Neothomism the official teaching of Catholicism, taking no hostages among its opponents. In the year of his election he brought the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano to heel by demanding that Thomism become the main form of instruction and appointing Kleutgen as the Dean of Faculty. For all his adherence to Thomism, however, Kleutgen was primarily a historical theologian, and it was not until 1885 that Louis Billot (1846–1931), a future cardinal, was appointed to teach Thomistic philosophy. (Of Billot it has been said, “History and its methods were beyond his horizon.”) In the meantime, the pope, his brother Joseph, and the Jesuit Thomist Matteo Liberatore (with the possible assistance of Kleutgen) had composed the “Magna Carta” of Neothomism, the Encyclical Aeterni Patris, issued on August 4, 1879. As the most important document in the history of the official reception of the Summa theologiae, the encyclical demands careful attention.
As an authoritative teaching document (though not infallible in the sense defined in Vatican I), Aeterni Patris sets out a theoretical argument and provides mandates, if in a general way, for the steps needed to realize this ideal. Unlike earlier conciliar and papal documents stretching back into antiquity dealing with particular theological questions, such as the approval by the Council of Ephesus (431 C.E.) of Cyril of Alexandria’s teaching on Christ against that of Nestorius, Aeterni Patris gives its support to a whole system of thought, Neoscholastic philosophy, as the foundation for a theology that would strike the correct balance between reason and faith. The long-standing emphasis on Thomas as a philosopher, evident in many of the classic commentators, thus became enshrined in papal teaching. Leo and his advisors intended Aeterni Patris as a response to the strong rationalism of much Enlightenment philosophy: in order to meet a new kind of total challenge, an equally total response was needed on the part of the revived, centralized, and now infallible, papacy.
Addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church, Aeterni Patris lays out an argument for the Pauline view of the superiority of Christian wisdom over the false wisdom of the world, provides a sketch (quite ahistorical) of the development of Christian philosophy, argues for Thomas Aquinas as the supreme form of scholastic philosophy, and calls upon the Catholic world, especially its educators, to return to the teaching of Thomas as “the invincible bulwark of faith” (para. 24). Leo’s case is based on a conviction of the inherent unity of the “solid doctrine of the Fathers and the scholastics, who so clearly and forcibly demonstrate the firm foundations of the faith, … and its perfect concord with reason” (para. 27). Although many patristic authors are mentioned in paragraphs 3 to 13, aside from brief references to Bonaventure and Albert the Great, Thomas represents the scholastic philosophy that Leo holds out as the ideal for Christian education. The argument given is primarily based on authority and tradition—Thomas has been recognized as the supreme doctor by all the best teachers, the religious orders, the universities, and the popes and councils (paras. 14–23). Revived Thomism, Leo says, will not only be a safeguard against modern error, but will also benefit the church at large, civil and domestic society (paras. 23, 28), as well as the arts and the physical sciences (para. 29). Just as there can be no real contradiction between the truths of faith and those attained by reason, Leo says there is no conflict between “the conclusions of modern physics and the philosophical principles of the schools” (para. 30). Although the pope makes clear the need for a return to “the golden wisdom of St. Thomas,” he does not specify what interpretation of that wisdom is to be preferred, beyond insisting that “the doctrine of Thomas be drawn from his own fountains, or at least from those rivulets which, derived from that very fount, have thus far flowed, according to the established agreement of learned men, pure and clear” (para. 31). The story of Neothomism was to show that there was no such agreement.
What Leo had in mind with regard to “the rivulets derived from [Thomas’s] very fount” was the view of Thomism put forth by his advisors, especially Kleutgen and Liberatore. It is interesting that neither of these scholars wrote a commentary on the Summa theologiae, but rather expressed their Thomism in monographs, more philosophical in the case of Liberatore, more theological with Kleutgen. This is not to say that the era of lengthy commentaries on the Summa was totally over, because the twentieth century was to see some examples of this genre among the Dominicans. Nevertheless, if the preferred genre of Second Thomism had been the commentary, the standard genre of Neothomism was the monographic analysis of some aspect of the thought of Thomas, primarily of a philosophical nature.
Liberatore’s philosophical appropriation of Thomas emphasized the Dominican’s realist epistemology based on abstraction from sense knowledge as opposed to the empiricism of Locke and the idealism of many German philosophers. He also denied that there was any direct intuition of the divine being, as some Catholic philosophers, such as the condemned Antonio Rosmini (d. 1855), had argued. Liberatore’s vindication of Thomas’s epistemology set forth in his Della conoscenza intellettuale (1857–58) and Institutiones logicae et metaphysicae (1860) set the groundwork for the Neothomistic attack on the Cartesian search for absolute certitude. Although the Italian’s epistemology did reflect aspects of Thomas’s views on knowing, he had little grasp of Thomistic metaphysics and its teaching on the importance of the act of existence. Kleutgen’s two major works were Die Theologie der Vorzeit (The Theology of Former Times, i.e., before Descartes), five volumes published between 1853 and 1874, and Die Philosophie der Vorzeit, two volumes put out between 1860 and 1863. Kleutgen’s view of the historical continuity of Catholic theology from its patristic roots down through the Middle Ages and culminating in Thomas was influential on Aeterni Patris. The German Jesuit’s use of the history of theology gave Catholic apologists the sense that they had an effective argument against those who attacked the continuity of Catholic teaching over the centuries. Like Liberatore, Kleutgen contended that the great advantage of Thomist thought against modern error was the way the Angelic Doctor (as he was usually now referred to) was able to combine epistemology, anthropology, and metaphysics into a seamless whole. The core problem with Liberatore, Kleutgen, and other forms of what has been called “monumental Thomism” is that they were really replacing Thomas’s Summa by rewriting it in a different historical context.
The Growth of Neothomism
Had Aeterni Patris merely announced a program with no follow-up it would not have amounted to much. Pope Leo, however, caught the spirit of the time. His own efforts toward reviving Thomism were significant, but had these not been met by the fervor of Catholic intellectuals throughout the world, little might have been achieved. Neothomism rapidly became a popular movement, though a full explanation for its triumph remains unclear. Part of its success was due to the dissemination of Thomism throughout the Catholic seminary system. Although the Summa theologiae itself appears not to have been much used as a class text outside Dominican universities and houses of study, the philosophical and theological manuals employed in seminaries circa 1880–1960 were generally based on Thomas, or at least purported to be secundum mentem S. Thomae, whatever that was taken to mean. A student of the North American College in Rome reflected the institutional triumph of Thomas in 1881 when he wrote to his bishop, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, “every tongue has learned to lisp the new slang phrase in Rome: ‘Ut ait Sanctus Doctor’ [‘as the Holy Doctor, i.e., St. Thomas, says’].” Although Thomism had become institutionally fashionable, there is no question that many also found it intellectually compelling. Of course, Thomas (unlike the writers of seminary manuals) was a major thinker, both philosophically and theologically, a point realized even by those who did not share his views. The American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916) hailed the revival of Thomas in 1903 by remarking, “Pope Leo, after all, let loose a thinker among his people—a thinker, to be sure, of unquestioned orthodoxy, but after all a genuine thinker whom the textbooks had long tried, as it were, to keep lifeless, and who when once revived, proves to be full of suggestions of new problems and an effort toward new solutions.”
Along with Aeterni Patris, Leo XIII moved rapidly to implement the revival of Thomism. A papal letter of October 15, 1879, set up the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas, one of whose tasks was to look into preparing a new edition of the works of the Angelic Doctor. On January 18, 1880, another papal document, Placere nobis, established what came to be called the Leonine Commission to undertake this task. Two other editions of the works of Thomas were produced in the nineteenth century, the twenty-five volume Parma edition of 1852–73, under the direction of Giovanni Maria Allodi, canon of the cathedral of Parma, and the thirty-four volume edition of Paris, the work of Louis Vivès and his collaborators (1871–82). Neither of these editions, however, pretended to be a critical text; both were dependent on the original Piana edition of 1570 with a few corrections and emendations. The Leonine Edition had greater ambitions and an official role. Leo’s Commission consisted of three cardinals, the Dominican Tommaso Zigliara, Antonio de Lucca, and Giovanni Simeoni. Their task was to produce a new version of the whole of Thomas’s Opera, but the question soon emerged, what kind of an edition was this to be?
On this issue there was a difference of viewpoint between Pope Leo and the members of the commission. Leo appears to have been emulating his predecessor Pius V in his desire to produce a sumptuous papal version of the Opera Omnia to further his program for the revival of Thomism. The members of the commission and their collaborators, however, were influenced by modern conceptions of critical editing that aimed at producing a text as faithful to the author’s original as possible. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, German scholars connected with MGH (Monumenta Germaniae Historica) had worked out the philological and diplomatic skills for producing critical editions of medieval texts. The cardinals on the commission were not trained in these methods, but they enlisted the help of priests versed in editing, including the Dominican, Constantius Suermondt. The original plan was to begin with Thomas’s philosophical works. Three volumes of these were published between 1882 and 1886, though these were scarcely of a critical character. Leo XIII, however, was not pleased. He wanted the Summa theologiae—the summit of Thomas’s thought and the answer to modern errors—and he wanted it quickly. As Louis-Jacques Bataillon summarized, “The first concern of the editors was quality, but the pope’s was celerity.” Leo ordered the editors to make use of the Piana text as the basis of the edition and utilize only manuscripts of the Summa found in the Vatican Library for corrections and variants. The harried editors got to work and managed to produce a defective edition of the Prima Pars in two large folio volumes published in 1888–89, as well as two volumes of the Prima Secundae in 1891–92. By that time Suermondt and his collaborators had begun to work out effective criteria for doing a more or less critical text of Thomas’s works (not easy when there were more than four thousand manuscripts!). They also silently disregarded Leo’s orders. Thus, the edition of the Secunda Secundae published 1895–99 marks a definite advance. The Tertia Pars and the Supplementum appeared in two volumes between 1903 and 1906. The Leonine edition of the Summa theologiae, therefore, is a kind of mélange—defective in its first half, somewhat better in the second. The Summa still lacks a rigorously critical text. The Leonine Commission, of course, has gone on to become one of the most distinguished of all medieval editing projects, producing meticulous editions of the other works of Thomas over more than a century. Its work looks to stretch on for decades to come, but it is not assured that the editors will come back to redo the Summa.
Concentrating the story of Neothomism on Rome does not give a full sense of the rapidity of the spread of Neoscholasticism/Neothomism throughout the Catholic world. A brief glance at some of the other centers of the Thomist revival, as well as at the new journals on Thomas and scholasticism can provide some sense of this. At the University at Louvain, one of the foremost centers of Catholic thought since the fifteenth century, a chair of Thomist philosophy was established in 1882 by the secular priest Desiré Joseph Mercier (1851–1926), later to become a cardinal. Mercier was interested in the relation between Thomism and modern philosophy and science, questions that were pursued at the Institute for Philosophy he established at Louvain in 1894. Thus, the Louvain form of Neothomism had a different tone from what was found in Rome. In France the Dominicans at both Paris and Toulouse returned to the study of Thomas in the 1880s, while in 1889 a Catholic faculty of theology was established at Fribourg in Switzerland and given to the Dominicans, who introduced a Thomist curriculum. Another measure of the success of Neothomism can be seen in the journals devoted to the study of Thomas and Neoscholasticism in general. These proliferated in the period between the first appearance of Divus Thomas in 1880 and the beginning of the American journal the Thomist in 1939. Another important step was the conversion of the Dominican House of Studies in Rome into a full-fledged papal university, the Angelicum (today the University of Saint Thomas) in 1909. In roughly a quarter century Neothomism had become the teaching of modern Catholicism.
Not everyone was happy with the triumph of Neoscholasticism and its ahistorical and antimodern mode of thought. The period 1890–1910 saw the growth of resistance to the regnant Neoscholasticism that sought to open Catholic philosophy, theology, and Biblical studies to contemporary thought, or at least to enter into dialogue with critical history, modern Biblical studies, and new philosophical currents. During these decades Catholic thinkers in France, England, Italy, and Germany sought a different approach to modernity. These scholars and thinkers were a varied lot engaged in many disciplines—for example, Alfred Loisy, Maurice Blondel, and Lucien Laberthonnière in France; George Tyrrell and Friedrich von Hügel in England; Romolo Murri and Ernesto Buonaiuti in Italy; Franz Kraus and Josef Sauer in Germany. As different as they were in temperament and viewpoint, they came to be grouped together as “Modernists” by the reaction they provoked in Rome under the pontificate of Leo’s successor, Pius X (1903–14).
The Modernists were too different in their interests to be described as constituting a movement with a single point of view. “Modernism” was the creation of its opponents (Pius X and his ghostwriters). The Modernists were accused of many errors, such as (1) abandoning an objective and realist view of God for an agnostic, immanentist, and subjective philosophy; (2) an adherence to a historical outlook that saw the Bible as a merely human document and the evolution of Christian doctrine as only a reflection on religious experience; and (3) a consequent denial of the truth of many basic Christian beliefs, such as the divinity of Christ, in favor of a “symbolical” interpretation. The extent to which different Modernists did or did not hold these views remains under review. In 1907 Pope Pius issued a stinging condemnation of Modernism, first in a July 3 decree of the Holy Office titled Lamentabili, and then in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis of September 8, mostly written by the Oblate priest Joseph Lemius. Pascendi described Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies … whose system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion.” In 1910 Pius issued a decree that all the clergy would henceforth be obliged to take an oath against Modernism, the Iusiurandum antimodernisticum, which remained in force until Vatican II. Soon after, repressive measures were instituted throughout the Catholic world to identify, proscribe, and excommunicate not only the Modernist authors who may have held some of the positions attacked by the pope, but also all who might be conceived to have sympathized with them. An ecclesiastical reign of terror ensued, which, although it only lasted about fifteen years, rivaled later twentieth-century political witch hunts in its level of dishonesty and duplicity, though fortunately the Vatican no longer possessed any machinery of physical coercion, imprisonment, or worse. Among those secretly denounced, but not condemned, were Cardinal Mercier, the whole Dominican faculty at Fribourg, and the young priest Giuseppe Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.
The Encyclical Pascendi condemns the Modernists for wishing to relegate scholastic philosophy to the history of philosophy and teach modern philosophy in its stead in seminaries. It also endorses Thomas Aquinas as the touchstone of truth, especially in metaphysics. There is no question that the major figures traditionally seen as Modernists identified the Neoscholasticism of Aeterni Patris as a key source of their complaints. Shortly after the publication of Pascendi, the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrel (1861–1909), soon to be excommunicated, wrote an open letter to the Times on September 30, 1907, in which he stated, “When the Encyclical tries to show the modernist that he is no Catholic, it mostly succeeds only in showing him he is no Scholastic, which he knew.” Tyrrell’s book Medievalism (1908), a response to Cardinal Mercier’s attack on Modernism, amply demonstrates the opposition between the abstract, deductive, ahistorical mode of Neoscholastic thinking, on the one hand, and the historically minded, non-Aristotelian modes of philosophizing explored by many Modernists. But if Neoscholasticism was abhorrent to the Modernists, what did they think about Thomas himself?
The Modernists’ views of Thomas were complicated, in part because the Modernists themselves were so different. Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), whose critical studies of the Bible and early church history made him perhaps the most prominent representative of Modernism, had read Thomas’s Summa as a seminarian in the late 1870s and hated it. The same was true of the Modernist philosopher and theologian Lucien Laberthonièrre (1860–1932). The layman Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) also had little sympathy for Thomas. Tyrrell, on the other hand, read Thomas on his own as a seminarian in the 1880s and expressed his debt to the clarity and rigor of his thought, although under Von Hügel’s influence he seems to have qualified this admiration late in his short life. The Dominican scripture scholar, Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), long under a cloud as a Modernist but never condemned, was deeply formed by his Thomist education. The lay philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), also not formally condemned, appreciated the role that Thomism had served in its day, but worked toward finding a new more dynamic philosophy that would address the concerns of the present world. In general we can say that the Modernists disagreed with the program set out in Aeterni Patris regarding the revival of Scholasticism and its stress that a return to the “pure springs” of St. Thomas was the answer to all the problems of the day. Writing in the wake of Pascendi, Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881–1946) summarized this view in his The Program of Modernism: “Whence it is clear that it is impossible to impose religious experience on the modern mind in the same forms as were adapted to the utterly different mediaeval mind. The Church cannot, and ought not to, pretend that the Summa of Aquinas answers the exigencies of religious thought in the twentieth century.”
Pius X and his program of repression crushed Modernism—the movement that never was. Some Modernists voluntarily left the church or were driven out; others remained in the fold but kept a low profile. What did the crisis mean for the evolution of Thomism in the twentieth century? One effect seems to have been to expose how difficult it was for even the centralized modern papacy to control what kind of philosophy was to be taught in seminaries and especially in Catholic colleges. This is evident from the fact that for about a decade (1914–24), in part in reaction to the Modernist crisis, the Roman authorities issued document after document stressing that Thomism was the common teaching of the Church.
In a decree of June 29, 1914, titled Doctoris Angelici, Pius X insisted, once again, that “scholasticism” meant the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and that “all teachers of philosophy and sacred theology should be warned that if they deviated so much as one iota from Aquinas, especially in metaphysics, they exposed themselves to grave risk.” Pius even went on to make the extraordinary claim that any commendation he or former popes had made of the doctrine of other writers and saints was true only to the extent that these writers had agreed with “the principles of Aquinas.” Pius mandated that the Summa theologiae be used as the fundamental textbook in pontifical faculties. On July 27, 1914, the Sacred Congregation of Studies issued a list of twenty-four Thomistic theses in philosophy that must be adhered to in Catholic teaching. This list, which today appears slightly bizarre, was basically designed to de-legitimize the Suarezian reading of Thomas still favored by some Jesuits. The twenty-four theses provoked a strong reaction on the part of the members of the Society of Jesus who still favored Suarezian Thomism. On March 7, 1916, another document from the Congregation of Studies backed off and declared the twenty-four theses to be only “sure directional norms.” On March 19, 1917, Pius X’s successor, Pope Benedict XV (1914–22), sent a letter to the Jesuit Superior General basically allowing the Jesuits to teach what they wanted to as long as they paid lip service to Thomas as the established teacher. “Twenty-Four-Thesis Thomism,” however, remained a force in some Catholic philosophical institutions for decades.
The successors of Leo XIII and Pius X did not cease legislating Thomism as the official teaching of the Church. On June 29, 1923, the six-hundredth anniversary of Thomas’s canonization, Pius XI (1922–39) issued an encyclical Studiorum ducem that hailed Thomas as “the common and universal Doctor of the Church, for the Church has adopted his philosophy for her very own, as innumerable documents of every kind testify.” An Apostolic Constitution of May 24, 1931, also promulgated under Pius XI, laid down a detailed program of studies for all seminaries following a Thomist model. Papal insistence that Catholic training in philosophy and theology adhere to Thomas continued up to 1960 and Vatican II, though often in a more muted fashion. One prominent example was Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis of August 12, 1950, which might be described as the last gasp of monumental Neothomism. The encyclical warned against “dogmatic relativism” and condemned errors of recent theology, especially the so-called French “new theology” (la nouvelle théologie—like “Modernism” a pejorative term created by the Thomist opponents of new modes of theology). According to Pius XII, dangerous “innovators” had been led “from contempt of scholastic theology into forgetting or even despising the authority of the Church itself.” The reason for these errors was the neglect of the scholastic philosophy of the Angelic Doctor, whose “philosophical system is an unrivalled method” and whose “teaching seems to chime in, by a kind of pre-established harmony, with divine revelation.” Despite Pius XII’s insistence, however, the cutting edge of Catholic philosophy and theology had begun to move away from Neothomism in the 1930s and 1940s due to the growing realization that there was more to the Catholic tradition than scholasticism and that Thomas himself was far from a rigid thinker, or one whose meaning was always easily discernible.
The Neothomism enshrined in these papal documents of the first half of the twentieth century, aptly described as “monumental Thomism,” “triumphalist Thomism,” or “authoritarian Thomism,” is just a memory today. Even as devoted a contemporary Thomist as the Dominican Jean-Pierre Torrell recently attacked it with vehemence, “What a strange reversal of fortunes! Resisted at its birth, and even condemned, Thomism, once made official, became a weapon in the hands of the authorities. … Imposed in an authoritarian way, Thomas’s doctrine had nothing left of the creative force of the original.”
Contested Varieties of Thomism in the Twentieth Century
Pope Leo seemed to think that true Thomism could be found just by reading the text of Thomas with the help of the classic interpreters, which is why he insisted that Cajetan’s commentary be reprinted along with the text of the Summa in the Leonine Edition. If history is barred from the front door, however, it has a way of sneaking in the back, as the story of the modern revival of Thomas and the Summa demonstrates. The contested varieties of Thomism that emerged in the first three quarters of the twentieth century show how difficult it was (and is) to find a single interpretation of a thinker as profound as Thomas. In many ways Neothomism nurtured the seeds of its own destruction almost from the start, especially because of its aversion to history. Due to the sheer amount of writing on Thomas in the twentieth century and also because we stand so close to this period, it is difficult to summarize this latest chapter in the story of the reception of Thomas and the Summa theologiae.
It is not surprising that Dominicans and Jesuits were among the most influential interpreters of Thomas in the twentieth century; what was new was the emergence of lay Catholics, such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson—both of whom significantly eschewed being called “Neothomists.” Attempting to categorize major philosophical and theological thinkers under specific headings is unfair to the subtleties of their thought, but useful for pedagogical purposes. I will use four general categories to provide a sense of twentieth-century Thomisms down to circa 1975: Strict-Observance Thomism, Revived Thomism, Metaphysical Thomism, and Transcendental Thomism. These categories are not to be thought of as discrete: a number of the figures mentioned could fit under several headings.
Strict-Observance Thomism came closest to what Leo XIII had in mind when he issued Aeterni Patris, that is, interpreting Thomas through the lens of the classic commentators, like Cajetan and John of St. Thomas, to establish a standard for Catholic teaching and the answer to the errors of modern thought. It flourished primarily in the first half of the twentieth century, and many of its foremost spokesmen were Dominicans, such as Ambrose Gardeil (1859–1931) and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964). Gardeil, who was instrumental in the founding of the Revue Thomiste (begun in 1893) and in setting up the Dominican House of Studies at Le Saulchoir near Paris, was one of the earliest Thomists to attack the vitalistic philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) from the perspective of Thomism. His student Garrigou-Lagrange, whom the novelist François Mauriac once called “the Sacred Monster of Thomism,” was among the most influential interpreters of Aquinas in the twentieth century. Garrigou-Lagrange taught at the Angelicum in Rome from 1909 until 1959 and was deeply involved in Roman ecclesiastical and theological politics. He wrote extensively, including a series of monographic commentaries on sections of the Summa theologiae (e.g., God, His Existence and Nature). Garrigou-Lagrange was sure that Thomas had all the answers necessary to refute modern errors, and he was equally sure that he knew exactly what Thomas meant. He was intensely polemical against what he saw as deviations from Thomas; it was he who coined the name “the new theology” (la nouvelle théologie) in 1946 to characterize what he felt were the errors of some French theologians, whom he accused of being halfway to the dread Modernism. Like his mentor Gardeil, Garrigou-Lagrange took a particular interest in spirituality and mysticism, lecturing on spirituality from 1917 until 1959. Although his approach to spirituality and mysticism is based on Thomas and John of St. Thomas, he also made use of mystics like John of the Cross.
Although the French ressourcement (literally, “resourcing”) is usually associated with the theologians, mostly French Jesuits, who sought to go back behind scholasticism to recover the riches of the patristic tradition as a resource for modern theology, this form of reviving the past also fits those writers who worked toward a more adequate historical understanding of Thomas in the context of his own time and intentions. The need for a revived historical analysis of Thomas seems obvious today; it was not for Leo XIII and classical Thomists. To introduce historical mindedness into the study of Thomas was seen by some as bringing a Trojan horse into the impregnable Neothomist fortress—which was true, although not the whole truth.
Historical investigation of medieval philosophy began in the nineteenth century. Scholars soon turned their attention to Thomas Aquinas. Among the major pioneers in studying Thomas’s life, as well as the evolution and dating of his writings, was the Dominican Pierre Mandonnet (1858–1936). His work was continued in the later twentieth century by other notable Dominican scholars. The major contribution of what I am calling “Revived Thomism” came through both general and particular studies of the historical meaning of Thomas. A central figure in this endeavor was another French Dominican, Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990). Chenu studied with Garrigou-Lagrange in Rome, but turned down an offer to be his successor at the Angelicum to return to Le Saulchoir where Mandonnet and his students were pursuing historical work on Thomas. As a historical theologian, Chenu was interested not just in establishing the details of Thomas’s career, but in investigating the significance of Thomas’s theology as a resource for contemporary thinking. Thomas for him was not the author of a timeless speculative system, but an example of how the Christian faith achieves theological expression in diverse ages and historical contexts. Without denying Thomas’s use of philosophy, Chenu correctly saw him as a theologian seeking the intelligibility of faith. “The very pith of his work,” said Chenu, “was scriptural and his theology had its root in the Gospel movement of his day, just as it did the [theological] renaissance movement of which it was one of the effects. … Herein is the characteristic proper to scholastic theology, the abiding richness of the Thomistic system, the lovely fruit of the only renaissance that succeeded in the Western Christian world.”
Chenu became the head of Le Saulchoir in 1932 and in 1937 published a brochure titled Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir, arguing for a historical approach to Thomas and criticizing the “Baroque Scholasticism” of Garrigou-Lagrange and the Angelicum. A donnybrook ensued. The Dominican Master General set up a commission to investigate the little book (Garrigou-Lagrange was one of the members), and Chenu’s work was placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books in 1942. Although under a cloud, Chenu pursued his historical studies of Thomas and the Summa, training younger Dominicans, such as the ecclesiologist Yves Congar (1904–95). Chenu’s 1939 paper on the structure of the Summa initiated modern discussion of this important topic, and in 1950 he produced his masterwork, Introduction à l’étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (English translation, 1964), an in-depth historical study of Thomas. Chenu went on to issue a second major work in 1957, a study of the twelfth-century theological renaissance that produced the world that made Thomas Aquinas possible, La théologie au douzième siècle (partial English translation, 1968). The French Dominican served as a theological advisor (peritus) at Vatican II and lived a long life in which he saw his historical-theological approach to Thomas vindicated by ongoing research.
Chenu was not alone in turning from ahistorical to historical investigation of Thomas and the scholastic world. The 1930s were the seedtime for the turn to history. Henri De Lubac (1896–1991), one of the leaders of the suspect “new theology” attacked by Garrigou-Lagrange, wrote about a wide range of theological issues, historical and contemporary. De Lubac was suspicious of the authoritarian Thomism of the time, but he too made a groundbreaking contribution to a more historical understanding of Thomas. From his student days, De Lubac had been interested in the question of how far the teaching about the supernatural character of human destiny put forth by the major Thomist commentators of the sixteenth century conformed to that found in Aquinas himself. He wrote various notes and papers on the topic over the years and in 1942 put these together into a manuscript called Surnaturel. Études historiques, though the book did not appear until 1946. De Lubac showed that the notion of “pure nature” developed in Baroque scholasticism and dear to the Strict-Observance Thomists had no foundation in the thought of the Fathers, such as Augustine, and that it was a misreading of Thomas. De Lubac’s work was an example of a basic shift in the Catholic theology of the period circa 1935–60, one that turned away from the regnant Neothomist model in three major ways: (1) by rigorous historical investigation of what Thomas actually said within the context of the problems of his time; (2) by relativizing Thomas’s position in the history of theology, seeing him as a significant figure but not as the ultimate authority on all issues; and (3) by engaging in a serious dialogue with modern forms of philosophy and non-Catholic theology.
Historical investigation of Thomas grew apace in the second half of the twentieth century through contributions by historians, philosophers, and theologians. The American Dominican James Weisheipl (1923–84), one of the foremost scholars of medieval philosophy and science, wrote much on Thomas, including a survey, Friar Thomas D’Aquino. His Life, Thought, and Work (1974), which remains one of the best general accounts. More recently, the French Dominican Jean-Pierre Torrell has contributed a host of studies, from specialized papers to impressive surveys. Another American, John Wippel of Catholic University, has become an important interpreter of Thomas’s metaphysics. The historical approach to Aquinas pioneered by Chenu and others, while certainly not the only approach, won the day, if not with ease, certainly with decisiveness.
It is not possible to separate historical studies of Thomas’s thought from presentations of his philosophy designed to provide a challenge or alternative to contemporary philosophy: what I am calling “Metaphysical Thomism.” Two of the most famous twentieth-century Thomist philosophers, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, illustrate the interaction of history and philosophy. Maritain (1882–1973) was primarily a philosopher, while Gilson (1884–1978) was a historian of medieval philosophy, but one who argued philosophically that Thomas’s position was the best form of metaphysics. Although these two thinkers remained within the Neothomist paradigm that treated the Dominican primarily as a philosopher, Gilson recognized that Thomas’s philosophy is found within his theology and that what he called Thomas’s “Christian philosophy” was shaped by theological issues. Although the two Frenchmen were contemporaries, friends, and often linked in the popular mind, their views of Thomas were actually rather different.
Jacques Maritain, born a Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of his teacher Henri Bergson. His first work on the philosophy of Bergson (1912) was a rejection of his mentor’s vitalistic and evolutionary view of reality in favor of the realism of Thomas. Maritain’s outpouring of works on every aspect of philosophy and what we would call today cultural studies was imbued with the traditional Thomism of Leo XIII, that is, Thomas as viewed through the classical commentators, especially Cajetan and John of St. Thomas. Nevertheless, Maritain advanced the Thomist cause in important ways. First of all, more than any other modern Thomist, Maritain sought to realize Leo’s agenda of employing Thomism to integrate the whole range of philosophy and science under the guiding influence of Thomist wisdom. Adopting Cajetan’s view of three degrees of Aristotelian abstraction (abstraction from individual matter in the realm of physics, abstraction from sensible matter in mathematics, and abstraction from all matter in metaphysics), Maritain argued for the autonomy of the various modes of knowledge, scientific and philosophic, within the wider natural integration of metaphysics and the supernatural integration provided by revelation. His integral philosophical perspective embraced an impressive range of topics on which he wrote with originality and passionate conviction: not only metaphysics and epistemology, but also art and poetry, prayer and mysticism, politics, and ethics and social issues. Maritain was resolutely opposed to Descartes and modern philosophy, insisting that the mind’s immediate grasp of reality is the beginning of philosophy. His interpretation of Thomistic metaphysics as the study of being as achieved through what he called “eidetic visualization,” that is, a kind of intuition of reality through the abstract form (eidos in Greek), was laid out in his Preface to Metaphysics (1934), and especially in Existence and the Existent. An Essay on Christian Existentialism (1948). Maritain’s most ambitious book, Distinguish to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge (1933), sought to integrate a Thomist understanding of the kinds of rational knowing found in science and philosophy with the supra-rational knowing available through grace and mystical experience, using John of the Cross. Nevertheless, this work shows that Maritain’s view of Thomas was primarily absorbed through John of St. Thomas’s teaching, not that of Thomas himself.
Like Maritain, Etienne Gilson came to Thomism by a circuitous route. He began his studies at the Sorbonne under the sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim in the midst of the excitement over the philosophy of Bergson. Gilson had not even read Aquinas when in 1905 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl suggested he write a dissertation on Descartes and the scholastics. In the course of writing this work (published in 1913) Gilson discovered Thomas. In 1913–14 he gave a series of lectures on Thomas that eventually appeared as the first edition of Le Thomisme, of which he later wrote, “The book deserves to survive in this first edition as a monument to the ignorance of its author.” But Gilson persisted in his study of Thomas and the whole medieval tradition. His impressive series of works on the thought of many medieval thinkers (e.g., Augustine, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Bernard), eventually summarized in his massive History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955), as well as a host of papers and other studies, made him the foremost twentieth-century interpreter of the intellectual tradition of the Middle Ages. Gilson recognized the variety that characterized medieval thinkers, but also argued for a fundamental unity of the medieval intellectual tradition under the rubric of “Christian philosophy,” which he saw, in good Thomist fashion, as the kind of philosophy developed by medieval theologians through the use of reason in investigating both the truths of faith and those that can be discovered by reason itself. Gilson first set out his view of the unity in diversity of medieval thought in his The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Gifford Lectures for 1931–32).
Gilson agreed with Leo XIII and the tradition of Strict-Observance Thomism that Thomas’s Christian philosophy represented the acme of medieval Christian philosophy, especially because of what Gilson referred to as “the Metaphysics of the Exodus,” that is, Thomas’s breakthrough to a philosophy based on God as ipsum esse subsistens, the pure act of existence revealed by the divine voice in Exodus 3:14, saying “I am who am.” The God of Exodus is the One whose Essence is identical with Existence itself and the Creator of all beings whose essence is not the same as existence, but who exist in particular ways as angels, humans, animals, and so on. Gilson appears to have made this breakthrough in his thinking on Thomas around 1940, since it appears in his book God and Philosophy (1941) and was incorporated into the fourth edition of Le Thomisme of 1942, as well as the definitive fifth edition, translated as The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (1956). Gilson’s metaphysics of the Exodus was summarized in his major philosophical work, Being and Some Philosophers (1949), in which he contrasts Thomas’s philosophy of Being as Existence with the opposed views of metaphysics based on the supremacy of the One (Platonists), of Substance (Aristotle and the Arabs), and of Essence (most modern philosophers and many so-called Thomists). Gilson’s books initiated lengthy discussions about the nature of Christian philosophy. Toward the end of his career in his memoir, The Philosopher and Theology, Gilson clarified his idea of Christian philosophy and its relation to theology, laying greater stress on the necessity for a theological perspective as the originating element: “The most original notions, and the deepest, in the doctrine of St. Thomas reveal themselves only to him who reads it as a theologian.”
Gilson’s recovery of the core of Thomas’s metaphysics was not an individual breakthrough, but was part of a general movement among students of Aquinas in the 1930s and 1940s. Other investigators of Thomas and the Summa also freed themselves from the essentialist interpretation of Thomas’s view of being found in the classic commentators and early Neothomism to realize that not only was the act of existence the heart of the Dominican’s view of reality, as Gilson affirmed, but also the notion of participation in existence (something he neglected) was a key to unlocking Thomas’s understanding of God as creator. Among the first in the field was Joseph de Finance, whose book Être et agir dans la Philosophie de Saint Thomas (Existence and Action in the Philosophy of St. Thomas) was written 1927–38, but not published until 1946 due to World War II. As he put it in the Preface to the second edition, “On the Thomist notion of esse, after many converging studies the agreement seems about to be realized today. More and more clearly the original contribution of St. Thomas is located in the relation of esse as existential actuation and of esse as a fullness limited by essence.” De Finance recognized that this limitation of esse was a form of participation, but it was left to several other thinkers to work out more detailed evaluations of how Thomas incorporated Platonic and Neoplatonic participation themes into his metaphysics. Cornelio Fabro published La nozione metafisica della partecipazione secondo San Tommaso d’Aquino (The Metaphysical Notion of Participation according to Saint Thomas) in 1939. A somewhat different view of Thomist participation was put forth by L.-B. Geiger in his La participation dans la philosophie de S. Thomas d’Aquin (Participation in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas) published in 1942.
The historical and metaphysical retrievals of Thomas’s thought from the 1930s and 1940s are to be distinguished from another movement in the modern reception of Thomism, one more radical, which sought to put Thomas into conversation with modern philosophy, especially the Kantian philosophy of the turn to the subject, as well as the emphasis on intuition and action found in the thought of Bergson and Blondel. This attempt to create a conversation between Thomas and modern philosophy was anathema for Garrigou-Lagrange, as well as for Maritain and Gilson: If Thomism gave away its objective sense of external reality founded on sense knowing, how could it not succumb to the subjectivism and relativism that popes from the early nineteenth century on had feared would be the end of Catholic truth? Early in the twentieth century some Jesuit philosophers and theologians began to wonder if it might be possible to investigate what Thomas had to say about how the human subject attains truth, that is, to start with Thomas’s a priori, or fundamental, conditions for knowing, even when these were not always explicitly set out by Thomas himself, in order to create a dialogue with the subjective turn of modern philosophy. In their view, Thomas’s epistemology, investigated from within the framework of the critical method, might provide a way out of the impasse between modern philosophy and Catholic thought. This approach came to be called “Transcendental Thomism,” though the name was not created by its supposed proponents.
The beginnings of this new form of Thomism can be traced to 1908. In that year the Jesuit Pierre Rousselot (1878–1915) published his dissertation L’Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas (The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas). For Rousselot intellectualism is “the doctrine which places the supreme value and intensity of life in an act of the intellect,” but this was not to be conceived of, as so often with the classical Thomists, as abstractive concept formation and deductive reasoning. Rather, true Thomist intellectualism is rooted in the primacy of contemplation, that act by which the mind’s dynamism is directed to the beatific vision. Rousselot summarized this by saying, “Intelligence, for St. Thomas, is the faculty of the real, but it is the faculty of the real only because it is the faculty of the divine.” Rousselot says that God alone realizes the identity of pure idea and living spirit in a supreme act of intuition; human knowing, tied to material reality but directed to the intuitive grasp of God as its end, strives to simulate and supplement the perfection of intuitive knowing through the formation of concepts and the creation of science, system, and symbols in human speculation. In this original book Rousselot refrained from investigating what Thomas had to say about the act of judgment, but he soon sensed that he had been mistaken in this omission by reading the articles of a fellow Jesuit, the Belgian Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944), who taught at Louvain.
Maréchal was trained in biology and empirical psychology, as well as philosophy and theology. The important paper that influenced Rousselot’s later work, published in 1908 and 1909 and titled “The Feeling of Presence in Mystics and Non-Mystics,” was an attempt to show that a philosophical analysis of the nature of human knowing is needed to complete and correct the findings of empirical psychology concerning mystical states of intuition of God. Maréchal’s argument rests upon his analysis of the a priori conditions for the possibility of a judgment of presence, which is also a judgment of reality. For the Belgian Jesuit, “The judgment of reality is a synthesis which is not justified solely by itself,” but is rather rooted in the nature of the human mind as a “faculty in quest of its intuition—that is to say, of assimilation with Being, Being pure and simple, sovereignly one, without restriction, without distinction of essence and existence, of possible and real.” At this point, Maréchal, not surprisingly, footnotes a number of texts from Aquinas, and, indeed, he closes off the article with the statement, “We judge that the hypothesis is psychologically acceptable. And this was of old the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas. We have hardly done more than interpret his doctrine.”
Maréchal’s lifting up of the act of judgment as central to Thomas’s intellectualism was to bear fruit in his massive five-volume “Notebooks” (Cahiers) titled Le point de depart de la métaphysique. Leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, published between 1922 and 1926. Volume 5, bearing the title Le Thomisme devant la philosophie critique (Thomism in the Face of Critical Philosophy), sought to mediate the conflict between Thomist realism and Kant’s insistence that the human mind can never attain real things (noumena), but knows phenomena only as received in the transcendental categories of space and time. For Maréchal the noumenal, or real, character of the finite essences affirmed in the act of judgment is revealed in the dynamic structure of the very act of affirmation, which is directed toward Absolute Being as the goal of its nature. Gerald McCool sees a close affinity between the positions argued by Rousselot and Maréchal: “Both of them felt that, properly understood and consistently applied, Kant’s transcendental method could vindicate a Thomistic metaphysics of man and being. Maritain and Gilson, on the other hand, remained firmly convinced that Thomist realism and post-Cartesian epistemology were radically incompatible. Any attempt on the part of a Thomist to ‘go in Kant’s door and come out his own’ was completely misguided.” Maréchal’s engagement with modern philosophy, however, was to bear fruit in other Jesuits who were influenced by the Belgian and sought to rethink aspects of Thomas’s thought within a modern context.
In the late 1930s the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904–84) began work at the Gregorian University on Thomas’s understanding of operating grace (gratia operans). Lonergan published his dissertation as a series of articles in the American journal Theological Studies in 1941–42 and later in book form. Through a meticulous analysis of Thomas’s developing thought on grace and freedom culminating in the treatment in the Summa, Lonergan was able to show that Thomas’s theory “stands as a higher synthesis to the opposition of later theories,” that is, the warring sixteenth-century views on grace and freedom found in the schools of Dominican Banezianism and Jesuit Molinism. Lonergan’s engagement with Thomas’s doctrine of grace was part of a more ambitious rethinking of the Dominican’s teaching on knowing that Lonergan said was inspired by reading Maréchal’s Cahiers. The first fruits of this came in another study of Thomas, this time devoted to his understanding of verbum, the inner word of understanding which, Lonergan argued, is the center of Thomist epistemology and crucial for grasping his Trinitarian theology (Ia, q. 27). Once again, Lonergan argued that Thomas achieved a higher viewpoint that was able to combine an Augustinian phenomenology of the subject with an Aristotelian psychology of the soul. Lonergan admitted that his argument put together scattered materials found in Thomas and so he described it as “Thomistic but hardly Thomist.” One can see the background in Maréchal when Lonergan says that his analysis of the act of judgment shows that “this act consists in a grasp of the native infinity of the intellect; for on the one hand, Thomist thought does stress that native infinity, and, on the other hand, from such infinity one can grasp the capacity of the mind to know reality.” Lonergan’s retrieval of Thomas on the act of understanding was the basis for the development of his own cognitional theory in his masterwork, Insight. A Study of Human Understanding (1957), a work that is not about Thomas in any direct way, but, Lonergan insisted, was a development of Thomas’s epistemology within the contemporary philosophical context.
Lonergan’s contemporary, the German Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904–84), took a different route to his version of what he once called “‘transcendentally-tainted’ philosophical Thomism.” Rahner’s earliest writings were on mystical theology, but in the mid-1930s, while studying philosophy at the Jesuit house at Pullach, he recounts, “I read with extraordinary eagerness and great care the fifth volume by Joseph Maréchal, S. J., Le point de depart de la métaphysique.” Rahner claims that this encounter was at the origin of what others later called “transcendental philosophy and theology,” so that, “To the extent that this Maréchalianism stems from Thomas and to the extent that Maréchal again and again tries to prove his thought through Thomas, I can say that Thomism formed my philosophy and, at a step removed, my theology.” Not everyone was convinced about the authenticity of this reading of Aquinas. When Rahner went off a few years later to study philosophy at Freiburg under Martin Heidegger and Martin Honecker, the thesis he prepared on Thomas’s theory of knowledge, specifically on what the Dominican meant by “conversion to the phantasm” (Ia, q. 84.7) as integral to human knowing, was not accepted by Honecker due to its radical interpretation of Thomas. Completed in 1936 and published in 1939, this work, Spirit in the World (English version 1967), is rightly seen as central to Rahner’s later immense output. Rahner did not intend to write a historical study of Thomas, but rather a reliving of Thomas’s “philosophy as it unfolds,” which, not unlike Lonergan, pushed Thomas beyond what he explicitly says, but in a direction that the author still claims is what Thomas would have said in the post-Kantian philosophical world.
Rahner and Lonergan had distinctive theological agendas that can be distorted by grouping them under the umbrella of Transcendental Thomism. Rahner learned from Thomas that theology necessarily implies philosophy, but his use of Thomas might be described as piecemeal, a picking and choosing of Thomas, especially in cases where his insights had been forgotten over the centuries. Rahner was also ready to criticize Thomas, for example, in relation to the setting and development of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology in the Summa. Lonergan, on the other hand, insisted that his subsequent philosophical and theological writings were developed out of insights he gained from reading Thomas, although he claimed that the Thomism of the future would need to be radically recast in the light of the shift from the static and ahistorical “classical worldview” inherited from Aristotle that shaped much of Thomas’s thought to the historical mindedness of the present, a shift he described as the transition from logic to method. Both Rahner and Lonergan abandoned the imperialistic Neothomism of Leo XIII and even that of Maritain and Gilson in favor of a pluralistic conversation among many philosophical and theological voices. These two major figures of twentieth-century Catholic theology cannot be understood without attention to how Thomas and his Summa helped shape their thought.
The third of the Catholic theologians who dominated the middle and late twentieth century was the Swiss Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88). Despite the fact that von Balthasar wrote an impressive study of Thomas’s view of charismatic graces and contemplation, his thought was much less formed by Thomas. Von Balthasar’s great contribution was a massive trilogy of multivolume works: The Glory of the Lord treating theological aesthetics in seven volumes (1961–69), Theo-Drama on divine and human action in five volumes (1973–83), and Theo-Logic in three volumes (1985–87). Theo-Drama contains von Balthasar’s sustained reflections on Christian doctrines, but given how different von Balthasar’s ordering of Christian doctrine is from Thomas’s Summa theologiae, it is somewhat surprising when the introductory note to the final volume says, “Following Aquinas, we have tried to erect theology on the articles of faith (and not vice versa).” In his treatment of “Metaphysics in Antiquity” in volume 4 of The Glory of the Lord, von Balthasar supports Thomas’s metaphysics of the act of being (actus essendi) as representing a decisive shift (kairos) from ancient thought that both “opens our eyes to the truth that God is self-subsistent being but … also closes our eyes and forbids us to cling to what we have seen.” Von Balthasar, however, was scarcely a Thomist.
The new theological voices that surfaced in the 1930s and 1940s had a key role in the Second Vatican Council that met between 1962 and 1965. The original documents for the sessions prepared in Rome according to the usual Neoscholastic theology were mostly rejected out of hand, so commissions of bishops and theological experts prepared new draft documents that would reflect the church’s attempt to fulfill Pope John XXIII’s desire for an “updating” (aggiornamento) of Roman Catholicism’s relation to contemporary society. Thomas Aquinas was not forgotten, cited 734 times in the Decrees and Documents of Vatican II, far more than any other authority (Augustine is next with 522 citations). Vatican II was a pastoral rather than a dogmatic council, one based not on confrontation with modernity, but on an attempt to reach out to people of good will. Above all, it was not set forth in the rigid scholastic language of deductive certainty based on irrefutable principles, but on a dialogical language of rhetorical engagement. It is not surprising that with the Council the Neoscholasticism, especially in its Neothomist variety, that had appeared so powerful even in the 1950s vanished almost overnight—it had been hollowed out from within for decades.
The decade following the Council down to 1974, the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Thomas Aquinas (and also of Bonaventure), was a time of turmoil and contention, both in the Catholic Church and in Western society, as witnessed in the reaction to the papal ban on artificial birth control in 1968 and the radical student upheavals in Europe and the United States in 1968–69. Serious differences of opinion and cultural divides were created then that are still strong today. These have had their effect on Thomism and the reception of the Summa, but in ways that may still be too present to be fully understood as yet. A curriculum based on (or pretending to be based on) Thomas Aquinas rapidly disappeared from Catholic higher education, but this did not mean that the study of Thomas was at an end. The monolithic Thomism that Leo XIII and his followers hoped would stem the tides of atheism, rationalism, subjectivism, fideism, and other errors faded both in official Roman Catholic teaching and in the world of scholarship. On the official side, papal support was still offered for Thomas, but within a theological world that admitted a pluralism of approaches to the understanding of faith. The anniversary of the deaths of Thomas and Bonaventure was greeted by a host of celebrations, conferences, and jamborees held throughout the Catholic world. The number of pages produced in the publications from these events certainly surpassed that of the Summa itself and added much to what we know about Thomas, his world, and his thought. Nevertheless, few of the authors of these studies were still holding up Thomas as the cure for all the ills of the modern world. Even Pope Paul VI, who sent a letter titled Lumen Ecclesiae to the Master of the Dominican Order for the event, did not do more than recommend “authentic fidelity to Thomas” for the saint’s own order.