There is no Bonaventurian school named after the Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure, a Doctor of the Church known for both his theological and spiritual writings.
Nor is there an Anselmian theological school to honor St. Anselm, another Doctor of the Church famous for his ontological argument for the existence of God.
As far as I’m aware, only one medieval theologian enjoys the privilege of having an entire school of theological thought named after him, with graduate-level programs at numerous universities across the world devoted to the study of his thought.
That honor goes to St. Thomas Aquinas.
That’s not to dismiss the importance of other medieval theologians. If the Church has taken the trouble to declare someone a “Doctor of the Church,” it means that man or woman’s contribution to Catholic theology or doctrine is of paramount importance to the Church’s two-thousand-year history. Yet it seems without question that despite the many admirable qualities of Bonaventure or Anselm, Aquinas’s influence looms largest.
Two recently published books, A Brief Life of Thomas Aquinas: The Theologian in His Context, by Jean-Pierre Torrell and translated by Benedict M. Guevin, and Thinking Through Aquinas: Essays on God, Humanity, and Christ, by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt illuminate why more than 750 years after his death, the Angelic Doctor remains of incomparable relevance to contemporary issues and debates.
Torrell’s biography fills in some fascinating details about Thomas’s life. For example, over the course of a career that included periods in Italy, Germany and France, he traveled an estimated ten thousand kilometers, mostly on foot because it was forbidden for the brothers to use a horse. Thomas wasn’t just prolific in “getting his steps in”—his output was more productive than the most best-selling popular fiction writers today, averaging the equivalent of about 12 pages per day, which by way of comparison amounts to approximately twelve books of 350 pages each per year. Perhaps most miraculous about the quantity of such high quality writing is that he maintained this schedule for about twenty-five years.
Scholars estimate that the list of authors Thomas cites in his corpus—such as Greek or Latin ancients, pagans, Christians, Arabs, and Jews—totals 164 names, though that doesn’t include anonymous writers, heretics, names only occasionally cited, and the lives of the saints. “Driven by his presumption of good will with respect to philosophers, [Thomas] borrows from them everything that is not incompatible with the Catholic faith, even going so far, according to several scholars, as to borrow from Aristotle a theory of divine providence,” writes Torrell. And if the Church Fathers—which apart from Scripture are his most regularly cited sources—wrote anything erroneous (or, to use Aquinas’s own language “with less prudence”), Thomas still sought to approach them with reverence and charity, “explain[ing] them respectfully.” As he elsewhere declared: “All that is true, said by whomsoever, comes from the Holy Spirit.”
And though we know him best for his Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas’s writing was quite diverse.
Titles accredited to him include: The Mixing of Elements, The Movement of the Heart, The Hidden Workings of Nature, The Judgment of Stars, Random Drawing, The Secret of Confession, and The Letter to the Countess of Flanders. Many of his works were written at the invitation of someone else, including Urban IV and Jean Verceil, then-Master of the Order of Preachers. He wrote his Summa Theologiae after observing that students were often hindered “by other authors, either on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments, or because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter…” Thomas was no esoteric ivory tower intellectual writing for professional intellectuals, but a relevant, popular theologian.
Many scholars argue that Thomas’s commentary on John’s Gospel is his greatest theological work, particularly for its lessons on the mystery of the Incarnation found in the Prologue, as well as his discussion of the Holy Spirit. Seemingly to prove the point, Bauerschmidt devotes an entire chapter to the topic of the Church Militant in that Commentary on John. Though also highly regarded by scholars, Thomas’s commentaries on the Pauline epistles are in contrast limited by what Terrell describes as the Angelic Doctor’s failure to recognize that the Pauline corpus are occasional letters, meaning they were written not to present a systematic body of theological thought, but to address particular events or crises in the first-century Church.
Bauerschmidt notes in his first essay that “Thomas rarely evinces anger or resorts to sarcasm or employs any rhetorical technique to defeat his enemies.” Nevertheless, Thomas could be quite the polemicist. In his conclusion to Against Those Who Lead Astray, he asserts: “If someone wishes to contradict this work, may he not go and babble in front of children; better that he write a book and publish it so that competent people can judge what is true and refute what is false based on the authority of the truth.”
In his The Unity of the Intellect (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas) he blasts: “Those who defend this position must confess that they understand absolutely nothing and that they are not even worthy to debate with those whom they attack.” Torrell opines: “I think we can agree that such polemics are not Thomas’s best moments.”
Thomas reserved some of his harshest language for Averroist thinking—particularly the ideas that all humans share the same intellect, and the consequent belief in determinism that eviscerates free will—which had become popular among many of Aquinas’s colleagues. In response, he wrote: “It is in fact contrary to all that we see, and this would destroy all moral science and all that would come from life in the human community, which is nevertheless natural to humans, as Aristotle said.” It is harrowing to consider that were it not for Thomas, whose arguments against Averroism persuaded many contemporaries, it’s possible that the errant philosophy of a Muslim scholar might have become dominant in European medieval thought.
Thomistic political theory seems particularly applicable today. In one famous passage, Thomas argues: “However, when it comes to politics, it is better to obey secular power over spiritual power, according to what we read in Matthew 21:2: ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.’” Torrell argues that what is most noteworthy about this passage is that Thomas was the only one of his era to speak like this:
Contrary to his contemporaries, Saint Bonaventure or even Saint Albert, still wed to the formula ecclesia = christianitas (Church and Christianity are the same thing) inherited from the High Middle Ages, with its permanent tension between hierocratism (the superiority of the religious) and caesaropapism (the hegemony of secular power) that ensued, Thomas clearly has a dualistic vision of the relationship between Church and civil society.
On this point, Thomas would never alter his opinion, and would in a way presage modernity.
That’s not to say that Thomas was a proto-liberal. Bauerschmidt observes that Thomas would argue that a rightly ordered society would legally accept and promote the Gospel; obviously, things have changed a lot since the thirteenth century. Unlike the Christendom of Thomas’s day, liberal societies seek to avoid many questions of truth, both because, as the post-Reformation wars of religion suggested, such events seemed unresolvable, but also because they are so easily subject to manipulation by those in power. Yet, as Bauerschmidt rightly notes, the supposedly dispassionate neutrality of our secular, liberal order is also based on truth claims, even if those claims are often hidden under the guise of autonomy and legal proceduralism.
Bauerschmidt also places Thomas in conversation with modernity over the nature of the human will, explaining the difference between persuasion and coercion. To coerce the will is to move the will violently, while persuasion is to persuade and draw the will to identify something as truly representing the good, given the Thomistic definition of the will as naturally inclined toward the good (though the intellect may misidentify that good). This is contrary to the understanding of the will posited by postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, who blurs the distinction between coercion and persuasion, not seeing the will as having a natural inclination toward the good, but, in Bauerschmidts’s summary, “is rather a force that creates its own good.” Thus does Foucault — pace Aquinas who (ironically) had a much higher view of human nature — interpret the world not as composed of a variety of individuals and institutions to various degrees ordered to the good, but through structures of power cynically employed to dominate others. But as Thomas writes in the Summa, the natural inclination to virtue is not destroyed, but only diminished by sin.
Finally, Bauerschmidt has Thomas engage with liberation theology, particularly the writing of the Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría. The Thomistic conception of the atonement, argues Bauerschmidt, recognizes that the efficacy of the cross requires both Jesus’ “solidarity with and substitution for us.” In contrast, the atonement theory of Ellacuría’s liberation theology distances itself from any expiatory account of the cross, instead focusing exclusively on Jesus’ solidarity with the poor and oppressed. This seems to suggest that what is salvific is the act of violence itself upon a victimized people. And this, assesses Bauerschmidt, leads to an instrumentalization of suffering in order to “move history forward,” as if the paradigm of victimization is central, rather than Christ serving as victim to free us from our sins and restore creation.
Who would have thought Thomas Aquinas could be so relevant to contemporary discussions over victimhood, critical theory, or postmodern relativism? Perhaps the next time your employer’s Human Resources department hosts another seminar on diversity, equity, and inclusion, you should bring St. Thomas along.
A Brief Life of Thomas Aquinas: The Theologian in His Context
by Jean-Pierre Torrell
Translated by Benedict M. Guevin
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
Paperback, 192 pages
Thinking Through Aquinas: Essays on God, Humanity, and Christ
By Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
Word on Fire Academic, 2024
Hardcover, 384 pages
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Such a good refection on the gigantic contribution of Aquinas, especially his refutation of Averroism and group think or the “herd mind”, “national spirit” etc. But to state that St Thomas believed that “when it comes to politics, it is better to obey secular power over spiritual power”, without making any of the distinctions he does, is simply untrue. Thomas Aquinas states very clearly in De regimine principum that civil society and the Church have different ends and are distinct, but that civil society’s ends are ultimately subordinated to man’s religious ends. Civil society cannot attain these ends and must defer to the Church in all matters that concern them. The Church may also intervene in civil society when it does not fulfill its own ends according to natural law.
Yes. Also I think Aquinas was not only expounding truth and philosophy but teaching Christians of varied ranks who had been exposed to Islam for so many centuries to his time (among other things).
I had wanted to contribute about his structure in the articles. That is, he condenses in there the main points or heads at issue and with concision, as the correct method; plus, he demonstrates his perfection of the method and how it is truth that guides it.
Ibn Rushd, [Averroes] along with Al Farabi, Ibn Sina were samples of the height of Islamic culture circa 700-1300. Ibn Rushd’s theory of the unity of intellect, the proposal of a universal intellect that explains universal compatibility of thought about things, of knowledge individualized in persons.
Aquinas rejected this theory that became popular in the Church because it doesn’t explain the independence of individual beings. The death of the person would logically end the physical relation of person to soul, the latter understood as a universal. Individuation in persons is due to esse, the act of existence that belongs to God, in that our being is due to God’s act. Consequently, the human person has an individual soul with the capacity to know and understanding, while akin to others who have the same ability remains unique. Each person possesses the faculties to perceive and understand, to form their own judgments, while similar to the faculties of others. As such a person also remains responsible for his own judgments and decisions. Good and evil become apprehensive and rendered responsible in our actions due to the individual’s ability to freely decide, which capacity would be absent with Averroes idea of a universal intellect. Knowledge would be known from without rather than apprehended from within, which would preclude freedom to decide.
That said regarding Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes Casey Chalk’s excellent, amazingly brief framework of the thought of Aquinas deserves acknowledgment, the reason why I tackled the complex issue of a universal intellect that results in determinism and loss of free will.
Aquinas said on Averroism, with the death of the body the ‘person’ loses identity because his intellect is not really his own rather a universal entity. Archbishop Etienne Tempier of Paris at the time Aquinas lectured at the U of Paris condemned the Averroist heresy that was taught by other lecturers to students.
A note here on the deep spiritual faith of Aquinas, who tells us in the breviary reading that “Whoever wishes to live perfectly should do nothing but disdain what Christ disdained on the cross and desire what he desired, for the cross exemplifies every virtue”.