Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae

by Bernard McGinn

  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.”20 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.”21

  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.22

  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.23 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.24 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.”25

  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 1942.26 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 1946.27 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.28 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.29 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.30 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.”31 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 o
f 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.32 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.”33