Is Aquinas the Universal Authority in the Church?

What authority does the theology and philosophy of the Angelic Doctor hold in the Church? I suggest you also read Aeterni Patris (On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy), by Pope Leo 
XIII.

From One Peter Five

By Fr Romano Tomassi, SLD

If St Thomas divides instead of unites, this is contrary to Thomism.

Editor’s note: see also this article by Mr Murray Rundus on the universal authority of the Common Doctor.

I plan to address what OnePeterFive seems to me to be about, rebuilding. Thomism builds and binds communities. If studying St. Thomas in various groups is not bringing communities closer and people together but divides them into silos, our supposition will be that St. Thomas isn’t being truly mirrored wherever he’s cited but does not unite. What ought rebuilding to be? Furthermore, how are we to understand Aquinas putting together many assertions of Scripture and monuments of the past like Ecumenical Councils’ dogmas into a systematic whole? Like mathematics, numbers serve as clear and evident signs of quantities of stuff and music or geometry assume in their use that numbers come from evident and undeniable clearness about numbers pointing to quantities of something. Numbers in music and geometry are not tested or experimented upon to prove that numbers work, nor investigated for whether they are arbitrary or meaningless but are assumed to work equally well for geometry and music, just as in higher math.

The fundamental insight of St. Thomas was to organize into a clear framework how theology of his Fathers can be put into a systematic description: theologians are like musicians borrowing numbers from math to write their symphonies. The equivalent of numbers, for St. Thomas, are Scriptural assertions and dogmatic axioms published for all time. He provided a framework to understand what his university of Paris was already doing, but he did it in a way that described the best practices of the first millennium and mapped for humanity, like a signal fire mounted on a lighthouse, known as theology. My opening lines concentrate the reader’s mind on what kind of theology St. Thomas’s legitimate promoters are speaking about. So, when we ask: Is he the universal authority, we aren’t talking about preaching or homiletics. While it might be great to be patron of over everything, homiletics would not be theology for St. Thomas, although a homily might contain theology according to Thomas’s definition. If we assert that he is the universal authority over theology, we need clarity before we affirm that. A truly Catholic community needs to know what things count as theology before rebuilding what has been lost (though his theology’s abandonment is more like being lost in the backyard of the Church’s consciousness instead of falling into a sinkhole forever).

The Insight of St. Thomas

St. Thomas was hungry for translations of the Greek Fathers and deeply immersed in whatever writings of the Latin Fathers were available. He unsurprisingly read a lot of homilies. Trained in Roman and Byzantine rhetoric of Cicero, Quintilian, and Priscian, like ancient Greek (e.g., Aristotle’s) and Latin rhetoric (e.g., Cicero’s), St. Thomas recognized along with fellow Schoolmen (who were trained in specialized schools of philosophy and theology) that the first-millennial tradition did not expect untrained parishioners to endure fully reasoned out chains of axioms. For example, “The fullness of the divinity dwells in Him (Jesus) bodily” (Colossians 2:9). This assertion of Scripture might be combined with a second sentence stating a necessary way beings (real items in the world) outside my head exist: “any and every time body is mentioned, it means something physical.” From here, we can take the very general sentence and combine it with narrow assertion from the Scriptures and we can say without fear of error “divine fullness dwells in something physically-existing.” That’s theology proper. We have just taken a peek into the first of a series of sentences that can be strung together without mental fault lines or feelings about something important and essential being left out. This is simply clear thinking. In what way St. Thomas is the universal authority of clear thinking about God is the proper question?

Secondly, St. Thomas ranks as the first in history to fully outline how theology proper is certain knowledge about God in detail. Ought we then to suppose that the Summa Theologiae, that is, Summa Theologiae is entirely a volume of certain knowledge (Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a. 2)? St. Thomas answers for himself: “No.” At the beginning of his handbook for basic theology proper (Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.5), he hands on but better organizes the philosophical tradition up to his time as taught at university:

• Theology proper is certain and it is rather rare in theology
• Most of so-called theology, like of the Doctors and Fathers of the Church, falls outside this and is about probable or very likely truths (Greek: endoxic or dialectical theology).
• The rest of so-called theology (addressing topics only dimly elucidated by Scripture, reason, and the Fathers) combines results in better or more plausible opinions (Greek: oikos)

St. Thomas is now himself (like is own no. 2 above) Doctor of the Church, Patron of Education, and Common Doctor by title. In St. Thomas’s own ranking system (held as true by Schoolmen after him for centuries), his own work is infallible when it repeats or discovers by syllogism infallible conclusions that are ever true (above, no. 1), but in the vast majority of lines written by this Doctor and new Father of the Church, St. Thomas’s writings would rank most of his theology as no. 2 by his own mind (above), as quite likely or nearly certain on those items not asserted by Scripture or formally defined. Finally, there are items that (though they cannot be known under the light of faith or the humility of obedience) we can say are better to believe or more pious to hold in light of the evidence (no. 3 above). Plausible explanations imitate theology proper in method but are not theology properly speaking in their inability to reach absolutely certain conclusions.

Is St. Thomas’s synthesis Catholicism itself? I answer that he is the condensation of the grammar in Church history for real theology. Grammar was anciently the first step in training to see how language works (and with Priscian), to what real world items – nouns, verbs, and participles – refer to. Logic followed upon grammar’s heals. Aquinas provides a primary foundation for reading the magisterium forward (fully conscious of St. Thomas) and finding these items backwards in history until we arrive at authors where his terms and the things they refer to are not present in this or that magisterial statement. Still, whether we study an ancient Father or papal letter, Thomism disciplines the mind to search out the sources for understanding this anomaly instead of projecting a non-applicable category onto the new datum. Mind you, history in theology proper is not itself so very important, though artifacts of history are attractive to many good theologians since they are concrete cases of something that exists or very likely existed as a  case for how the same might exists today. St. Thomas’s historical role as the grammarian of Catholic theology proper can be argued only after gathering available documents of antiquity and the Middle Ages and telling a story of theology by them. As grammar is the principle by which all other arts are made possible, St. Thomas provides the theological grammar by which theology proper is made intelligible. By this telling, we must admit a history of theology to be always revisable by adding new documents or subtracting falsified documents from storytelling. Nonetheless St. Thomas in history is the descriptor par excellence of theology proper. His real predecessors and contemporaries had a similar deep feeling, as the best thinkers of their generation. St. Thomas, for his part, economically chose the precise words to represent their deepest sentiments and thoughts about how and when theology is infallible.

This accounts for how many Catholic readers, seminarians, and priests (who are pastorally trained but who yearn for something deeper in theology) feel anything from unease to a visceral recoil to theological indecisiveness often enough detected in what is professionally called “historical theology.” While the feeling is understandable, the wholesale rejection of the discipline is not. Not exclusively (even if nearly so), only a few religious orders and tiny guilds of theologians or philosophers in today’s Church preserve the way of St. Thomas, which is still in danger of being marginalized. It is not an exaggeration to say that practically every Schoolman after St. Thomas engaged (and absorbed) his fundamental insight about the Christian tradition: the inevitability of syllogism to map theology and reality into a harmonious description. As rational beings we need to start out with stuff in our head that is certain, that is, the word of God and certain math-like axioms that make intuitive sense in the moment we understand what each word of a relevant truism means (for example, every part is less than its whole). These revealed and natural axioms can guide what we ordinarily ignorant mortals can really know about God with certitude. Everything else that claims to be theology or theological merits the saying: “You’re in the ballpark, but not on the team.” This is the second way that St. Thomas represents Catholicism. He is the point of departure for all later schools (Franciscan, Suarezian, etc.) of theology to discuss theology proper and to tweak a little or accept wholesale St. Thomas, not to reject his method – still immortalized even in the new 1983 Code of Canon Law – but to discuss the ways St. Thomas’s method of theological reasoning and its status can best be applied to the life of the Church.

Today, very different from St. Thomas, historical theologians reign supreme in publishing and book sales. Yet, whether they should be designated theologians depends on a theological rating system. Secular academia dominates that certification process. Prior to Vatican II, the certification process within the Church had the most respect paid to the way of St. Thomas. This explains why things feel so fractured to so many in the pews. The new system mainly documents the past and tries to supply new information about past thinkers and thought, given the vast archives and databases for modest contributions. These accumulate and potentially organize a tiny field in a valuable way.

I admit, in the worst cases, that a sort of Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Theological Disorders could classify abusers of historical theology and its “revisionist history” as projections onto the past, especially when the researcher is poorly trained in ancient and medieval language and philosophy, its sources for grammar, and especially the ancients’ metaphysical thinking. In short, by detaching words and phrases from a connection to stable, real, and existing things outside our heads, today’s writers betray an outlook, in such cases, of presuming human minds aren’t passive to understandable, real stuff in the world. This stuff acts upon our minds, giving us certain insights about that same stuff. The post-Kantian temptation supposes human minds imposing organization and order on messy stuff as it appears to the mind, but who really knows what even the most basic stuff really is outside the thinker’s mind? Historical theology and even its methods within academic-patristic theologies (even among Eastern Orthodox believers who are patrologists) can surprisingly assume words aren’t intimately connected to really understandable and describable beings outside the Father’s head.

A catchphrase for this has become apophaticism, which is often unanalyzed assumptions that has become part of our framework in academia after Kant’s criticism of metaphysics. In an ancient world saturated with logic and metaphysics in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, this smacks of being an anachronism. Specialized fields of study indeed fail to recognize that words are consistently used in Latin and Greek and Syriac over centuries that allow generations to keep saying not only the same kinds of phrases but to carry on the same kinds of thinking about what everybody is commonly experiencing in their day-to-day lives as really existing. In other words, historical theologians – who form the bulk of people calling themselves theologians and possessing a degree – are rewarded for post-Kantian worldview and de-incentivized for returning to classical grammar and metaphysics when studying it and explaining it in its own context.

This ends up supporting slogans about the ancient and medieval worlds (East-West) unable to talk to each other, although we today do so in different cultures and nations. We have communication on the most important and basic levels. Ancient and Medieval authors of all three traditions did not assume such a negative outlook on the whole. After Coptic, Ge’ez, and Slavonic were added to the conversation, the ancient society of Christianity handed them a limited number of highly educated persons who were theologians proper, like higher mathematicians whose notebooks can be read by numbers. The system-thinkers or metaphysicians of ancient Christianity condensed pastoral theologians’ (or theological musicians’) insights about numbers and quantities in composing their symphonies and made them justifiable at a higher or more abstract level. So, St. Thomas’s map of theology existed in the form of a seedling in these theologians’ writings.

For example, the Aristotelian and philosophically friendly Gregory II Bar Hebraeus (a so-called Jacobite or Oriental Orthodox who died in 1286) summated a similar inheritance for Syriac Christianity, calling for a synthesis between disciplined philosophy (“the milk”) and theology “the butter of wisdom.” The Eastern Orthodox theologian, Gregory Palamas (died in 1357), also fully embraced theology as a syllogistic science. He opposed vehemently a fellow Eastern Orthodox Barlaam (at that time) who claimed agnosticism or apophatic ignorance about beings and their relations to one another, as signified by the terms of theology. Both aforementioned writers were long separated into dissident churches from Rome and from each other, but they saw the world as intelligible in the same way.

These noble metaphysical minds occur on the historical stage less than once per generation but they repackage the coherence of Christianity for each Church in line with underlying homiletic techniques of their predecessors. The common language between St. Thomas, Bar Hebraeus, and Palamas lies in the patristic inheritance of metaphysical and rational discourse abbreviated in rhetorical techniques and handbooks from the very first centuries until their times. This unity of method should tempt us to investigate whether these three writers (near-contemporaries separately operating in their monolinguistic systems but with the same fundamental insights) are speaking the exact same language: Theology acts like an Aristotelian science in many ways (even if not in each and every way). What makes St. Thomas special is that he did not just repropose an ancient outline to solve theological puzzles by recourse to the Greco-Roman system of rational investigation, but he wrote a manual to be easily inserted into every theological kit to construct a coherent system.

Criticism of historical theologians can, in this light, be directed at those who speak as if they are representatives or successors of Thomism but who sound more like factories putting out: “the margarine of wisdom” over “butter of wisdom.” Their effect might be less severe than atherosclerosis on the heart of theology, provided that they try not to synthesize outside of their competence. Historical theology, as such, does not bid them do this as it rewards a lack of intention to arrive at a certain or conclusive theological truth. The exasperation for many a believer arises in their modesty, since historical theologians lack intention to write a meaningful position to defend a truth, but relay only plausible historical narratives or the range of meanings within a Father’s statements. That is not the fault of the discipline, but some mistakenly think that they are doing theology by tracking trends in rhetoric and currents of thought in past segments of dead societies.

This cannot be what any Church proposes as theology proper. It is not the way to meaningful reconciliation, unity, and rebuilding. It endangers the health of a Church and does not enhance it. Historical theology is not rebuilding, but it can help. I give only a diagnosis, not a creative solution which must come by revitalizing disciplined metaphysics or theology proper within each tradition by the higher minded synthesizers who appear on the scene only every so many generations. Art is long, life is short. Metaphysical syntheses are rare, and their appearance in history rarer. Only by self-motivated Oriental and Eastern Orthodox embracing Bar Hebraeus and Palamas in their methods, can access to their own tradition be compared and contrasted with Catholic theology. Once that is accomplished each Church has the ability to build together on what is commonly shared. That is the diagnosis and the orientation toward a cure of schism. Aquinas provided the instructional video for doing theology, not describing its past.

Aquinas’s insight, famously immortalized at the introduction of his Summa Theologica or Summa Theologiae, can be chronicled as follows. First, patristic and late antique pagan academies were not masters of logic and strict kinds of argumentation. This required many years to study Aristotle and Stoic logic, to which few had access and very few were able to understand with so few written texts available and the rarity that must be admitted for persons in history to think on a logical and abstract plain of reasoning about what kinds of beings exist, how they exist, and what kinds of things are necessary if they exist. What did Christians typically do? They saw that human rationality was mapped by pagan academies in general, but it served for speaking at courts, and holiday speeches, and contributing to civic life. The argumentation of the Fathers was correctly an adaptation of this soft version of theological reasoning in homilies and for missions. The goal was to create a stable community by appealing to what the littlest old lady could affirm or felt in her bones as coherent and explanatory of reality. Returning to the Greeks, when the wiser minds first encountered translations of St. Thomas Aquinas after 1354 AD, they recognized something familiar, as with St. Clement of Alexandria (still honored among Oriental Orthodox) in the second century:

Therefore, if some such argument be found, that is, capable of constructing faithful-trust from [premises] already believed into what are not yet faithfully-believable, then we shall call this very thing “substance of demonstration”. It has been explained, too, that the genus of faithful-trusting [argument] and demonstration is twofold: First, people hear what is alone persuasive to their souls, but, secondly, what is productive of science. Now, if somebody were to begin from evident principles, in relation to sense and intelligence, then such a man would conclude a proper conclusion (viz., a real demonstration); but, if from mere probable premises –not from first principles (i.e., from what is evident with respect to both sense and intelligence)– then such would conclude a proper conclusion. Indeed, such a person will syllogize, but will definitely not produce a scientific syllogism. And, if the aforesaid is not according to its proper format, then he won’t even syllogize the principle [of the premise validly into a conclusion]. (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 8, 3, 7, 7–8)

Next, St. Basil (On Psalm 115) the Great in the fourth century, is clearer in his program:

On the difficulty of those who argue about the first principles: It is possible to arrive at the conclusion by a method and order. And this you learn from those [pagans] who are outside. For if you do not allow the first principles to the geometer, you will find it difficult for him to conclude the later ones. And of arithmetic, he who insists on the first principles and the connection of elements, cuts off the way forward. Similarly, the beginnings of medicine are unprovable to doctors. And altogether, in any order of the path and order of the products at the end, it is impossible to seek proofs of the first axioms. But the necessity of the logical arts is to accept without examination the existence of the suppositions is complete in the subsequent conclusions. Thus, then, the mystery of theology seeks consent from the most ardent faith. (Patrologia Graeca 30:104)

These Fathers had argued in an uncannily similar way that the craft of theology required its tradesmen to start with raw materials of iron (Scripture) and coal (reasonably undeniable and obvious statements about reality). The smithy of theology was for them a process of hammering out a final product, a conclusion, that had the same certitude of something like the vision of Abraham at the oak of Mamre or Moses on Sinai. This made a deep impact on the Greek East in the Middle Ages since St. Thomas reminded them that his language of theology proper had been long ago mentioned, but as something in passing, even if legitimate and real.

True, there was a reactive movement, and that has grabbed the headlines since the 1960s, but celebrated and saintly Eastern Orthodox embraced partially or wholly Thomas’s method and his way of identifying premises. It was only the Turk that kept the synthesis from taking on a life of its own in the Greek East among its best and brightest. When Constantinople fell the renaissance of creativity was destined frozen, but its preservation in documents and archives can be thawed. The resistance of the concrete-thinking historians, who want to hide metaphysics and forbid the East from reengaging, argue freezer burn. In Oriental Orthodoxy the hill to climb to Sinai is steeper, after generations of historical oppression, lack of resources and a recent renaissance in Coptic and Syriac Studies. Only now are the zealous young generation of thinkers poised to compare and see that the insights of St. Thomas are already mirrored in their own tradition and in its proper idiom. As Cardinal Slipyj (died 1984) wrote on behalf of true Ukrainian religion some generations ago, St. Thomas’s work always impelled toward unity.[1]

St. Thomas wrote the first ever user manual that allowed vast swaths of Christians to move relatively easily from being mere journeymen of theology to members of a trade guild, masters of a craft. This licensed craft is theology. Let’s be clear: Those who do higher math are few and their abstractions are not bedazzling but off putting. The limited number of Fathers who saw theology as systematic in this sense speaks to a similar situation. Most Fathers were not system-builders but pastors. Instead of the architecture, they concentrated on solid walls and functional doors. Ancient literature consisted of homilies or sermons and commentaries on Scripture to aid these. Still, given the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine commitment to the discipline or art of rhetoric, something important must be noticed: Nearly all the Fathers had formal training in ancient rhetoric, which prioritized shortened syllogisms, probable (not scientific) arguments of musicians (over mathematicians), and presentation of geometry for people to see in their head pictures (not trigonometry and calculus since it was pastorally destructive). This plays a significant part in St. Thomas’s synthesis, though the pastorally probable is not the foundation of faith but what is certain. Yet, abstraction after abstraction from the pulpit did not teach, it did not inspire, and it did not change self-destructive behavior. The Fathers built communities or stabilized them, and they typically did not use theology as a sharp instrument to fracture believers into silos. That is what Thomism is as theology, a community building exercise rooted in what is the deepest unifying fixture in humans, rational thinking (about revealed dogma).

St. Thomas’s insight that theology is at its best certitude excludes historical descriptions as sufficient. Soft sciences may be suggestive in proposing solutions but are far from qualifying as theological truth. Stabilizing communities with a feeling of confidence and identity across the globe demands a way to absorb vast amounts of knowledge that is messy and sometimes threatening. St. Thomas made a decisive contribution, providing religious persons an intelligent way to ask the deep questions about what makes anyone’s work name-brand theology versus a Chinese knock-off. Other schools manufactured competing stress tests but Thomism remains the industry standard that is still in the marketplace, whereas the others are niche. Thus, unsystematic writers calling themselves today theologians should be more cautious, even though St. Thomas would find their contributions very interesting – though untheological strictly speaking – and helpful to theology, for his own explanations did not ignore the recorded chronicles of real people in the past in order to explain how errors or controversies came about. St. Thomas was always delighted to read histories to get a sense of how dogmas developed, but he did not foreground these histories but backgrounded them. That is historical theology, a background for caution over projection, and disciplined reading of past puzzles as they were, not reading into past puzzles our unsolved problems that may need adjustments before using St. Thomas as a point of departure for solving them.

What Universal Authority Cannot be when Reading Thomas through Thomas

The fracture between and among guilds of theologians crept in along with a kind of agnosticism about whether there can be a consistently described world of beings and even its supreme being. Each guild’s forefathers legitimately began studying very specialized areas in the years prior to Vatican II. Specializations in themselves are very useful in Aquinas’s theology (properly named). There are excellent reasons for specializing, but by its nature specialty concentrates on the study of oaks, limiting one’s expertise on the big picture on forests. St. Thomas is the scholar of foresters, not of the species of trees. He studied the whole forest canopy not the intricate designs of leaves, unless this data clearly affected the forest ecology. Sometimes humility of today’s guilds can be misinterpreted: They simply punt on Aquinas’s theology proper, because that is beyond their job description. This is professionally admirable. The difficulty often enough at the root of most believers’ complaints is that some specialists in guilds inevitably forget that they study trees, and before understanding everybody else’s trees they publish their vision of how to save the forest or theology proper.

Lack of humility in one specialist (so-called) theologian can easily lead not only to poor arguments, but theological error and heresy due to ignorance of what is required for religion to be coherent in its broad outlines. Humility can be difficult to come by, whenever one finds himself at the top of a heap of very disciplined experts concerning something that feels theological (after all the stuff it works with, for example, like ancient books contains early liturgies). To look at material that is theological is not the same as theologically arranging obligatory ideas into their proper spots to put all the pieces of a puzzle together in a harmonious way. The gift of Thomism today lies in being the only existing system of harmony and coherence that exists as a guild (which we will uniquely call “the school”). There exist stable communities dedicated to guardianship of St. Thomas’s thought, handing on his inheritance, and creatively engaging today’s challenges. This creativity, for example, expands St. Thomas’s reach by confronting the complicated world of bioethics and making it align with the Church’s perpetual teachings.

The guilds of specialists (not properly theology) have been operating in a narrow lane for decades or longer, so that they innocently do not ask what the entire transport network of theology looks like. Since Vatican II, Roman Catholic administration in Rome and in just about every nation have declined to highlight the limits which each specialization like liturgy and patristics must admit and failed to remind its experts not to push dogma up the chain of command. Today’s guilds typically come up with probable and plausible conclusions about history claims and theological ideas of the past. The Holy Office or Congregation/Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith exists to remind a stable community of believers that theology is not properly about probabilities and possibilities, but about certainty. Only one living school with brick and mortar buildings hosting numerous scholars actually exists to reintegrate certainty into theology and that is Thomism (would that other schools had survived Vatican II). Its membership is often by choice not merely by imposition of an external conscience. It has survived modernity due to internal and external advantages that ensure its place despite a feeling that it is being pushed to the margins in the last papacy. Only one school of theology proper can practically help entire communities in the Church wade through the worlds of probability and possibility and underline what is certain.

While an individual can excel in fidelity and holiness by recourse to any approved author of the past, since the French Revolution Scholasticism came to its nadir. Today’s billions cannot benefit from defunct schools in comparison to a living and creative one that has survived and is now working and uniting disparate cultures and ethnicities. Note also the difference before and after Vatican II. Before, Thomism was assumed to provide the guardrails for theologians publishing merely probable data. These guardrails were employed at the level of religious orders, national conferences of bishops, and Roman congregations. Thomism highlighted places where helpful guesswork and limited conclusions of guilds allowed deepening St. Thomas’s reflections in obedience to the legitimate authority, while it limited specializations within the Church from forcing provisional opinions as facts, so as not to destabilize the believing community. For this reason, Thomism functioned as a mental policeman and was remembered by some theologians negatively.

As with all professions of guardianship, police brutality happens, but this does not thereby call into question the vocation of policing the City of God to maintain law and order. Much of the rejection of Thomism after Vatican II as a kind of riot can be accounted for by grievances of many who brushed up against the Church’s mental policemen who were less luminous than St. Thomas himself, and less tolerant of debate on legitimate questions as the history of the schools in St. Thomas’s own time. In this regard, schools are not wed to abusive power dynamics that reflect the weaknesses of checks and balances in the Roman curia and the operations of the Roman Pontiff stemming from Roman law and, thus, administrative policy badly in need of reform in an institution that serves billions with a tiny central office of clergy whose poor morale is legendary (and accurately described), whose efficiency is negligible, and whose incentives are not governed by clear understanding of mission. In the system of clerical education, it ensures that the basic facets of this very article are foreign to most clerics in the Roman Curia (or elsewhere) who have never encountered a theory of theology in the vein that I have described. The question as to whether any one Catholic theologian or theological tradition (for example, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church) suffered from police brutality in the name of Thomism requires assessment of individual’s biographies which are too intricate to address here. Yet, the results in an administrative system functioning principally in the mode of (pagan) Roman law is predictable: Abuses cannot really be enacted from anywhere other than the emperor and there are no incentives to resist since the structure only rewards loyalty to an occupant not to a mission. It is worthwhile acknowledging legitimate grievances in application of method goes a long way in the long run of reconciling in a way that rhetorical invective by conviction of the unassailability of one’s arguments does not. The Thomist commission member, Fr. Walter Senner, OP, I recall always emphasizing the few and particular number of times that St. Thomas chose to intervene with heated rhetoric against fellow Catholic opponents, which was reserved for absurd arguments not historical memory or principled opposition. The latter two demanded finding common points of departure to reason toward mutually intelligible conclusions. The notion of starting an argument by appeal to absurdity (a squared-circle) drew the Common Doctor’s ire.

What is the Value of a school versus the School and Why?

Iron sharpens iron. The laziness and inefficiency that results from a monopoly dominating a marketplace is a staple of free market economics. In the economy of the schools, using the language akin to Milton Friedman, lesser minds and their undisciplined arguments or incomplete methods were drowned out by the quality of the product in the marketplace of ideas. Institutional monopoly imposed and directed from above does not make institutions stronger as the soft laws of economics consistently show us, the arbitrary appeal to grace in the marketplace of theologies should not overcome nature: In other words, draconian imposition of an institutional Thomism (controlled and interpreted by non-descript bureaucrats at all levels) kills the very thing it claims to cherish. Providing space for real Schoolmen to flourish and innovate within the guardrails of defined dogma is a hands-off approach that leads to adaptation and growth. Questions of institutional strategy to promote Aquinas’s synthesis do not do well to ignore the data of how societies flourish; totalitarian control of ideas has a long and tragic biography; Vatican II cannot be dismissed as a possible textbook example of how previous authoritarian imposition of an -ism by an institution (valuing loyalty over intelligent assent) led to institutional collapse when freedom was permitted.  

While a commentary on Lombard’s Sentences was the medieval equivalent of a dissertation, only those that formed deep impressions on readers were again and again recopied and then – at the advent of the printing press – made profitable by demand side economics. St. Thomas’s syntheses and the incorporation and creativity of his successors ensured that the school grew and flourished (not without ossification from policies within and rigidity from administrative structures without; but this is true of bureaucracies by design). Demand for his clarity of style, completeness of synthesis, and openness to new puzzles made him a brand name on Medieval grocery lists of university archives. What is more, the Thomist school proved valuable for policing bad content and conclusions in the fourteenth century inquisitions. While selection of Dominicans makes sense as men of rare capacity, centralized religious policing by violence invites only criticism and opportunities for excess. Most societies of antiquity and modernity have policed thought – America being a rather unique experiment that has somehow been overall more balanced than most nations that allegedly imitated her – and medieval Western Europe was no exception. As history moved forward, both the Dominican and Franciscan schools produced the most level-headed policemen, who were overrepresented in the universities, inquisitions, and bureaucratic institutions of the Church.

The challenge today is to separate Schoolmen who were instrumentalized for purposes of coercion from New Schoolmen who have the capacity to ingest what is best in the secular sciences of our own day and integrate them into a more humane and less abusive system of administration by checks and balances. Scholasticism is not an instrument for the protection of power, it is a tool for bringing together different disciplines into a coherent world where different kinds of arts, crafts, and sciences can be understood accurately and be integrated as known vs. experimental projects. In some cases, new objects and disciplines are by their nature imperfectly able to be understood. So, any incorporation of such items into theological syntheses must be cautious and provisional under conditions. So, what prevents us from declaring today the Franciscan synthesis of either St. Bonaventure or Bl. John Duns Scotus or the later school of Ven. Francisco Suarez to be the hope for a return to some theology proper and coherence in theology as normative?

On the theoretical plane, the entire school of Thomism is still synthesizing in ethics as a contemporary and living school that has never ceased to do what theology does. It continues to serve the Church without hiatus. The collected works of St. Thomas and his commentators were early gathered and published not only by his order, but among the first that were semi-officially published under Pope St. Pius V. The Franciscan school was subtle and powerful and the gigantic number of Franciscans provided it with a larger pool of men to become Schoolmen. Despite all this, Thomism’s smaller base rivalled it younger sister school. St. Bonaventure, always mindful of how the Dominicans had first hosted Franciscans in Paris in the youth of the newly erected order, was loath to do anything to encourage mean-spirited rivalry. This does not build. However, in search of greater precision in dialectical (probable) theology (so-called) and plausible theology (analogous to theology), the rivalry of these two living schools in a stable community sharpened their intellects and the addition of more schools made the marketplace of competition truly stupefying in how lovers of St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and Ven. Suarez were able to maximize the capital of their order’s Father to absorb all new learning and knowledge and order it in a way to make sense of the world. The debates were typically not centered on the method or conclusions of theology proper, but on what St. Thomas had identified as probable and worthy of greater precisions within (and therefore outside) of the order, not to mention the only plausible argumentation of other questions treated in his works.

As such, every Catholic who feels the draw and love of Bonaventure, Scotus, and Suarez contributes – by building and refining – to the betterment of the Thomistic synthesis indirectly. Their identities are to build in their own right and to be peaceful in service of the Church today, sadly bereft of living schools with brick and mortar addresses and memberships to give them space to serve a greater portion of the flock in a stable way. But, by inhabiting the thought, grammar, and metaphysics of great Schoolmen, which produced saints and systems that made reality welcome instead of threatening, each individual Scotist, Suarezian, or representative of a formerly sustained school provides fertile ground for faith to grow instead of wither. In these schools, commitment to charity and the common good should ethically be paramount.

So, how does the individual outlier contribute to the stabilization and rebuilding of the community when tearing down and trying to destroy a sister school, as a school, instead of identifying weaknesses in its probable and plausible argumentation? By suggesting and debating adjustments to better explain seemingly disparate facts through more cohesive and better harmonizing solutions, each individual who adopts the mental outlook of another school can still build up the believing community that is fragile, more obviously so after Vatican II. The vocation of the outlier without a school is to sharpen iron with iron and to stand as a conscience to Thomism to stay sharp and irreducible to slogans and smugness, but to remember that St. Thomas saw reality as complex and contingent and his way has not reached its full extension, since the universe is getting bigger, disciplines are becoming more numerous and complex. The Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 1-5 historically provided Dominicans, Franciscans, Suarezians and the living magisterium the user’s manual for adjudicating what if anything contributes to mission of the Church, the rational enterprise to bring about the perfection of mind in body for the sake of each man’s final end, beatitude, under the draw of God as the final cause or end of every rational activity under the sun.

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[1]  Cardinal Joseph Slipij, “ On the value of St. Thomas Aquinas for the Union and its influence on Eastern theology ,” in Acta Congressus Velehradensis (Leopolis, 1925), 1–18.