During this time the Dominicans and Jesuits entered into theological combat, debates that often involved differing interpretations of Thomas. The most notorious was the controversy over the relation of grace and freedom called the “De auxiliis Controversy” because it concerned the “aids” (auxilia) to divine grace. This quarrel disturbed Catholicism from the 1580s until 1611 and continued to poison relations between the two orders well into the twentieth century. In 1584 Domingo Bañez published a Treatise on the System of Physical Predestination Founded on Preexistent Divine Decrees in which he set forth, on the basis of texts from Thomas, a form of predestination centered on divine decrees giving “irresistible grace” by way of what he called “physical premotion” to some people and denying it to others. Many thought that Bañez’s view denied the role of human freedom in the path to salvation. In 1588 the Jesuit Luis de Molina (d. 1600) argued for another approach in his Concord of Free Choice with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation. Molina contended that human cooperation with grace can be guaranteed only by grounding the efficacy of grace not in a divine decree, but in God’s foreknowledge of free human actions through what he called “middle knowledge” (scientia media), that is, the knowledge God alone has of what humans would do in any set of circumstances.63 Therefore, God gives grace to those he foreknows will cooperate with it. Bañez and the Dominicans said that they were following the authority of Augustine and Aquinas and accused Molina and his Jesuit supporters of Pelagianism. The Jesuits, including their foremost theologian Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621), responded that they were not innovators and that Bañez’s view contradicted Trent and was not different from that of the Protestant predestinarian theologian John Calvin. Disputations were held, accusations hurled back and forth, pamphlets and treatises issued on all sides. In 1598 Clement VIII mandated silence on both groups and established a special “Congregation on the Aids” to investigate the question. Molina came close to being condemned in 1598 and 1601, but the Jesuits staved off defeat. Clement VIII and his successor Paul V reserved final judgment to the papacy and heard endless arguments that resulted in mounds of evidence. Although the majority of the consulters wanted to censure some of Molina’s propositions, many of the cardinals and higher clergy convinced the pope that the issues involved were too intricate for a decision at the time. No conclusion was ever reached. The Congregation on the Aids was dissolved, and in 1607 Pope Paul issued an injunction ordering both parties to stop calling each other heretics and “hoping that they abstain from mutual harsh words signifying bitterness of soul.” On December 11, 1611, the Inquisition issued a decree that all writings on grace, even under the pretext of commenting on St. Thomas, would henceforth require its examination and approbation.
The last of the great Thomist commentators of this Golden Age began his teaching shortly afterward. John Poinsot, the son of a Hungarian nobleman and a Portuguese mother, was born in 1589 and entered the Dominicans in 1612, taking the religious name John of St. Thomas. He started teaching in 1620 and spent most of his career at the University of Alcalà, dying in 1644. John moved in the highest ecclesiastical and political circles, serving as advisor and confessor of Philip IV of Spain. He published his Thomistic Philosophical Course between 1632 and 1636, a work that remained in use in Catholic seminaries down into the twentieth century, though often in abridged or adapted form. His greatest work, however, was the unfinished eight-volume Thomistic Theological Course (1620–44), which followed the order of the Summa, although with many digressions and discussions of current issues. John of St. Thomas made extensive use of earlier commentaries, especially Cajetan and Suarez, though often disagreeing with the Jesuit. The most famous part of his influential commentary (the last section he lived to complete) was his treatise on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit discussed in Summa theologiae IaIIae, question 68, and IIaIIae, questions 8–9, 19, 45, 52, 121, and 139.64
The Decline of Thomism (1650–1850)
The authority of Aquinas and the Summa in early modern Catholicism was evident not just in the ongoing loyalty of the Dominicans and the adherence of the Jesuits, but also by the fact that perhaps the greatest school of Thomists of the 1600s was that of the Spanish Carmelites. A succession of Carmelite professors at Alcalà called the Complutenses wrote a seven-volume philosophical survey of Thomas’s thought published from 1624 on. An even more weighty Theological Course on the Summa of St. Thomas was put out by the Carmelites of Salamanca between 1600 and 1725.65 The work of these Salmanticenses, as they were called, one of the largest commentaries on the Summa, is a monument to how different ages have understood and (mis)understood the Summa. These Carmelite commentators, for example, did not even deign to discuss the first two questions of the Prima Pars in which Thomas explains the significance of sacra doctrina and the existence of God, issues that were to become major in twentieth-century Thomism. The volumes devoted to the Tertia Pars feature an extensive treatment of the first twenty-six questions on Christology and then go on to treat the sacraments, but totally neglect questions 27 to 59 on Christ’s saving mysteries.
By the time the Salmanticenses completed their immense—and skewed—commentarial efforts Thomism was no longer an important part of the cutting edge of philosophical discussion in Europe. René Descartes published his Discourse on Method in 1637 and his Meditations on First Philosophy appeared in 1641. Although Descartes had some knowledge of scholastic thinking, his books set philosophy on a new course in their quest for a new form of philosophical certitude and the construction of a carefully articulated mathematical model for metaphysics. The Enlightenment philosophers who followed him, such as John Locke, David Hume, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, had little sympathy with Thomas, even when they had some familiarity with his thought. Comparative analyses of the philosophical differences between Aquinas and Kant, as well as other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers, have been written, but these Thomist encounters are too complicated to be addressed here. The distance between Thomas’s sacra doctrina based on revealed truth and Kant’s critical and ethical philosophy is well illustrated by the title of one of Kant’s most famous writings, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793).
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries what Thomism there was in Catholic universities and seminaries was restricted to the production of long, dry commentaries. There was a good deal of eclecticism in many Catholic schools, with philosophical textbooks often more based on Suarez, Descartes, or Wolff, than on Thomas.66 Many Catholics of the Enlightenment Era lost interest in the world of Thomist commentary, concentrating rather on the positive, historical theology that had been born in the seventeenth century and grew strong in the eighteenth, as can be seen in the editions and publications of the Benedictines of the Congregation of St. Maur and the Bollandist Jesuits who inaugurated the critical edition of the lives of the saints (the Acta Sanctorum).
Despite this shift in interest, Thomism did not die out between 1700 and 1850, although even devoted Thomists admit that this era can be described as the nadir of Thomism. An incident from the end of the period illustrating the decline can be found in the career of the most famous Catholic thinker of the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman (1801–90). After Newman converted to Catholicism in 1846, he went to Rome for a year (November 1846–June 1847) to prepare for being ordained a Catholic priest. Newman had just published one of his most profound works, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Already equipped with a deep knowledge of patristic theology, Newman seems to have hoped to find out more about Thomas Aquinas at the center of Catholicism. He was disappointed. A Jesuit father he encountered told him, “O no—he said—Aristotle is in no favor here—no, not in Rome: nor St. Thomas. I have read Aristotle and St. Thomas, and owe a great deal to them, but they are out of favor here and throughout Italy. St. Thomas is a great saint—people don’t dare to speak against him—they profess to reverence him, but put him aside.”67 Newman’s love of the F
athers had drawn him to Rome, but his knowledge of Thomas remained a distant and notional one, not a real knowing. Things were about to change.
The Rise and Fall of Neothomism
CHAPTER 5
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.1 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.2 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.3
The triumph of Neothomism was rapid, but, like most revolutions in thought, it had a significant, if hidden, period of gestation.4 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.5
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.”6 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 adhe
rence 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.”)7 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.
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