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VAE MIHI SI NON THOMISTIZAVERO
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VAE MIHI SI NON THOMISTIZAVERO 1 The foregoing chapter should make clear that when Maritain amends the cry of Saint Paul, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel,” into the slogan that provides the title of this section, he is not putting Scripture to secular use.The study of Thomas, the intellectual life, was not something separate from the spiritual life for Maritain.What grounded his conviction that in taking on the Catholic faith he was effectively takingThomas Aquinas as his main mentor in things intellectual? We have seen that this did not come home to him immediately. Some years passed after his conversion before he began to read Thomas Aquinas. But once he began, nothing was ever the same again. In , a quarter of a century before Maritain’s conversion and three years before his birth, Leo XIII issued an encyclical known from its incipit or opening words as Aeterni Patris. As its title made clear, the pope wanted Christian philosophy in the manner of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, to be established in Catholic schools.Thomas Aquinas had been recommended time and again by the papal Magisterium; he held pride of place in the intellectual training of members of his own order, the Dominicans, as well as others. Editions of his works continued to appear, but by the time of Leo XIII,Thomas no longer played a significant role in the intellectual life of the Church. How this came about has much to do with the extraordinary character of Leo’s encyclical. The Summa theologiae and the Bible were displayed on the altar during the sessions of the Council of Trent as the principal works of reference for the bishops gathered to consider what was to be done about the issues raised by the Reformation.The renewal in the Church occasioned by the defection of Luther and others was characterized by the reform of seminary education. The prominence given Thomas Aquinas at the Council’s sessions would seem to promise that he would function as mentor in philosophy and theology . But the Tridentine Church does not seem to have enjoyed anything like aThomistic revival. Rather, historians provide us with an increasingly bleak and fragmented picture. When John Henry Newman, recently converted to Catholicism, came to Rome in expecting to find a bastion of Thomism, he found anything but. “I have read Aristotle and St.Thomas,” a Jesuit told him, “and owe a great deal to them, but they are out of favor here and throughout Italy. St. Thomas was a great saint—people don’t dare to speak against him, but put him aside.” We may wonder what had happened since the time of Descartes at the Jesuit College of La Fleche, where he was introduced to at least the tail end of theThomistic tradition, i.e., the commentator on the Summa,Toletus. 2 One thing that happened was Descartes himself, who, putting away what he had learned as mere opinion and verbiage, set out to put philosophy on so firm a foundation that the endless quarrels that had characterized its previous history would come to an end. Descartes was a Catholic; when he died in Stockholm, where he had gone as a guest of Queen Christina, it was feared that he was trying to convert her to Rome—a conversion that did indeed eventually take place after Descartes’s death: Christina’s life ended in the eternal city. The Cartesian method was not aimed at undermining religion, but with Descartes we see the beginnings of a philosophy self-consciously separating itself from Christian faith. In time, philosophy would come to see itself as completely secular, an alternative to Christianity ; but this was far from the immediate result.Well into the nineteenth Prime [34.201.37.128] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:00 GMT) century, philosophers saw themselves as providing the only defense of Christianity possible in modern times. In the eighteenth century, Kant would recommend a religion that kept within the limits of reason alone; while in the nineteenth, Hegel saw his philosophy as the apotheosis of Christianity: philosophy as the truth of religion.The modern philosophy that dominates the history of the discipline can seem merely an extension of the Protestant Reformation—and this despite the role that Descartes, Malebranche, and Pascal, Catholics all, played in its first generation. Catholic thinkers seemed to take as their first task the assessment of Descartes’s rejection of scholasticism.With the success of what...