Thomistic Revival and the Modernist Era by Thomas J. A. Hartley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Thomistic Revival and the Modernist Era. By THOMAS J. A. HARTLEY. Toronto: Institute of Christian Thought. University of St. Michael's College, 1971. Pp. 110. Now when the hegemony of Thomism within the Church seems over, it is perhaps inevitable that interest in the historical details of its revival in the 19th century will mount. This little book brings together in summary fashion the present state of our historical knowledge. It is swift, interesting , and well-researched, and any reader who approaches it with the assumption that the revival of Thomism sprang full-blown from the brow of Leo XIII will be pleasantly disabused of the notion. I was reminded of Newman's surprise on coming to Rome after his conversion to find that St. Thomas was held in low esteem and little studied, except of course among the Dominicans. Newman could not have known that elsewhere in Italy there were places where St. Thomas and other Scholastics were carefully studied. These centers grew up independently of one another and ultimately were to have their impact, in varying degrees, on Leo's decision to write to the Church at large on the role he wished the thought of Aquinas to play. One of the features of this development, as Hartley sketches it, is that the Dominicans did not play a major part in it. Rather it was the Jesuits, Vincentians, and secular priests who influenced now this school, now that, until finally, when Cardinal Pecci of Perugia became Leo XIII, those scattered efforts coalesced in Aeterni Patris. But of course, the history of the revival of Scholasticism and of Thomism cannot confine itself to Italy, and Hartley devotes chapters to Germany and Spain and makes reference to France as well. The reader of Hartley's little book will be struck by the way in which the strengths and weaknesses of the Thomistic revival were present almost from the beginning. The principal weakness, perhaps, was that it was not always the first-class mind which elected to be a spokesman for Thomism and that such spokesmen often sought a uniformity of thought which betrayed insensitivity to the methods of theology and philosophy. There was also the tendency to reject wholesale unexamined philosophies. The movement from Aeterni Patris to the XXIV Theses exhibits all these weaknesses. It would have been far more difficult for Hartley to exhibit, in a short monograph, the strengths of Thomism. Those strengths have to be seen in detail, in terms of substantive doctrines, and that requires patient and prolonged reflection. Programmatic statements about Thomism 519 520 BOOK REVIEWS as a whole may be valuable as protreptic but can scarcely substitute for theological or philosophical argument. What one would like to call essential as opposed to programmatic Thomism continues today and perhaps more effectively when it seems no longer to be propped up by rules and regulations. It has been suggested that Thomism is now in a state of diaspora, and it is, but rather than see this as an unnatural condition, one might observe that this is the normal way of the intellectual life. Philosophers come one at a time; the great ones seldom have students who attain their level, let alone advance beyond it. If there is a cumulative advance in philosophizing it surely does not take place in the layered and communal fashion we can discern in the natural sciences. The philosopher who relies on a label to get our attention is not unlike those pathetic individuals whose atavistic interest in their family tree seems meant to make us regard a twig as a branch or even a trunk. Twenty years ago almost every Catholic philosopher in this country regarded himself and was regarded by others as a Thomist. How swiftly the scenery, and the labels, changed. Surely, if the appellation had had serious reference, it could not have been so easily set aside. Nonetheless, I think there are as many serious Thomists now as there were then, that there was always a diaspora but that now it is no longer disguised. What commends a philosophy, finally, is not that it is commended, even by the Church, but that it enables us to...