Father D’Arcy’s Thomas Aquinas

Extract

The inclusion of a monograph on St. Thomas in the ‘Leaders of Philosophy’ series is significant of the growing strength of the Thomist revival. Even in England, later than in the rest of Europe, St. Thomas is now coming to be considered as taking rank among the philosophers who have mainly influenced western thought; with Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant. Father Knox’s Lady Denham, with her ‘Sir Thomas who?’ after the game of ghosts, is a type already growing uncommon.

Perhaps there is no one in this country better qualified than Father D’Arcy to give an acceptable statement of St. Thomas’s thought. A high and dry Thomist can cut an awkward figure in modern philosophical society. Father D’Arcy is never that; his manner is always tactful, indeed at times even deprecatory. He is inclined to present a Thomist certitude almost hat in hand, as when he says that the problem of the One and the Many receives ‘an attempted explanation in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. By an employment of his fundamental distinctions and what he calls analogy he tries to find a via media’ (p. 109). Still, a wedge cannot be driven in thick end first, and it is possible that Thomists in the past have not been sufficiently ingratiating. And there cart be little doubt that Father D’Arcy has also entered well into the spirit of his subject, and has written a book profitable even to the practised Thomist; something better than a list of theses strung together and described from outside; a synthesis showing a real insight into St. Thomas’s thought and the meaning of the principles of act and potency, of analogy, and of knowledge.