Men and Morals

Extract

It is very gratifying to me to have the opportunity to express the good things I think of Father Gerald Vann’s recent book, Morals Makyth Man. A work such as this delights the mind with a “rejoicing in the truth” which is indeed characteristically thomist: a joy in fresh Air and Light. In this book we find, combined with constant care for doctrinal accuracy and for fidelity to the established principles received from tradition, that reverence for experience and for the humble truths of ordinary human existence, that quality of compassionate concern for the needs and the sorrows of the time, which we recognise as part of the heritage of the great Dominicans of history. For it has been written that we “must redeem the time”; and if it be that the distinctive mission of St. Thomas and his disciples is the evangelisation of the intelligence, who would feel more acutely than they the pressing urgency of this work of redemption?

It is certain that such work cannot be achieved without toil and hardship. Not without sufferings and opposition was St. Thomas able to assimilate to Christian thought a pagan Aristotle who appeared suddenly in his time surrounded by a cortège of Moslems and Jews. Towards the end of his life he was called to maintain, against the Bishop of Paris and the great majority of contemporary divines, the doctrine of the oneness of the substantial form of the human being, that doctrine which after his death was to be censured by Etienne Tempier and the Doctors of Oxford, but which now has become classical and established.