Recent Thomistica: II

Extract

No one in the English-speaking academy would even try to write an exposition of ‘Thomism’, inhibited as we are by fifty years of the (no doubt salutarily) deflationary effects of analytic philosophy. More positively, the current wave of scholarly works suggests that a systematic exposition of Thomas Aquinas’s thought, if possible at all, would be premature. (We have noted some of the studies of his use of the Bible: New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 245-251).

Thomism is a tradition, long tracts of which remain unresearched. Two conferences have recently mapped some of the territory. Saint Thomas au XXe siècle (Paris: Saint-Paul 1994) contains more than twenty excellent papers tracing the history of Thomism since the foundation of Revue thomiste, the quarterly journal of the Dominican friars at Toulouse. The focus is on France, indeed on the Toulouse ‘school’; yet, as well as a fascinating picture of that particular tradition, we get a great deal of insight into the principal conflicts in Catholic theology during the twentieth century (how deep these were is not widely appreciated in the English-speaking world, where even Catholics themselves tend to believe that we all agreed, prior to the Second Vatican Council).

Saint Thomas au XIVe siècle, a special issue of Revue Thomiste (Janvier-Mars 1997), offers another set of fine essays on one generation of theologians, the first after Aquinas’s death, some of whom were devotedly Thomist, others (including Dominicans) much more critical and some even ferociously anti-Thomist. Largely unknown to any but specialists in medieval studies, these controversies show how contested Aquinas’s thought has been all along.