Why St. Thomas Aquinas is so Important

I once observed an online exchange between a couple people, one of whom is what you might call a Catholic celebrity which is just to say he’s a high profile Catholic commentator. Over the course of the conversation the less renowned debater made an appeal to St. Thomas Aquinas to which the celebrity replied with something like, “St. Thomas is fine for some, but give me Rahner, give me Kung, give me Congar.”

That little exchange on the surface just appears to be a couple nerdy Catholics describing their favourite theologians but in reality, it’s a depiction of a deep divide that exists in the Church today that most of us probably aren’t aware of and it’s important to understand because it speaks to why there are these competing currents in the Church today and how we should discern between them.

Going all the way back to the earliest days of the Church, leaders and evangelists started confronting a question that wasn’t easy to answer which was how do we reconcile faith and reason which represented two kinds of knowledge.

Faith is a knowledge that comes to us from God through revelation. It’s God giving us the answer key to life and encouraging us to trust him and to follow it. Reason is our ability to access what is true through our intellectual capability.

And the reason this challenge emerged so quickly is because of the Church’s collision with the Greco-Roman world through its evangelistic efforts, because they had a tradition of reason through the deposit of knowledge that came through great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among many more.

And this tension was kind of neatly put by Tertullian who was an early Church father who said, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem.” And by that he wasn’t describing two nationalities or cultures. He was using these cities as metaphors for faith and reason, Athens representing the tradition of reason, and Jerusalem representing the place where God dwelled and where the people lived by faith.

We also see right at the beginning of John’s gospel he describes Jesus as the Logos identifying God with reason and in Acts 17, we see Paul appealing to the Athenians by reason and argument. So from the absolute beginning of the Church there’s a recognition of the legitimacy of reason as a means to knowing truth and persuading others.

But how they inform each other, how much we should rely on one or the other was unresolved. Some believed all we needed was faith and this current was known as Fideism. Some took a more rational line and believed that our reason could apprehend all truth.

And this tension played out through the Church for centuries until scholasticism and St. Thomas Aquinas arrived who introduced a concept that helped resolve the question for a lot of people. He said that Grace does not destroy nature, but it perfects it.

Because the trouble with reason is that it’s a human faculty and the problem with human faculties is that they are clouded with sin and our fallen nature. So how much we can rely on them has always been a difficult question to answer.

If you follow the Protestant line of thinking on this, our nature, and therefore reason, is completely broken and we can’t rely on it at all which is why Luther said that reason is a whore (Luther had a way with words).

He was promoting a renewed emphasis on faith and or Fideism which is why there are so many currents within Protestantism, especially American fundamentalism, where people say things like, just have faith.

It’s why so many people backlash against their fundamentalist upbringing because when they started to ask questions and employ their reason, they were met with slogans like, “When in doubt, faith it out.” And that’s unfortunate because that’s not the ancient tradition which has been one that has tried to balance the legitimacy of both faith and reason.

And St. Thomas took a massive stride forward in our ability to do that when he said that Grace perfects nature. Yes, nature is compromised, but when we expose ourselves to God’s grace and his willingness to make his goodness available to us that we might be transformed, then our nature, reason with it, becomes elevated and perfected into a condition where we CAN rely on it.

Thomas did much more than that as a prolific thinker and writer, but this contribution to Catholic thought made it possible for faith and reason to live in a kind of harmony until the Protestant Reformation became a loud voice for fideism once again.

[lucdubras]

Catholicism's sound balance of faith and reason was very attractive to me when I converted. Especially the anti-scientific and fideistic attitude of some forms of American Evangelicalism stood out to me as a big red flag. If christianity is true, it speaks to the whole of reality: the sciences, the arts, philosophy, society, culture. In other words it's truly universal and therefore also truly 'catholic'.

In that sense, Thomism is THE catholic philosophy par excellence: combining the whole of scripture and tradition under the guidance of natural reason and supernatural revelation in a single synthesis.

[CrustyMac]

Sounds like a good opportunity for “Pints with Acquinas” eh, Matt and Brian?

[fathermikeschmitz]

I am so grateful for your wisdom and insight, Brian! Thank you for this channel!

[JohnFromAccounting]

Nobody has heard of these new wave theologists, but every Catholic has heard of St Thomas Aquinas.

[LauFiu]

This is so funny, my highschool had 4 houses which are Lavalla, Champagnat, Xavier and Aquinas but in 1969 the Marist brothers whom ran the school removed Aquinas. Just this year the new Headmaster reinstated Aqiunas

[avenger]

Luther burned the Summa Theologica! As an aspiring Catholic I find this highly offensive.

[justinward]

Pretty soon after I was Baptized I told one of my priests that things were often so confusing and unclear that I had decided that I just wasn’t interested in anything that was in conflict with Aquinas (with the exception of the Immaculate Conception and the like of course). He seemed a little bothered by my statement. I didn’t quite realize at the time that I was defining my position in this divide in the Church.

[Johannes]

Kung? Rahner? How about no. In fact, let us say no to all types modernism in whatever flavor it comes. The teachings of those men are dangerous.

[crazymuthaphukr]

"The peril is that human intellect is free to destroy itself." - G.K. Chesterton

[Malik-hzfg]

I was raised by Franciscans, yet even I know that anyone who considers himself Catholic MUST read Aquinas. He is often very legalistic and I don’t always agree with his assertions but he is a MUST READ for Catholics.

[wgenitojr]

This was an enjoyable video. However, as a Catholic priest, I feel like I should offer an explanatory note. It is certainly the case that Neo-Scholasticism fell by the way side during the latter half of 20th century, and the unintended consequence that resulted from this transition was that some threw the baby out with the bath water (i.e., disregarding St Thomas). No one, however, ever said that St Thomas was irrelevant. In fact, St Thomas is still cited in magisterial texts. The core problem for the prominent theologians that influenced the Second Vatican Council was not St Thomas himself, but how the Neo-Scholastics were utilizing his theology for ends that they held were contrary to his original intent. It became necessary, therefore, for the Church to remind herself that there are other voices in the Tradition which can speak in a complimentary way. As such, when Pope Leo XIII asserted that the theology of St Thomas is definitive, we should not draw from this that we are bound to view St Thomas as synonymous with Catholicism in an exclusive manner. What Leo XIII said of Thomas is equally true in an unofficial sense - that is to say, in the way things are received by the Church but never consciously defined - of the other prominent medieval doctors (i.e., Anselm, Bonaventure, Theresa of Avila, etc). In sum, what the well-grounded theologians of the 20th century desired was a holistic approach to the Tradition of the Church. It was not intended to "disenfranchise" St Thomas or disregard his theology. This is to say nothing of the fact that St Thomas is relative, contingent and beholden to the earlier layers of the Tradition which he drew upon, namely the fathers. If St Thomas was watching this conversation, he would be telling us to use his Summa as a synthesis of, and a supplement to, patristic theology, because those are the real giants whom he stood upon.

[brookekennel]

I can distinctly remember dropping out of a medieval philosophy class as a masters student because I had looked over the syllabus on the first day and saw that Ockham was on it, but Aquinas was not. I’ve never regretted that decision.

[aaronmaddox]

Thank you! As a new Catholic I have been struggling with the reconciliation of faith and reason and this helped a lot.

[BuggyrcobraAya]

I think your assessment of the Nouvelle Theologie is too one sided and promotes a somewhat false dichotomy. Both Nouvelle Theologie and the neo-scholasticism of Garrigou-Lagrange came as a result of Leo XIII's statement about Thomism. NS was more focused in the substance of St Thomas, while NT was more about applying St Thomas' method to modern times, and both are valid approaches. For St Thomas' day, what he was doing in applying Aristotle to Christian thought was a novel idea, and stood in contrast to traditional Platonism of the centuries before him. It is also worth noting that figures such as Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar were all also a part of this Nouvelle Theologie and produced great fruits from it (I'm not saying all NT theologians are great or orthodox, but you can find unorthodox theologians in all schools), and popes such as Paul VI and JPII promoted their ideas and positions because they found them to be true and in line with the Faith

[murrax]

If someone said to me "Give me Küng, give me Rahner" in response to me quoting Aquinas, I think I would laugh out loud. You might as well say "Give me Luther, give me Calvin"

[chrisgoomba]

If only more atheists and agnostics read Sumna Theologica they wouldn't have such perturbed and ignorant views on Christianity and the Existence of God and theology. Aquinas is a figure we should All aspire to be, he was wise, charitable, holy and always focused on manifesting the Glory of God through work and writing.

[levisando]

Thankfully, I've never heard someone say "when in doubt, faith it out", but it wouldn't surprise me if some of my "friends" on Facebook have posted a "meme" of it.

[charlieclubers]

Given all this we ought to pray for unity in the Church! It's really unfortunate that those who tend to be more traditional (which I would include myself in) are at odds with those who are more "progressive" in the Church. Ideally we wouldn't need these distinctions.

[afieds]

Well observed. Aquinas is the man of reality. His knowledge comes from contemplation on the "I am" ie. "being", in person. All who stray from this path end up in ideology

[antaine]

"...like this gadfly that just won't go away..."

The truth has a tendency to do that.