Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae

Impact

Recognized as the authoritative expression of conceptualism, the Summa’s system of thought became appropriately known as Thomism. From the early fourteenth century onward, Thomism became one of several competing forms of Christian philosophy, alongside the realist Augustinianism (named after the early theological giant Augustine of Hippo [354–430]), the quasi-nominalism of John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308), and the nominalism of William of Ockham (ca. 1280/88–1348/49). Accordingly, Pope John XXII canonized Aquinas as a saint and gave him the title “Angelic Doctor” in 1323. Because of its meticulous reason and logic, Thomism emerged as a valuable ally against sixteenth-century Protestantism and Anabaptism and secured its place as the leading school of Catholic thought. Thus Pope Pius V declared Aquinas the “Universal Doctor of the [Roman Catholic] Church” in 1567.

With the advent of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, many in the West came to embrace a secular worldview based on scientific rationalism with no room for religion, here regarded as superstition. This separation of science and religion, foreshadowed centuries earlier by the nominalist double-truth model, was widened by Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). Hence the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic Church needed a fully integrated Christian worldview that allowed for the truth of evolution and other scientific discoveries and demonstrated their consistency with theology, which, far from superstition, comprised a science and the highest branch thereof. Harmonizing natural reason with religious knowledge, the Summa provided precisely such an integrated worldview, leading Pope Leo XIII in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris (“Of the Eternal Father”) to pronounce it as the official theology of the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1960s the Second Vatican Council opened Roman Catholicism to a variety of philosophical perspectives, such that Thomas was no longer considered the Church’s exclusive voice. But the modern revival of Thomas’s thought, chartered in 1998 by Fides et ratio, has returned Thomas to the premier rank among the many available Catholic perspectives and thereby places him in fruitful dialogue with contemporary philosophy.