The Universal Authority of St. Thomas Aquinas
In the post-conciliar age, there is often a tendency to look to the times preceding the Second Vatican Council and find attitudes that we can blame the whole crisis on. This is not an attitude unique to those who seek to save the Council from the “Spirit of the Council”; it is also found among traditionalists, who I believe don’t wish to seem unhinged by pretending that all our problems began in the 1960s. One of the so-called problems that can be presented is what is said to be the over-emphasis of Thomism. This, of course, was a primary point of the Nouvelle théologie theologians who repeatedly stressed the need for us to embrace an attitude of Ad fontes, oftentimes going to the sources around St. Thomas entirely. Father Garrigou-Lagrange, speaking of the Nouvelle theologians said of them “We do not think that the writers whom we have discussed abandoned the doctrine of St. Thomas. Rather, they never adhered to it, nor ever understood it very well.”[1] But those who decry the over-emphasis of St. Thomas now do so in different ways and are much more subtle.
For example, Bishop Barron, while calling himself a Thomist, decries the “closed Thomism” of the past which closes itself off as a self-contained system, but promotes an “open Thomism,” which allows for the simultaneous embrace of contemporary theologians like Balthasar or the embrace of phenomenology. Another way is by means of some elements of Eastern Catholicism, insisting on having their own means of theological and philosophical thought as we can see in one of the foundational documents of Eastern Catholicism, “The Courage to be Ourselves” of the Melkite Archbishop Tawil, which states that the East must not copy the theology of the West.
These attitudes, while potentially being able to be taken in a certain tolerable sense, has led to the exaggeration of such sentiments, often stemming from a poor understanding of the history and terms of the philosophical and theological topics involved. One still finds on the parochial level many priests who know more of Rahner or Kant than they know of St. Thomas, while perhaps paying lip-service to the contributions of the Saint. Similarly, I have encountered some Eastern Catholics who take the statement of Archbishop Tawil to mean that Thomism has no place for Eastern Catholics, and that they are free to accept everything within Eastern Orthodoxy, including a denial of the Filioque, as implied by Melkite Archbishop Zoghby.[2] It nowadays seems quite fashionable to say that one may be a Thomist as long as he realizes that he is on the same footing as everyone else, and acknowledges an egalitarian rule of theological and philosophical schools. But is this what the Church teaches?
An Already-Established Tradition
The most pre-eminent work on the authority of St. Thomas has already been written, and it would be foolishness and hubris to attempt to do a better job. This work was The Authority of St. Thomas Aquinas, by Santiago Ramirez, O.P. in 1952. I do not aim fully in this article to reproduce his treatise, but merely to summarize some of the essential points of his work, examine the pre-conciliar[3] teachings on the authority of St. Thomas Aquinas and use these findings as a basis to evaluate the present controversies in our time. In general, I wish to defend the claim given by Ramirez that “the slightest digression from Aquinas is neither permitted nor tolerated; but the Church urges and strongly praises fidelity in following him,
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