A Quick Thought: The Enduring Scholarship of Thomas Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas is credited with leading the Roman Catholic Church out of the Dark Ages. For me, he was – and perhaps is – the measure of my Catholic and Christian education.  Thomas, a Dominican friar, was taught to me all through my Catholic school education, and beyond.  From the third grade, he was invoked as the patron saint of every schoolboy’s studies. He was famous in grade school for his explanation of the nine choirs of angels. In seventh grade, I was made to dress up as Thomas for the class’ All Saint’s Day celebration (we each were given a Saint; I had it easy compared to the girl who had to come as Joan of Arc!) and was made to read my biography of him before my assembled classmates and teachers. In high school (an all-boys catholic prep school run by Benedictine monks), he was taught as the Doctor of the Church who reconciled Aristotelian philosophy with Western theology.  We became students of Thomism and read excerpts from the Summa Theologica, debating his Five Proofs for the Existence of God. 

Thomas himself was a student of the Benedictines of the Abbey of Monte Cassino in Rome. The Abbey at Monte Cassino is a place I have had the good fortune to have visited on two occasions so far. It is a beautiful and serene locale visited by many over the centuries on pilgrimages to Rome. I still have the medal of Saint Benedict I purchased in the gift shop there on a sunny day way back when, on what seems like a trek undertaken at least a century ago.  In my college years, I became a Philosophy major, and my first philosophy course, The History of Western Thought, began and ended with Thomas Aquinas. I was in a Methodist college in the Mid-west in the late 1970’s, and here we debated Thomas’ exposition of the Just War doctrine, rooted in the thought of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and like Aristotle another of Thomas’ heroes.  It was just after the Vietnam war, and the arguments for and against participating in such a violent and politically problematic conflict continued to divide the nation, especially on its college campuses. 

The Catholic Church remained divided on the morality of America’s involvement in Vietnam as well at the time, with many on the right citing Thomas Aquinas to support the war, and many on the left citing him to denounce the war.  For myself, although I personally objected to the war, I was teaching high school students in a Sunday School class at the local Catholic Church in southern Indiana where I was in college. Being true to my heart, I presented the Thomistic argument on a Just War to show how it could be used to both support the US war effort and to condemn it. I taught that one needed then to rely on one’s own conscience to decide as to whether such a war effort was just. I received an angry phone call the next Monday morning from the pastor firing me for such blasphemy.

In law school, many years later, Thomism was alive and well in the guise of Natural Law theory. It was the mid-1980’s in New York City, and once again the right was using Thomas’ arguments, this time from Natural Law, to show how we “homosexuals” brought the AIDS epidemic on ourselves, while many on the left --understanding the strides made by science in human sexuality over the last 1,000 years -- used Thomism to show that Natural Law supported the existence of a wide range of human sexualities.  The fact that a virus does not discriminate in nature was lost on many, despite the fact that the face of the AIDS pandemic was vastly different across the globe. For example, in Africa, HIV and AIDS remained predominately centered in the heterosexual population, whereas in the United States, it remained predominately centered among the gay male population.

For my part, I truly believed (and continue to believe) that based on everything I have studied, read, and discussed about Saint Thomas, it became clear that Thomas Aquinas wanted nothing more than to integrate the Church’s thinking with science, philosophy, human reason and human experience.  He wanted to show that God loves us and makes his revealed truth known to us through the human heart and mind (and not, as others would have it, through scripture alone, or through stagnant theories ignoring scientific strides and philosophical advances in the community of humankind). It would seem to me that to condemn LGBT men and women for the progression of a disease then would be contrary to everything Thomas wrote and thought. It would “put us back into the Dark Ages” if you will.

So now as an ordained minister – as an interfaith and interspiritual minister --  where does Thomas Aquinas fit in? I believe he is still relevant for all of us struggling with how to minister to God’s people.  In teaching that God so loved his Creation that he gave us a mind capable of logic, reason, philosophy, science and thought, Thomas sought that we people of God should use these gifts to discern his law and his will.  But that still leaves some room for right and left to disagree on what place Thomas’ wisdom has in the Western Canon, and what he stands for in the Roman Catholic Church as opposed to the larger community of interfaith and interspiritual believers in this dynamic age.