Current Philosophy

0014 Wayne Hankey. "Making Theology Practical: Thomas Aquinas and the Nineteenth Century Religious Revival," Dionysius 9 (December 1985), pp. 85-127.

Despite his title, Hankey is mainly concerned with 20th century and contemporary theology. But he finds what he considers to be the error of modern Catholic theology to have its roots in the 1800's.

While Anglican theologians were busy removing philosophy from historical and doctrinal studies and denigrating systematic theology, Pope Leo XIII was moving the opposite way, restoring Thomism as the preferred Roman Catholic philosophy. This was an attempt to overcome worldly philosophies not by turning away but by offering a strong alternative. Thomism was a keen choice because it served two contrary purposes. On one hand it could speak to an intellectual world where science and philosophy stood on their own ground. On the other, it could ultimately subordinate these to ecclesiastical thought.

A problem developed, however: a division occurred in the approaches taken by the different Thomist schools. The transcendentalists (Maréchal, et al) tried to find something positive in the modern critical spirit and to link Aquinas's epistemology and ontology to it. The realists (Gilson et al) found in Aquinas an immediate intuition of being (esse) which completely divorced him from modern critical thought. Each side reflected one part of Leo's original conflicting intentions.

Hankey describes at some length the opposing views of the 20th century Thomists concerning the place of esse in Aquinas's thought. His conclusion is that, consciously or unconsciously, modern Thomists have approached ontology in a Heideggerian as opposed to a Hegelian manner. And they have been blind to the Platonic element in Aquinas's thought. Hankey here returns to the 19th century Anglicans who loved Plato because when the highest principle is known as the Good, we seem to pass without undue philosophizing from decision to practice. It suited them to let philosophy and theology blend, while Leo wanted the opposite.

Today existential Thomism is no longer dominant in the Roman Church, but the battle of Thomists against modernism continues in other forms. And their essential problem remains the same. They build walls, Hankey says, between philosophy history and theology, and so oppose genuinely speculative theological systems. This unites them with 19th century theology but we cannot go back to that era: we lack our predecessors moral confidence and optimism about history. We are thus left with credal symbols and Biblical historical researches that we can't quite drop but which have lost their power for us.

But this is because we (theologians) have falsified our past, trying to bend it to our practical purposes. We now need to restore integrity to Christian theology. Critical scholarship and historical consciousness are instruments to this end, but they are not sufficient. We must also choose to be renewed in the spirit. in our minds. We need to turn back to the old forms of philosophy, but with the intent of subordinating our thought and our wills to their intellectual substance -- not to make them tools for executing our preconceived designs. If we fail to do this, the only alternative is to carry forward the subjective side of the 19th century revival to its ultimate dead end, where we will have nothing left but self-consciously arbitrary self-assertion -- which we will call Christian theology.

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