Nova et vetera

Introduction

Fifty years after the overthrow of St. Thomas and Thomistic Scholasticism in Catholic intellectual life in general and in Catholic philosophy and theology in particular, we are now witnessing a revival of Aristotelianism and Thomism in a place where one would have least anticipated it, mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosophy. This phenomenon has been relatively well-documented in the case of moral theory, but is less well known in two areas that, from a Thomistic standpoint, are more fundamental than moral theory—philosophy of nature and philosophical anthropology. In my presentation, after highlighting certain consequences of the overthrow of Thomism, I will discuss this revival, along with some cognate developments within recent Catholic theology, with an eye toward giving some direction to the new generation of Catholic philosophers and theologians.

The Overthrow: Fifty Years Later

First of all, I want to thank the Dominicans of the province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus and, more specifically, those associated with the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley for inviting me to speak at this Dialogue between Philosophy and Theology. Indeed, while others are welcome to listen in, the intended audience for my presentation is precisely Catholic philosophers and [End Page 565] theologians—and especially the younger ones, including graduate students.

I know what you are thinking: “Oh, no, not one of those dreary talks by an old guy imparting ‘wisdom’ to us supposedly benighted young people.” I am sorry, but all I can say in my defense is that I hope it is not too dreary, and I hope you are not too benighted. The truth is that I am desperate to find a receptive audience, given that nowadays at Notre Dame there are only a handful of graduate students in either theology or (especially) philosophy who are interested in St. Thomas or the other great Scholastic thinkers. And therein lies a tale: the tale of the overthrow of St. Thomas and Thomistic Aristotelianism in Catholic higher education and, more generally, in Catholic intellectual life throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. I begin my presentation with this tale mainly in order to discuss its lasting consequences, rather than to dwell on its causes. As for the latter, there is more than enough blame to go around on all sides, as is evident from Philip Gleason’s detailed and even-handed re-telling of the history of Catholic higher education in the 1950s and 1960s.¹ By contrast, my main purpose in this paper is to talk about the past only in order to shed some light on the present and the short-term future.

So, there I was in the mid-1960s, a student in a diocesan seminary filled to the brim with idealistic aspiring clerics, studying philosophy and theology. In addition to various figures in the history of philosophy, we were reading the likes of Henri De Lubac, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, and even the very early Joseph Ratzinger. Some of our teachers were just back from studying in Rome, where they had drunk deeply of so-called Transcendental Thomism—which, upon later scrutiny, I found to be in some significant ways an inversion of Thomism, rather than a version of it. In any case, those were heady days. We who had hardly read a page of St. Thomas himself or of his most important commentators considered ourselves experts on the shortcomings of Thomism. When, years later, I read Ralph McInerny’s vivid description, near the beginning of Thomism in an Age of Renewal,² of a mindless and baseless tirade by a young priest in a seminary common room against Thomism and prominent Thomists, I was embarrassed to recall that I myself [End Page 566] had participated just as mindlessly and just as baselessly in many such conversations. (I had read my de Lubac, after all.)

And it was not merely we neophytes. Our elders, many of whom knew little of the actual documents of Vatican II but had nonetheless imbibed what they called “the spirit of Vatican II,” decided that this spirit dictated...