WHAT IS THOMISM?
The term “Thomism” has many meanings. Let us begin by saying what we do not understand by it.
I am, first of all, not concerned with that very special Thomism which, in the teaching on supernatural grace, is contrasted with “Molinism.” Nor am I dealing with Thomism as it is generally distinguished from “Suarezianism.” These are, strictly speaking, various modes of interpretation of St. Thomas. A celebrated discussion between Martin Grabmann and Franz Pelster at the International Thomistic Congress in Rome in 1925 made it evident that the most important of the controverted doctrines, that of the real distinction between essence and existence, had for St. Thomas himself only a subordinate value, and that his earliest pupils thought it possible and legitimate to interpret it in several ways. Whatever the correct solution of this complicated question may be, both interpretations, the “Suarezian” as well as the one which calls itself “Thomistic,” recognize explicitly the authority of St. Thomas. Undoubtedly the divergence between them is less significant than their agreement.
How then are we to understand Thomism in this discussion of its timeliness? We will take the term in its broad current usage as the designation of all forms of Thomistic discipleship, and particularly of the world view elaborated in the works of St. Thomas. Thomism in this sense means nothing more nor less than the teaching of St. Thomas.
But here let me observe immediately that this is a questionable and problematic term, justified though we may be in using it, in view of the shortcomings of the human vocabulary.
However vaguely the term Thomism may be applied in general usage, it contains undoubtedly some elements of interpretation which may easily lead to an erroneous idea of the teaching of St. Thomas. Leo Tolstoi has said that the philosophy of a “Tolstoyan” would inevitably be completely foreign to his own philosophy. I would not venture to suggest that St. Thomas might have made a similar statement about a Thomist. Yet one can readily see how suspect the designation “Thomism” becomes. Why is it so inappropriate? Because it leads us to think almost automatically of a specific school of thought elaborated in polemical theses and counter-theses, and particularly of a traditionally perpetuated teaching system of propositions.
But it would seem to me quite impossible to compress the doctrine of St. Thomas into the framework of a “school” system of propositions, unless one leaves out something of fundamental The majestic elaboration of thought manifested in St. Thomas’s work is far too rich for such treatment and also far too flexible. The richness consists not alone in the fact that the theological wisdom of the earliest Christian centuries is interwoven with the philosophical heritage of the Greek world; and this is not confined to Aristotle only—there are threads from Plato also, and even from the Neo-Platonists (an author almost as often quoted by St. Thomas as Aristotle is that mysterious Syrian disciple of Plotinus who had great prestige in the West under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite). It is, I say, not this abundance of content alone which constitutes the richness of St. Thomas’s work—it rests also on the fact that this process of assimilation develops on the ground of a spirituality which is altogether patterned on the teachings of Scripture and the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church. The end result is a structure of the highest intellectual order, but not in any way a closed system of school propositions.
Accordingly, St. Thomas has this in common with other truly great teachers, that he cannot easily be appropriated as the head of a specific school of thought, as the patron of an “ism.” The “isms” are wont to be exclusive, and in controversy they are as “precise” and “distinct” as possible. The truly great masters, on the other hand, because of their deeper appreciation of what is unfathomable in truth, much prefer to emphasize what is common to differing positions than what is peculiar to each. They have no love for controversy. Their preference is for the more flexible and natural idiom and not for a fixed and artificial terminology. For example, all the “isms” that attach themselves to St. Thomas regard “Augustinianism” as the common adversary. But what is the attitude of St. Thomas himself? It is true that he nowhere speaks of an identity of outlook with St. Augustine. However, when he deals with the problem of divine illumination in human knowledge—one of the matters most hotly debated between Thomists and Augustinians—he states that the divergence between Augustine and himself is of no great significance, non multum It is very unlikely that an author so little interested in his own “individuality” could be readily compressed within a scholastic system without losing what is essential to his thought. Who, for instance, would venture to formulate in abstract propositions all that Plato states in the Symposium about the nature of love? The comparison with Plato is not as far-fetched as it might appear. In my opinion, it belongs to the essence of St. Thomas’s teaching that the scholastic articulus has retained, and not merely in external form, the character of a genuine conversation or dialogue, that is, the character of reflective meditation, which makes no claim to possessing a definitively formulated answer. An analysis of that remarkable and almost inexhaustible first article of the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate demonstrates that no pat, unequivocal, textbook reply is given to the query: “What is truth?” Rather, St. Thomas first develops his own ingenious interpretation, and then, with rare modesty, works it into the garland of traditional definitions of truth in a web of reciprocal illumination and confirmation. Not one of the traditional formulae is rejected entirely or accepted as exclusively valid. Though they are in no way fully concordant, he can appreciate the partial validity of each. What actually is happening here? It happens that St. Thomas is, in effect, placing himself within the stream of traditional truth nourished by the past; without claiming to give a final solution, he leaves the way open for future quest and discovery as that stream flows onward toward the yet unknown. This is exactly the method of the Platonic dialogues. A similar conclusion is reached in recent studies on the theory of knowledge in St. Thomas. They prove that Thomas quite evidently deliberately refrained from giving a dogmatic definition of knowledge.
All this should make sufficiently clear why it seems to me highly questionable to treat the teaching of St. Thomas as an “ism,” and why we should use the term “Thomism” only with important reservations.
It might well be said that by this very structure the teaching of St. Thomas is relevant to our time, in the sense both of timeliness and untimeliness. It might be said that the timeliness of St. Thomas rests to a large extent on the fact that there can be no such thing as “Thomism.” This remark, I realize, requires elaboration. But before attempting this, we have to consider briefly the actual situation of modern philosophical thought.