Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Placing St. Thomas

I have criticized the prominence of neo-Scholasticism and the aphoristic attitude towards clerical education is elicited in the post-Tridentine age, culminating in the three generations of bad clergy who met in Rome from 1962-1965 (the old bishops, the middle aged monsignori and auxiliaries, and the priests and monks who would succeed them). At night, when I find a moment, I navigate John Senior's The Restoration of Christian Culture. Chapter Four, Theology and Superstition, begins with a series of astute mini-rants observations about the problem of Thomistic education, which has little to do with the portly, saintly friar who wrote the Summa:

"Superstition" is something "standing over" from a former time which we no longer "understand...." The theology of St. Thomas has become something like that, a superstition among twentieth-century Catholics, including conservatives and traditionalists, his formulas, like rakes and hoes, hanging in our theological gingko trees; and it is no wonder that the younger generation has decided to junk them.
A few uncommon and relatively unknown, and old, theologians still study and teach St. Thomas, but he is no longer received as the Common Doctor of the Church. The Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas himself says in the Prologue, is a book "for beginners;" but we have few real beginners anymore. Our schools and colleges turn out advanced technicians in what are called the arts and sciences, but none has the ordinary prerequisites to traditional philosophical and theological study, none with the famous mens sana in corpore sano of the ancients, that is, disciplined in the perception, memory, and imagination of reality. To compensate for our failures, seminaries in the decades preceding Vatican II tabulated maxims based upon the Summa as texts for easily testable courses run on principles remotely traceable to Descartes, full of method, and having little to do with reality, ess of memory and nothing of imagination or the spirit of St. Thomas. In the great Catholic universities at Rome and elsewhere, the grand old Dominican and Jesuit masters went on lecturing in Latin to students, many from America, who had to get laugh-in signals from the graduate assistants when the master cracked a joke because none knew Latin well enough to tell a joke from a Scholastic formula. It is hardly surprising that in such universities scholastic formulas became jokes. The only usual skill you had to master at the Roman colleges, they say, was to read the easy Latin upside down because on oral examinations the professor would read aloud a question form the manual—holding it right there in front of him. If you had the trick of reading upside down you could give the answer word for word to pass with high distinction. Through a gross misunderstanding of docility, students sat on their disengaged intelligences through hours of what to them was gibberish, at the end of which they received gilded Italianate certificates in Canon Law and Theology certifying in reality an education in outlines, "ponies," and tests whose questions had been leaked in advance with answers right in front of them. And with these doctorates, as professors, rectors and even bishops, their graduates occupied positions of authority in Catholic universities and seminaries. Of course there were exceptions, but I think, brutal as it seems, this is a fair description of the general situation....
....It is better, as Socrates repeatedly said, not to know and know you don't than not to know and think you do. Or as the poet said.... A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring....
....Neo-Thomism in our own time couldn't even stand up to the grasshoppers of relativism and Social Darwinism. Nor could the few serious Thomists such as Garrigou-Lagrange propose a real theology to those who couldn't see beyond the rhetoric of popular science, which dazzled them with figures of speech in place of the quiet light of thought. Gilson recounts in one of his last, sad books, how he had refused a request from Pius XII to write a refutation of Teilhard de Chardin.... because there was no clear doctrine in Teilhard to refute, only a kind of poetry which confused the imagination and affected the emotions but without argument, evidence, or substance.
So I do not advocate anything like a revival of St. Thomas. I think it is impossible under present conditions. He is better off where he is and incidentally needs no "revival" because he isn't dead; we're the ones who are dead, or almost dead; the rent is overdue and we are starving in ruined torment.

10 comments:

  1. If St Thomas cannot be used under the present circumstances, what should one use? What do the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholics use to educate their clergy?

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    1. A bit of a broad question. It varies church-to-church (I haven't the slightest idea what the non-Byzantine Oriental Catholics use) and I can speak mostly only for The Ukrainians:

      Mostly Patrisics, with special emphasis on the Cappadocian Fathers, several later Byzantine saints like Gregory of Palamas, a bit of the 18th/19th century Russian writers (like Seraphim of Sarov), and a little bit of Alexander Schmemann.

      Byzantine theology is actually very highly developed, it just took a different direction than Roman.

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  2. I enjoy reading Garrigou-Lagrange, and think he was probably the best Thomist of our time. It's true, however, that he was unable to provide robust reactions to the theological errors of the twentieth century.

    The best condemnation of Teilhard de Chardin's errors came from Dietrich von Hildebrant, and no Thomist was he.

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    1. Von Hildebrant was also no friend of the liturgical reform and his wife is no friend of weak-willed men! Has there been a better pair since Francis and Clair?

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    2. I think not. Mrs. von Hildebrandt is a firecracker. She even took the popular sex talk speaker Christopher West to task.

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  3. This is pretty absurd stuff. I love John Senior, but when he gets ranting, there's no telling what may come out of it. I have spent much of my life in centers of Thomistic renewal and it's been a beautiful thing to behold. Young minds, uncluttered by a lot of modernism, take to Thomas like fish to water.

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    1. Peter,

      I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that was not Senior's point. His point was that scholastic education had become a parody of Thomas by the mid-20th century and that without the liturgical environment of monasticism and with the technical nonsense that passes for "education" today most students are too ill-equipped to handle him, much less the Fathers.

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    2. Professor,

      When I was getting my B.A. in theology, I somewhat obsessively studied the corpora of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. At that point, I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you. My opinion since then has somewhat mellowed due to some personal experiences "in the real world" (so to speak). This is what I have found: scholasticism is a perfect tool with which to explain certain matters to somebody that already agrees with the conclusion. This is why it is so beloved by many faithful Catholics--Thomism is simple, intuitive, and very rarely leads one to error (if rightly applied).

      However, it is not particularly efficient rhetorically, and very exceptionally does it cause Church dissenters or non-believers to conclude that they are mistaken about whatever false opinions they hold. These people unfortunately are highly resistant to the reasoning of St. Thomas Aquinas: they do not accept the fundamental premises of Aristotelianism--they do not even have the patience to learn what they are--and so any reasoned scholastic argument is usually met with eye-rolling.

      The problem is that dissenters are extremely entrenched in Catholic schools, and your average household catechesis is in a truly abysmal state. The result of this is that nowadays, dissenters usually taint the minds of children and teenagers with their errors before the child/teenager has any opportunity to learn systematic philosophy. I don't think employing St. Thomas to dissuade them will be effective, nor would teaching it to them in the classroom. I have found patristics much more useful in this regard, since one can learn classical Platonism/Aristotelianism as one reads the works of the Church Fathers, whereas one needs a pretty solid background in metaphysics for most of the Summa to make any sense.

      On these grounds, I agree with John Senior, with all due respect to you.

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    3. Indeed, we need to use the right tool for the right time. Scholasticism worked when it did because it reflected the thought process of the culture at that point. The faith never really changes, but the way it's presented can and should based on circumstances.

      What does our current society more closely represent, the High Middle Ages or the pagan darkness of the first three centuries of Christendom? Based on that alone, many of the early Fathers and writers would be more practical for catechesis.

      Besides, if we neglect the Fathers we get people like von Balthasar making up crap the Patrisic theologians never intended.

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    4. Besides, if we neglect the Fathers we get people like von Balthasar making up crap the Patrisic theologians never intended.

      Having just sojourned through Lyra Pitstick's book, I had to laugh out loud at this.

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