A mediaevalist trying to be a philosopher and a philosopher trying to be a mediaevalist write about theology, philosophy, scholarship, books, the middle ages, and especially the life, times, and thought of the Doctor Subtilis, the Blessed John Duns Scotus.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
The Fall of Thomism
Two recent essays by D.Q. McInerny on the fall of Thomism, here and here.
Here's one from a while back, on attacks on Thomism. Happy reading.
Note the essentialist faith that something pure and "authentic" can be identified in Thomism. This is acompanied, as usual in Neo-Thomism, by a bogey, variously named "nominalism", "idealism" or "modernism" (McInerney's favorite). But what if basic deviations happened long ago? What if European science assimilated Thomism to a foreign Rationalist understanding several centuries ago? Then "retrieving authentic Thomism might require a radical and creative augmentation of Thomism, e.g. that of Gilson et al? McInerney seems not to allow for this possibility-
The third essay, the Rortae Caeli one, is a more interesting diagnosis of What Went Wrong in Catholic intellectual history. The essay defends a distinction between authentic history and a post-modern historicism, then proceeds to offer suspect history, something like this:
Aquinas was a detailed clear expositor of his ideas on the Catholic faith and Catholic philosophy; so much so that the Church recommends him pedagogically. But somehow, even though he had many followers, his ideas were distorted into "baroque Scholasticism" by nominalist and Scotist influences. (But wasn't there a succession of authentic Thomists that defended pure Thomism? There must have been Thomists before Gilson that really understood Thomas' writings?)
Ah, finally, Scotus is id'ed as the real villain... causer of global warming, extinction of dinosaurs, atheism, and the Holocaust, not to mention being the intellectual cause of abortion, and for some Neo-Con Thomers, the reason Obama won twice.
4 comments:
Good read... and all without one reference to the Greatest Evil the Cosmos has ever witnessed--Scotus. I appreciate that kind of self-control.
Note the essentialist faith that something pure and "authentic" can be identified in Thomism. This is acompanied, as usual in Neo-Thomism, by a bogey, variously named "nominalism", "idealism" or "modernism" (McInerney's favorite). But what if basic deviations happened long ago? What if European science assimilated Thomism to a foreign Rationalist understanding several centuries ago? Then "retrieving authentic Thomism might require a radical and creative augmentation of Thomism, e.g. that of Gilson et al? McInerney seems not to allow for this possibility-
Jim Given
The third essay, the Rortae Caeli one, is a more interesting diagnosis of What Went Wrong in Catholic intellectual history. The essay defends a distinction between authentic history and a post-modern historicism, then proceeds to offer suspect history, something like this:
Aquinas was a detailed clear expositor of his ideas on the Catholic faith and Catholic philosophy; so much so that the Church recommends him pedagogically. But somehow, even though he had many followers, his ideas were distorted into "baroque Scholasticism" by nominalist and Scotist influences. (But wasn't there a succession of authentic Thomists that defended pure Thomism? There must have been Thomists before Gilson that really understood Thomas' writings?)
Ah, finally, Scotus is id'ed as the real villain... causer of global warming, extinction of dinosaurs, atheism, and the Holocaust, not to mention being the intellectual cause of abortion, and for some Neo-Con Thomers, the reason Obama won twice.
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