Jacques Maritain Center :
Thomism in an Age of Renewal /
by Ralph McInernyUniversity of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN (1966).
In Memoriam Charles De Koninck.
Books, like children, inspire a split of spirit in their authors. On the one hand, we feel they ought, when they go out into the world, to speak for themselves; on the other hand, there is an impulse to explain them, even to apologize for them. In the case of children, pointing to their lineage to excuse their faults is fair enough, but with books that sort of thing is less seemly. To develop the comparison to the point of conceit, in the literary sense, I notice how enthralled my children are with the story of how I met their mother. Perhaps what grips them, as they try to peer into that unsettling past, prior to any present of theirs, is the thought of how easily they might not have been. Books cannot be expected to quiver with a consciousness of the contingency of things, of course, but perhaps the reader will be interested a brief account of how this book came to be written. It is certainly no product of planned parenthood.
During the spring semester of 1965, Father Cornelio Fabro was Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame. I had been reading him for years; while doing my doctoral dissertation I had made use of is Italian edition of Kierkegaard's Journlas, which contains many scholarly and illuminating notes; during my first year of teaching I read his La nozione metafisica di partecipazione.Subsequently, I read much of what he has written. His scope, his scholarship, his boundless interests caused me to think of him as a member of that small group of truly top-flight Thomists. It was a pleasure, therefore, to have him at my own university and to find that he is every bit as interesting a person as he is a scholar. In March of 1965 an article of Father Fabro's, entitled Tomismo di Domani, "The Thomism of Tomorrow," appeared in L'Osservatore Romano. My colleague Professor Joseph Bobik and I were much taken with the article and undertook to put it into English. Unfortunately, the article found no home in an American publication; we really have no counterpart to the continental weekly newspaper. Father Thurston Davis, the editor of America, found Father Fabro's article simply too long for his publication but asked me if I would care to do something along the same lines. The result was an article bearing the same title as this book's, which appeared in September 1965. I received a great many letters in the weeks following its publication from Catholic thinkers of widely different interests and persuasions, and the majority professed to find in what I had written something with which to agree. Thus encouraged, I was in a receptive mood when contacted by Mr. J. F. Bernard of Doubleday, who wanted to know if I would be interested in developing my thoughts at book length. Apparently I was.
Thanks to Pope John XXIII, we live in an age of renewal in the Church. The Council, which is his true legacy, has been concluded, but work will continue in other forms. To renew involves, of course, a disturbance of much that has become familiar, a putting away in favor of an essential conservation. There are many who fancy themselves at opposite extremes who have yet reacted in a basically similar fashion to what has been going on because they both tended, I think, to confuse the accidental with the essential. There have been some who gave the impression, almost, that if the liturgy can be changed, so too can the Ten Commandments; there have been others who seemed to feel that, since the liturgy has been changed, nothing is the same. Both extremes have done a lot of lamenting during the past several years: the Fathers of the Council were dragging their feet and impeding progress. Or, the Fathers of the Council had lost their wits and were doing imprudent and dangerous things. Those who are called liberals sometimes acted as if the Council were a private possession of theirs which, by some subtle strategy, they had foisted on a resisting Church and which, in the event, was wrested from their hands by the bishops, of all people, and turned to whatever degree from its intended direction. Those who are called conservatives seemed to concede much of that claim but to feel the liberal impulse had not been sufficiently checked. Surely by now we must realize that the Council belongs to the Church, that is, to all of us. It represents neither a partisan victory nor a partisan defeat but the ecclesia docens. Its decrees are neither liberal nor conservative, mine nor yours, but ours, and our response to their letter and spirit should be wholehearted and complete.
In the present essay I have attempted to discuss the status of Thomism in the present situation. There were those who awaited its dethronement by the Council; there were others who expected a stiffer restatement of earlier directives. Both, I suppose, have been disappointed. It would be difficult to work up sympathy either for those who hoped Aquinas would be supplanted by existentialism or phenomenology or Teilhard de Chardin; it would be equally difficult to sympathize with those who felt that all was as it should be with Catholic philosophy. As it happens, the Council had very little to say on the matter of philosophy, and this may seem to leave the matter quite ambiguous. What is the status of all thos ecclesiastical documents converning the philosophy of St. Thomas, those going back to Leo XIII, but those as well that go back many centuries before Leo? Are we to suppose, in the absence of any detailed discussion of them, that they have been superseded? And, if so, by what? Has Thomas Aquinas fallen from favor? Is Thomism in or out? These are some of the questions to which I try to address myself in the discussion which follows. What I have to say does not pretend to be the last word on questions so important; neither does this essay contain my fist thoughts on the matter discussed. Like most Catholic philosophers, I have been reflecting on the question of Thomism almost from the beginning of my studies. It is my earnest hope that nothing I say here will do disservice to the thought of Aquinas. If, in some small way, I can convince the well disposed but wary that their philosophizing has everything to gain and nothing to lose by going to Thomas, I will be more than content.
I will not bore the reader or embarrass my friends by mentioning all those who, over the years, have helped me to achieve what little clarity I have on the topics I discuss here. This book is dedicated, as a modest token of gratitude to the memory of an inspiring teacher and a dear friend. May he rest in peace.