‘Why Aquinas Matters Now’: The Battle For Campus Intellectual Freedom And His Timeless Relevance
(REVIEW) The university system is under attack. Professors risk careers by publicly speaking out on issues of intellectual freedom. Campuses are tinderboxes, with threats of violence and actual brawls breaking out over religious differences while Islamophobia and antisemitism simmer to a boiling point. Meanwhile, the lines between church and state are increasingly blurring, imperiling the independence of the former while power-hungry political rulers seek to expand their iron-fisted grip over both.
Welcome to the age of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian and education reformer, widely regarded as the most influential Western thinker of the Middle Ages. As a “powerful voice for community, justice, friendship and peace” Thomas remains as relevant today as he was during his own era of devastating “war, injustice, poverty and alienation,” writes Oxford University theologian Oliver Keenan, author of the new book, “Why Aquinas Matters Now.” In fact, Keenan argues, so critical were Thomas’ ways of “looking at the world” that we ignore them “at our peril.”
Thomas was born into a noble family in 1225 in the county of Aquino, about 80 miles southeast of Rome. His father was a wealthy knight in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II while his uncle was abbot of the nearby Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, a famed learning center where Thomas began his education. But when local territorial conflicts between the emperor and Pope Gregory IX led to war, Thomas’ parents sent him to Naples to study at the new university there founded by Frederick. The emperor’s motives for establishing the school were both practical and petty. He envisioned it as a breeding ground for loyal, well-educated bureaucrats to help manage his expanding empire. Yet he was also thumbing his nose at Bologna and Paris, home to older, more prestigious universities with papal roots.
Powerfully built and soft spoken, Thomas was ridiculed by some of his classmates as a “dumb ox.” The insult could not have been further from the truth. In Naples, he immersed himself in Aristotle’s methodically logical interpretations of nature and humanity, together with two of the medieval world’s most famous Aristotelian commentators, Islam’s Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and Judaism’s Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), even as Crusaders were slaughtering Muslims and Jews in Europe and the Holy Land.
Meanwhile, Aristotelianism was viewed suspiciously by another major monastic order, the Augustinians, who, like the Benedictines, ran so-called “cathedral” or “monastic” schools. They feared that the earth-bound teachings of Aristotle “would imperil theology’s supremacy and eliminate the mystical” inherent in Christian thought.
Not only did Thomas disagree, but he further shocked his family by joining the Dominicans who, in contrast to the cloistered Augustinians, advocated more engagement with society via preaching and education. With the establishment of schools like Naples, “the locus of the Church’s intellectual life shifted … from the monastery to the university,” a convulsive change.
Thomas stood at the center of this controversial shift and soon earned a reputation as an advocate for an intellectually rigorous approach to Christianity, exemplified in perhaps his most famous work, the “Summa Theologica,” in which he used Aristotelian logic to prove the existence of God. Essentially, all creation had to begin somewhere/somehow and the answer could only be the first cause or prime mover, as Thomas wrote, for example God.) To understand this is to use the gift God gave us (reason) to comprehend and take part in his divine plan or natural law.
Another theme of Thomas’ writings is justice, which he defined as the “disposition to give to each person what is due to them,” or, as Keenan writes, “a form of equality between persons.” While the term did not exist in Thomas’ day, this sounds a lot like “human rights,” a concept, Keenan observes, that is “undeniably present throughout [Thomas’] moral theology and philosophy.”
He further demonstrates that Thomas believed that God empowered humans “to enjoy freedom and determine the shape of their lives” and are “owed by right that which is necessary to … develop their human capacities and potential.”
Such self determination brings to mind a formal declaration made by freedom-seeking subjects of England’s King George III in July of 1776. While there is scant evidence that any of the Founding Fathers read Aquinas, it has been suggested that a full understanding of the Declaration of Independence includes at least some knowledge of Thomas’ philosophy.
Nonetheless, to modern readers, the saint’s writings are not easily digestible. Even Keenan, former director of Oxford’s Aquinas Institute, acknowledges that Thomas is not the “the type of thinker whose work you can pick up and read cover-to-cover.”
Likewise, the general reader should approach Keenan’s own analysis with the understanding that this book is not the breeziest of introductions to Thomas Aquinas. Yet even after so many centuries, Thomas still offers answers — however difficult the questions — to those willing to listen.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.