Aquinas, Anyone?

Ferment in the Church appeared to reach a peak in the wake of the October 2019 Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region. Outré theological positions crafted 50 years ago were anointed as a new normal for a novum named the Synodal Church. With each synod of the Bergoglio papacy, the Church inches toward the Anglican model. But the Amazonian synod broke new and shocking ground. It strained for nothing less than the replacement of the eternal Logos with the pagan mythos, resulting in chilling echoes of the “abomination of desolation” from the book of Maccabees.

But, surprisingly, this new theological inversion seems to be serving transcendent providential designs. This undisguised embrace of syncretism, at best, or full-blown paganism, at worst, is like ice water splashed in the face of a long somnolent Catholic faithful. Scales are falling from the eyes of scores who were once willing to “let the spirit blow where it will” or to accommodate the Church to the “spirit of the times.” They now see where that wind was intended to blow. Included among them are more and more of the Catholic intelligentsia, as well as the effete theological Brahmans seated in seminaries and universities, not a few of whom have spent the past decades playfully flirting with daringly new theological paths.

Even Catholics of a more cautious stripe have been given pause. These, once quite certain that the mere glorious exposition of the beauty of the faith would be sufficient to bring the Church’s enemies to their senses, have been shaken. These Catholics are the ones once loath to speak ill of error, to punish, or ever to use prohibition from Holy Communion as a “weapon.” Yes, even such as these are waking to the bitter price of irenicism. Hands-off toleration is showing its real face, and those dear Catholics are regretting their half-century exercise in naïveté. It seems they never learned the lessons given at our mothers’ knees: God helps those who help themselves. Ignoring that truism leads down the road of presumption. Irenicism only feeds the theological beast, and soon the beast begins to feed on the innocent.

Perhaps it is time for the Church to unchain her own slayer of theological beasts, St. Thomas Aquinas. For too long, the Common Doctor has been relegated to an inglorious exile. For well-nigh half a century, the conventional theological class has sedulously censored St. Thomas when not vilifying him. Even when invoked — remember Transcendental Thomism and the nouvelle théologie? — it was only through the lenses of Kant and Heidegger, effectively neutering him. To their mind, for good reason. These au courant theologians knew well that the writings of the Angelic Doctor form the thick steel wall protecting the faith against the seepage of modernity. Tear it down, and the faith is fatally exposed. This is not hyperbole; it is the Magisterium.

Pope Leo XIII, after citing 600 years’ worth of pontifical praise for St. Thomas, concludes a section of Aeterni Patris (1879) thus: “To these judgments of great pontiffs on St. Thomas Aquinas comes the crowning testimony of Innocent VI: ‘His teaching above that of others…enjoys such an elegance of phraseology, a method of statement, a truth of proposition, that those who hold it are never found swerving from the path of truth, and who dares assail it will always be suspected of error’” (no. 21). As an intriguing aside, the same encyclical reveals, “It has come to light that there were not lacking among the leaders of heretical sects some who openly declared that, if the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas were only taken away, they could easily battle with all Catholic leaders, gain the victory, and abolish the Church. A vain hope indeed, but no vain testimony” (no. 23).

To repeat, this was written in 1879. Over 50 years of Thomistic deprivation gives ringing confirmation to these Leonine monita.

If there be still any so starry-eyed as to doubt this effective modernist strategy, they need only roam the writings of the modernists themselves. Abbé Henri Huvelin, the 19th-century vicar of Église Saint-Augustin in Paris, was the mentor of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, both vintage modernists. Huvelin once solemnly cautioned von Hügel, “Scholasticism clarifies things by impoverishing them…. [Scholastics] do not understand that life, all life, escapes analysis. What they dissect is the dead body…. Pass them by with a gentle, very gentle, smile; pass them by.” Étienne Gilson remembers trolley rides with the censured modernist Père Lucien Laberthonnière when he was a student at the Sorbonne. Over and over, the embittered heretic inveighed against the evils inflicted on the Church and mankind by St. Thomas.

For these early modernists, the dream of burying St. Thomas would have to await a more propitious time. It would arrive in the 1950s, when the modernists gained sufficient seats in seminaries and universities. That time reached its full moment a decade later, when the shepherds of the Church let the modernists have their way beneath the banner of ressourcement and a new “historical consciousness.” And so St. Thomas was shunned, and the faith withered.

G.K. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy (1908):

Of all the horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within…. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, as fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

We can’t know for sure, but it may well be that Chesterton wrote those memorable lines after reading paragraph 39 of Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), in which Pope St. Pius X coined the now nearly canonical phrase describing modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.”

Modernism earned that epithet because it sweeps away God as a real Person and replaces Him as the sum total of man’s finest impulses. Nothing more. Or, as Chesterton declared, “the god within.” This is man’s apotheosis and the death of faith, a kind of atheism-lite. No heresy gained so much in so little time. It attacked with a ferocity and thoroughness more than all other heresies combined. Each heresy from Arianism to Jansenism aimed its fire at one article of the Creed or another, but never at the existence of God Himself. But while modernism is grotesque, it preens in the finery of modernity’s most cherished pieties. Hence, its appeal is never to be underestimated.

Behold modernism’s amazing stealth. It entangles itself around the Catholic soul with stunning success, slowly squeezing from it any breath of Catholic life. Examine the smarmy antinomianism on display in the liturgical songs mumbled in most parishes. By tugging at heartstrings, they sedate reason, resulting in a treacly subjectivism that recoils at the stentorian objectivity of the Nicene Creed. Under this burden, most ordinary Catholics see doctrinal fidelity as rigidity, eliciting a fear once reserved for mortal sin.

St. Jerome famously remarked in the fourth century that the world awoke and found itself Arian. Fr. Arius’s error seemed to set its stranglehold on the Church overnight. Similarly, modernism. Poll any group of Catholics and prepare to be shocked by the vast percentages who have embraced its premises: that God is not to be found in the truth proclaimed by the Church but, rather, in an exploration of the “Inner Light.” This claustrophobic world becomes a backdrop for a new creed, a cruel facsimile of the real one. Like Mr. Jones worshiping Mr. Jones, the incessant blather among Catholics about the “spirit” is not the severe fire of the Holy Ghost breathing His ineffable gifts but Mr. Jones stroking Mr. Jones. Modernism paves the way for a whole new “spirituality”: preparing man not for spiritual combat but therapeutic absorption.

Thus, modernism stands on two pillars. The first is subjectivism: truth is merely a construction of the individual mind, requiring the replacement of truth as adequatio mentis ad rem (conformity of the mind to the thing) to the fatal adequatio mentis ad vitam (conformity of the mind to life.) The second follows from the first as its logical consequence. The individual “me” is the center of the world with his “experience” critical to the enterprise of life and religion. Every inch of St. Thomas’s being would be repulsed by these claims. Every dot and comma of his metaphysics shriek against solipsism of this sort. To him, it is the cyanide of the intellect.

Each of the ten million words of Thomas’s theology and philosophy revolts against the idea that man is the center of the cosmos. The Angelic Doctor would have instantly recognized that such thinking is nothing less than standing reality on its head. Think of it this way: St. Thomas’s teachings line up like an army of ten thousand armored tanks poised for attack against the modernist enormity. Against the Church’s Thomistic might, there is no contest. Modernists grasped this perfectly. So did Leo XIII. “Among the Scholastic Doctors,” he wrote, “the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because ‘he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all’” (Aeterni Patris, no. 17). St. Thomas is the Church’s Samson; modernism is her Delilah.

St. Thomas teaches that reality is the thing, not what is in our minds. Our minds are given to us only that they might conform themselves to reality. That, in fact, is Thomas’s definition of truth. What is inside the mind only counts if it precisely reflects what is outside the mind, which is exactly why St. Thomas’s philosophy is called realist. No Ph.D. is necessary to appreciate that. No wonder the modernists squirm beneath that kind of talk. They intend to remake the world according to their “image and likeness.” God must be tossed from the picture so they can become the picture. What a shock to the Canadian bishops in 1969, flush with the appetite for aggiornamento, when they asked Dr. Marshall McLuhan how they could better understand the modern communications revolution. Good Catholic that he was, he promptly replied, “Read St. Thomas’s De Spiritualibus Creaturis.”

For the better part of the past century, a Catholic student’s only dip into philosophy consisted in a pell-mell look at diverse philosophical opinions. Never would one be declared better than another, as one “outlook” or “perspective” is as good as any other. Truth is simply one’s own “story” or “narrative,” and the real crime against humanity is believing one’s “story” truer than another’s. This is that much-touted “mosaic,” or, to a more Catholic ear, the “seamless garment.” How far this is from the lucid words of St. Thomas: “The end of philosophy is not to know what men have thought but in what consists the truth of things.”

Leo XIII was aptly named. Only a lion could roar the dictates of Aeterni Patris like this one: “Let teachers be carefully chosen to do their best to instill the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas into the minds of their hearers; and let them clearly point out its solidity and excellence above all other teaching. Let this doctrine be the light of all places of learning which you may have already opened, or may hereafter open. Let it be used for the refutation of errors that are gaining ground” (no. 31).

For St. Thomas, the whole world of reality was made by God and for God and reaches its only fulfillment in God. Man is created by God to find God so that he might find himself and so find happiness. Man is not made to look into himself but always to look at God. When he wants to hear God, he doesn’t listen to his “inner voice”; he listens and surrenders to the voice of His bride, the Holy Catholic Church. That voice is normatively heard in the public worship of the Church, the Holy Mass. That voice is muffled when Catholics are tutored in the liturgy-as-canvas school: created anew with the palette of the community’s need. But where is God?

Thomas Aquinas knew. Catholics must again lean their heads upon the wisdom of St. Thomas, as he often leaned his head on the tabernacle as he wrote. Catholics must guard the walls of the sacred city of the Church. But they stand strong only when bearing the arms of Aquinas. If not, the city falls.

Fr. John A. Perricone, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor of Philosophy at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York. His articles have appeared in St. John’s Law Review, The Latin Mass, The Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, and at CrisisMagazine.com.

(Article was originally published in New Oxford Review, December 2021)

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[ Image credit: St Thomas Aquinas, Public Domain, Wikimedia ]