What is Thomism?
Thomism is an intellectual tradition that emerges in the late Medieval era with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), at the same time that universities began to rise to prominence out of the earlier monastic tradition, and it continues down to the present today in the numerous adopters and commentators who interpret and propagate the thought of Aquinas. This succeeding propagation has seen Aquinas’ method, teaching, and system grow and develop through time, so that today we find in Thomism a well-reasoned and orderly whole that provides a coherent and stable interpretive framework for the whole of reality—inclusive of God the Creator and His creation.
I will here focus on the philosophical dimension of Thomism, even while this aspect is deeply interwoven with his overarching theological commitments.
St. Thomas’ way of doing philosophy closely tracks the practice of the late Middle Ages. It involves reasoned reflection upon what is given in sense experience (the beginning of all knowledge), coupled with sifting the various positions at play in the philosophical (and theological) writings bequeath to him and his contemporaries from the whole of the (prior) Western tradition. Therefore, it involves investigating the whole of reality in community with others, questioning everything in tandem with the thought of the major figures of previous ages, while disputing with one another over controversial topics and their subtleties.
The primary figures engaged by Aquinas are the classical Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, upon whom—to borrow and extend an idea from A.N. Whitehead—the remainder of philosophy is but a footnote. Yet, by no means only these two greats: Aquinas also owes a debt of gratitude to the Presocratics (particularly Parmenides and Heraclitus), to the Classical Romans (part. Cicero and Boethius), to the early Christian Medievals (part. Augustine and Pseudo Dionysius), to Muslim and Jewish thinkers (part. Avicenna/Ibn Sina, Averroes/Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides/Moses ben Maimon), and to his late medieval confreres (part. Albert the Great) … and, of course, as a late medieval theologian, Aquinas does all this under the umbrella of the Catholic Christian faith to which he is fully committed.
As a result of his close investigation of reality, together with his intense engagement with other philosophers arrayed throughout place and time, Aquinas forges an expansive and coherent synthesis of the scientific, philosophical, and theological thought of his day. His synthesis is definitely a work of genius inasmuch as it involves the production of a coherent conceptual framework that provides a clearly delineated interpretive key to the nature of reality, in which each teaching forms part a complex intellectual structure. Thus, to understand part (a teaching) is to enter into an understanding of the whole of the interwoven complex (the system).
And this is exactly how those who came after Aquinas—most often called his commentators—received and adopted his teachings and system. Having understood his writings, in part or in whole, these individuals (initially often Dominicans) recognized the incisive and stout character of Aquinas’ teachings, and they sought, as a result, to communicate his immense intellectual heritage to others by employing his system to answer philosophical questions both old and new. In this way, Thomism remained an integral whole while developing through time and progressively taking into consideration the novelties introduced in the modern and contemporary eras.
These novelties began in earnest with the ‘turn to the subject’ inaugurated by René Descartes and propelled by Immanuel Kant, before morphing into Phenomenology and Continental philosophy on one side, and Analytical philosophy on the other (the two dominant strands present in contemporary thought). Thomism readily met the demands of these competing worldviews, while also, in some strands, incorporating the genuine insights emerging from these new philosophical movements.
Evidently then, Thomism is a time-tested system of thought, inasmuch as it is a doctrinal structure containing numerous concepts coherently arrayed and logically intertwined, embracing the grounding premises from which these concepts have been forged, together with the reasoning processes through which the whole system has been developed and is maintained. As something proven by so many thinkers throughout such an immense length of time, Thomism is a robust system of thought, well-established and validated. Of course, this gives us much confidence in Aquinas’ system of thought—many reasons why we can and should, at least tentatively, give ourselves over to his thought as a guide in the life of the mind.
However, notwithstanding its comprehensive, full-bodied, and precise nature, Thomism is not a rigid and immutable doctrinal framework, but a living intellectual heritage that propagates, grows, and develops slowly through time at the hands of numerous thinkers who ever new adhere to the system of Aquinas. Yet, given the manifold differences of those who take up the mantle of Aquinas—their historical, geographical, and linguistic separation, the variability of their tendencies and interests, the acuity of their abilities and skills, and their already given formation—Thomism will mean vastly different things at the hands of its numerous promulgators.
Partly as a result of this, several differentiated Thomistic Schools are currently acknowledged—such as Existential and Essential Thomism, Transcendental and Phenomenological Thomism, Neo-Scholastic and Analytical Thomism, etc.—each of which provides a subtly different form of Thomistic thought in the contemporary world. The variation of form lies in the differentiated way some or other feature of Aquinas’ thought is stressed—such as existence or essence in Existential and Essential Thomism—and sometimes the variation lies in the way Thomism incorporates (or refrains from incorporating) the philosophical developments subsequent to Aquinas—such as Neo-Scholastic, Phenomenological and Analytical Thomism.
Finally, I should note the centrality of Aquinas and Thomism in what has come to be called the philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy). The philosophia perennis identifies the way philosophical methods and teachings have developed slowly and progressively through time in the Western tradition. Though much modern and contemporary philosophy ‘restarts’ the philosophical venture in some or other putative foundational insight, an alternate way to approach philosophy—the one tracked by Aquinas and Thomists—is to understand philosophy as a communal venture that gradually develops through time at the hands of many thinkers, sometimes slowly, sometimes at great pace.
According to this understanding, Aquinas represents a high point in the development of the philosophia perennis, both because the tradition that came before him was brilliantly synthesized at his hands, and because the tradition that comes after him could rely upon this foundational synthesis as the firm ground upon which further developments became possible. The integrity of Aquinas the man, together with the synthesis he wrought at his particular historical moment, enabled this centrality of Aquinas in the philosophia perennis. The import of all this cannot easily be overstated.
