Why St. Thomas Aquinas is so Important

I once witnessed an exchange between two people online one of whom you could describe as a Catholic celebrity which isn't meant to be disparaging or anything like that it's just that they were a high profile Catholic thinker and commentator and over the course of the or the exchange the lesser-known individual made some sort of an appeal to st. Thomas Aquinas I don't remember what they were talking about but he seemed to think that st. Thomas had something definitive to say on the subject matter and was at that point that the traffic celebrity responded with something like st. Thomas Aquinas is fine for some people but give me your honor give me give me Conger now that little exchange may to most people appear to be just a couple of nerdy Catholics debating about who their favorite theologians are but in reality it actually speaks to a deep divide that exists within the church and so I want to address it and talk about it because it's important to understand what this divide is where it lies and how to discern between them [Music] going all the way back to the earliest days of the church evangelist and leaders started confronting a question which for them was not easy to answer which was how do we reconcile this apparent dichotomy between faith and reason which represented two kinds of knowledge faith is a knowledge that comes to us from God through revelation it's like God giving us the answer key to life and then telling us to trust him and to follow it reason is our ability to access truth through our intellectual capability and the reason this challenge emerged so quickly in the early days of the church was because of the church's collision with the greco-roman world through its evangelistic efforts because they had this rich intellectual tradition through great thinkers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle among many many more and this was kind of succinctly put by one of the early church fathers named Tertullian who said what has Athens to do with Jerusalem now on the face of it that may just sound like someone who was comparing different ethnicities or different cultures or different city-states but what he actually meant by that was a metaphor where Athens and Jerusalem were stand-ins for reason and faith Athens representing the tradition of reason and Jerusalem representing the tradition of faith because God dwelled there among the people and they lived by faith we also see right at the beginning of John's Gospel where he refers to Jesus as the logos identifying him with reason and then in acts 17 we see st. Paul engaging and debating with the Athenians trying to persuade them of the truth of the gospel so again right at beginning there's this legitimacy in this recognition of the legitimacy of reason as a path to knowledge of truth and to use it to try to persuade others but how they inform each other and how much we should rely on one versus the other was unresolved and difficult to resolve some believe that we should more so or even fully rely just on faith if God has given us all the knowledge that we need then that's all we need and this became known as fede ism took a more rational approach and said that by reason we can know all that we need to know and this tension carried on through centuries in the church until scholasticism and someone named Saint Thomas Aquinas who introduced a concept that really helped resolve this question for so many people he said that grace does not destroy nature but it perfects nature because the problem with reason is that it's a human faculty and the problem with human faculties is that through the Christian tradition we understand they are compromised by sin and clouded by sin in our fallen nature so how much we can rely upon them was always a difficult question for Christians to answer did he follow the Protestant line of thinking on this our nature and therefore our reason along with it are completely broken so you can't rely on them at all and that's why Luther said things like reason is a Luther had he had a way with words he was promoting a renewed emphasis on faith alone or just feet ISM which is why there are so many currents within Protestantism especially in American fundamentalism where when people start to ask questions people reply with things like you don't ask questions all you need is faith this is why you hear so many stories from people who backlashed against their fundamentalist upbringing because when they did start to ask questions and employ that reason inherently recognizing that there is good in their ability to think and do you employ their reason they're often met with silly slogans like when in doubt faith it out and that's unfortunate because the ancient tradition of the church is one where it has always tried to balance and harmonize faith and reason and st. Thomas Aquinas took a massive step forward in helping us resolve this by saying that grace perfects nature he's acknowledging that yes our nature is compromised but grace which is God's goodness that he gives to us and when we expose ourselves to God's goodness it takes our nature our broken nature and it raises it up it sanctifies it it elevates it so that it becomes something that we can rely upon and st. Thomas as a prolific thinker and writer did a lot more than that but this contribution the Catholic thought made it possible for faith and reason to live in a kind of harmony all the way up until the Protestant Reformation when the Reformers became this very loud voice for feet ISM once again but what we have in the church today is a climate in which tome ISM which is Thomas's branch of thinking and his his theology is treated like just one among many currents of thought that are acceptable strands of Catholicism even if they kind of compete with each other or disagree with each other tome ISM has given no pride of place even though Thomas anchored the church in resolving a question that was so difficult to answer and which if you get wrong can lead to a lot of problems and disharmony like we see in Protestantism and this is this is kind of strange because at the Council of Trent the council fathers took st. Thomas's Summa Theologica which is if you know it's his magnum opus it's his great contribution to to Catholic thought and philosophy and theology and they placed it on the high altar next to Scripture next to the Bible as a gesture to say that st. Thomas's contribution to Catholic thought is second only to Scripture and while tome isms popularity kind of abdun flowed it was renewed not just in recognition of popularity but in Magisterial or authoritative recognition in a movement that came to be known as neo scholasticism this was a time in the church in which tome is immortal mystic thought was enshrined not just as one among many theological persuasions but as the Catholic Church's official theology it was during this time that pope leo xiii wrote an encyclical called attorney Patras in which he insisted that the theologians and the clergy used st. Thomas's thought and his theology as the basis for all their theology and that it be the standard taught in all seminaries in that same encyclical he said that Aquinas is theology was a definitive exposition of Catholic doctrine so again this wasn't just a movement to try to make tome ISM a little more popular it was a magisterial way of establishing tome ism as synonymous with Catholic theology it's also important to know that during this time the church was combating a very serious heresy called modernism which Pope Saint Pius the tenth condemned as the synthesis of all heresies which could be quickly characterized as this kind of agnosticism and relativism where you could line up all kinds of currents of thought and even religions and say none of them are objectively true or maybe there isn't even an objective truth and you could just sort of pick and choose which were your favorites and and and create the sort of cafeteria sensibility of truth in the world and in the universe now on the heels of this renewal and establishment and enshrinement of tome ISM and scholasticism there emerged this new movement this new theological movement which a very well-known and prominent theologian named Reginald Gary goulash dubbed the nouvelle Taylor G and he was it's important to know that he was he was a Dominican so obviously a Thomas but he was also a prominent teacher among very important future scholars and clergymen such as Pope Saint John Paul the second and as this movement was emerging and gaining momentum lagron examined it he considered it and then he condemned it as modernism has heretical and the same criticisms that he made were taken up by Pope Pius the 12th in his encyclical humana generis and so there became this competing interest and tension for the mind of Catholicism between scholasticism or neo scholasticism which had gained Magisterial endorsement and the nouvelle taillow G which was novel untested and which was operating dangerously close to the fringes of her of heresy and this rivalry came to a head and what many describe as a confrontation at the Second Vatican Council on the one side you've got the established order of scholasticism of traditional Catholicism and then on the other you've got the nouvelle Taylor G and by most accounts it was the nouvelle Taylor G that won the day and was able to sway the council and provide the most influence in the documents that were published by the council and it has been this new brand of theology that has been extremely influential in the church ever since the council now if we can revisit that anecdote from the beginning again this isn't just a situation - in which - nerdy Catholics are championing their favorite theologians but rather to people who are defining where whether they know it or not where they reside in this this sharp divide because on the one side you've got you've got scholasticism which is sort of characterized and associated with traditional catholicism and then you've got that cast of characters that we heard about people like Karl Rahner Eve Conger and Hans Kuhn who were the leaders and the prominent theologians of the nouvelle Taylor G movement and if you know anything about these people you would know things like before the council Conger was was censored and restricted from teaching or publishing at all by Pope Pius the 12th and then as the council started to games gained steam he was invited in and became one of the most dominant leading voices and influential voices within the council Hans Kuhn suffered a similar fate after the council he was restricted and told that he couldn't teach anymore because of the heretical things that he was promoting in the aftermath of the council we eventually got a new pope in Pope Saint John Paul the second who wrote an encyclical called fidei at rat Co which means faith and reason and this was the first time that a pope had revisited this topic since Pope Leo the 13th attorney Pat Rees which if you remember was the one that enshrined tome ISM as the standard of Catholic theology as that definitive exposition of Catholic doctrine and this encyclical was met with a lot of hostility and fear by factions in the church who thought finally we've done away with scholasticism and tome ism and now novelty and newness can reign supreme in the church they rightly feared that it was a return to emphasizing faith and reason as it had been established and understood thanks to st. Thomas who ends up being like this gadfly that just won't go away like you you put him away you bury him you proclaim his death and then he sort of comes back to life which is a pattern we see kind of similar to our Lord or the church itself so if you're like me and you found yourself disoriented and confused by the currents of thought that seemed at times incompatible but we're told we're led believe they're all compatible they're all part of the umbrella of Catholicism and you're finding yourself wanting to say well I really want to know what the Church teaches here but it seemed unclear and there seems to be these competing voices let me say that tome ISM and scholasticism as we know thanks to the Magisterial authority that established it and enshrined it is a safe place to rest your head thank you so much for watching that I really hope that you enjoyed it and you got something out of it and if you did and you want to consume more content like this then please consider subscribing to my channel or if you saw this on Facebook then like my page and follow along if you're on youtube it's not enough anymore to subscribe because YouTube wants to think that it can tell you what you should watch instead of what you actually want to watch so in this case you actually have to hit that little Bell to be notified as to whether or not I've uploaded something more recently so please subscribe and hit the bell at the same time that really helps me out a lot and if you could consider sharing this among your social network that helps me a lot too and if you want to support the making of these videos please consider supporting my business which is a communications and strategic marketing company who specializes especially in branding and web design and this is especially catered towards ministries and apostolates and parishes we have a parish web design system that we've built specifically for parishes and churches that is affordable but also beautifully packaged and easy to use so if you're interested in that check out my business which is Holdsworth design.com and hit the contact button in the navigation and get in touch and we can figure out if there's a good fit for you there

Channel: Brian Holdsworth

Views: 62,571

Rating: 4.9247513 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Holdsworth, Holdsworth Brian, Worthy Commentary

Id: dcYcgPzwk5Y

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020