Mr. Nathan Turowsky (STH ’17) Publishes Commentary on Thomas and the Super-Thomists

The following is an excerpt from Mr. Nathan Turowsky’s commentary “Thomas and the Super-Thomists,” published on May 24, 2022 in Where Peter Is. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Boston University School of Theology, its employees, faculty, or students. 

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Not only does Aquinas come in for feting as a uniquely correct or authoritative theologian, he is something of a Catholic cultural icon even in contexts that have nothing to do with academic theology, Eucharistic piety, or anything else for which he is widely known. I’ve heard people suggest him as an intercessor for needs ranging from minor health complaints to family members in danger of losing their faith, as if he were a medieval-Marian-piety-esque jack-of-all-trades. Even in the heyday of pre-Vatican II Neo-Scholasticism he did not have a cultus of this kind; those were the days in which church after church, at least in the United States, saw a statue of St. Anthony and a statue of St. Thérèse installed on either side of the sanctuary. A popular cultus of Aquinas is in itself welcome because it indicates a more erudite Catholic laity, but looked at in combination with the trend towards attempting to rehabilitate the “Aquinas knows best” current in Catholic philosophy, it begins to look like an awful lot is being placed on the Dumb Ox’s admittedly broad and sturdy shoulders.

Why is this? A simple answer, as I alluded to above, is that there was a time when St. Thomas’s positions and reasoning style were seen as not only examples but exemplars of sound theology, and sound theology is a major issue in the Church, especially in the corners of the Church that think that the current magisterial authorities lack it. There is a disproportionate overlap between Catholics whose experience of the faith emphasizes formal theology, those who take conservative or traditionalist views on what that theology ought to express and how it ought to express it, and those whose formation in the faith was heavily influenced by practices developed in Neo-Scholasticism’s period of dominance. All three categories also overlap disproportionately, perhaps especially among laypeople, with Catholics who are interested in serving the Church as educators or in various media apostolates.

All of this, combined with the fact that Leo XIII and Pius X really did speak extremely highly of Aquinas in terms of his quality of thought and reliability as a theological and philosophical authority, produce an intellectual environment in which St. Thomas has a stature almost like that of Karl Marx in pre-1950s leftist political thought: if he speaks directly to something, he’s right about it unless proven beyond all reasonable doubt otherwise, and if he doesn’t speak directly to something, figuring out what he might have or would have thought about it is a surefire way to arrive at a sound position. Of course, eventually even diehard communists mostly came to acknowledge that Marxism was not actually a complete worldview in and of itself that could be applied to every imaginable scholarly question, and I expect that eventually even diehard Catholic traditionalists will acknowledge this about Thomism. Certainly the fact that there is at least one dogmatically defined subject (discussed below) on which Aquinas was wrong means that it’s already impossible to elevate him quite as much as Marx used to be elevated on the far left.

So what’s the problem? Simply put, the problem is that even if Thomas Aquinas is generally a reliable key to Catholic theology and attendant areas of philosophy, and even if the sense that he’s more than that, some sort of para-magisterial authority in his own right, is probably a passing phase in Catholic thought, he still should not be overemphasized at the expense of other thinkers who might illuminate certain issues better. St. Bonaventure’s contemplations on the “book of Scripture and the book of Nature” and the relationship between Time and Eternity might, for instance, better situate environmental theology than anything in Aquinas. I have also seen those particular concepts applied to the rationales underlying the sacrament of marriage. Non-Scholastic anonymous mystical texts like The Cloud of Unknowing and Revelations of Divine Love, many of which are written in late medieval vernacular English, might provide keys to ecumenical contact with Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and even Judaism and Islam, as might much of St. Teresa of Ávila’s body of work.

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