Thomism

   Broadly, Thomism is the school of thought that grants special authority to the systematic thought of Thomas Aquinas in theological and philosophical issues. More narrowly, Thomism involves the views of those within the Order of Preachers (Dominicans). Early Thomism developed in the fourteenth century as the Summa Theologiae replaced Peter Lombard's Sentences as a standard textbook among Dominicans. By the eighteenth century Thomism had stagnated owing to a failure to engage with the philosophical shift to a modern worldview that dispensed with forms, potencies and final causes. In the early nineteenth century some scholars began advocating a neo-Thomism, a move that came to fruition with Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which commended the programmatic use of Aquinas among Roman-Catholic scholars as a response to the challenge of modernity. Initially much of the resulting work was weak in historical sensitivity, but this has been addressed through the work of scholars like Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Neo-Thomism underwent a further permutation with the work of theologians like Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, who developed a transcendental Thomism that sought greater dialogue with both the Enlightenment and the work of philosophers like Heidegger. The Second Vatican Council ended the monopoly of Thomism so that Roman-Catholic theologians and philosophers are now free to explore various schools of thought including process theology.

   See Aquinas, Thomas; Lonergan, Bernard J. F.; Rahner, Karl

   Further reading: Brezik 1981; Grenet 1967; McInerny 1966