Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose Wikipedia entries in Portuguese and Slovene (neither of which I read) are for some reason a major source of traffic to this site, is an important forebear of the Dominican tradition in which some of us stand.
His Rule remains part of the Constitutions to this day, and his influence suffuses the great theologians and spiritual writers of Dominicanism.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose Feast is today, was a Dominican.
Therefore, far from being the rupture with Augustinianism that is often asserted, his thought is wholly within it, and indeed utterly incomprehensible apart from it.
Other attempts to affirm the Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination are not necessarily in opposition to Thomism; rather, under the Magisterium, which is its own point of reference and correction, it provides their point of reference and correction.
This applies to the entire rational and empirical systems, since, at least in the context of those who devised these systems in Early Modern Europe, the very belief in the possibility of true knowledge by rational or empirical means – indeed, of true knowledge at all – is Augustinian, and indeed Thomist.
Saint John Paul the Great, in Fides et Ratio, commended at once Thomism in paragraphs 43 and 44, and the works of Blessed John Henry Newman, Blessed Antonio Rosmini, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and Russians of various stripes alongside Maritain and Gilson in paragraph 74, not to mention engagement with Indian and other non-Western philosophies in paragraph 73.
Alas that Chesterton defines Aquinas against the Christianised Neoplatonism of the Augustinian illuminist tradition, rather than recognising Thomism’s Christianised Aristotelianism as nevertheless belonging within, and greatly enriching, that tradition.
Had Chesterton done this, then he would have been quite astonishingly prescient in this as in so many other areas.
However, what Chesterton writes about Thomism as the definitive philosophical articulation of the worldview that he shares is of course entirely correct.
In Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), he sets out that “the primary or fundamental Part” of Thomism “or indeed the Catholic Philosophy” is “the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World.”
Precisely so.
Ora pro nobis.
Saint John Paul the Great, in Fides et Ratio, commended at once Thomism in paragraphs 43 and 44, and the works of Blessed John Henry Newman, Blessed Antonio Rosmini, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and Russians of various stripes alongside Maritain and Gilson in paragraph 74, not to mention engagement with Indian and other non-Western philosophies in paragraph 73.
Alas that Chesterton defines Aquinas against the Christianised Neoplatonism of the Augustinian illuminist tradition, rather than recognising Thomism’s Christianised Aristotelianism as nevertheless belonging within, and greatly enriching, that tradition.
Had Chesterton done this, then he would have been quite astonishingly prescient in this as in so many other areas.
However, what Chesterton writes about Thomism as the definitive philosophical articulation of the worldview that he shares is of course entirely correct.
In Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), he sets out that “the primary or fundamental Part” of Thomism “or indeed the Catholic Philosophy” is “the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World.”
Precisely so.
Ora pro nobis.
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