Why Study Aquinas Today?

This essay offers an evaluation about the future of Catholic theology. It argues that those interested in approaching the study of theology will benefit from a close reading and study of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Appropriate help also comes from consultation of the Thomist Commentatorial Tradition. The author lists five reasons that should persuade the attentive reader to the rightness of the article’s central thesis. Aquinas is then presented as the Safeguard of Catholic Orthodoxy, Defender of Cognitive and Ontological Realism, Integrator combining faith and reason and presenting a coherent synthesis of the entire depositum fidei, Spiritual Master, and Guide for the Theologian Today. The opportuneness of this essay becomes evident when one considers how much Catholic theology, worldwide, has become diversified in the period that followed the close of the Second Vatican Council (1965). In the majority of places where theology is taught, especially the major universities, the study of theology has, in fact, become a survey of what different theologians, both Catholic and others, have said or written. Aquinas, on the other hand, sees Catholic theology as a science, mainly speculative, that develops from God’s own knowledge of himself. The Church’s repeated commendation of Aquinas as a sure guide for doing Catholic theology, including in the post-conciliar period, provides the best grounds for choosing Aquinas’s works over those of other authors, both medieval and modern. Indeed, Popes have praised Aquinas as a Doctor of the Church (the first after the patristic period to be so identified) who enjoys a certain preeminence over the other learned men and women who also enjoy the same designation.