Resources promoting the Thomistic intellectual tradition are widely available — if there was ever an uncontroversial thesis, in this information age, in the overlapping worlds of Theology and Catholicism it is surely this.
And, I am happy to lend my voice in support of the thought that the availability of Thomism is a good thing. I have watched its increase. Having come to theological awareness, first, in the somewhat sanctified halls of Duke University Divinity School from 2004-7, I can attest that the potent mezclas of Aquinas and Barth shaping the sensibilities of my various professors were, surely, a vibrant and good thing. Most of these professors assigning Aquinas were Yale-school Methodists — Stanley Hauerwas and Amy Laura Hall and J. Warren Smith significant among them — and my first Aquinas seminar was taught by Reinhard Huetter, a Lutheran who was received into the Roman Catholic Church during my time in the M.Div. program. As a Methodist seminarian, then, I experienced firsthand the way in which the new Thomistic ressourcement was a good thing. I came to love Aquinas under the tutelage of these people. When I first encountered the works of Fr. Thomas Joseph White and Matthew Levering, I was both instructed by them and grateful for what they were doing, and that is still the case.
The years since I’ve graduated from Duke have only seen an increase in the availability of Thomistic texts and voices: the English and the Latin of Aquinas’ ST are both available in convenient forms without the mediation of any paywall, as are legion voices capable of competently teaching both Thomas and more developed and nuanced Thomistic positions. These range from the highest levels of erudite academic theology to the most popular, and span media from text to video to all the multivarious organs of social media: Pope Leo XIII’s strong recommendation of St. Thomas in Aeterni Patris has surely been heeded in significant ways in this information age.
And yet the Thomistic tradition does not contain, alone, the sum total of Christian faith nor of theology nor of philosophy.
Alongside St. Thomas — even in Aeterni Patris (par. 14) — stands the Franciscan Intellectual tradition represented by its seraphic doctor St. Bonaventure.
As a scholar of, and enthusiast for, the Victorine-Franciscan theological stream, I cannot help but note that it boasts little of the same wide availability of publicly accessible, high quality, no-paywall English texts. That this is the case seems to me to the direct detriment to the spread of this tradition. And it seems like an obstacle which can be surmounted.
The situation is also surely ironic. That the intellectual & spiritual tradition of the poverello should, in the information age, prove difficult to access, even in terms of major texts of the most significant figures — figures of incalculable influence in at once the theological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of the Church and the world — cannot help but occasion remark. Does this intellectual tradition earnestly intend its own continuation and spread? Is it content to exist in diminishing form in fewer and fewer academic halls?
What are needed are more theologians and friars and priests and religious sisters and brothers willing to speak and teach their Victorine-Franciscan perspectives at a variety of intellectual levels, and scholars being willing to share even “good enough” versions of their translations of key Victorine and Franciscan works without the intervention of any paywall or purchase.
In short, what is needed are for the basic texts to be freely available in English, and for a body of teaching and commentary and scholarship and reflection to grow up around them.
Happily, in this regard, those who would learn from the wisdom of the Early Franciscans have received a substantial gift in Schumacher and Bychkov’s translations of a narrow but important selection of texts from the Summa Halensis, which Fordham is giving away for FREE (yes, selling them online for $0) in eBook edition. The Summa Halensis is, among other important things, the foundational textual pedagogy of Franciscan theological culture, arising from the first generation of Franciscan academics at the University of Paris gathered around “doctor irrefragibilis,” Alexander of Hales, teacher of St. Bonaventure.
A further gift, and not to be overlooked, is that Peter Simpson has made available his translations of Bl. John Duns Scotus’ Ordinatio, among other significant works. Thank you Professor Simpson!
Despite such remarkable gifts, much remains to be done to make the riches of the Victorine-Franciscan tradition available, to bring them to bear in ways that contribute to Christian intellectual and spiritual flourishing, to the fullest.
Hopefully this blog and resource site can contribute to all this in some small ways.
— Pax et bonum —