Notes from an Anglican Thomist

Editor’s Note: This essay concludes our special series celebrating the 800th birthday of Thomas Aquinas.

I am an Anglican, and I’m a Thomist. The percentage of the world’s population familiar with both terms is surely less than 1 percent. Yet, when I find myself conversing with these one-percenters, a surprisingly high number of them express astonishment at my claim to be both an Anglican and a Thomist. Their reaction is the same as if I’d said I’m an anarchist and a monarchist, or an anti-feminist feminist. Is it really possible to be an Anglican Thomist?

Why not? Being an Anglican means belonging to the Anglican Communion or adhering to a theological perspective rooted in the history of the Church of England. Being a Thomist means adhering to the ideas and theological insights of the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Plenty of Anglicans refer to themselves as Barthians or Augustinians. Why shouldn’t Thomists be invited to the party?

There is no inherent contradiction between Anglicanism and Thomism, and this should be an uncontroversial claim. As the German Protestant theologian Ulrich Kühn once wrote, Thomas Aquinas “belongs among the fathers of Protestant theology” and “deserves to be listened to as a pre-Reformation theologian, not as a voice in the chorus of post-Tridentine theology.”

Virtually all the perceived tensions between Thomism and Anglicanism stem from historical accidents rather than any fundamental theological incompatibility. Aquinas has held a position of theological prominence in Western Catholicism since his time, the 13th century, although he was not without his detractors. His use of Aristotle’s ideas — thanks to new Latin translations of texts that were previously thought to be lost — brought Aquinas’s works under the suspicion of those who believed that Platonism was the philosophical school most compatible with Christian dogma. He nevertheless came to be revered as a theological authority, and he was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567.

Aquinas’s reputation as a Roman Catholic theologian, over against Protestant theology, resulted in large part from Martin Luther’s failure to understand him. As David Steinmetz writes in an important essay, “While some early Protestant reformers were well versed in Thomistic theology, Martin Luther was not among them.” Nevertheless, Luther criticized what he mistakenly saw as Pelagian tendencies in Aquinas’s thought. The problem is that Luther didn’t read Aquinas. Instead, he read about Aquinas’s thought in the writings of later scholastics like Gabriel Biel who were formidable theologians but unreliable interpreters of Thomistic theology.

Luther thought that Aquinas uncritically adopted Aristotle’s philosophy of human nature and dressed it up in religious language. But nothing could be further from the truth. While Aquinas often did use Aristotelian distinctions to articulate the finer nuances of his theology, his core theological commitments are decidedly un-Aristotelian. Consider, for example, Aquinas’s definition of virtue: “Virtue is a good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us.” It’s difficult to imagine a more un-Aristotelian (or anti-Pelagian) concept of virtue than Aquinas’s.

Aquinas was one of many important theological voices during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods, but it was in the late 19th century that he became enshrined as the Roman Catholic theologian par excellence. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni patris (1879), in response to the rising threats of modernism and secular philosophy, sought to reestablish Christian philosophy based on the writings of Aquinas.

One will search in vain for a more hyperbolic description of Aquinas’s genius. Leo writes, “[R]eason, borne on the wings of Thomas to its human height, can scarcely rise higher, while faith could scarcely expect more or stronger aids from reason than those which she has already obtained through Thomas.” Moreover, Aquinas is portrayed as a bulwark against whom critics of the Roman Catholic Church can only tremble in fear: “For it has come to light that there were not lacking among the leaders of heretical sects some who openly declared that, if the teaching of Thomas Aquinas were only taken away, they could easily battle with all Catholic teachers, gain the victory, and abolish the Church.” Such descriptions bolster the ahistorical narrative of Aquinas the Roman Catholic polemical theologian standing in opposition to Protestantism, a phenomenon that emerged more than two centuries after his death. For comparison, that gap is the roughly same distance as George Washington’s presidency and today.

It was also Pope Leo XIII who declared Anglican ordinations to be “absolutely null and utterly void” in his 1896 apostolic letter, Apostolicae curae. It should come as no surprise then that the relationship between Anglicanism and Thomism has been somewhat fraught.

For a broader coverage of the general history of “Thomism,” especially in relation to Thomas becoming the perceived Roman Catholic theologian par excellence, see Frederick Bauerschmidt’s essay in this Covenant series. Despite these accidents of history, many Anglicans (including yours truly) have found a treasure trove of theological resources in Aquinas’s writings. Book I of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, one of the most important theological texts in the Anglican tradition, shows unmistakable traces of Aquinas’s influence. Contemporary scholars debate the extent to which Hooker might be described as a Thomist (J.S. Marshall went so far as to say that Hooker’s Laws is an English Summa), but there can be no doubt that Aquinas’s account of the natural law, which is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God, informed Hooker’s thought as he attempted to defend the Elizabethan Settlement against its critics. For Hooker, the polity of the Church of England is defensible on both biblical and rational grounds.

In the 17th century, the Caroline Divines engaged Aquinas’s writings in a much more systematic way than Hooker, and it is their engagement that cements Aquinas’s reputation as a crucial figure in Anglican moral theology. As Peter Sedgwick notes in his excellent, two-volume history of Anglican moral theology, Anglican writers like Jeremy Taylor and Robert Sanderson “saw themselves as being moral theologians who discerned the true likeness of Aquinas after it had been obscured by many blemishes.” These blemishes include legalism, a lack of emphasis on the Beatitudes, and the narrow focus on individual moral acts. In many ways, the work of these 17th-century Anglican divines prefigure important trends in late 20th-century Catholic moral theology, which sought to reinterpret and reframe Aquinas as a virtue ethicist.

It might be a surprise to some, but Aquinas did not play a leading role in the Catholic revival in Anglicanism known as the Oxford Movement. John Henry Newman, the movement’s most prominent figure, translated Aquinas’s Catena Aurea (a collection of patristic texts commenting on the four Gospels) into English, but beyond this endeavor he left us with no substantial engagement with Aquinas’s thought. The Oxford Movement was motivated by a return ad fontes, a return to the writings of the early church fathers to make the case for Anglicanism as an authentic expression of Catholic Christianity.

The 20th century was the golden age of Anglican Thomism. If the fathers of the Oxford Movement had little to say about the Angelic Doctor, they nevertheless paved the way for a fresh and bold engagement with Aquinas in subsequent generations. Twentieth-century Anglican theologians didn’t hesitate to claim Aquinas as one of their own. These thinkers include philosophical theologians like Austin Farrer, E.L. Mascall, and Victor Preller, as well as the moral theologian Kenneth Kirk, whose magnum opus, The Vision of God, is one of the most important works of moral theology in the 20th century.

Because of the pioneering work of these earlier figures, Anglican theologians today are uninhibited in their engagement with Aquinas. I’m grateful to these forebears, because thanks to them I’m free to draw upon and write about Aquinas’s thought simply as a theologian. I don’t have to pretend that I’m involved in some imagined “Anglican Thomist” project, as if there were such a thing. There are many versions of Thomism on offer, but “Anglican Thomism” (as a discrete school of thought or interpretation) is not one of them. There are simply Anglican Thomists, meaning Anglicans who are Thomists, and I am happy to count myself among them.

Aquinas’s contributions to theology cannot be reduced to a single idea. If there is a common thread to these Anglican Thomists, though, it is the claim that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” In other words, there is a sense in which we can study the world — the nature of things — as it is simply given to us and perceived by our senses. This means that truth can come to us from many sources: the sciences, philosophy, psychology, literature. At the same time, the fullness of truth — the world as God intends it to be — can only be known by the light of revelation. We cannot become who we were ultimately created to be without the aid of divine grace.

St. Thomas Aquinas expressed his greatest wish with the words Domine, non nisi Te (“Lord, nothing except you”). This longing for divine truth will continue to draw students of theology — Anglican, Roman Catholic, and others — to Aquinas for centuries to come.