The Leonine Revival
The modern history of Thomism may be said to begin with the appearance of Leo XIII ' s encyclical Aeterni Patris in August 1879. Thomas Aquinas, who was not mentioned until the midpoint of the papal document, was taken to be representative of a style of philosophy -an alternate title of the encyclical was On Christian Philosophy -and not the unique instance of that style. But if Albert the Great and Bonaventure, as well as many of the Fathers, were cited, the thought of Thomas was said to epitomize the best of the best, such that in studying him one received the benefi t of all the others (see Chapter 9 , The Christian Contribution to Medieval Philosophical Theology). Leo clearly regarded Thomas himself as a veritable summa of the perennial philosophy, a phrase appropriated by the Thomistic revival. And Leo ' s successors, notably Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII, lent their authority to Thomas almost to the exclusion of other Christian teachers.
During his lifetime (1225 -74), immediately after his death, and throughout the intervening centuries, Thomas Aquinas had as many opponents as he had followers. As a newly installed Dominican Master of Theology, he found himself in a fi erce battle at the University of Paris, defending the propriety of mendicant monks holding university professorships. His appropriation of Aristotle was to make him a target of Franciscan criticism, including that of Bonaventure, when the controversy over Latin Averroism heated up. And, among the 219 propositions condemned in 1277, three years after the death of Thomas, by a commission appointed by the bishop of Paris, are to be found a number of Thomistic tenets. The dispute over Aristotle, actually a dispute over Avicennian and Averroistic interpretations of Aristotle, dominated Thomas ' s second regency at Paris (1269 -72). Its lasting effect was to establish a rivalry between the Dominicans and Franciscans, with Thomas functioning as the paladin of his order, and John Duns Scotus (and other Franciscans) opposing him. During what has been called Second Scholasticism, which took place after the Reformation and was largely an Iberian phenomenon, the Jesuits became the preferred opponents of Thomists, who were usually Dominicans. It would be quite wrong, accordingly, to imagine that Thomas enjoyed an intellectual hegemony in European universities prior to the Reform, or indeed after it among Catholics. The Thomistic revival initiated by Leo XIII was thus A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition Edited by C. Taliaferro, P. Draper and P. L. Quinn