So What's New About Scholasticism?

How Neo-Thomism Helped Shape the Twentieth Century

Rajesh Heynickx, Stéphane Symons, Rajesh Heynickx, Stéphane Symons

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110586589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In So What's New about Scholasticism? thirteen international scholars gauge the extraordinary impact of a religiously inspired conceptual framework in a modern society. The essays that are brought together in this volume reveal that Neo-Thomism became part of contingent social contexts and varying intellectual domains. Rather than an ecclesiastic project of like-minded believers, Neo-Thomism was put into place as a source of inspiration for various concepts of modernization and progress.

This volume reconstructs how Neo-Thomism sought to resolve disparities, annul contradictions and reconcile incongruent, new developments. It asks the question why Neo-Thomist ideas and arguments were put into play and how they were transferred across various scientific disciplines and artistic media, growing into one of the most influential master-narratives of the twentieth century.

Edward Baring, Dries Bosschaert, James Chappel, Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Rajesh Heynickx, Sigrid Leyssen, Christopher Morrissey, Annette Mülberger, Jaume Navarro, Herman Paul, Karim Schelkens, Wim Weymans and John Carter Wood reconstruct a bewildering, yet decipherable thought-structure that has left a deep mark on twentieth century politics, philosophy, science and religion.

Part I Shaping A New Society

The manuscript of Le Docteur Angélique (1930) [translated in 1931 as ‘The Angelic Doctor’] in which Jacques Maritain described the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas. In the text, Maritain argued that precisely because Thomas needed to develop his ideas when the Aristotelian corpus in Latin translation arrived, this reopened the question of the relation between faith and reason. Accordingly, Thomas’ insights could form a cultural resource in the rapidly changing world of the twentieth century. Once again, Maritain argued, western culture was at a critical juncture. [Kolbsheim (France), Cercle d‘études Jacques & Raïssa Maritain]

James Chappel

The Thomist Debate over Inequality and Property Rights in Depression-Era Europe

In recent years, inequality has become a topic of burning moral and political concern. The notion that a rising tide will lift all ships is increasingly implausible in a world of shipwrecks. Many agree that property relations will have to be reformed, perhaps radically so, in the interest of social justice. But what is “property” in the first place—does it mean anything beyond a bundle of legal claims? Curiously, the interest in inequality has not led to a revival of interest in this question. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for instance, treats the theme of inequality in encyclopedic detail but has no theory of property. Piketty is not alone. As Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith have pointed out, “property has fallen out of fashion,” as philosophers and theorists have ceased paying much attention to the issue.19 The history of philosophy, of course, provides immense resources to answer this question: until not long ago, it was a major theme of reflection across the human sciences. Thinkers like Locke, Hume, and Mill have pondered the origins of property rights, while Marx, Proudhon, and their followers attacked the institution of property at its root. Jedediah Purdy has recently looked to early American law and Enlightenment thought, showing that there exist critical appreciations of property that seek to reform but not abolish the institution.20 In a kindred spirit, this essay will focus on Thomism: a theory that, like American jurisprudence and unlike anarchism or even Marxism, has access to institutional resources that make it a living tradition for hundreds of millions of people.

Most histories of modern Thomism have focused on its epistemological and ontological dimensions in lieu of its social or ethical ones.21 The story of the Thomist theological revival is by now quite well known, as are the many conflicts that pitted traditionalists like Jacques Maritain against transcendental Thomists like Joseph Maréchal. Thomism, however, was always more than a theological doctrine: it was a social one, too, and Thomist theories of the economy were just as widely debated as Thomist theories of the intellect were. This tradition has had an immense impact on the social teachings of Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, and legions of priests and missionaries across the world. It is one of the most vibrant and influential traditions of social thinking and social justice in existence, and yet its history is poorly understood.

This essay will treat a particularly important episode in that history. Between 1928 and 1931, as the Depression rolled across the continent, a furious debate broke out over Catholic theories of property. At the time, the Church had not yet spoken definitely about capitalism, and Catholics across the continent struggled to articulate what the Church had to say about the crisis. This led to an anti-capitalist form of Thomist ethics, which specifically took aim at the sanctity of private property by arguing that state-led redistribution, and not merely charity, was required by natural law. Theologically, this was primarily the work of those influenced by classical Dominican commentators like Cajetan; socially, it took advantage of the widespread critique of capitalism that was commonplace in Catholic circles (and non-Catholic ones, too). This coincided with a separate tradition—largely Jesuit, and less concerned with the intricacies of Thomist texts—according to which Catholic social teaching could make peace with any economic system, including capitalism and its attendant doctrines of property. From this perspective, the rich should share their excess wealth under the rubric of voluntary charity, not involuntary law. This debate largely came to a close with Quadragesimo anno (1931), drafted by German Jesuits. The encyclical placed the sanctity of private property at the heart of a healthy social order, said nothing about capitalism (a loud silence), and enjoined the rich to share out of beneficence, not out of legal duty. Henceforth, the most radical interpretations of Thomist property doctrines fell out of favor in Catholic circles, and most Catholic social thinkers from 1931 onwards pursued a “third way” that accepted the basic class structure of the capitalist order as a given while subjecting private property to the dictates of the common good in various ways.

I The Thomist Assault on Private Property

For the many Catholics interested in questioning the pieties of liberal capitalism in the era of the Great Depression, Aquinas was a useful source to think with. In his Summa Theologica, he had provided a theory of property that differed from anarchist, Marxist, and liberal views alike. The section on property is short and somewhat ambiguous. According to one plausible reading, at least, Aquinas did not dispute private property as an institution, but he did refuse to legitimate any particular property holding with the imprimatur of natural law. Nature, he insisted, is the dominion of God, who has commanded mankind as a species to make use of it. According to natural law, then, nature belongs to us in common. However, private property, a creation of human law and not natural law, was a reasonable addition insofar as men take best care of what is their own. Rights to property are legitimate but limited by the superior fact of common dominion. This had two consequences. First, whatever the wealthy have in “superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.” Secondly, those in urgent need are within their rights to take, openly or secretly, the property of another, which does not technically constitute theft, robbery, or a sin.22

Aquinas did not provide ammunition for critiques of private property as such, but for the use and distribution of that property. Other resources for property-critique existed in the Catholic tradition, as Charly Coleman has recently shown. Those earlier and more mystical traditions attacking the very notion of property, building upon a call for the dispossession of the self. This doctrine held little sway amongst Catholic social thinkers in the Thomist tradition, committed as they were to the dominion over the self as the antecedent to the valid ownership of property.23 Thomas, however, was radical enough on his own: as the short gloss of the Summa’s position indicates, the possible ramifications were explosive. This potential was exploited across the continent in an era when Thomism had, as Raïssa Maritain wrote in her journal, “a large entry into the world of culture” for the “first time.”24 In Britain, Thomist intellectuals like G.K. Chesterton mobilized scholasticism in the name of “distributism,” an economic theory that sought to dismantle usury, and even currency, in the name of a drastically reformed and more equitable economic system.25 The British sociologist R.H. Tawney argued that capitalism and its property relations were rooted firmly in Protestantism, a conclusion expanded upon by one of his students, a German Jesuit named J.B. Kraus.26

The most penetrating of the anti-capitalist Thomists were on the continent, and especially in Vienna, where they found support from a crusading anti-capitalist 1925 manifesto from the Austrian bishops.27 While the Christian Socials under Ignaz Seipel were trying to save the rump Austrian state from economic ruin by appealing to the League of Nations, Vienna harbored a robust collection of revolutionary Catholic writers, who could not bear to see their ancient faith utilized in the name of a center-right, essentially pro-capitalist party.28 To be sure, most of the anti-capitalist rhetoric in Catholic Vienna came from the epigones of Karl von Vogelsang, whose writings predated the Thomist revival. Othmar Spann, Anton Orel, Eugen Kogon, Franz Xaver Landmesser, and other anti-capitalist writers were more interested in his Romantic tradition of Catholic sociology than they were in neo-Thomism. Winter, a student of both Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann, was positively critical of scholastic social thinking, arguing that its obsession with natural law was keeping Catholics from understanding the nature of modern societies.29

That said, the most prominent Thomist assault on private property and capitalism came from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Into Neo-Thomism: Reading the Fabric of an Intellectual Movement
• Part I Shaping A New Society
• Part II. Encountering Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Aesthetics
• Part III. Reconciling Science and Religion
• Part IV. Mediating Tradition
• About the Authors
• Index of Persons