However great an Anglican’s veneration for Aquinas might be, they will probably concur with Mascall that “I do not consider Thomas locutus, causa finita [Thomas has spoken, the case is closed] as the last judgement to be passed on any theological problem; though my approach might be summed up in the words, Thomas locutus, causa incepta [Thomas has spoken, the matter is begun].”
AQUINAS was a man of superhuman intelligence and insight. As Josef Pieper put it, his arguments have the interlocking architectural majesty of a Bach fugue. He offers both a summation and a fountainhead. But what makes him a saint — and, indeed, such a fine theologian — is his interest in God. Faith does not reach out to a proposition, he wrote, but to a reality. That gets to the heart of why so many people turn to Aquinas today: because he thought that theology was about God.
Seven hundred and fifty years after Thomas’s death, one of the distinctive characteristics of the Church in our time is that quite so many Christians — across so many Churches — would gladly echo the words of Pope Pius XI in 1923: “Just as it was said of old to the Egyptians in time of famine: ‘Go to Joseph’ [Genesis 41.55], so that they should receive a supply of corn to nourish their bodies, so to those who are now in quest of truth we say ‘Go to Thomas,’ that they may ask from him the food of solid doctrine of which he has an abundance to nourish their souls unto eternal life.”
"His sense of the pouring forth of creation, in glorious multiplicity, as an imitation of the Plenitude from whom all things spring, puts Aquinas in the top rank of Christian Platonists."https://t.co/DlpZWGG750
— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 11, 2024