Almighty God, who hast enriched thy Church with the singular learning and holiness of thy servant Thomas Aquinas: Enlighten us more and more, we pray thee, by the disciplined thinking and teaching of Christian scholars, and deepen our devotion by the example of saintly lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Happy Feast Day of St. Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of students! pic.twitter.com/cCHKq8dzH4
— LETRAN MANILA (@LetranOfficial) January 28, 2016
Thanks, Kendall. Nice picture to embellish the prayer.
Three comments pertaining to the importance of Aquinas for Anglicans.
First, anyone who loves Richard Hooker and appreciates his crucial role in the evolution of Anglican theology should explore the Thomistic roots of much of Hooker’s system of thought. There are whole sections of Hooker’s [b]Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity[/b] that are basically drawn straight out of Aquinas. Not least, Hooker took over from Aquinas a deep appreciation for the importance of natural law, and the fundamental Thomistic principle that “[i]Grace is not opposed to nature, but perfects it[/i].”
Second, I contend that Hooker was in fact the first major Protestant theologian who really understood and appreciated Aquinas. Alas, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer, etc., did not, and as a result of being ignorant of Catholic theology at its best, the Reformation took an unnecessarily drastic form, throwing out the baby with the dirty bathwater more than it had to. It is one of the great tragedies of history that so many of the Reformers, as ex-priests, were only really familiar with debased and inferior forms of medieval Catholic theology, especially the Nominalism of guys like Gabriel Biel.
But Hooker was a third generation Protestant, and by his time (the 1590s), too much blood had been spilled and too many bridges burned, for Protestantism to take a more moderate form in the Hooker mold. Sad.
Third, we Anglicans have never been known for producing good systematic theology. We have no Melancthon or Calvin (or Chemnitz or Beza) that we can look to, as we are such a diverse and inconsistent lot. But as far as I’m concerned, Aquinas is the greatest systematic theologian of all time. His over 3500 page [b]Summa Theologica[/b] surpasses all other works of its type in its thoroughness and rigor, and in its faithfulness to the consensus of the ancient Fathers. Not that Aquinas was always right. No human being is. But he sets the gold standard for that kind of vital theological enterprise. We have so much that we can and should learn from the Angelic Doctor.
David Handy+
More a historical theologian than a systematic one myself