Aquinas and the Academic Life

Abstract

In a book on Aquinas and beauty, Fr Armand Maurer starts with an apology. For, so he notes, ‘we look in vain in the immense body of Aquinas’s writings for a detailed and comprehensive treatment of beauty’. In general, says Maurer, ‘Thomas seems to have given short shrift to beauty or to have avoided it altogether’. And I might say something similar when it comes to Aquinas and the academic life. In his writings, the word ‘academic’ occurs in two allusions to St Augustine’s Contra Academicos. Otherwise, it is not to be found at all whether as a noun or as an adjective. There is a common 16th and 17th century English use of ‘academic’ according to which someone academic is a disciple of Plato. But Aquinas is heavily critical of Plato. And he has no treatise on the nature and purpose of centers of higher learning and the like. No work of his remotely corresponds to studies such as Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University.I might add that some famous academics have been throughly skeptical of Aquinas’s own academic value. He is often presented as an important philosopher. But was he? Not, for example, according to Bertrand Russell. As Russell himself put it: ‘There is little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead ...