www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Infallibility and Primate of Jurisdicion - acceptable by EC?

I had a class once as an Undergraduate at the University of San Diego on the Summa and Saint Thomas. The Professor was Fr. Thomas O'Meara, O.P, Ph.D. and he was teaching us about the Eastern Influence of St. Thomas. At the time I didn't really buy it- I was staunchly Eastern and wanted nothing to do with the West. Since that time I have really changed my outlook on the Latin Church and then came into Communion with her this last year(thanks be to God) I reread my class notes and I found that my professor was right and I was just a stubborn undergraduate who didn't want to see it. All the best.

Wow, I'm glad to hear from an Orthodox priest the view that St. John of Damascus was basically "Scholastic" in his approach. I would argue that much of what is called "Scholasticism" is derived directly from St. John's approach, especially through St. Thomas Aquinas who pretty much based his theological work on St. John's approach.

I also agree that St. Thomas Aquinas was fundamentally a mystic (and his mystical approach can not be reduced to the single event that is often cited). He just also tried to put the mystical into a cohesive form of thinking, much like his predecessor St. John of Damascus. St. Thomas spent much more energy in mystical prayer than he ever did on the Summa, and his insights came from that mysticism, not from any "systematic" approach to God.

Peace and God bless!

It is quite interesting to note that the great founders of the golden age of scholasticism were people -- often saints -- who lived in a monastic atmosphere and led a rigorously liturgical life. The Dominicans of the 13th century were not "active religious"; they were canons regular, who chanted the entire Divine Office in choir in addition to the Office of the Blessed Virgin and various other devotions. St. Thomas Aquinas, it is said, was present at two masses every day: he celebrated one mass, after which he would serve another. And this was in addition to his daily offices! And was he not himself the poet and doctor of the Eucharist? The Franciscans have not always been the most liturgical of orders, but the 13th century coincided with their best liturgical work, when Franciscan hands were molding what we now know as the classical "Roman" breviary. St. Bonaventure himself was a renowned mystic, fond of prayer and of the common life. The Franciscans of those days, for all of their activity, were first and foremost men of retirement and intense prayer, both liturgical and private. Those precursors of scholasticism, the Canons Regular of St. Victor, were also men of intense liturgical life. While Hugh and Richard of St. Victor wrote sublime theological treatises, their fellow Canons of St. Victor were writing some of the most beautiful sequences of the Western liturgical heritage. Furthermore, Paris, the center of medieval scholasticism, was among the most liturgically-conscious dioceses of the West. And, were not medieval Oxford and Cambridge places surrounded by glorious chapels, where the Sarum Use was celebrated in all its exuberance?

Perhaps the doctors of the Scholastic age were able to do what they did, to construct elaborate systems that were quite foreign (without being opposed to) to the patristic heritage and that welded elements of pagan, Jewish and Islamic philosophy with the thought of the Bible and the Fathers, precisely because their intellectual and affective lives were balanced by the constant round of liturgical offices and the discipline of the cloister. This is not a mere "prayer-and-study" balance I am talking about, as if the scholastics could have replaced the liturgy with devotions and mental prayer and still have pulled off their intellectual achievement (more on this later). I hold that it was the lived experience of the liturgy in the context of cloistered life that precisely made it possible for the scholastics to soar into the heights of philosophical speculation without losing their own familiarity with the fathers and scripture. As for the "monastic" life that the greatest medieval doctors lived, its contribution was not simply as a framework for the daily liturgy. Rather, the monastic life, with its institutions, its mentality derived straight from the Fathers, made it possible to fully live the patristic and evangelical spirit present in the liturgy.

Conversely, to cut off scholasticism from the lived experience of the liturgy, with its rich treasures drawn from the Bible and the Fathers, is to begin the inevitable shriveling up of scholasticism into the dry and impoverished system that could only alienate -- and did alienate -- people from the fullness of Catholic teaching. Without a liturgical environment, scholasticism faces the prospect of aridity. I could even adduce a theological reason to this: the liturgy is the primary and privileged expression of the magisterium, the most authentic exposition of the mind of the Church. Without it, no system, no school of thought could claim to transmit the fullness of Catholic teaching.

The Silver Age of Scholasticism shows this impoverishment well. What we often call "dry scholasticism" has been traced to the 16th and 17th century (and even earlier) attempt to revive scholasticism. However, this attempt, called the "Silver Age" did not add as much to the great corpus of scholastic teaching as would be expected, and often entangled Catholic theology in misinterpretations of the scholastic and patristic heritage that had to wait for 20th century developments in order to be dispelled. One thinks of the Bannezist and Molinist controversies that only muddled up the Thomistic doctrine of predestination, the "Augustinian" theologians who only succeeded in making the Doctor of Grace look entirely dark and who made the ground hospitable to Jansenism, the disjunct established between nature and grace that had to wait for 20th century attempts at clarification in order for it to be mended. It was ultimately the tangles of Silver Age theology and philosophy that would result in the revolutionary reactions of mid-20th century theology.

It is significant that the Silver Age and its antecedents occurred precisely when the liturgy had ceased to be the center of Catholic spiritual life, even in the monasteries. In place of liturgical spirituality there was the "devotionalism" that would dominate Catholic piety from the 15th to the 20th centuries. Far be it from us to utterly condemn the "devotionalism" of the 16th to the early 20th centuries, to brand it as being somehow un-Catholic. It certainly made many great saints. Still, there can be no denying that the "devotions" and other subjective forms of piety that came to dominate the post-medieval Catholic world were a poor substitute for the liturgy. Even the liturgy came to be treated as just another private devotion.

Ultimately, what does being scholastic mean? It means attempting to think rigorously and clearly about theological questions. I presume that Sts Cyril of Alexandria, John Damascene, Maximus the Confessor also attempted to do this, each in their different idioms.

No, Aquinas has not said the same thing, because the created intellect can never (ever) see the essence of God, since God's essence is hyperousios.

By saying that the created intellect can see God's essence (in any way), one has created an idol, for such a person has made the divine essence a category of created thought (see St. Gregory of Nyssa's "Sixth Sermon on the Beatitudes," "The Life of Moses" nos. 162-163, and his "Seventh Homily on Ecclesiastes"; see also St. Maximos the Confessor's, "Chapters on Knowledge," First Century, no. 2; and St. Basil's Letter 234).

And even in that regard, it is important to remember that the Church of the First Millennium "never knew true unity, but bore witness to it".

What does it mean that phrase, please, Stuart?