St. Thomas Aquinas “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth”: The Historical and Theological Contours of Thomas’s Principia

Leo XIII’s commendation of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas in Aeterni Patris (1879) created the exigency for the extensive scholarly engagement with Thomas’s philosophy that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The modern efforts at retrieving and explaining his work that resulted from this engagement, for all of their value, risked obscuring the actual thirteenth-century Thomas to the extent that they neglected the scriptural dimensions of his thought. Before being a philosopher, Thomas was a religious and a theologian. It is unlikely that he would have recognized a sharp disciplinary distinction between philosophy as such and theology as such. He was certainly not a speculative philosophical theologian in the modern sense; if anything, he should be classified as a scriptural theologian. Thomas’s religious vocation as a Dominican, literally “the order of preachers” (ordinis praedicatorum), and his academic profession, “master of the Sacred Page” (magister in sacra pagina), both attest to this fact. Thomas lived in an atmosphere saturated by Sacred Scripture. Any