Thomists at War: Dante, Aquinas, and the Dominicans

A Thomistic Institue lecture from Dr George Corbett (St Andrews) on St Thomas Aquinas and Dante.

Thomists such as Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) and Pierre Mandonnet, O.P. (1858-1936) fought extremely significant battles in the field of Aquinas Studies, battles which would question the very nature of Catholic theology itself; they also fought less well-known skirmishes in the field of Dante Studies. In this paper, I argue that to understand the twentieth-century reception of Aquinas, Thomism, and Dante, we need to consider these battles together, as part of a wider intellectual war between Thomists, the consequences of which continue to be felt to this day. I show that alleged points of divergence between Dante and Aquinas’s thought – on the natural desire for the beatific vision, the doctrine of two final ends for man; or the relationship between philosophy and theology and between nature and grace -­ have as much to do with scholars’ interpretations of Aquinas’s works as with their interpretations of Dante.

Tickets: Free