The road from atheism

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism.  I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition.  A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14.  Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good.  Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.  Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that.  Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends. 

Scholastic’s Bookshelf, Part IV (UPDATED)

I have recommended Michael Cronin’s long out-of-print two-volume The Science of Ethics as possibly the best of the old Neo-Scholastic manuals of ethics written in English. Reader Deogolwulf kindly informs us that both volumes are available online via archive.org. Browsing through the archive, I’ve found several other old philosophical and theological works worth calling attention to, which (along with Cronin) I’ve listed below, as an addition to my “Scholastic’s Bookshelf” series of posts (the earlier installments of which can be found here, here, and here). I’ll add further works to the list as I discover them:

Bernard Boedder, Natural Theology

Philotheus Boehner, Medieval Logic

P. Coffey, Epistemology, Volume I and Volume II

P. Coffey, Ontology

P. Coffey, The Science of Logic, Volume I and Volume II

Charles Coppens, A Brief Textbook of Logic and Mental Philosophy

Charles Coppens, A Brief Textbook of Moral Philosophy

Michael Cronin, The Science of Ethics, Volume I and Volume II

Walter Devivier and Sebastian Messmer, Christian Apologetics: A Defense of the Catholic Faith

Maurice de Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New

Thomas Gilby, Barbara Celarent: A Description of Scholastic Dialectic

Thomas Harper, The Metaphysics of the School, Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III

Sylvester Joseph Hunter, Outlines of Dogmatic Theology, Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III

G. H. Joyce, Principles of Logic

G. H. Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology

A. Koch and A. Preuss, A Handbook of Moral Theology, Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III

Michael Maher, Psychology: Empirical and Rational

Cardinal Mercier et al., A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, Volume I and Volume II

John O’Neill, Cosmology: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Matter

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, Christology

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, The Divine Trinity

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, Eschatology, or The Catholic Doctrine of the Last Things

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, God, the Author of Nature and the Supernatural

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, Grace, Actual and Habitual

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, Mariology

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, The Sacraments, Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, and Volume IV

J. Pohle and A. Preuss, Soteriology

John Rickaby, General Metaphysics

Joseph Rickaby, Scholasticism

M. Scheeben, J. Wilhelm, and T. B. Scannell, A Manual of Catholic Theology, Based on Scheeben’s Dogmatik, Volume I and Volume II

Thomas Walshe, Principles of Christian Apologetics

Scholastic’s Bookshelf, Part III

Resuming my “recommended reading” series on (mostly) pre-Vatican II works in philosophy and theology – the earlier installments are here and here – we come now to ethics and moral theology. Readers of chapter 5 of Aquinas, chapter 4 of The Last Superstition, and the first half of my recent article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation” will be familiar with the general moral theory underlying the Neo-Scholastics’ approach to these topics. The works described below all expand on that approach, some developing the theory in greater detail, some applying it to various specific moral issues, and some doing both. Naturally, the works in moral theology also incorporate theological considerations (Catholic ones, specifically). But they too should be of interest to non-Catholics sympathetic with Thomistic natural law theory, because they are all informed by a rigorously worked out philosophical ethics.

On these topics especially, one often hears the Neo-Scholastics dismissed – even, sad to say, by some with a reputation for theological conservatism – for their “manualism,” “legalism,” and committing of the so-called “naturalistic fallacy.” In my view, none of these criticisms has any force. I explain in the works cited above why there is no “naturalistic fallacy” given a classical metaphysics. The possibility of such a “fallacy” arises only if we take for granted a modern mechanistic philosophy of nature, which, of course, the Neo-Scholastics did not. To reject their alternative classical metaphysics is one thing. But to allow that their metaphysics may well be valid while at the same time insisting that they are guilty of the alleged “fallacy” in question (as “new natural law” theorists appear to do) is simply muddleheaded.

The “legalism” charge is sometimes based on the suggestion that a law-oriented approach to ethics of the sort one finds in Scholastic manuals is a holdover from late medieval nominalism. (Apparently Moses was an Ockhamite – who knew?) The truth, I would say, is rather that there is bound to be a “legal” aspect to any workable system of ethics. If there are objective moral principles, we need to know how to apply them to concrete circumstances, and working this out carefully and systematically entails that casuistry will be a part of any serious moral theory. (It is certainly something the Neo-Scholastics’ critics inevitably engage in themselves when applying their own alternative systems – witness the three gargantuan volumes of “new natural law” pioneer Germain Grisez’s The Way of the Lord Jesus. “Manualism” indeed!)

There is also the fact that the priests for whom the old manuals were largely written needed guidance in the confessional, as did their penitents. And that means, inevitably, a way of telling mortal sin from venial sin – grave matter from light matter, sufficient knowledge from insufficient, sufficient consent from insufficient, in all the areas of human life where we find ourselves tempted. If you don’t like this, blame Catholic doctrine. But if you accept Catholic doctrine – as I do, and as many critics of the Neo-Scholastics do – then, it seems to me, you should not complain about “casuistry,” “legalism,” “manualism,” etc. Here the critics will say that the Neo-Scholastic ethics nevertheless encouraged “moral minimalism,” letting penitents and the faithful in general rest content so long as they stayed within the law. We should aim higher than merely fulfilling our strict moral obligations, the critics tell us. And so we should. But whatever might be true of angels, “new natural law” theorists, nouvelle théologie adepts, et al., we mere flesh-and-blood mortals, when striving to go beyond the moral minimum, find it helpful to know what the minimum is.

“Manualism” is also a bad thing, we are told, because the old Neo-Scholastic works merely repeated each other, peddled a closed system, and thereby stifled theological creativity. One problem with this charge is that it isn’t true; anyone who has actually read the work of the Neo-Scholastics knows that they disagreed about and debated all sorts of things. But it is true that their disagreements took place against a background of agreement on fundamentals. But so what? No one complains that the existence of textbooks of physics, geometry, or logic – which do rather “repeat each other” insofar as the basic material presented does not vary much from book to book – is evidence of a regrettable “manualism.” Nor do contemporary philosophers whine when textbooks on philosophy of mind (say) all tend to approach the subject from a naturalistic point of view (the occasional exception notwithstanding) and address more or less the same issues and arguments. One man’s unreflective prejudice is, apparently, another man’s “settled wisdom” – except that it’s only ever one side, it seems, that’s allowed to see itself the second way.

The thing is this, though: Ethics and theology either comprise objective bodies of knowledge or they do not. If they do – and it is hard to see how a Catholic could deny that they do – then “manualism” is as appropriate here as in other branches of knowledge. To insist otherwise is simply to beg the question against the Scholastic, who regards the classical metaphysical assumptions held in common by Platonists, Aristotelians, and Thomists and other Scholastics as a “perennial philosophy” whose basic tenets are rationally unavoidable, with the details rather than the big picture being what requires serious debate. Obviously, given the culture we live in, defending the big picture has its place too – here and here, for example – but so does working out the implications of the system from within, especially when the priest, the man in the pew, and the man in the street need answers to their moral and theological questions, not expressions of the theologian’s creativity. If you want creativity, take a pottery class. A good theologian is more concerned with rigor, systematic thinking, and fidelity to the deposit of faith, and these the old manuals possess in abundance. Nor will it do to complain (as is often done in certain Catholic circles) that the Neo-Scholastic system is “outdated” or that it fails to speak to “the needs of modern man.” What matters is whether the system is true – and the Neo-Scholastics gave arguments to show that it is, arguments their critics rarely bother to address.

I will end this mini rant by quoting the late Ralph McInerny, from a blurb he provided John Haldane’s Modern Writings on Thomism series of reprinted Scholastic works: “The phrase ‘Scholastic Manual’ has sometimes been used perjoratively. [Yet] some Scholastic Manuals deserve to be read before they are condemned. Indeed, some deserve to be praised.” Amen. And for good measure, here’s another blurb for the same series, from Dominican theologian Fergus Kerr: “Scepticism, philosophical psychology, metaphysical and moral realism, virtue ethics, etc., the standard topics in current Anglo-American philosophy, were all much debated by Thomistic and other Neo-Scholastic philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century: It is a great pleasure to see some of them brought back into the discussion.” Amen again.

On, then, to the recommendations. Let us consider first some introductory works on ethics:

Celestine N. Bittle, Man and Morals

Austin Fagothey, Right and Reason, Second edition

Thomas J. Higgins, Man as Man: The Science and Art of Ethics

John A. Oesterle, Ethics: The Introduction to Moral Science

Henri Renard, The Philosophy of Morality

Renard and Oesterle, which are brief, emphasize moral theory; the other three, which are longer, develop the theory and then apply it to various specific moral issues. Fagothey, the best of those three, is also the one book among those just listed which is still in print. It is elementary, but clear as a bell and systematic, and provides a very solid overview of the structure of classical natural law theory and how it deals with various concrete moral topics (though because it was written half a century ago, it does not address all the currently “hot” topics in applied ethics or all the objections contemporary philosophers might raise – see some of the recommendations at the end of this post for that). Poor Higgins you’ll have to read in a brown wrapper, since he seems to be the favorite whipping boy of “new natural law” writers who would like to consign the Neo-Scholastics to the memory hole. But his book too provides a useful, if elementary, overview. For depth, though, you’ll want to get hold of:

Michael Cronin, The Science of Ethics, Volume I: General Ethics

Michael Cronin, The Science of Ethics, Volume II: Special Ethics

Cronin’s two giant volumes comprise, for my money, the best of the old English-language Neo-Scholastic manuals in ethics. As the subtitles imply, the first volume concerns what is today generally referred to as moral theory, while the second concerns applied ethics. If you could own only a single Neo-Scholastic manual, this big boy is the one to get. It has long been out of print, but affordable copies are available online, and it looks from Amazon that it is also available from at least one of the on-demand reprint publishers (though keep in mind that these outfits vary in the quality of their reprints).

Next we have some introductory books on moral theology:

Francis J. Connell, Outlines of Moral Theology

Heribert Jone, Moral Theology

Dominic Prümmer, Handbook of Moral Theology

H. E. Cardinal Roberti, ed., Dictionary of Moral Theology

None of these is still in print, though the most recent reprinting of Jone was not too long ago. Jone and Prümmer are old standbys. Every Catholic moral theorist should own both, though Prümmer is harder to find a cheap copy of. For depth you’ll want to consult:

Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology (in five volumes)

Antony Koch and Arthur Preuss, A Handbook of Moral Theology (in five volumes)

John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan, Moral Theology: A Complete Course (in two volumes)

I think McHugh and Callan is probably the best of these; certainly it is absolutely packed with information, and you can’t do better if you want a solid grasp of the overall theoretical structure, terminology, and characteristic doctrines of traditional moral theology. But you will have to shop around for it. The Davis volumes, also very useful, are easier to come by and have (mostly) been reprinted now by one of the reprint publishers. Koch-Preuss is a bit tougher to track down – and for some reason, only the first three volumes of it have been reprinted recently.

Among the old moral theology manuals, though, special mention must be made of the most recent of them:

John C. Ford and Gerald Kelly, Contemporary Moral Theology, Volume I: Questions in Fundamental Moral Theology

John C. Ford and Gerald Kelly, Contemporary Moral Theology, Volume II: Marriage Questions

The second volume of Ford and Kelly’s outstanding set appeared in 1963. The two volumes do not present a complete treatment of moral theology, but volume 1 treats a number of special topics in depth (such as the various psychological issues underlying questions of culpability, and the debate over the direction of moral theology that would come to a head with Vatican II); and volume 2 comprises by far the best and most thorough treatment of sexual morality (at least in English) that I know of. The books are also very sensitive to ordinary human weakness – Ford was an expert in the treatment of alcoholism, for example – without making of it an excuse for sin; anyone who thinks the manualists were insufficiently “pastoral” has not read Ford and Kelly. As it happens, they also defend a more “lenient” position on at least one issue – the removal of a damaged uterus where no immediate danger to the life of the mother is present – that was an open question at the time they wrote but has since been settled by the Church in a less “lenient” direction (the Church has as of 1993 officially forbidden such removal). But on several still-open questions they provide an excellent, fair-minded analysis of the alternative positions Catholics loyal to the Magisterium of the Church might defend.

The Ford and Kelly volumes too are out of print, though used copies should not be too hard to track down. Someone should reprint them immediately – especially volume 2, since there is (in my view) so little first-rate material currently available on the subject.

Also worth mentioning are some important volumes on questions of political philosophy written from a traditional Catholic natural law theory point of view:

John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations

Johannes Messner, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Modern World

Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought

John K. Ryan, Modern War and Basic Ethics

Eppstein and Ryan are especially important in-depth treatments of just war theory (a topic also given briefer but significant treatment in some of the volumes mentioned above, such as Fagothey, Cronin, and McHugh and Callan).

Finally, let me recommend some recent works written from a classical natural law position similar to that of the Neo-Scholastic writers. By far the most important are:

David S. Oderberg, Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach

David S. Oderberg, Applied Ethics: A Non-Consequentialist Approach

The Oderberg volumes are the fullest recent defense of a traditional natural law position against the sorts of objections that might be raised by contemporary analytic philosophers. The volume on applied ethics focuses on “life and death” topics – abortion, war, capital punishment, and the like.

Recent works on Aquinas’s ethics which eschew “new natural law” and other revisionist approaches include:

Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas

D. Q. McInerny, A Course in Thomistic Ethics

Fulvio Di Blasi, God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas

There, I’ve now given you that most wonderful of gifts – a new excuse to spend enormous gobs of money on books. No need to thank me; just do the same for someone else some time.

Scholastic’s Bookshelf, Part II

Continuing my series of posts on recommended reading in (mostly pre-Vatican II) Neo-Scholastic and Thomistic sources. This time up: works on natural theology.

As I emphasize in The Last Superstition, Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments in natural theology are often very badly misunderstood – not only by skeptics but also by many modern theists – because contemporary readers are not familiar with the metaphysical concepts underlying them and tend to read into them all sorts of alien (and from the A-T point of view, false) modern metaphysical assumptions. This is true not only of arguments for God’s existence (like Aquinas’s Five Ways), but also of arguments concerning other topics in natural theology – the divine attributes, the problem of evil, divine providence, divine foreknowledge, miracles, and so on. Indeed, there is virtually no topic that fails to take on a dramatically different complexion when seen through the lens of classical, and especially A-T, metaphysics. (For example, the contemporary tendency to think of God in terms of “theistic personalism” rather than classical theism – a tendency I have discussed here briefly a couple of times before – is, I would say, a natural outcome of the move away from classical metaphysics, and has all sorts of often-unnoticed implications, none of them good.)

In light of this, two very useful books for understanding the A-T approach to philosophical theology in general are:

John F. McCormick, Scholastic Metaphysics, Part II: Natural Theology

R. P. Phillips, Modern Thomistic Philosophy, Volume II: Metaphysics

As their titles indicate, each of these books is part of a series of books on A-T philosophy in general. But this particular McCormick volume is entirely devoted to natural theology, and the last 100 pages or so of the Phillips volume is as well (the rest of it being an introduction to general Thomistic epistemology and metaphysics).

McCormick’s book is intended as a fairly elementary textbook, but since it shows how all the main topics mentioned above are understood from a specifically A-T point of view, it provides something that is simply not readily available in the current literature in philosophy of religion. It is probably a little bit better than Phillips on this score, though Phillips has the advantage of also treating other philosophical topics.

Phillips is also probably a little more useful in its treatment of the Five Ways, though neither McCormick or Phillips is as good on this subject as some of the books I’ll be mentioning in a moment. Overall, McCormick is probably the best book I know of for the beginner who wants a basic overview of the A-T approach to topics in natural theology other than the classical arguments for God’s existence. (I’ll mention some more advanced books below.)

Like many of the books I’m recommending in this series of posts, the McCormick volume is out of print, but used copies can be found online fairly easily for just a few dollars. An affordable reprint of Phillips is now available, though even cheaper older copies can also still be found.

Some of the same, general topics in philosophical theology are also usefully treated in the next set of works I want to mention:

Celestine Bittle, God and His Creatures

Maurice Holloway, An Introduction to Natural Theology

G. H. Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology

Henri Renard, The Philosophy of God

A more distinctive advantage of these books, however, is their treatment of the classical theistic proofs, particularly those summarized in Aquinas’s Five Ways.

Of the four of them, Bittle is probably the least helpful for someone looking for an overview of each of the Five Ways, but it does have a fairly useful treatment of several of the arguments, especially the argument from motion. Renard’s treatment of the arguments is not really any longer than that found in McCormick or Phillips, but it does seem to me to give a somewhat clearer idea of what is distinctive about the Thomistic understanding of cosmological and teleological arguments (e.g. Renard puts special emphasis on the “existential proof” from Aquinas’s On Being and Essence). Joyce and Holloway have especially good treatments of the Five Ways in general. Joyce is particularly good on the argument from motion and Holloway on the (often neglected and badly misunderstood) Fourth and Fifth Ways.

(As I keep emphasizing, A-T arguments in natural theology simply cannot be understood apart from A-T metaphysics, and this is probably even more true of the Fourth Way than of any of the other arguments. I will be devoting a future post to works in metaphysics, but it is worth mentioning now that Charles Hart’s Thomistic Metaphysics is particularly helpful in situating the theistic arguments – especially the Fourth Way – within the framework of Thomistic metaphysics in general.)

Again, all of these books also offer treatments of other topics in natural theology, though in some cases at least slightly less comprehensively than McCormick and Phillips. (In particular, while they are all useful vis-à-vis the divine attributes, they are generally less helpful than McCormick and Phillips on topics like miracles.) Only Joyce has been reprinted recently, though old copies of the others can be found fairly easily and affordably.

Overall, I’d say that anyone reading even just Holloway and McCormick (say) will come away with a pretty good introduction to the A-T approach to all the main topics in natural theology. For a more advanced treatment of the subject, you cannot do better than:

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, God: His Existence and His Nature (in two volumes)

Garrigou-Lagrange was the greatest 20th century thinker in the period of the Neo-Scholastic revival. (Obviously lots of people would give that honor instead to Gilson or Maritain. Not me. But that’s a big topic all by itself.) This work has recently been reprinted and is a must-have for anyone who wants to pursue these issues in depth. (G-L pursued some of the same issues in other works, but this is his most substantial treatment and the one-stop place to look.)

Now, unlike much that is written today on Aquinas’s natural theology, none of these books is particularly interested in the historical or textual context of his arguments; instead, they are interested simply in whether the arguments are correct and defensible today. And that is, ultimately, what matters. Still, historical and textual context can obviously be illuminating, and can in particular help to free us from common misunderstandings. Two invaluable works providing such context are:

William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz

John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas

Craig is very helpful vis-à-vis the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways; Wippel provides background on all five.

There is also the question of how A-T positions in natural theology relate to the sorts of issues and assumptions characteristic of contemporary analytic philosophy. Four very useful books in this connection are:

Christopher F. J. Martin, Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations

Eleonore Stump, Aquinas

Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism

Brian Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil

Martin’s book is the most thorough sympathetic examination of the Five Ways currently in print, and is written from an “analytical Thomist” point of view. Stump does not say much about the classical theistic arguments but has much of interest to say on divine simplicity and some of the other divine attributes. Kretzmann is mostly a detailed examination of Aquinas’s arguments concerning the various divine attributes. (It also treats some of Aquinas’s theistic proofs, but in my view Kretzmann is more impressed than he should be with some of the objections to these proofs.) Davies briefly defends the “existential proof” from On Being and Essence and then very helpfully distinguishes the Thomistic approach to the problem of evil from the approaches usually taken in contemporary philosophy of religion. Readers unacquainted with contemporary analytic philosophy will find these works difficult; Davies is the most accessible.

(While on the subject of analytic philosophy and Thomism, I might also briefly mention David Braine’s The Reality of Time and the Existence of God and Barry Miller’s trilogy From Existence to God, A Most Unlikely God, and The Fullness of Being. Even more than the other books mentioned, though, these books are for the more advanced reader, and go well beyond the bounds of a traditional Thomistic approach to natural theology and into issues the understanding of which requires extensive knowledge of the literature in analytic philosophy.)

These books are all very recent compared to the ones I’m emphasizing in this series of posts. Another recent book worth mentioning is:

D. Q. McInerny, Natural Theology

which is written in the style of an old Scholastic philosophy manual – indeed, it is part of a series of textbooks written in this style – but (given that it was published in 2005) addresses recent issues and objections the older manuals do not discuss.

Finally, some books devoted to miscellaneous topics:

Harry R. Klocker, God and the Empiricists

James A. Weisheipl, Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages

William A. Wallace, From a Realist Point of View

Klocker’s book is a useful study, from an A-T point of view, of the ways in which the development of empiricism affected philosophers’ understanding of the classical theistic proofs. What makes the book especially interesting is its extended treatment of Ockham as the forerunner of Locke and Co. The Weisheipl and Wallace books are anthologies largely concerned with issues in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, but many of the essays are relevant to understanding and evaluating the argument from motion.

More recommendations could be given, but that’s enough for now, and will already strain either your wallet or your librarian’s patience…

Scholastic’s Bookshelf, Part I

In a belated reply to a reader’s request, and because I suspect other readers might find it useful, here is the first in an intermittent series of posts on some recommended reading for those interested in Neo-Scholastic and Thomistic thought. For the most part I will not mention obvious or recent works, but rather out-of-print or otherwise hard to find books, especially those from the period prior to Vatican II when the Neo-Scholastic tradition was at its height. Nor will I attempt to be exhaustive, but will focus on works which are in some way particularly noteworthy or useful. Many of the books I will mention can be acquired fairly cheaply from online booksellers, though some are more expensive. Some have recently been reissued by publishers specializing in reprinting long out of print books, like Wipf and Stock, Kessinger, or TAN Books. A few are available via Google books or have otherwise been posted somewhere online. All of them are worth tracking down.

In this initial post, I will recommend some reference books and other general works which readers new to the Neo-Scholastic tradition will find invaluable in finding their way around its vast conceptual structure and getting accustomed to its sometimes forbidding and alien technical vocabulary. Future posts will provide reading recommendations vis-à-vis specific subject areas like natural theology, ethics, epistemology and metaphysics, philosophical psychology, logic, dogmatic theology, etc.

General reference:

George F. McLean, ed., An Annotated Bibliography of Philosophy in Catholic Thought 1900-1964

Pietro Parente, Dictionary of Dogmatic Theology

Bernard Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy

Bernard Wuellner, Summary of Scholastic Principles

The McLean volume is an invaluable guide to the Neo-Scholastic philosophical literature of the period prior to Vatican II, essential for those interested in serious research into the system of thought these writers developed and defended. It is divided into subject areas – metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, etc. – and provides useful short descriptions of the contents of most of the books it lists.

The entries in the Parente and Wuellner dictionaries are philosophically and theologically substantive. Wuellner’s Summary is a lengthy and detailed outline of the theses that tend to be held in common by most Neo-Scholastic Thomists in all the main areas of philosophy. While a thorough understanding of the arguments for these various theses requires immersion in the literature, this book provides an invaluable guide to the overall structure of the Thomistic system as most writers in the Neo-Scholastic tradition understand it. It also provides a brief account of those areas with respect to which there is disagreement among Scholastics.

General works on Neo-Scholasticism:

Helen James John, The Thomist Spectrum

Written in the mid-1960s, this book provides a very useful brief account of the various approaches to Thomism prominent up to that time. Particularly useful is the treatment of the differences between Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, and Gilson, given that these writers are often mistakenly lumped together by non-Thomists as if they were all saying more or less the same thing (they definitely were not, certainly not on every important issue). Also treated are those approaches to Thomism which emphasize its affinities with Platonism (e.g. Fabro) and “Transcendental Thomism.”

[A very brief treatment of the various approaches to Thomism, but one which pretty much covers all the various schools – and, since more recent, includes some that John's leaves out – can be found at the beginning of Benedict Ashley’s The Way toward Wisdom. Also recent and useful is chapter 1 of Brian Shanley’s The Thomist Tradition. There are of course other recent and more in-depth accounts of the various schools of Thomism. Gerald McCool’s trilogy Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism, From Unity to Pluralism, and The Neo-Thomists is one example, and Fergus Kerr’s After Aquinas is another. These works might be too lengthy and/or idiosyncratic to be helpful to the novice, though they are definitely worth the attention of the more advanced student. (FYI, before long I will be putting up a couple of posts to serve as a brief primer on the various schools of Thomism.)]

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought

Cardinal Mercier, ed., A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy (in two volumes)

A. D. Sertillanges, Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy

Daniel J. Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: The Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition

Charles Baschab, Manual of Neo-Scholastic Philosophy

These works provide general treatments of the Neo-Scholastic system which are more in-depth than what is provided by a work like Wuellner’s Summary, though less in-depth than what one will find in a work on (say) metaphysics or natural theology specifically. Garrigou-Lagrange and Mercier were among the most eminent figures of twentieth-century Neo-Scholasticism, and Sertillanges was significant too. Garrigou-Lagrange’s Reality covers dogmatic theology as well as philosophy. (It has recently been reprinted by Ex Fontibus.) The volumes edited by Mercier (pictured above) contain articles by prominent Neo-Scholastic writers of the early twentieth century (including Mercier himself) on each of the main sub-disciplines of philosophy.

Sullivan’s book is the most elementary of the ones listed, but for that reason it is about as clear and accessible an introduction to philosophy written from an Aristotelian-Thomistic POV as you will find. (It has been kept in print in recent years by TAN Books.)

A more recent work providing an overview of philosophy from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective is William A. Wallace, The Elements of Philosophy: A Compendium for Philosophers and Theologians.

Finally, some books that are not quite Neo-Scholastic, but still Aristotelian: John Wild’s Introduction to Realistic Philosophy and Mortimer Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Wild is an interesting case – a Harvard philosopher who defended a broadly Aristotelian position before moving in the direction of phenomenology and existentialism in the late 1950s. Adler is well-known, of course, as is the book in question. It is not a general introduction to Aristotelian philosophy and it is elementary, but it is a very useful summary of some of the errors Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophers see in some of the characteristic assumptions made and positions taken by modern philosophers.

(Next in the series: Natural theology)