Theologian · Contemporary
Marie-Dominique Chenu, OP
1895–1990 · Historical Thomism; ressourcement (Le Saulchoir)
Dominican; regent of Le Saulchoir; his “Une école de théologie” (1937) was placed on the Index in 1942 and he was removed from teaching; peritus at Vatican II and a drafter of Gaudium et Spes.
Read St. Thomas as a thirteenth-century theologian rather than a timeless system: the Summa as a pedagogical and sapiential work shaped by the Gospel, the Fathers and the mendicant movement, its structure an exitus–reditus of all things from God and back to Him. Championed the worker-priests and a theology that listens to “the signs of the times.”
Why he matters: With Pieper and Gilson he is why “Thomism” now means Thomas himself and not only the commentators; “Toward Understanding Saint Thomas” is still the best entry to how the Summa is built. His pupils included Congar and Schillebeeckx.
Where to be careful
The Holy Office's censure of 1942 concerned a historicist tendency: if theology is only the faith's expression in a given age, dogma risks dissolving into history. Read him with Garrigou-Lagrange's “Where is the New Theology Leading?” on the other side of the desk.
School of Thomism · Sapiential and spiritual Thomism
Pieper, Chenu, Pinckaers and Bouyer: Thomas as a spiritual master and a theologian of the Gospel, whose Summa is built on the beatitudes and the gifts of the Spirit, whose ethics is a morality of happiness and virtue, and who ended by calling all he had written straw. The recovery of Thomas's own spirituality against the manuals.
Others in this strand: Josef Pieper, Servais Pinckaers, OP, Louis Bouyer, Dante Alighieri, St. Catherine of Siena
Reading
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Toward Understanding Saint ThomasM.-D. Chenu, OP · How the Summa is built and why; the antidote to reading it as a manual.
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Aquinas and His Role in TheologyM.-D. Chenu, OP · Short, warm, and historical.
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Where Is the New Theology Leading Us?Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP · The 1946 attack on his school; read both.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.