Perche Tommaso

http://www.ignatius.com/magazines/hprweb/schall_June2007.htm#17

Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003), 21.

In 1974, Henry Veatch, in his book, Aristotle: A Contemporary Interpretation, likewise argued the same view with much persuasiveness [12] If modernity was a rebellion against Aristotle, the subsequent intellectual incoherence of the alternatives to his rejection should suggest a return to him, to his enormous common sense.

The fact of our time, however, is not any doubt about the pertinence of the intellectual acumen of Aquinas, but the remarkable realization of the pertinence of Augustine. [15] “Whenever we suffer some affliction, we should regard it both as a punishment and as a correction,” Augustine said, mindful of Paul, in a sermon whose spirit we hear expressed all too seldom. “Our holy Scriptures themselves do not promise us peace, security and rest.” Modernity does promise these things.

The only avenue is Nietzsche or Aristotle. The massive effort to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism is already out-of-date, not necessarily because Catholicism is irrelevant, but because liberalism is.

As Alasdair MacIntyre, Rowland’s principal guide in these reflections, put it in After Virtue: “My own conclusion is very clear. It is that on the one hand we still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and one of sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualism point of view; and that, on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.” [17]17 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 241.