« AETERNI PATRIS ». — Initial words of the encyclical by which Leo XIII, on 4 Aug. 1879, restored Thomistic philosophy to honor.
Having observed how false doctrines open the way to bad individual and social conduct, it points out that sound philosophy disposes one toward faith, demonstrates the reasonableness of adherence to revelation, makes its content better understood, and defends its possession, while receiving light and defense from faith. The Fathers of the Church treasured whatever was sound in the philosophy of the gentiles and enlarged it with Christian wisdom. The Scholastics demonstrated the agreement between reason and faith more effectively through refined logical procedures and sobriety of expression. St. Tommaso stands out among them all for the exceptional gifts of an angelic mind, reducing the Scholastic currents to unity by eliminating and integrating.
The Church, which has always recognized this primacy of the Angelic Doctor, points out the harm caused to science and society by the modern neglect of that philosophy. The Pontiff intended to restore it to honor for the solid formation of the clergy, for an effective apostolate among those learned men who claim to follow reason alone, for the security of the social order, and for the progress of all the sciences and arts that derive light and direction from philosophy. The Scholastics are not to be accepted indiscriminately in whatever may have fallen away, and what is gold must be enriched by all subsequent achievements.
So that the great reform would not remain on paper, Leo XIII, in the same year 1879, addressed an apostolic letter to Cardinal De Luca for the foundation in Rome of a Thomistic academy devoted to the study and defense of the restored philosophy. On 4 Aug. 1880 he declared St. Tommaso patron of all Catholic schools, and by a motu proprio of the same year ordered a critical edition of all the works of St. Tommaso, allocating a fund of 300,000 lire for the purpose. A letter to Cardinal Goossens, Archbishop of Malines, dates from 1889; in it the Pope congratulates him on the foundation of a Higher Institute of Thomistic Philosophy at the University of Louvain, praises and confirms the choice of D. Mercier as its head, and promises to contribute toward the expenses. Thus the great Pontiff extended to the universal Church what he had already done for his own diocese as Bishop of Perugia, where, in order to form a learned clergy, he had founded a Thomistic Academy dating from 1872, and therefore preceding even that of Naples, which dates from ’74; among its members were Luigi and Anastasio Rotelli, Gabriele Boccali, Geremia Brunelli, Giuseppe Cernicchi, Giuseppe Pecci (the brother of Gioacchino), Federico Foscati, Fabio Ferrini, and Mons. F. Satolli.
Anyone who knows what the condition of philosophy was, even in Catholic schools, before the A. P., understands the statement of Pius XI in his letter to Cardinal Bisleti of 1 Aug. 1922 (AAS, [vol. 14] pp. 449–58): « If Leo XIII had no other merits before the Church than that of having restored Thomistic philosophy, this alone would suffice to immortalize his memory ». Cardinal Mercier was thus able to summarize the effects of that reform: « The encyclical A. P. has in fact restored the philosophy of the great masters of Scholasticism to honor, restored unity of teaching to the Catholic Church, and drawn the attention of learned men, strangers to the faith, to a quantity of ideas unknown to them » (op. cit. in the bibliography, p. 328).
358; D. Mercier, Il Neotomismo, in the volume Origini della psicologia contemporanea, Italian translation, Rome 1903; A. Pelzer, Les initiateurs du Néothomisme contemporain, in Revue Néoscolastique, 18 (1911), p. 330; J. Berthier, S. Thomas Aquinas « Doctor Communis » Ecclesiae, I, Rome 1914; S. Talamo, Il Rinascimento del pensiero tomistico e la scienza moderna, Rome 1927.