Greeting, everyone -

Currently reading John D Mueller's Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element (ISI Books, 2014). He argues that, if one wishes to understand Aquinas (especially his economics), one must understand that Aquinas' thought is a synthesis of the insights of both Aristotle and Augustine. At one point he quotes Copleston on the issue: "What [Aquinas] did was to express Augustinianism in terms of Aristotelian philosophy” (Aquinas [New York: Penguin, 1991], 33, quoted in Mueller 379 fn. 50).

He raises an interesting objection to reading Aquinas as "essentially Aristotelian" in his discussion of the thought of Heinrich Pesch:

Though extraordinarily fruitful, the Thomistic revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which Pesch participated was burdened by a neo-Thomism that viewed Aquinas as restating an essentially Aristotelian philosophy. As I have suggested, the formula of Scholastic economics, is Aristotle + Augustine = Aquinas. The neo-Thomist formula, on the other hand, is “AA economics”: Aristotle = Aquinas (= Catholic social doctrine. Which raises the obvious question: After Aristotle, why do we need Aquinas or Catholic social doctrine?). Neo-Thomism and probably Pesch himself influenced the erroneous statements in Joseph Schumpeter’s otherwise valuable History of Economic Analysis (1954) that Aquinas’s economics was “strictly Aristotelian” and that Augustine “[n]ever went into economic problems.” (Mueller 118).

As someone who grew up on Francis Schaeffer and has only been studying Thomism for the last two or three years (I can't remember when I started reading Ed's blog), is it proper to say that understanding both Augustine and Aristotle are proper for understanding Saint Thomas' thought?

Karl
14 Nov 2016