“18th Century Catholic Reception of Aquinas,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas, Matthew Levering and Marcus Plested, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2021). (original) (raw)
The eighteenth century was a time of intellectual innovation, political change, and social upheaval. After the close of the second scholastic period and the age of the great Thomistic commentaries, philosophers and theologians were confronted with the challenge of interpreting Aquinas in light of the many new intellectual paradigms that had become so powerful during the European Enlightenment. Although textual commentary continued in some places, in many ways the reception of Aquinas in this century was defined by the need to navigate pressing questions in dogmatic and moral theology. Rationalism posed new challenges for Catholic systematic and dogmatic theology, either as a foil or as an aid, and moral theologians continued to confront the tension between rigorism and laxism that had divided Catholic approaches to graced human action since the late sixteenth century.
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