Which Jesuit writers helped begin the 19th-century Thomistic revival?

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St. Thomas Aquinas Enthroned Between the Doctors of the Old and New Testaments, with Personifications of the Virtues, Sciences, and Liberal Arts, fresco by Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365; in the Spanish Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. — Thomism *St. Thomas Aquinas Enthroned Between the Doctors of the Old and New Testaments, with Personifications of the Virtues, Sciences, and Liberal Arts*, fresco by Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365; in the Spanish Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

The 19th-century revival of Thomistic thought was advocated by three influential Jesuit writers based in Italy and Germany: Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, Matteo Liberatore, and Joseph Kleutgen.1

These scholars helped initiate the movement by encouraging the study of Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastic thinkers as a means to address contemporary intellectual and social challenges, particularly by countering the influence of modern idealist and subjectivist philosophies. While their individual positions in areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, and social theory remained eclectic, their work provided the necessary impetus for the broader neo-Thomism movement that gained decisive support from Pope Leo XIII in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris.1