Britannica Sources used in this answer

Why did Catholic thinkers revive Thomism in the mid-1800s?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

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.

Catholic thinkers and church authorities revived Thomism in the mid-19th century primarily to provide a robust intellectual defense of the Christian faith against the rise of modern idealist and subjectivist philosophies.1

By the mid-1800s, many church leaders believed that the realism found in the works of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas offered a necessary counterweight to contemporary thinkers like G.W.F. Hegel, whose views on reality were seen as incompatible with traditional doctrine. This movement gained decisive momentum with Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which formally called for the restoration of Scholastic philosophy.123

Leo XIII viewed Aquinas as a "special bulwark" for the church, and the revival aimed to integrate the wisdom of the Scholastics with the reliable findings of modern research. This initiative eventually led to Thomism becoming the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, with the Code of Canon Law of 1917 requiring that Catholic teachers follow the principles and methods of Aquinas.14