F. C. Copleston, Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker

Penguin Books, 1955, 272 pages.

Summary: A sound, lucid, and accurate description of Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical system by the Jesuit scholar F. C. Copleston (1907-1994). The book is strictly limited to Thomas’ philosophical system and suggests that Thomism is a perennial philosophy. 

Thomas denied that humans have innate ideas and attempted to develop a system that allowed Christian philosophers to remain in the church while philosophizing. Or as Copelston summarizes Pope Leo XIII encyclical letter Aeterni Patris:

[Leo XIII] was not asking them to shut their eyes to all thought since the thirteenth century but rather to penetrate and develop the synthesis of a thinker who combined a profound and living belief in the Christian religion with a real trust in the power of the human mind and in the value of philosophic reflection, uniting in readiness to see truth wherever it might be found with a fidelity to fundamental rational insights which prevented any surrender to passing fashion just because it was fashionable (246).

Benefits/Detriments: I find Copleston’s summary of Thomas and his interaction with other theologians and philosophers in Medieval Philosophy: From Augustine to Duns Scotus in A History of Philosophy (cf. review) to be more illuminating. 

Very helpful at establishing the potential of pre-Kantian philosophy as a response to modernity. However, I would argue for a more Augustinian stance as the perennial philosophy.