Clarke, W. Norris, S.J. The Philosophical Approach to God: A Neo-Thomist Perspective . Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University, 1979.
Abstract
"The aim of these three lectures
is to present for your reflection and discussion some of the
significant developments that have been going on in the contemporary
Neo-Thomist school of philosophers and philosophizing theologians with
respect to the philosophical approach to God...I understand the term
"Neo-Thomist" here very broadly to signify that loosely but
recognizably united group of thinkers who acknowledge that the basic
inspiration and structure of their thought derives from St. Thomas
Aquinas, even though each one may have made various creative
adaptations of his own, in both method and content, inspired by various
movements of thought since the time of St. Thomas. Many of you may
perhaps believe that since the heyday of Jacques Maritain and Etienne
Gilson, when it seemed temporarily to regain a place in the sun in
contemporary thought, Thomism had quietly faded away, save perhaps in a
few seminaries. Others of you may perhaps wish that it would just fade
away and cease to bother us, once and for all, as anything but a
chapter in the history of thought. Neither belief nor wish seems likely
of immediate fulfillment. Thomism has a remarkable survival power, and
every so often, just when it seems that it is about to fade out, it has
a way of renewing itself, like the phoenix, usually by a double
movement of deeper return to its own sources plus the creative
assimilation of some new insight or method of later thought."