The Relevance of St. Thomas Aquinas in Today’s World, by Dr. Donald DeMarco

In the Preface to the 1958 edition of St. Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain states that his presentation is not of a medieval Thomism, but of a lasting and present Thomism.”   Such a presentation, however, goes against the grain of today’s intellectual climate in which progress, and all that it implies, is taken for granted.  Can ideas have lasting power?  Can something that was said in the 13^th century be relevant in the year 2024?

Built-in obsolescence belongs to the world of technology but not to the world of art.  John Keats recognized the durability of art when he declared that “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”  The works of Plato and Aristotle, Bach and Beethoven, Da Vinci and Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Dante have retained their eternal freshness.  Whatever is up-to-date is quickly out-of-date.   But it is the glory of the human mind that it can create forms that intimate the eternal.  “I am not trying to include the past in the present,” Maritain writes, “but to maintain in the now the presence of the eternal.” ….