Sixteenth-Century Reception of Aquinas by Cajetan

AbstractThomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534) was a uniquely gifted Thomistic philosopher, theologian, biblical exegete, and churchman. His reception of Aquinas holds a meridian place in intellectual history because of the profundity his Thomistic commentaries manifest in their pages and the influence his writings exercised in Catholic life and thought. Cajetan’s was an intensive reception of Aquinas’ universal and necessary first principles. And this intensive reception proceeded according to two movements of concrete application: a defensive movement that responds to the objections of Aquinas’ critics, and an extensive movement that applies Aquinas’ principles to the questions and controversies of his own fifteenth- and sixteenth-century period. Cajetan’s philosophical, theological, and exegetical work received their shape from the fundamental first principles that governed Aquinas’ own thought. Finally, Cajetan’s reception of Aquinas accounts for both the manner and the significance of his ecclesial service in early modern history.