Cajetan, the Cardinal who examined Luther, was the age’s leading Thomist. What intrigued me what an article I once read about him, which had it that what he opposed Luther and might have had him killed, nonetheless saw merits in his views, and in the Reform view in general. He even proposed an overture to the Protestants. He was of course himself a reformer. Luther seems to have had but the most superficial knowledge of Thomism, which Cajetan was in fact trying to revive as a living teaching. He and the Cardinal had this in common: each rejected nominalism. Fact is that first-rate intellects recognize one another. Which is why Calvin ascended so quickly: his opponets knew they were striking fire against flintn
The article, by the way, I am unable to find again. Just happened to pick it up in a library while whiling away the time. So can’t verify/disprove what I remember.
There's a lot of that, BTW, in the liberal response to Newt Gingrich. A capable and dangerous opponent, once recognized as such, will draw fire.
The liberal narrative is, of course, that Republicans are either 1) bitter clingers to God, guns, and traditional morality who have been left behind by the inevitable progress of American culture and revel in their ignorance born out of a disguised jealousy, or 2) cynical demagogues who use the language of religion and tradition to manipulate the masses to gain power for their own ends, not because they believe the rhetoric they use.
It's easy to portray a lot of Republican conservatives as ignoramuses. That narrative simply isn't true, but there's enough truth in it that those who have a predetermined agenda can find examples to “prove” their prejudices.
Newt Gingrich doesn't fit that mold. He's acknowledged even by his enemies as usually being the smartest man in the room. Precisely because he's smart, he's recognized by the liberals as being dangerous to their goals and draws a tremendous amount of fire on other issues from people who know they can't refute his ideas in fair debate.
In that context, I want to give you a compliment. Very few people, even active churchgoers, would have any idea what you mean by nominalism, Thomism, etc. The article by Maureen Dowd shows the depth of the ignorance of basic Catholic doctrine in educated circles in America — someone like at her level of elite media ought to have at least some idea of the Seven Deadly Sins before she took up her pen to write about religion. While anyone can make a mistake, something like that shows less about her and more about American cultural ignorance of religion in general.
The issues involved in the Reformation have been grossly simplified at the popular level — i.e., high school history books, the mass media, fiction, and the movies. The average American often has no idea that the Reformation was anything more than Luther's objection to gross immorality in the Roman Catholic Church of his day. That's nothing but nonsense: Both Luther and Calvin understood that it is a Donatist heresy to split a church because of immorality, and both made very clear in their writings that they would never leave a church because of immorality.
Add in the agenda-driven deliberate misrepresentations of the Reformation, for example, the Marxist interpretation of Protestantism as an early bourgeois revolt against the agrarian feudal establishment, or people who look at Luther's biography and think he rejected authority because he was beaten and abused by his father (never mind that was typical for virtually all German boys of his era) — and it's surprising that Americans know anything at all about the issues in the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-reformation.
The central issues in the Reformation were none of those things, but rather such issues as salvation by grace alone, the sole authority of Scripture rather than church tradition or ecclesiastical authority, the nature of what happens in communion, whether the Pope as an individual or the institution of the papacy in general is Antichrist, and liturgical issues of what it means to properly worship God according to His Word.
I wish more people like Dowd would take the time to educate themselves about religious matters before writing on the subject. Their ignorance of a subject they don't care about enough to take seriously would be bad enough, but articles like hers show that she doesn't even understand religion well enough to intelligently criticize it. She wouldn't tolerate an ignorant statement by a Republican politician about a subject she's studied, but apparently she feels free to write about things she doesn't understand and doesn't care to learn about.
The only good thing about that, using military terms, is that when your enemy both underestimates you and misunderstands your capabilities, you have a significant chance of using his ignorance against him to his hurt.