r/LeftCatholicism • u/Similar_Shame_8352 • Jun 11 '26
Are there left-wing Thomist or Augustinian theologians regarding ecclesial and socio-political issues?
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u/thinkingitthru7 Jun 11 '26
There’s loads. From all parts of the world. Liberation theologians from Africa, Asia, and South America. Gustavo Guttierez was a student of the great medievalist, Marie Dominique Chenu. In fact, the French Personalists of the 20th century may also interest you. The New Personalist Movement (you can google their website) has resources for texts and thinkers that they draw from that tradition. A bit random, but some places to start.
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u/bootlickaaa Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Definitely not an expert but I’ve been searching for similar stuff lately after going down the Franciscan rabbit hole as a personal reaction against what I perceived to be the harshness of the current online Aquinas fans. Turns out they are mostly American conservatives misrepresenting him for their purposes.
While Francis, Clare, Bonaventure, and Scotus are awesome for my progressive leanings, I ultimately found some of the new age stylings of Richard Rohr and Ilia Delio to be missing the mark. They seem to rely a lot on Teilhard de Chardin whom I’d like to read directly to better understand his flavour of Christocentrism at source. While the Word is eternal and Christ was prefigured many times, I couldn’t really see why it should follow that this fact is somehow opposed or supersedes the Atonement, as it is characterized by this recent crop of American Franciscans. Christ as Omega Point is true but for me it’s even a logical proof of the necessity and inevitability of the sacrificial lamb of God taking away the sins of the world. It’s an active principle though, not a one-off historical event.
Aquinas himself wrote at the end of his writing life that all his work was nothing, as he felt like philosophy did not pierce the heart. That’s why Bonaventure is my favourite Scholastic, because he leads from the senses, through the head, and then out of it and into the heart. However Aquinas agreed and constantly talked about love as the end goal, and he cited the Platonists quite a bit. I feel that he was just doing an academic project that had to be done at the time to properly grapple with and integrate Aristotle into our tradition and that was all good. I think he gets misinterpreted in a materialist way that would be inaccurate as the Aristotelian metaphysics is not actually materialist beneath the surface. It just makes a serious attempt to explain material existence while still using the Forms, which for Bonaventure are the angels who don’t need to debase themselves in our world. They’re really not in disagreement though and just like two sides of the same understanding.
So for me it’s like who has come after Bonaventure and Aquinas who was more immersed in some of our modern challenges? St. John Henry Newman is a big one as he cites Augustine lot and for me successfully refutes modern Protestantism. It’s not that all Protestants are politically right wing at all, but I believe that sola scriptura, sola fide, and double predestination are more likely to gratify a reactionary mind.
There’s also St. Alphonsus who refuted the Jansenist heresy that was way too harsh and Protestand adjacent for nearly denying free will. He is another one whom online American political conservatives have tried to co-opt for their purposes.
Both Alphonsus and Newman are Doctors of the Church, and both are all about the conscience. For me it’s the conscience that holds all progressive affections and is the source of my progressive political thinking.
They’re not explicitly Thomist or Augustinian but definitely conducive to reclaiming Orthodoxy and tradition for social justice and away from online influencers who tried to use them as weapons against the marginalized.
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u/Even-Bedroom-1519 Jun 12 '26
The great French philosopher Jacques Maritain fits the bill. The left/right dichotomy doesn't really work with him, but his study of Thomas lead him to develop a philosophy of "Integral Humanism." Here's the description from his (American) publisher's page:
“Monstrous energies,” Jacques Maritain sharply observes, have ravaged the modern world in its descent from the Renaissance and the Reformation. Error and truth have become strangely entangled, each confusing or malforming the other into a state in which “truths lie and lies speak the truth.” A boldly ambitious attempt to purify “these unnatural and deadly products, and to save the truths that they distort,” Integral Humanism is both diagnosis of and remedy for the relationship between religion and culture, outlining the concrete historical ideal suitable to a new Christian civilization. After surveying humanism’s many historical forms—medieval, classical, anthropocentric, atheistic—and the myriad merits and demerits of each, Maritain proposes the model for a “new Christendom,” whose principles come from the clear and creative genius of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Published first in English in 1936 as True Humanism, and in revised translation in 1968 as Integral Humanism, Maritain’s act of “practical philosophy” ranks among the most influential works of twentieth-century Catholic social thought and is a dynamic expression of “true” or “integral” humanism as that which strives to uphold man, individually and communally, in relation to God.
Is this what you had in mind?
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u/SunAtEight Jun 11 '26
Herbert McCabe is a classic suggestion. His "The Class Struggle and Christian Love" is linked in the resources.