Semester Two of my graduate school experience has begun, and I'm beginning to notice a curious trend: Everywhere I go (in everything I read), I find some reference to Thomas Aquinas, his fellow scholastics, or the neo-scholasticism of de Lubac's and Danielou's nouvelle theologie. First, in my course on Chaucer, the scholastics (along with Jacques Maritain) played a central role in Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, offering what Eco terms a "unifying vision" of beauty in relation to truth, goodness, and the One. Then comes Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition, in which Holsinger seeks to situate the French literary theoretic tradition within its broadly medieval framework--a task impossible without noting, for instance, Bataille's engagement with Danielou over a cup of tea regarding an article of his on Nietzsche. (Of course, there's also the fact that de Certeau was taught by de Lubac, and that Lacan himself engaged with Teilhard de Chardin, facts noted by Marcus Pound in a recent interview: http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=293).
Next, in my seminar on historicity, Henry Adams finds that his search for the historical roots of the Virgin's force lead him back to the scholastics (in "The Dynamo and the Virgin" from _The Education of Henry Adams_). Not to mention I'm planning on writing a paper on MacIntyre's notion of tradition for the course.
Furthermore, in my Romantic Atlantics class on trans-atlantic literature, an engagement with Benedict Anderson's _Imagined Communities_ provoked a thorough discussion of his conception of the secular and how it related to other conceptions, such as Charles Taylor's. Anderson's "empty, homologous time" is meaningless without its contrast to the "Messianic time" of Benjamin, which, it was argued, reached its peak in the Middle Ages and the time of the Scholastics. For the same class, finally, we just finished Scott's excellent (and underappreciated) novel _Guy Mannering: Or, the Astrologer_. The comic figure Dominie Sampson (the name should tip you off) is a sort of Scholastic lost in the wrong century, and he appropriately quotes from Latin theological sources and spends his days researching in his library of obscure works inherited from a Scottish bishop.
In short, I'm pleasantly confused as to whether, at this supposedly "secular" university, I'm receiving a more thorough education in literary scholarship or Sacra Doctrina!
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