I dedicate this session to the subject of the mental word, calling it “the word of man – verbum hominis with the terminology of Saint Augustine – in human life”. The word “human life” in the work of St. Thomas appears continually. I think he is about to make a doctoral thesis, or many, about the concept and all its dimensions of what St. Thomas calls “human life”.
This lecture, given by Francisco Canals Vidal on the day the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU awarded him the degree of Doctor Honoris causa, in 2005, suggests core themes and lines of reflection in order to draw the attention on the doctrinal synthesis of saint Thomas Aquinas, unknown to many thomists, as well. In effect, Aquinas synthesizes dimensions of reality which have been constituted in unity by the divine creative action. Even more, since saint Thomas is a “Christian philosopher” it is not convenient to split his synthetic ability between human natural being and activity, and the constitutives of man’s elevation to the supernatural order of divine filiation and its consummation in the eternal beatitude to which all supernatural and gratuitous gifts given by the divine generosity are ordered. Nevertheless, all these dimensions, assumed with unilateral exclusiveness, have given way in human thought to inadequate options among antithetic stances, which ended up postulating in post-Kantian modernity the dialectics of the opposites as the factor of movement and life of human thought
«En el principio era la Acción.» En la pretendida interpretación del texto evangélico que expresa Fausto en el momento anterior a la aceptación del pacto con Mefistófeles, podríamos ver e~presada una actitud que define para muchos la del hombre occidental moderno: el hombre fáustico.
En septiembre de 1955, en ocasión de asistir al IV Congreso Tomista Internacional que se celebraba entonces en Roma, conocí por primera vez a fray Bartolomé M.ª Xiberta, O.C. (1897-1967), de quien se ha escrito autorizadamente que «es tal vez el mayor teólogo que el Carmelo ha producido a lo largo de los siglos».
