A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding St. Thomas Aquinas’s Teaching about the Actual Composition of Essence and Esse in Created Beings

A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding St. Thomas Aquinas’s Teaching about the Actual Composition of Essence and Esse in Created Beings

Given the contemporary, widespread, centuries-long and entrenched, misunderstandings of major teachings of St. Thomas (even among his historically most-celebrated students from the time of his death to the present day), within the past several years I have started to refer to myself as a “Ragamuffin Thomist;” and I have published a trilogy of books through which I hope to be able to initiate a renaissance in Thomistic studies (which I have started to call “Born-again Thomism”), chiefly related to his metaphysical and moral teaching (2015, 2016a, 2016b). As the title of this article indicates, I write the present work as the first of two parts of the history of the 21st-century “Born-again Thomism” movement.