On August 28, the French Dominican theologian Jean-Pierre Torrell (1927–2025) died at age ninety-eight in Fribourg, Switzerland. Up until shortly before his death, he remained calm and lucid, receiving the sacraments in a self-aware state before expiring. He was an epochal figure in modern Dominican theology, and his passing represents the change of an era.
It is no secret that there is a widespread revival of interest—at least in the English-speaking world—in the study of St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as medieval theology more generally. Torrell has a great deal to do with this, even if his name is not well known to many. In the 1970s and ’80s, mainstream Catholic theology was changing direction, trying new things, often seeking to renounce its scholastic past, which was no longer considered relevant or useful. Torrell was not animated by hostility to these trends. In fact, prior to the Second Vatican Council, he had achieved a profound erudition in the study of modern theology. As a doctoral student in the late 1950s, he had worked in Paris under great theologians such as Yves Congar and Jean Jérôme Hamer, both intimately associated with ressourcement theology, and both later named cardinals.
However, during the time after the council when there were very few people transmitting expert understanding of St. Thomas, Torrell re-specialized as a medievalist. He wrote works on twelfth- and thirteenth-century theology, and began to explore the thought of Aquinas from a new angle. After Aeterni Patris and the early-twentieth-century revival of Thomism that stemmed from Leo XIII, European scholars such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain emphasized the contribution of Aquinas’s philosophy. Torrell changed the focus, concentrating especially on Aquinas’s spiritual theology, his theories of prophecy, and his Christology.
Coming out of this new focus, Torrell produced what is no doubt his most famous and influential work, a two-volume biography and intellectual profile of St. Thomas Aquinas. These two works, published in French in 1993 and 1996, have been translated into English as Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work and Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master. The latter volume is considered the most important study of Aquinas’s spiritual theology produced in half a century. It is a masterpiece of historical erudition. By focusing on Aquinas as a spiritual guide, saint, and mystic, Torrell sidestepped the classic concern about scholasticism as a dry and arid system. He focused instead on St. Thomas’s use of learning in the service of contemplation and interior union with God. This subsequently became an influential way of recasting the whole project of Thomism in a more existentially vibrant and spiritually inspiring way. Torrell paid attention to themes in St. Thomas others had noted but not accentuated: the role of the Holy Spirit in the sanctification of the human person, the Gifts of the Spirit, the role of charity in elevating human beings into higher states of contemplation.
Torrell’s study of prophecy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is of interest for surprisingly modern reasons. Today, we tend to think of prophecy as the capacity to know things pertaining to the future, normally known to God alone. But in fact, the medievals frequently used the term to denote all knowledge that exceeds the range of natural human understanding. In other words, it pertains to the knowledge of the authors of the Old and New Testament by which they convey genuine supernatural knowledge of God that is of epistemic warrant, and thus worthy of belief for modern rationally oriented persons. The medievals did concern themselves in sophisticated ways with this question: What is the status of prophetic knowledge by which revelation is conveyed, and how is it compatible with natural knowledge by which we acquire philosophical and empirical understanding of creation? Torrell was exploring in effect the historical origins of modern fundamental theology, which is concerned with the relations of faith and reason, and was showing that the medievals were true forerunners of the modern Catholic drive toward rational exploration of revelation, without being reductively rationalistic.
In the study of Thomistic Christology, Torrell’s work is of landmark significance. Toward the end of his career, he completed a comprehensive translation of the whole third part (Tertia Pars) of the Summa Theologiae devoted to the topic of Jesus Christ, his person, life, death, and resurrection. Torrell wrote an extensive commentary on this part of the Summa, producing one of the most extensive studies of the Christology of St. Thomas in the modern era. His interpretations of Aquinas contain disputable points, but his interpretive choices are always interesting, and, in an understated way, he is always in dialogue with modern Catholic Christology of the postconciliar period. Effectively, Torrell’s work raises the question: Might Aquinas’s notions of the Incarnation, the life of Christ, the passion, atonement, and resurrection of Jesus have as much or more to say to us today than many contemporary revisionist theologies?
Most importantly, his work here, as with the topics in spiritual theology, changed the focus regarding Aquinas’s thought in general. While many have been concerned above all with St. Thomas’s metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of the human person, Torrell emphasized Christology, spiritual life, and revelatory knowledge of God. He helped modern Catholic theology recover a sense of St. Thomas Aquinas, the theologian. Moreover, he transmitted this patrimony to important protagonists of theology in the subsequent generation who conducted their doctoral research under his supervision, people like Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, Serge-Thomas Bonino, and Gilles Emery, all of whom have had a major impact on the renewal of Thomistic studies over the past generation.
Fr. Torrell was famous for working twelve hours a day, every day, in the Albertinum priory in Fribourg. He attended every religious office and every priory meal. His officiousness rivaled that classically attributed to Immanuel Kant. But he was a fiery and glowing preacher and a person of great charity toward his fellow religious confreres. The research he produced was an outward sign of an inward life of devotion and feeling, motivated by sincere love for Christ and a desire for union with God. Having completed his earthly pilgrimage, he now leaves an important spiritual legacy in his wake.
