?ISKOLAR NG BAYAN? AND ?scholastic? do rhyme, after all.

Scholasticism (a.k.a. medieval/Catholic philosophy) is alive and well in the so-called ?godless? University of the Philippines-Diliman, with its students and faculty poring over St. Thomas Aquinas? voluminous ?Summa? over the ?Little Red Book.?

The credit goes to the Opus Dei Thomists of the Tanglaw Center near the campus. The center, a sort of women?s hangout, seems to be breeding a new ?Dei-liman Republic.?

?Workers of the world, unite!? says Karl Marx. ?Workers of God, unite!? say the women of Tanglaw.

One Dei-limanian is Ma. Liza Ruth Ocampo, author of the ?The Dignity of the Thinking Person: A Philosophical Reflection on Human Nature? (UST Publishing House, 2006, 212 pages; tel. 7313522 and 406-1611 loc. 8252 or 8278).

Ocampo obtained her Bachelor of Arts cum laude and master?s degree in Philosophy from UP.

While UP?s Philosophy department was formed by atheist Ricardo Pascual, academic freedom (or some miracle) produced the likes of Ocampo. After earning licentiate and Doctoral degrees in Philosophy from Rome?s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, he?s back at the UP to teach scholasticism as an alternative philosophy of life.

The thinking animal

The book is really Ocampo?s doctoral dissertation, and it answers the question of human dignity and nature after the thoughts of Aquinas, the godfather of Catholic philosophy.

Jovino de Guzman Miroy of Ateneo de Manila says the book is ?arguably the most vital book on Aquinas published in the Philippines.? (He says that apparently without apologies to the Dominicans and Thomists of UST who published Ocampo?s book in the first place. Ocampo?s mom is a faculty member at the Pontifical University.)

To solve contemporary man?s identity crisis and loss of self-worth, Ocampo suggests a rereading of Aquinas? reflection on man as a ?rational [thinking] animal,? which is rooted on classical Greek and Latin philosophy. She evaluates Aquinas? interlocutors like Norman Kretzman, John Crosby, Lawrence Dewan, Alasdair ManIntyre and other Anglo-Saxon philosophers.

?In the modern classic, CS Lewis? ?The Abolition of Man,?? Ocampo says, ?we find the disturbing image of ?men without chests? who are at a loss in grasping the problem of their ?whatness.? These ?men without chests? are trying to figure out what their misplaced identity consists of; Lewis? portrayal is a powerful indictment against approaches that leave out the basic question of human nature unanswered.?

But also far from limiting man to a definitive nature, Aquinas? teachinggives direction and purpose to an otherwise dismissible being, Ocampo writes.

Far from being archaic, Thomism has touches of existentialism, Kantian humanism and postmodernism. By buttressing man?s reason, Aquinas affirms man?s subjective capacity to think for and by himself, to live for his sake, to advance discourse, to celebrate his genus-specie, his personal uniqueness in vivé le difference.

Appealing to man?s individual conscience, Ocampo quotes Crosby: ?Persons are unrepeatable that they are capable of acting on strictly personal maxims, which cannot be made into general laws valid for all human beings.?

And while Aquinas is called the Angelic Doctor, he was far from likening man to angelic life form. Instead he opted to define man as an intelligent animal rather than an ?incarnate spirit,? whose value lies heavy on the soul.

The soul is not the man, oh dear religious. Soul and body are. God alone is Mr. Perfect but no deus ex machina. He made man the agent of his Creation?s own perfection.

UP?s scholastica

Readers familiar with metaphysics will find the book engaging?a real venture into high scholasticism. Hailing from a family of Thomists, Ocampo labored through hair-splitting Greek and Latin terminologies and texts.

Her interest in the works of Flannery O?Connor, GK Chesterton, TS Eliot, John Henry Newman and Karol Wojtyla indicate that she may one day do an Umberto Eco, i.e., dovetail literature with philosophy.

In the words of her thesis director, Stephen Brock, Ocampo ?has the good luck of becoming privy to a kind of an open secret, which she wants to share? This wisdom goes by the name metaphysics.?

Ocampo?s study primarily benefits debates on reincarnation, ensoulment, human rights, bioethics and philosophical anthropology. Positive responses from the country?s top universities prove that Thomism is a resurging gospel truth amid cerebral class struggles.

Thomism finds new voice in the work of laywoman, a Filipina and an alumna of ?that godless university.? What Ocampo offers her students is a ?new? way to think about themselves, in oblation to dignity, reason and freedom.