Thomism is a contested category that exhibits considerable plasticity in its application. An examination of the role played by such invocations of proper names in contemporary theological discourse indicates the importance of textual accessibility and engagement. The role played by texts is examined in terms of an often-elided distinction between ‘intelligibility’ and ‘readability’, with the former aligned with propositional contents and the latter a more expansive attentiveness to the text's performative operations. The historical remoteness of Aquinas coupled with the importation into theology of secularised reading strategies is seen to have alienated the full readability of Aquinas's texts. Acting against Cartesian modes of reading, Cornelius Ernst's re-performance of Thomistic pedagogy as ‘engaged contemplation’ is concerned to enact a horizon of meaning within which Aquinas's texts retain enduring readability. This article develops Ernst's Thomistic meta-theology into an account of Thomism as ‘meta-reading’. On this account, authentic Thomism involves the intentional cultivation of a total human culture, within which the inherently theological discipline of textual engagement exercises a quasi-liturgical function.

The new ontology of meaning proposed by Fr Cornelius Ernst OP as a means of articulating the Thomistic synthesis in the idiom of the modern era coheres around ecclesiology. Drawing upon the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Ernst sees meaning as the distinctively human praxis by which man ‘subdues’ and ‘transcends’ the world to which he belongs, thereby transposing it into the world that belongs to man. The Church, as the Body of Christ – who is personally the ontological meaning of history – is the distinctively Christian linguistic community of meaning, in which ultimate meaning – the ‘meaning of meaning’, i.e. God – is present in each successive era. Established in the illuminating event of Christ's incarnation, the Church is the sacramental institution that makes present Christ's re-integration of the plurality of human meanings, realising itself as a concrete community within the world, and realising the world authentically within itself. As the sacrament of the Trinitarian mediation of meaning, therefore, the Church is irreducibly both human institution and mystical communion, serving as the ontological a priori of faith, and thus the authentic locus of Christian theology.