The Thomisitic restoration officialised by Leo XIII in 1879 had been prepared, in the preceding decades, by the work to justify such a retrun to a philosophy of the past, at odds with modern philosophies. The arguments put forwards by three of the main contributors to the Thomistic revival under Pius IX (Liberatore, Kleutgen, Sanseverino) reveal the difference in emphasis between a return to the past as past and the highlighting of the past as Christian.