Psychology and Theodicy in Aquinas

Abstract

Throughout much of this century the most prominent exegetes maintained that Aquinas’s mature moral psychology is fundamentally voluntarist, that he considers the will an independent cause of action, most conspicuously in his later works. Disagreement over the character of the will’s causal authority and the composition of the list of later works did little to unsettle their shared conviction that Aristotle’s intellectualist moral psychology was improved, indeed saved, by Aquinas’s insistence that the will can move itself, at least in some fashion, apart from the influence of the intellect. See Rene Antoine Gauthier and Jean Yves Jolif, Aristote: L’ethique a Nicomaque, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Paris: Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1970), p. 218; Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. J.P. Burns (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), pp. 93–97; Odom Lottin, “La Preuve de al Liberte Humaine chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Recherches de Theologie Ancienne et Medievale 23 (1956): 323–30; and Klaus Riesenhuber, Die Transzendenz Der Freiheit Zum Guten: Der Wille in der Anthropologie und Metaphysik des Thomas von Aquin (Munchen: Berchmanskolleg Verlag, 1971), p. 290.