Sin: A Thomistic Psychology by Steven J. Jensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sin: A Thomistic Psychology by Steven J. Jensen Romanus Cessario O.P. Sin: A Thomistic Psychology. By Steven J. Jensen. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Pp. 336. $34.95 (soft). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3033-7. The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston enjoys prominence among faculties devoted to the study of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Since 1975 a succession of recognized authorities in the field of Thomist studies has taught there. Steven Jensen, who currently serves as Director for the Center and also holds the Bishop Nold Chair in Graduate Philosophy, continues a work that began under the directorship of Professor Anton C. Pegis, formerly president of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto. The Center places Houston on the map of Thomist centers throughout the world, alongside Toulouse, Rome, and Fribourg—to name only a few. The present volume witnesses to the quality of the scholarship that one has come to associate with Texas Thomism. Distinguer pour unir recalls an important work of the Thomist author Jacques Maritain, who visited the Houston Center and is numbered among its honorary members. Distinguish to unite captures the overall achievement of Jensen’s presentation of what he calls a Thomistic psychology. In other words, the author demonstrates the remarkable ability of a good thinker to expose the arguments of those colleagues who purport to interpret the same texts that he does. In this case, the texts under analysis come from the pen of the Angelic Doctor, especially the Secunda pars of the Summa theologiae and the disputed questions De malo. Both works date from roughly the same period of Aquinas’s teaching career (the late 1260s and early 1270s). It is a fair generalization to state that the way Aquinas understands the specifically human workings of the rational animal differs from how many theorists of our period explain human behavior. To claim, as Aquinas does, that “a good understood [bonum intellectum] is the will’s object and moves it by being something to aim for” (STh I, q. 82, a. 4) separates Thomists from those who hold that human actions arise from anything but an understood good. To further claim “that in all of our choices we always act for some good” (1) introduces a number of questions that the author treats in chapter 1 under the heading of “The Enigma of an Evil Will.” Facile replies to questions about the relationship of the will to the highest good leads to assertions that would easily fit in the mouth of someone like Goethe’s Mephistopheles. The authentic Christian tradition, however, will not allow evil to determine anything. Had Adam not sinned, Jensen would not have had to write this book. However, original sin entered the world. Christian thinkers, then, face the challenge of explaining the existence of disorder in a world that God created good. I believe that the author chose the title that he did, Sin, in order to make this point. One, therefore, may be forgiven for thinking that a book about Aquinas’s discussion of human willing would most fittingly carry the title [End Page 318] “Blessedness,” whereas casuist authors might hawk their wares by promising cogent thought about sins. The present author, however, cleverly draws us to his subject by his implicit appeal to that which no Christian can escape. Once Christ dies on Calvary, those who follow him must seek to promote the good and to restrain what is evil. Aquinas in fact makes this point explicitly at the start of the Tertia pars. Some have even argued that the whole of the Summa exposes the path persons must follow to become what God made the human creature to be. Jensen outlines the mistakes that thinkers have made about how one should walk along this path. We need to know these errors, even though it remains the case that the only real remedy for the mistakes humans make provides work for theologians and not philosophers. Chapter 2 introduces the various ways in which contemporary philosophers interpret Aquinas’s teleology. The word “teleology” does not appear in the Index. Jensen discusses the ways...