Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. Anderson David Elliot Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. By Justin M. Anderson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 341. $99.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-108-48518-0. Struck by the unique way he combines comprehensive genius and judicious balance with an air of serene detachment, many regard St. Thomas Aquinas as such a complete thinker that the idea of him repeatedly changing his mind can seem outlandish. While it is not controversial to say that his thought developed from his early to his later works, few could imagine him writing a book like St. Augustine’s Retractations, or would suggest that Thomism would have taken some radically different shape had he lived a decade longer. His mature works come across not as brilliant detours but as fully ripened conclusions, making the notion of an incessantly “evolving” Aquinas seem deeply eccentric. At the same time, there were a few periods—such as his fruitful stay at Orvieto and then Rome in the 1260s—where Aquinas made remarkable discoveries and changed course in important ways. Recognition of this is sometimes traced to the twentieth century, but already in the 1440s John Capreolus (the “Prince of Thomists”) noted major shifts in Aquinas’s teaching on grace after his earlier Scriptum on the Sentences, as did Cardinal Cajetan and the Salamancan Dominic de Soto a century later. For Capreolus the Summa theologiae was a kind of understated Retractations in that Aquinas fully “moved back from the Pelagian error” which his contemporaries and his own earlier Scriptum did not completely root out. On this view, it is to the late Aquinas that we owe a fully adequate doctrine of grace from which the theological and infused cardinal virtues flow. In this excellent book, Justin Anderson takes up the role of a latter-day Capreolus, pushing firmly against any current trends toward a “Thomistic Pelagianism” (169). He argues that Aquinas’s theology of virtue and grace underwent “titanic developments” that led him to stress themes such as the moral necessity of grace and the damaging effects of sin in ever more refined and emphatic ways. This argument is substantially correct and vast in its implications, but Anderson holds that these shifts have yet fully to impact Thomistic moral theology, like a detonation that has flashed on the horizon but whose fallout has yet to land. The book seeks to trace the fallout, showing how Aquinas’s mature teaching on grace and sin pulled his virtue theory in ever more Augustinian and Pauline directions, yet without forfeiting core Aristotelian [End Page 299] commitments. The book also joins this stress on Christian particularity with a quite different effort to affirm the category of “pagan virtue” on very generous terms. It is by turns an in-depth exegesis of Aquinas’s texts, an historical examination of the hundred years preceding, and an attempt to shift the conversation in Thomistic virtue scholarship toward the moral consequences of Aquinas’s later teaching on grace. It is an engaging story that in some ways could have been better told, but there is no doubting its importance. The first chapter gives a general outline of Thomistic virtues as habits perfective of human powers. Anderson distinguishes virtues based on their causes and ends, and as bundled into cardinal and theological, acquired and infused, and other familiar clusters. The second examines Aquinas’s exact vocabulary of virtue to describe its many meanings and analogous senses. The most important concern virtue simpliciter or “without qualification,” and virtue secundum quid or in a “qualified sense.” Gratuitous or infused virtue, which directs us to our ultimate end, is virtue simpliciter (61). By contrast, connatural or acquired virtue falls short of that end, and yet its level of perfection does qualify it as virtue secundum quid. It can be said that the full definition of virtue (simpliciter) is theological while leaving space for “pagan virtue” in a secondary sense (secundum quid). But it is from the third chapter onward that the really significant achievement of this book emerges. Anderson gives a detailed study of how the...