Aquinas's Account Research Articles

True Love Is Reciprocal: Thomas Aquinas on the Love of Friendship

AbstractOne of the most important topics that Thomas Aquinas discusses in his extensive corpus is the love of friendship, which is a unique form of love aimed at persons. Yet Aquinas's teachings on this are perplexing, for he claims that this love always produces union between lover and beloved, and that it is always a mutual love. This implies that one's love depends on reciprocation from the beloved, which seems implausible given the possibility of phenomena such as unrequited love. A common interpretation of Aquinas's account of the love of friendship maintains that it is enough that one desires union and mutuality for such love to obtain even if such desires remain unrealized, but in this paper I reject this reading and argue that achieving union and mutuality is essential to this form of love. This novel interpretation ultimately reveals that the love of friendship is an intrinsically interpersonal act.

How Augustinian Is Aquinas's Basic Account of Free Decision?

How Augustinian Is Aquinas's Basic Account of Free Decision?

Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity by Roberto Di Ceglie

Reviewed by: Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity by Roberto Di Ceglie Gregory Stacey DI CEGLIE, Roberto. Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity. New York: Routledge, 2022. x + 196 pp. Cloth, $160.00 Suppose one wishes to argue that Christian faith (that is, supernatural belief in propositions insofar as they are divinely revealed) is compatible with the proper exercise of reason (that is, forming beliefs through natural cognitive processes). Two strategies suggest themselves. First, one could argue that faith is itself a natural cognitive process or else meets criteria by which natural beliefs are considered rational or appropriate. Alternatively, one might contend that faith can meet its own, independent criteria for rationality or propriety. Thomas Aquinas, whose natural theology and discussion of public evidence that God has revealed himself in Christ are famously robust, may appear to be an exponent of the former strategy. Yet in this volume, Roberto Di Ceglie advances a reading of Thomas that illustrates how faith can support rational enquiry, while remaining independent of it. On this view, faith is "caused mainly by God" and is therefore "at least partly unresponsive to rational criteria." Part 1 begins Di Ceglie's case obliquely, by criticizing both efforts to argue (following Gilson and Maritain) that philosophy can be influenced by Christian faith and recent attempts to explain Aquinas's account of faith and reason. Reviewing the work of commentators including Anthony Kenny, Richard Swinburne, and Eleonore Stump, the author objects that many philosophers hold that for Thomas, faith is primarily a form of propositional belief that should be evaluated for propriety in the same way as natural beliefs. He alleges that this understanding of faith is inherited from Locke, who endorsed "methodological naturalism": the view that appropriate "religious belief can only be taken as the outcome, if any, of a rational exploration of our experience." While this material usefully outlines views which Di Ceglie means to oppose, readers unfamiliar with scholarship on Aquinas and Locke may find these initial chapters difficult to follow. The argument becomes easier to follow in part 2, which provides Di Ceglie's own interpretation of Aquinas. The key third chapter explores Aquinas's definition of faith as "an act of the intellect assenting to the Divine Truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God" (ST II-II, q. 2, a. 9). It demonstrates that while for Aquinas faith involves firm propositional belief, its certitude derives not from believers' assessment of signs that God has revealed the articles of faith but from their free choice—itself a gift of grace—to embrace those articles. More precisely, in cases of "formed" faith, this choice is motivated by supernatural love for God (charity). Charity's role in Aquinas's religious epistemology is [End Page 547] highlighted in two subsequent chapters. Inter alia, Di Ceglie charges that faith is meritorious principally due to its grounds in charity rather than because the articles of faith are not evidently true. He further claims that Aquinas understood "unformed" faith as merely "faith commonly so called"—that is, natural belief in propositions because one judges that they are testified to by a competent authority. Accordingly, unformed faith lacks perfect confidence because it is merely based on probabilistic evidence that God has revealed the articles of faith, rather than on a strong, loving will to trust God. More generally, the certitude of one's faith is proportionate to the perfection of one's charity. Having developed a reading of Aquinas's religious epistemology that stresses the distinction between faith and reason, in part 3 Di Ceglie considers their positive relationship. First, he attempts to reconcile the apparently opposing views that Aquinas's philosophy is purely an exercise of natural reason, and that his philosophical work was influenced by his Christian faith. Broadly, the charity that grounds formed faith also inspires and enhances rational investigation, although philosophical arguments cannot presume faith's truth. Believers with formed faith, however, should reject positions that contradict faith and seek to revise their philosophical reasoning accordingly. The final chapter argues that Christian faith affords a better position from which to engage in rational reflection than atheism or agnosticism. Among other advantages, faith...

Reframing Anselm and Aquinas on Atonement

AbstractThomas Aquinas's vision of atonement is generally considered more conceptually expansive than Anselm of Canterbury's. Where Aquinas's multipartite account of Christ's passion incorporates a variety of biblical motifs, Anselm appears to narrow the focus to satisfactory debt-repayment alone. This article proposes two approaches for reframing the comparison between the two accounts. I argue first that both Anselm and Aquinas considered debt-repayment necessary but not sufficient in itself to accomplish all that is needed for the remittance of sin and the restoration of humanity. For Anselm, as for Aquinas, Christ must also liberate captives, defeat the devil, amend Adam's sin by recapitulation and win merit in which his members participate. The first reframing thus locates Anselm in much closer proximity to Aquinas than has generally been supposed. The second reframing throws light on a significant divergence between the two. I argue that the kenotic trajectory of abasement and ascent, pictured in the Philippian hymn, is put to strikingly different use by each theologian. This second reframing throws into sharp relief Aquinas's emphasis on Christ's suffering as a theological priority which Anselm does not share. Looking to Anselm's Benedictine context, I contend, yields one possible means of accounting for this departure.

A Thomistic Solution to the Deep Problem for Perfectionism

AbstractPerfectionism is the view that what is intrinsically good is the fulfillment of human nature or the development and exercise of the characteristic human capacities. An important objection to the theory is what Gwen Bradford calls the “Deep Problem”: explaining why nature-fulfillment is good. We argue that situating perfectionism within a Thomistic metaethical framework and adopting Aquinas's account of the metaphysical “convertibility” of being and goodness gives us a solution to the Deep Problem. In short, the fulfillment of human nature consists in the actualization of human potentialities or fullness of human being, and because being is ultimately the same thing as goodness, the fulfillment of human nature is good. We show that Thomistic perfectionism meets the requirements for an answer to the Deep Problem, provides the best explanation possible for the goodness of nature fulfillment, and is a natural foundation for perfectionist theories of value.

Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science by Rudi A. te Velde

Reviewed by: Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science by Rudi A. te Velde O.P. Philip-Neri Reese VELDE, Rudi A. te. Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2021. vii + 246 pp. 38,00€ In the opening chapter of Metaphysics 4, Aristotle states not only that there is a science of being as being and its per se properties but also that it is the task of the metaphysician to investigate the principles and causes of such being. Does this mean that metaphysics comes in two parts—namely, an ontology that investigates being and its properties, followed by a theology that investigates the first principle of being? Or does it mean that the very investigation into being and its properties involves an investigation into the first principle of being—that is, that ontology in some sense is theology? The central purpose of Rudi A. te Velde's newest book is to show that, at least for Thomas Aquinas and those who would follow him, the answer is emphatically the latter: Thomistic metaphysics is essentially the resolutio, or tracing-back, of common being (ens commune) to divine being (ens divinum). This process of resolution situates Aquinas's metaphysics "between experience and transcendence." Unlike natural philosophy, metaphysics is not focused on reality as it is given to us in and through sensory experience. Unlike Christian theology, metaphysics is not focused on God as revealed to us in and through supernatural faith. Rather, it is focused on what both of these—experience and transcendence—presuppose, namely, the fundamental truth that all of reality comes from, and points back to, God as its principle and source. For te Velde, Aquinas's metaphysics is etiology or, as he puts it, "the science of presuppositions." Chapter 1 offers the reader a synoptic view of the basic outlines and contours of Aquinas's metaphysics, both positively and negatively. Positively, te Velde points out that Aquinas understands metaphysics to be an Aristotelian science, that is, a discipline unified around its subject. For the properties of a subject are what we aim to demonstrate when we engage in Aristotelian science, and its principles are what we appeal to when doing so. Negatively, te Velde contrasts Aquinas's view of metaphysics with that of his contemporary, Siger of Brabant, and that of our contemporary, John Haldane. Unlike the former, Aquinas's metaphysics takes common being, which is participated and created (and so does not include God), as its subject. Unlike the latter, Aquinas's [End Page 162] metaphysics is unified by the intelligibility of being in light of its principles. In chapters 2 through 5, te Velde focuses in on particular themes that are of central importance to Aquinas's account of metaphysics. Chapter 2 examines the role of separatio in distinguishing metaphysics from physics and mathematics. Where physics considers things that require matter both to be and to be understood, and mathematics considers things that require matter to be but not to be understood, metaphysics considers things that require matter neither to be nor to be understood. It does so by means of a judgment of separation—a judgment that something (for example, substance, form, and so on) can be without matter. Chapter 3 turns to the topic of resolutio, wherein the mind moves "from the concrete particular to its intelligible ground." Aquinas's metaphysics is marked by a twofold resolution: one in which being and its attributes are grasped as the intrinsic principles of all things, and a second in which God and separate substances are grasped as the extrinsic principles of all things. Chapter 4 then investigates the notion of transcendentality, which arises in the first of those two resolutive processes—for insofar as being and its attributes are common to all things, they are not limited to just one of the ten categories (that is, they are transcendental). Nevertheless, the way in which predicates like "one," "true," and "good" cut across the categories that divide common being is different from the way that they cut across the divide between God and creatures. This difference ushers in chapter 5's discussion...

Thomas Aquinas and Contemplation by Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021, pp. viii + 220, £65.00, hbk

Thomas Aquinas and Contemplation by Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021, pp. viii + 220, £65.00, hbk

Thomas Aquinas on Truthfulness, Character, and What We Owe Each Other

AbstractA trait that is often associated with a good person is caring about the truth. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, describes a virtue that concerns truths (truthfulness). However, he limits the virtue to being truthful about who one is and what one's achievements are. This restriction seems almost arbitrary and exceedingly narrow. In this paper, I explore the motivation for Aquinas's restricted account and argue that his view is motivated by broader virtue theoretical commitments and that his approach to the role of truth for being a good person is distinct and worthwhile.

Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism by Mariusz Tabaczek

Reviewed by: Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism by Mariusz Tabaczek Michael J. Dodds O.P. TABACZEK, Mariusz. Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. xviii + 346 pp. Cloth, $75.00 This book is written against the background of a paradigm shift currently taking place in science, away from reductionism and toward the theory of emergence (EM) and downward causation (DC). The theory asserts that an emergent whole, whether a biological organism or a dynamic system, cannot be explained by its parts. The book evaluates a number of theologians who have embraced this theory in their accounts of divine action and concludes with an alternative account based on the theology of Aquinas. Tabaczek initially investigated the theory of emergence in his earlier work, Emergence: Towards a New Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science (2019). There, he explained how a neo-Aristotelian dispositional [End Page 603] metaphysics may serve as an ontological ground for emergentism. He begins the present work by summarizing and developing those arguments. Recognizing the inadequacy of the "classical" version of the theory of emergence that employs efficient causality to account for downward causation, Tabaczek turns to the "dynamical depth" account of emergence, developed by Terrence Deacon, that employs the notion of "constitutive absences" or constraints to explain the emergence of complexity and specialization. He finds, however, that Deacon's theory also fails to provide an ontology of the emergent whole. Many contemporary thinkers employ Aristotle's philosophy of causation in their discussions of emergence, but often without adequate understanding. Tabaczek therefore offers a masterful review of Aristotle's actual teaching and shows its relation to the dispositionalism of the New Aristotelianism. The main concern of the present work is theological. Tabaczek notes that theologians who employ emergence in their account of divine action frequently anchor their theology in panentheism, the theory that the world is somehow in God and that God is both in the world and somehow more than the world. God influences the world, but the world also affects God. The theory requires that, to avoid interfering with the world, God's power and knowledge must be somehow limited. Tabaczek finds that such theology "calls into question the classical understanding of God as immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, eternal, and impassible." He argues that "the concept of God's self-limitation of the divine attributes … leads to an image of God as a superintelligent and a superpowerful agent, yet not a truly divine one." Tabaczek's aim is "to critically evaluate emergentist panentheism within the circles of the theology–science dialogue and to propose an alternative theological interpretation of emergence in terms of the classical and the new Aristotelianism and the Thomistic concept of the concurrent action of God in the universe." He develops an interpretation of divine action that preserves the traditional, transcendent divine attributes while affirming God's immanence in the world. His model of divine action is "built in reference to both the classical DC-based and Deacon's dynamic depth views of EM (reinterpreted in terms of the classical and new Aristotelianism) and the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the God-world relationship." It provides "an important alternative to the emergentist panentheism developed by Peacocke and supported by Clayton and Niels Henrik Gregersen." Tabaczek presents an insightful review and critique of theologians who employ panentheism and emergentism in their account of divine action. In so doing, he unearths some serious theological problems with panentheism in general and emergentist panentheism in particular. He finds a troublesome ambiguity with the notion of "in" (en) not only in the claims of panentheism regarding the God-world relationship but also in the very term "pan en theism" itself. He also spots an unresolved tension between the notions of divine transcendence and immanence. The issue [End Page 604] of theodicy arises with the claim that the world, with all its natural and moral evils, is somehow "in" God. Finally, there is a tendency to view God as a univocal cause, belonging to the same order as natural causes. Inpresenting his theory of emergence and divine action, Tabaczek first offers a magisterial review of Aquinas's account...

Caregiving, Self-Care, and Contemplation: Resources from Thomas Aquinas

AbstractIn the last decade, the helping professions have increasingly recognized compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary trauma as hazards integral to care-work, and in response, they have turned to self-care to build caregiver resilience. To examine the theological and ethical assumptions implicit in self-care literature, I turn to Thomas Aquinas's account of the active and contemplative lives in the Summa Theologiae. In correlating the two lives as meeting neighbors’ needs and beholding God, Thomas offers three competing accounts. Rather than synthesizing these differences, I argue that they map a range of interactions possible between one's own wellbeing and another's: care for the neighbor can hinder, prepare for, or be referred to contemplation and its consolations. While affirming self-care's recognition of human limits, my reading of Thomas also offers a correction, insisting that divergent experiences of caregivers are possible. This depends on the particulars, among which include the grace of divine assistance.

The Christological Prudence of the Natural Slave

AbstractThe account of prudence found in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and the Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is bound up with his endorsement of Aristotle's notion of the Natural Slave in his Commentary on Aristotle's Politics. This connection not only hobbles his account of the virtue of prudence, but also weakens other areas of his theology, including his account of providence. A creative rereading of Aquinas's biblical commentaries, however, affords Aquinas the opportunity to correct himself. Aquinas's commentaries on Paul, especially the Commentary on Philippians, provide ample resources for doing so. The Christ hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 forms the cornerstone of a thoroughly Christological, even Apocalyptic, account of prudence, which overcomes the tensions in Aquinas's account of prudence resulting from his endorsement of natural slavery. This scriptural reformulation of prudence heightens the stress on exemplification even further and in so doing makes its exercise more conducive to peaceableness. Due to the political dimensions of prudence, these shifts have an ecclesiological dimension that reveals Aquinas's affinity with Giorgio Agamben's philosophical account of mendicant life.

Revisiting Aquinas on the Passion of Despair

AbstractThe passion of despair, according to Thomas Aquinas, is an appetitive movement away from a future arduous good that is impossible to attain. Criticism of his account of despair abounds. Nicholas Lombardo argues that despair cannot be proper passion because the appetite cannot move away from a good. Eric D'Arcy and Susan James argue that Aquinas's description of passions as movements casts doubt on his understanding of some passions, including despair. Michael Miller and John Patrick Reid deny that despair can be morally praiseworthy and conducive to action. In this paper, I defend Aquinas's account of the passion of despair from these criticisms.

Thomas Aquinas and the complex simplicity of the rational soul

AbstractThomas Aquinas holds that the rational soul is not only, like other created immaterial substances, mereologically simple, in that it is completely lacking in any kind of material parts, but also mereologically complex, in that it includes within its composition its own essence, an act of existence, and various powers. Aquinas's account of the mereological complexity of the rational soul introduces several tensions with his understanding of the soul as the substantial form of the body and his larger ontology of the human person. After providing an overview of several key mereological notions operative in Aquinas's thought, and an overview of the mereological simplicity and mereological complexity of immaterial substances in his ontology, I introduce three potential concerns for the Thomistic account, all of which might have been avoided had Aquinas instead understood the rational soul to be entirely mereologically simple—serving as the source and subject of, but bearing some other nonmereological relation to, the aforementioned parts. Though Aquinas does not pursue this simpler solution, I argue that he already has built into his ontology the resources to make such a solution consistent with the rest of his thought.

III

III John S. Grabowski Mark S. Massa utilizes Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm revolution and replacement in the history of modern science to offer a novel reading of modern Catholic natural law theory. The various paradigms of natural law do not betray linear, organic development as much as wholesale replacement of competing accounts as each sought [End Page 70] to explain better the anomalies of the reigning paradigm and the "data" of lived moral experience, the complexity of which always exceeds the ability of any one model to capture. Certainly, this Kuhnian lens yields insights into the inadequacy of what Massa calls the Neo-scholastic paradigm in the face of the twentieth century crisis of Catholic moral reasoning before and after Humanae Vitae. Yet one cannot help but wish that the landscape was surveyed more widely both historically and analytically. The use of Lonergan's account of "historical consciousness" to outline the overturning of the "classicism" of modern Catholic moral theology can have an ahistorical ring insofar as this language fails to acknowledge its own embeddedness in a historical tradition with its roots in Hegel, Vico, and others. It also tends to create an unfortunate binary in regard to method—either one is classicist or "historically conscious"—as if there were no other alternatives. Something like Alasdair MacIntyre's account of dialogue within and among rival historical traditions seems to offer a more sophisticated approach to this history without smoothing away Massa's sharp Kuhnian edges of disagreement. Another set of problems is posed by Massa's decision to focus on what he calls the "micro-tradition" of natural law. This can create the impression that natural law is a sufficient or stand-alone methodology for Christian moral reasoning and the language of virtue or scripture is an afterthought or add on. In regard to some of the thinkers he engages (e.g., the proportionalism of Richard McCormick or the new natural law of Germain Grisez), this might be fair. But certainly, Jean Porter gives significant weight to the language of virtue in her "robust realist" recovery of Thomas and Lisa Sowle Cahill spends a significant amount of time wrestling with the biblical witness in constructing her pragmatic, cross-culturally capable, feminist ethic. And beyond these figures, much of the work of post-conciliar renewal has been precisely in a deeper engagement with biblical theology and virtue theory. When it comes to the Angelic Doctor himself whom Massa sees as the font of the many paradigms he surveys, the problem is even more pronounced. It is worth considering that while the Summa Theologiae devotes a mere question to natural law (I–II, q. 94), the language of virtue (and opposing vices) occupies much more space within the prima secundae and virtually all of the secunda secundae. Further, Aquinas's entire account of virtue is situated within a deeply biblical account of creation and salvation history. The effort to construct an entire moral system on the basis of natural law is simply foreign to Thomas. In the end Massa's reading is interesting, but the lens too narrow. Catholic moral theology—medieval or modern—cannot be reduced to a [End Page 71] dispute over the most adequate accounts of natural law without significant distortion. John S. Grabowski The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2020 American Catholic Historical Society

Approaching Other Animals with Caution: Exploring Insights from Aquinas's Psychology

AbstractIn this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas's account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a naïve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas's doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas's ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas's account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas's account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species.

Assent to Faith, Theology and Scientia in Aquinas

AbstractThis paper revisits Aquinas's understanding of theology as a science based on a participation in the divine scientia. Our modern presuppositions (in terms of “autonomous” reason and philosophy as a discipline utterly separate from theology) often appear to render Aquinas's claims implausible. In this contribution it is argued that (a) all sciences are fiduciary in the broad sense (with the exception of those that rely on principles per se nota) and (b) that first principles can only be accepted or rejected, but not refuted or demonstrated within the relevant discipline. From this, two conclusions can be drawn: first, despite its reliance on revelation theology's case is, therefore, not as peculiar as modern readers might initially assume: every discipline operates with key assumptions it simply accepts. Secondly, given the role of first principles, to characterise Aquinas's account of the assent of faith as fideist or voluntarist is beside the point, for you can only accept or reject first principles. The contribution ends by suggesting that assent to the articles of faith is not an extraneous acquiescence in assertions of divine authority either, as a reading of the first question of the Secunda Secundae makes clear. Indeed, the paper hints that we should not read the first question of the Prima Pars without engaging with the first questions of the Secunda Secundae.

Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter

Reviewed by: Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter Jason Heron Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), xiii + 286 pp. Students of Thomistic moral philosophy will be grateful to Jean Porter for her contribution to conversations regarding justice's place in both the virtue ethics tradition and modern liberal thought. It is gross understatement to say that justice is complex. But the complexity is amplified in our context, where justice is imagined as fairness in the organization of institutions and distributed goods. Add to this the effort one must spend when we attempt to speak in Aristotelian terms of the mean or when we try to describe justice as a personal perfection of the will, and one discerns Porter's motivations in offering us a Thomistic account of justice. Porter exposits Aquinas's account of justice as a virtue perfecting the will and rightly ordering our social relations. The upshot of this analysis is a rich treatment of justice as both an external moral ideal and the relationship of that ideal to the perfection of the person's will. Porter's objective in chapter 1 is twofold. First, to demonstrate the coherence and relevance of Aquinas's account of the virtues. And second, to set up the problem animating her inquiry: the fact that justice as a virtue stands apart from the other cardinal virtues, especially as an ideal. We typically conceive of virtues as habitual dispositions, internal to the agent and judged praiseworthy or blameworthy according to a "rational mean" that, while potentially functioning normatively, is also internal to the agent and her circumstances. Thus, the courageous or temperate person acts courageously or temperately according to very specific—maybe even unrepeatable—contingencies that require prudence, practice, and knowledge of what other courageous or temperate persons have done in similar situations. But when it comes to justice, we judge agents and their acts according to the "real mean" of the right (jus), which is necessarily external to the agent, her circumstances, her knowledge, and so on. In other words, the tension between justice's relationship to a "real mean" and the other virtues' relationship to a "rational mean" seems to throw us into unhelpful binaries: law/virtue, rules/ideals, universals/particulars, and the right / the good. But as Porter demonstrates, the tension between these binaries lessens when we recognize that the tension is not between two different ways of evaluating action. Rather, the divisions characterizing these binaries "track the fundamental division between the virtues of the passions, which observe a rational mean only, and justice, which observes a real mean" (41). The concept of a rational mean guiding our evaluation of courage and temperance is relatively straightforward (as a concept!), and is squarely at home in a conventional account of virtue. But the concept of a [End Page 608] real mean guiding our evaluation of justice is decidedly more complex and requires careful attention to the faculty perfected by the virtue. Thus, chapter 2 exposits the Thomistic doctrine of the will as the causal principle of voluntary action. The hope here is that if we adequately represent the faculty of the will, then we will have some insight into the virtue that is supposed to perfect it, even if that virtue seems oddly out of place among the rest of the perfective habits. Aquinas's account provides valuable insight into the rational agent's participation in the appetitive orientation of all natures toward their perfection. But in humans, we see this appetite exercised in a distinct way that makes action susceptible to personal and social reflection and evaluation. Human actions are susceptible to such evaluation because they are voluntary—the result of complex processes of deliberation and choice among myriad goods proposed to the rational appetite. At this point, Porter considers whether the will is completely subject to the dictatorial intellect. Her treatment of the issue unsurprisingly defends the liberty of the will. But in attempting to make this case without recourse to theology, one may wonder about the significance of her contribution to the infinite regress inherent within the question. Porter then asks: why must the...

Christ Our Ritual Sage? A Chinese Articulation of Christ's Priesthood

Christ Our Ritual Sage?A Chinese Articulation of Christ's Priesthood Joshua Brown This article concerns developing an account of Christ's priesthood utilizing concepts and terms from Chinese philosophy. The primary problem I address is methodological: how can an intercultural reading of Christological doctrine be simultaneously culturally relevant and orthodox? In answer to this question, I seek to negotiate intellectual complications that arise in attempting to articulate a doctrine concerning Christ's historical and cultural embodied person while drawing on a cultural and ritual milieu vastly different from those of the Christian Scriptures or doctrinal tradition. Focusing on the question of Christ's priesthood, I demonstrate here that a reading that is at once both culturally relevant and orthodox is possible through cultivating a reading of two concrete programs and then using these perspectives to analyze and resolve issues in articulating Christ's priesthood in a Chinese key. Thus, I base this work here on an analysis of ritual and ritual agency in the philosophical writings of the early Confucian Xúnzǐ (310–210 BC) and St. Thomas Aquinas's account of Christ's priesthood in question 22 of Summa theologiae [ST] III.1 The framework in which I pose this reading of Christ's priesthood is, [End Page 15] then, the relationship between human culture and Christian doctrine. In the modern West, the difficulties of articulating Christian teaching in a Western idiom have been by and large negotiated for a long time, and thus many Western Christians do not have any trouble understanding Christian doctrine in their native intellectual categories. However, especially in the wake of postmodernism and postcolonialism, this is not true in many parts of the world. In recent decades, a number of Asian and Asian American theologians have articulated some variety of the claim that traditional Christian doctrinal categories, especially Christological doctrines, are products of and are only relevant to the dominant intellectual culture of the West and that, hence, a culturally relevant and responsive theology for Asian peoples must find a different foundation to be really "Asian."2 Modern theology therefore faces a considerable dilemma. On the one hand, many Asian theologians are suspicious of the possibility of a truly Asian theology being founded on traditional Christian categories and discourse. On the other hand, sociologically speaking, it seems that Christianity itself is fading in the West and that the dominant Christian culture will be Chinese within a matter of decades.3 We face, then, a very imaginable situation in which the majority of Christians might be led to believe that the doctrinal content of traditional Christology is not culturally relevant to them, and thus can be replaced. What is to become of these categories, then, and the doctrines they communicate? What is to become of the theological sciences that today seek to better understand and articulate these doctrines and their categories? Will they fall away and, indeed, [End Page 16] become irrelevant, or will they find ways to speak to a changing context? In this article, I seek to show that being responsive to the changing global context enables Christianity to accommodate the concerns for both cultural relevance and traditional Christian doctrinal categories. Yet doing so requires a difficult process of understanding how traditional Christian proclamation can inform and be relevant to the intellectual devices of historically non-Christian cultures, such as that of China. And so, instead of making an argument for method, I demonstrate what this work could look like. In this demonstration, I focus on the challenge of articulating Christ's priesthood in a Chinese idiom, mediated by Xúnzǐ. Ultimately, the prospects for this articulation will rest heavily on the ability to consider Christ's priesthood within the category of the ritual sage, the shèngrén , as it functions in Xúnzǐ's philosophy. But, in order to appreciate why this move is necessary, we first require a presentation of Xúnzǐ's broader understanding of rituals and their role in moral cultivation. Then, we must understand Christ's priesthood in traditional doctrinal categories so that we may explore the relationship between this doctrine and Xúnzǐ's thought. Hence, in the second section of the present article, I...

Evil in Aristotle by Pavlos Kontos

Reviewed by: Evil in Aristotle by Pavlos Kontos Samuel Baker Pavlos Kontos, editor. Evil in Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 277. Cloth, £75.00. This is the first volume devoted to Aristotle's thoughts on evil or badness (to kakon). The work calls attention to several relatively neglected areas of scholarship, and the contributions [End Page 342] give any reader grounds for thinking that Aristotle has thoughts about to kakon that are sophisticated and worthy of deep philosophical engagement. The volume is divided into three parts: metaphysics and biology in the first, practical philosophy in the second, and the "presence of Aristotle in post-Aristotelian philosophy" in the third (189). The topics vary widely—deformed animal kinds, the worst constitutions, the subhuman vice of brutishness, the misfortunes of the virtuous etc.—but the volume presents no clear philosophical connections between these diverse evils. Some contributions do discuss the same topics and texts, even at length, but no contribution seems to be aware of any other. Thus, it falls to the reader to determine whether, for example, the three discussions of brutishness are compatible or not. Yet the volume's general heterogeneity is largely due to the subject matter itself: Aristotle maintains that there is no single science of the good because good "is said in many ways" (Nicomachean Ethics I.6), and he similarly would seem to think that there is no single science of evil because evil is said in many ways. In the first section, Jonathan Beere analyzes Metaphysics Θ.9, which is Aristotle's most important discussion of the metaphysics of evil. Aristotle believes that there can be no bad first principles, and his argument rests on two key claims: badness is posterior in nature to capacity, and first principles involve no capacity. Beere argues at length in support of the first claim, and in so doing he contends that human capacities exist "for the sake of virtue" (46)—and so vice is always a corruption of a capacity that exists for the sake of virtue. This is a bold claim, and I would have liked for other contributors in the volume to have addressed it. (Here I should note that Beere refers the reader to his Doing and Being [2008] for a "fuller treatment of Theta 9" [50n11].) The chapter by C. D. C. Reeve ranges over topics in metaphysics, ethics, politics, and psychology, concluding with an exploratory discussion of god, ethics, and the principle of non-contradiction. Stasinos Stravianeas relies on recent work by Charlotte Witt to argue that there are bad ends in nature, and he rightly suggests that in order to understand such ends we must recognize that Aristotle employs a scala naturae. The second section, which concerns practical philosophy, begins with three discussions of vice that focus on extreme cases. Pavlos Kontos differentiates the ways in which intemperance (akolasia) and brutishness (thēriotēs) are extreme vices, Howard Curzer discusses principles for ranking virtues and vices, and Giles Pearson contributes an exceptionally clear analysis of brutish behavior, plausibly arguing that Aristotle is a pioneer in psychopathology. Marta Jimenez argues that Aristotle's virtuous people can often remain happy despite misfortunes because they "grasp the hierarchy between the shameful, the harmful, and the painful" (169), and Richard Kraut follows with a discussion of the lowest constitutions in which he shockingly contends that Aristotle has a "dark conception of human nature" according to which many desire "to get away with any form of aggression (including violent sexuality) against anyone they choose" (188). The third section is described as dealing with "the presence of Aristotle in post-Aristotelian philosophy," but it seems a bit of a hodgepodge. Paul Kalligas discusses Plotinus's account of evil, but here Aristotle figures in a minor way. Kevin Flannery, S. J. reasonably detects "Aristotelian resonances" in Aquinas's account of evil as the "privation of good." However, neither here nor anywhere else in the volume is there an evaluation of whether Aquinas is right to think that Aristotle has a privation theory of evil; similarly, there is no discussion of whether the privation theory, which is of central importance to Thomistic philosophy, should be thought of as...

Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter

Reviewed by: Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter J. Brian Benestad Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective. By Jean Porter. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2016. Pp. xiii + 286. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-7325-5. Porter describes her book as "a study of the virtue of justice as Aquinas presents it in the Summa theologiae, developed in such a way as to bring out the contemporary significance of his account" (x). Porter does not attempt to summarize in any way what Aquinas says about justice in his other extensive writings. She thinks "that Aquinas's overall account of justice and the virtues is the true theory of morality" but will not attempt to prove this statement conclusively in her book (ibid.). She does make clear that she "will offer a constructive expansion of Aquinas's views on justice . . . developing Aquinas's theory in some way, rather than simply interpreting what he says" (6). In other words, readers should be aware that she may depart from Aquinas's account of justice or add new things to it. The remaining parts of chapter 1 focus on the basics of the Thomistic presentation of justice. Justice is a personal virtue of individuals rather than a characteristic of society's basic institutions. It is a perfection of the will, the most excellent of the moral virtues, but inferior to the supernatural virtue of charity. For Aquinas, "the will is perfected through right relations to others" (27). In order to understand justice as a virtue, we need to understand the fundamentals of Aquinas's understanding of virtue. Porter notes that Aquinas begins his analysis with Peter Lombard's definition of virtue, which was, in turn, drawn from Augustine's writings: "Virtue is a good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God [End Page 317] brings about in us, without us" (18, quoting STh I-II, q. 55, a. 4, which is quoting II Sent., d. 27, q. 5). The last part of the definition only applies to the infused virtues. The word "quality" in the definition refers to a habit or stable disposition inclining a person to do the right thing. Porter also makes her readers aware of the complexity of justice by distinguishing different kinds of justice: general, or legal, justice and particular justice, which is subdivided into distributive and commutative justice. To put justice into practice, a person will always need prudence, she adds with emphasis. More examples of these three kinds of justice and a more discernible order of the book's five chapters in relation to each other would have helped Porter's readers. Already in the second paragraph of chapter 1, Porter notes correctly that Aquinas's treatment of justice as a virtue and a perfection of the will is totally foreign to the theories of justice expounded by John Rawls and his interlocutors. Porter rightly sees that Rawls's "theory of justice . . . proposes an account of the ways in which institutions ought to operate, which kinds of structural arrangements are acceptable, and which kinds of outcomes are acceptable, given basic criteria of fairness and respect" (2). Although Porter says that "Aquinas gets justice right," she immediately adds that "he does not raise, much less address, questions pertaining to social and institutional structures that are central to most contemporary theories of justice" (5). Despite her great appreciation of Aquinas's thought on the virtue of justice, she never says that Rawls and his interlocutors should draw upon Aquinas in order to raise questions pertaining to the practice of the virtues by individuals responsible for the reform of institutions and structures. The constraints of a short review will not allow me to deal thoroughly with the main points of chapters 2 through 5. In the remainder of this review, after briefly mentioning a few insightful points made in these four chapters, I will focus on Porter's nonacceptance of Aquinas's way of evaluating the morality of the human act. In sum, she thinks that his analysis leads to more prohibitions than are acceptable today. In chapter 2, Porter directs...