Reading Of Aquinas Research Articles

Thomas Aquinas and Contemplation

<i>Thomas Aquinas and Contemplation</i>

Conscience Working within Prudentia—Instructed by Thomas Deman’s Reading of Aquinas

The French Dominican Thomas Deman (1899–1954) argued for the restoration of the virtue of prudentia against a background of moral theology and philosophy that, as he saw it, had replaced the centrality of prudenti a with a centrality of conscience. This article will follow Deman in his reading of Aquinas and develop an understanding of prudentia as a moral virtue of the intellect, which co-ordinates the good life, the moral life. Conscience is a moment within the performance of prudentia. The argument of the paper is that, while conscience and prudentia are both important for good human decision-making, they should not be seen as rival concepts but rather, conscience should be understood as working within the virtue of prudentia. Specifically, the argument is that the role of conscience passes into the practical order only when it is enacted via the virtue of prudentia.

Divine Ideas and the Dependent Nature of Creation

ABSTRACT In the first part of this essay, I explain why Aquinas thinks that it is better to understand ‘creation’ as a relation rather than a change, and I establish what it means in Christian theology to say that the world depends on God. I then argue that one of the most philosophically and theologically persuasive ways of articulating this relation of dependence is via the Platonic metaphysics of divine ideas. Through a careful reading of Aquinas and Eckhart, I respond to some of the pantheistic fears which led to the virtual disappearance of the divine ideas paradigm in the Christian tradition after the medieval period, and argue that a keen sense of our own ontological fragility is a good thing – both metaphysically and spiritually.

Still Human: A Thomistic Analysis of ‘Persistent Vegetative State’

Would Aquinas hold the view that a patient in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) is something other than a human being? Some recent interpreters have argued for this position. I contend that this reading is grounded in a false symmetry between the three stages of Aquinas’s embryology and the (alleged) three-stage process of death. Instead, I show that there are textual grounds for rejecting the view that the absence of higher brain activity in a patient would lead Aquinas to say that the patient no longer has a rational soul. On my reading of Aquinas, the patient in PVS has a rational soul and is unequivocally a human being.

Thomas Aquinas and Antonio de Córdoba on self-defence: saving yourself as a private end

ABSTRACTRevisionists about Aquinas’ teaching on private self-defence take the standard reading to hold that Aquinas applies a version of the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) according to which the intentional killing of a wrongful attacker by a private person is morally prohibited while the non-intentional but foreseeable killing of the attacker is permitted. Revisionists dispute this reading and argue that Aquinas permits the intentional killing of wrongful attackers. I argue that revisionists mischaracterize the standard reading of Aquinas. I consider one of its main proponents, Antonio de Córdoba (1485–1579). When Córdoba condemned the intentional killing of wrongful attackers by private persons, he was not applying DDE. Rather, he was arguing that when you decide to kill an attacker you treat the attacker as a resource for the private end of saving your life. Killing a member of your community is a form of irrevocable social exclusion. This decision ought to be left to the public authorities. The disagreement between the authors defending the standard view and their critics was not about DDE but rather about the moral limits that membership in a community sets on the pursuit of private ends, including the private end of staying alive.

Trying Truths: Dreyer, Bresson and the Meaning Effect

This essay explores the relationship between fact and faith developed by two cinematic representations of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc: Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Robert Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc (1961). Both films are preoccupied with how to present evidence - the proof of Joan's supposedly divine visions - that is ultimately unverifiable, and turn this epistemological problem into their chief aesthetic concern. Through readings of Aquinas, Susan Sontag, and Hayden White, the essay tracks what the stakes of such a problem might be, finding especially in Bresson's method a negative definition of truth or meaning through the sudden but persistent withholding of even its most pronounced historical, cultural, and material content. Whereas Dreyer's film pursues the total legibility of its subject through a constant focus on faces and gazes, showing us literally all that it can, Bresson's film insists on the integrity of that which is unseen, creating what I come to call a kind of meaning effect.

Natural Law and Our Contemporary Institutions

Extending recent directions in the field and informed by a renewed reading of Aquinas, we argue for a broadened sense of the natural law that radiates to social and political life, not only in the narrow form of positive law but in the life of our institutions that necessarily presume an ordering to the common good. While increasingly under the threat of privatization or bureaucratization in individualistic cultures, institutions can and do function as sites where gifts are freely given and received, shared goods articulated and debated, and friendships formed.

Heidegger's Critique of Aquinas on Truth: A Critical Assessment

AbstractFew more sophisticated or more divergent treatments of the relation between truth and the divine are to be found than those offered in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Martin Heidegger. This paper traces the differing approaches of these two thinkers in order to attempt a partial elucidation of that relation. One motivation for this contrastive analysis is the conviction that recent treatments of Heidegger's readings of Aquinas have tended too hastily to deny the possibility of fruitful or substantive dialogue between them. In contrast to these accounts, I argue that Heidegger's three central criticisms of Aquinas’ conception of truth – that it posits a subject-oriented and representionalist theory of knowledge, an unwarranted intellectualism, and an ontotheological grounding of truth's objectivity – paradoxically expose vulnerable flanks in his own constructive account. The argument proceeds by way of: (i) an exposition of these three strands of Heidegger's critique, focusing inter alia on some overlooked lectures delivered during the composition of Sein und Zeit; and (ii) a critical assessment of those strands by reference to relevant passages in Aquinas’ writings on truth.

Reading the Actio of Cognitional Acts in Bernard J. F. Lonergan and Joseph Owens

Bernard Lonergan argued that a Thomist theory of intellect must begin with advertence to the act of understanding. He distinguished his cognitional theory from a conceptualism that neglects the experience of insight and reflection on it. Early in his career, he explained how the conceptualist approach misinterprets Aquinas and creates problems for the metaphysics of rational psychology. This article explains Lonergan’s position and illustrates the conceptualist alternative by analysing Joseph Owens’s view of cognition. By explaining the metaphysical differences between Lonergan’s and Owens’s opposing views of human knowing in relation to their distinctive readings of Aquinas, this article contributes to a more accurate reading of Aquinas on the act of understanding.

Book Review: Orthodox Readings of Aquinas

Book Review: Orthodox Readings of Aquinas

The Concurrentism of Thomas Aquinas: Divine Causation and Human Freedom

The paper deals with the problem of divine causation in relation to created agents in general and human rational agents in particular. Beyond creation and conservation, Aquinas specifies divine contribution to created agents’ operation as application in the role of the first cause and the operation of the principal cause employing an instrumental cause. It is especially the latter which is open to varying interpretation and which might be potentially threatening to human freedom. There are different readings of what it is for the secondary agent to “act through the power of the principal cause”. Either the divine cause causes only the existence of the effect of the secondary cause, or it also causes the cause to operate in the sense that it determines its outcome. The latter seems to contradict human freedom. Both readings of Aquinas were developed in the latter half of the sixteenth century within scholastic philosophy and theology.

Doting Thomists: Evangelicals, Thomas Aquinas, and Justification

Over the past several decades, some Evangelical philosophers and theologians have embraced the metaphysics, epistemology, and natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), despite that fact that historically some of the leading lights in Evangelicalism have rejected Aquinas’s views because they believed these views are inconsistent with classical Reformation teaching. Some of these Evangelical Thomists have argued that on the matter of justification Aquinas is out of step with Tridentine and post-Tridentine Catholicism though closer to the Protestant Reformers. This article argues that such a reading of Aquinas is mistaken, and that Aquinas’s understanding of justification is of a piece with his both his predecessors (Augustine, Council of Orange) as well as his successors (Council of Trent, Catechism of the Catholic Church)

Marcus Plested: Orthodox Readings of Aquinas

The article reviews the book Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, by Marcus Plested.

A Renaissance Reading of Aquinas: Thomas Cajetan on the Ontological Status of Essences

Aristotelian philosophers have been always puzzled by the ambiguous status of essences: it is not clear whether an Aristotelian should admit that an essence, taken in itself, is real, even though essences do not exist over and above particular things, as Platonists posit; furthermore, it is not clear whether an Aristotelian should endorse the view that essences have a certain unity, even if they are taken in themselves, namely, by abstracting from the individuals of which they are essences. I tackle Thomas Cajetan’s analysis of this problem: this analysis is more sophisticated than that developed by Aquinas—whose texts had been commented upon by Cajetan. Cajetan distinguishes two senses of “real” and of “unity,” in order to speak of the reality and of the unity of essences, taken in themselves, though not endorsing a Platonist’s ontology. I suggest that his solution is appealing for the contemporary debate about this problem.

Orthodox Readings of Aquinas by Marcus Plested

Orthodox Readings of Aquinas by Marcus Plested

ON “THOMISTIC KABBALAH”

AbstractThe Christian Bible was from the outset a dogmatic and Christological conception, which entailed a mystical reading of signs and events, a practise of speculation at once narratological and phenomenological. The trilogy of Olivier‐Thomas Venard OP – Thomas d'Aquin, poète théologien – is proposed as crucial to understanding how Thomas Aquinas preserves the authentic biblical character of Christian theology, proceeding along the diagonal axis of the mystagogical, an axis neither purely vertical nor purely horizontal but a blending of both at once. Here a reading of Aquinas is offered as initiating a participational ‘linguistic turn’, an alternative modernity that can heal the dissociation of the science of being from the phenomenal and hermeneutical embeddings in which human life is constituted.

ON BEING HEARD BUT NOT SEEN: MILBANK AND LASH ON AQUINAS, ANALOGY AND AGNOSTICISM

AbstractThe article investigates an important recent dispute within systematic theology over the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. John Milbank has defended the view that the doctrine of analogy in Aquinas is peculiarly implicated with his entire ontology, that it cannot be understood in merely semantic terms, and that it involves a less “agnostic” position on knowledge of God than is often assumed. The article critically engages this position in two ways. It offers an archaeology of the prior polemical context out of which the claim arose, for the meaning and purpose of Milbank's claim are illuminated once it is seen as the vigorous repudiation of a “grammatical” or “linguistic” interpretation of Thomas on analogy which had been proffered earlier by Nicholas Lash. It will also provide a close investigation of the citations and interpretations of Aquinas texts that Milbank uses to ground his position, in order to adjudicate the dispute with Lash. The result will be to call strongly into question the plausibility of Milbank's readings of Aquinas. The article also indicates at several points the way in which those readings are shaped by an overriding anti‐Kantian thrust in Milbank's entire approach to the discussion. In conclusion, it adumbrates the larger and older question which subtends the entire dispute: to what degree is some kind of vision or intuitive grasp of being as such, or of God's being, granted human beings in this life?

Understandings of nature and grace in John Milbank and Thomas Aquinas

AbstractJohn Milbank is one of the most recent and arguably most radical proponents of an understanding of nature as graced. This article critically examines Milbank's understanding of nature and grace, specifically as elaborated within his reading of Thomas Aquinas. In the first part I will outline Aquinas's most direct discussions of nature and grace in the Summa Theologica, drawing attention to several central, albeit subtle, distinctions that these contain. In the second and third parts, I will examine Milbank's reading of Aquinas in Truth in Aquinas, and examine whether it adequately reflects and negotiates Aquinas's distinctions. On this basis I will argue Milbank's reading, while drawing attention to some important and often neglected areas of Aquinas's thought, ultimately remains limited.

A Reading of Aquinas in Support of Veritatis Splendor on the Moral Object

I. Introduction On one hand, Pope John Paul II's 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (VS) has broad scope, which includes reaffirmation of relatively undisputed--but perhaps neglected--matters from tradition. For example, first chapter is primarily exposition of central New Testament teachings about Christian life, including its beginnings in the encounter with Christ, call to discipleship, and responses of conversion, apostolic mission, and pursuit of holiness. As Fathers of Second Vatican Council rightly recognized, presentations of Catholic theology must be deeply rooted in these biblical sources and illumine lofty vocation of faithful in union with Christ. (1) full agreement, John Paul reminds us in VS that it is Christ who opens book of Scriptures for us, to teach us truth about (2) On other hand, encyclical is specific response to what it describes as the systematic calling into question of doctrine ([section] 4), phenomenon of revisionist theology that developed largely from reaction against 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, with broader precedents including mid-twentieth-century situation ethics. (3) particular, VS insists that adequate theory must be able to uphold traditional teaching that certain kinds of human are and therefore always evil. This tradition is rooted in biblical texts such as Decalogue and Pauline vice catalogs, and it is reaffirmed in multitude of sources from subsequent tradition. Moreover, section 75 of encyclical judges that these revisionist theories go astray regarding evil acts or moral absolutes precisely because they have an inadequate understanding of of [a] action. (4) Given havoc wrought by postconciliar debate about theory and particular acts, we must not underestimate importance for contemporary Catholic theology of this diagnosis about danger of inadequate understanding of object. Because it addresses central matter of moral upon which subsequent discussion of intrinsically evil (in [section][section] 79-82) depends, section 78 is of decisive importance. It suggests way toward adequate approach to through series of six affirmations: (1) morality of human act depends primarily and fundamentally on 'object' rationally chosen by deliberate will ; (5) (2) In order to be able to grasp of act which specifies that act morally, it is therefore necessary to place oneself in perspective of acting person; (3) the is freely chosen kind of behavior; (4) is not a process or event of merely physical order; (5) object is proximate end of deliberate decision which determines act of willing on part of acting person; and (6) morality of depends upon its conformity with order of reason. (6) From these texts, from their role in structure and argument of encyclical, and from understanding of their historical context, we can reasonably conclude that John Paul thought that resolution to postconciliar crisis in Catholic theology requires more adequate account of with above characteristics. insisting that this must not be understood as a process or event of merely physical John Paul's primary target was revisionist theory, which inherited what might be called a physical understanding of from post-Tridentine casuist tradition. (7) The Pope's approach, however, also challenges many more traditional Thomists, who sometimes treat that determines morality of human act as something of merely physical order, or as what is caused physically. …

Thomist Epistemology of Faith: The Road from “Scientia” to Science

ArgumentThe paper offers a reading of Aquinas' treatise On Faith as a source of inspiration for later developments in the Catholic world of learning. My main argument is that Aquinas' attempt to interpolate his discourse on faith into a clear epistemological context had long-term intellectual and institutional implications. On the intellectual level Aquinas' discourse had the effect of blurring the ancient dichotomy between episteme/knowledge-science, and doxa/opinion-belief, that had presupposed an ontological difference between their objects. On the institutional level Aquinas' discourse on faith allowed for the superposition of intellectual and political authority. The Jesuit educators of the early modern age, who identified themselves as Thomist, elaborated on the potential of the special configuration of knowledge and authority they had found in Aquinas' theology and transformed its principles into social-intellectual mechanisms to organize a framework in which to produce and transmit knowledge in the first global educational system.