Aquinas’s Fifth Way argues for God’s existence from the perception of goal-directed activity in nature. Its details are difficult to understand. This study interprets the premises and offers background reasoning for them, which Aquinas develops elsewhere in his writings. A major focus is clarifying the scope of finality the Fifth Way invokes. The argument leaves unspecified the kinds of purposive activity in nature Aquinas has in mind. Thus, the discussion first treats types of purposive activity in nature Aquinas recognizes. It then looks at the two reasons the argument gives for final causes in nature. Things tend to act in regular ways and tend toward what is ‘best’. Attention then turns to the key premise that goal-directed activity in nonrational beings requires direction by something with intelligence. A final section of the article explores why Aquinas seems to look to a single source of finality in nature and why, in the conclusion, he claims that we call this God. Thus, Aquinas’s larger views on finality in nature shed light on his intents in the Fifth Way.

In 1264 in the town of Orvieto, St. Thomas Aquinas composed the Lauda Sion as the Mass sequence for Pope Urban IV’s new universal solemnity of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the feast of Corpus Christi. The present paper will consider this text of St. Thomas’s liturgical sequence in relation to the eucharistic theology that he teaches in the Summa Theologiae. Just as, according to the Dionysian Aquinas, the Psalms contain all the doctrines revealed in the rest of scripture but transposed into the highest literary genre of praise, so the Lauda Sion contains all the essential eucharistic doctrines of the Summa Theologiae, now set in that same laudatory genre as the Psalter. The paper is divided into ten sections, corresponding to the questions in St. Thomas’s treatment of the Holy Eucharist in the Tertia Pars. Proceeding one topic at a time, this paper will show how the Lauda Sion serves as a doxological compendium of St. Thomas Aquinas’s whole eucharistic theology.

Catholic education faces a number of serious challenges including cultural and political disrespect for, and hostility towards religion in general and Catholicism in particular, and lack of knowledge of, and commitment to, Catholic beliefs and values among Catholic educational administrators, school managers, teachers, and other staff, as well as the diminishing percentage of even nominally Catholic staff. I set these matters within the context of broader challenges surrounding Catholic education, deriving from three cultural movements: the reformation, the emergence of liberalism, and the scientific revolution, which undermined the synthesis of scripture, theology, and speculative and practical philosophy achieved in the high middle-ages. I propose in response a creative critique showing that what is of authentic value in modernity can be accommodated within the traditional synthesis. I also connect that tradition with strands of eastern philosophy suggesting that the movement of people, ideas, and traditions from Eastern cultures into historically Western societies provides an opportunity for further synthesis of a wisdom-based approach to education.

This paper argues that being there, actually existing, is a notion that cannot be explicated by formal logicians, cannot be defined in terms of conscious perception, and cannot be satisfactorily explained using the theories of mathematics or natural science. So, must we turn to theology to make up for the deficiencies of the methods so far canvassed? The paper concludes by considering the Thomistic identification of God with existence itself, but argues that it would be a mistake to suppose that the mystery of actual existence is thereby dispelled.

The nature and value of the religious priesthood have often been questioned, including after Vatican II. John Paul II, however, claims that the religious priest ‘reproduces in his life the fullness of the mystery of Christ’. Examining Aquinas’s understanding of Christ’s total self-sacrifice provides a model that explains how. In this article, I present a Christological and Thomistic approach to the question by identifying Christ as a religious priest, highlighting one of Aquinas’s patristic sources (St Gregory the Great) and one of his greatest spiritual interpreters of modern times (Bl Columba Marmion). Because of his grace of headship, Christ contains all the perfections found in his members. The perfection of Christ’s priestly and religious life consists in his total sacrifice of himself to the Father out of love. Christ firmly fixed his will to offer himself from the moment of the Incarnation. By vowing to follow the counsels, religious priests imitate the fixity of Christ’s will to offer himself as a total self-holocaust. This conclusion allows me to propose that Christ is the religious priest, which has several theological and pastoral implications.

The paper considers three possible definitions of what it is for an action to be ‘morally’ good: (1) that it is overall important to do; (2) that it is overall important to do in virtue of a universalisable principle; and (3) that it is overall important to do in virtue of a universalisable principle, belonging to a system of such principles, which includes almost all of certain moral fixed points. I defend (3) and show how we can reach such a system, starting from the basic beliefs with which we find ourselves, through the process of reflective equilibrium. Moral realism is then the doctrine that there is such a system of true moral beliefs. My optimistic view is that all human communities could eventually reach the same such system. But, if they cannot, then there will be two (or more) different such systems, and so two (or more) different senses of ‘moral realism’.

This paper sets out Joseph Ratzinger’s Christocentric theology of creation as a counter to the increasingly popular naturalist movement anti-natalism. Paradoxically, anti-natalism is parasitic on the doctrine of creation and yet, at the same time, denies creation, for, as Ratzinger argues, the doctrine of creation affirms both the human person and the natural world within which she lives; creation is necessary for self-acceptance. Furthermore, creation and redemption go together. It is with and through the human person, not without, that the natural world is brought to its proper end.

It has been a teaching of the Catholic Church for many centuries that the fact that an act is immoral is not itself a sufficient reason for acts of that kind to be punishable under the law. Therefore, before American Catholics or their bishops actively support laws making abortion illegal and punishable, they must carefully examine such laws to determine whether they are consistent with the common good and thus morally justifiable. This article first turns to the three conditions that Thomas Aquinas offers in the Treatise on Law (Summa Theologica, I-II, QQ. 90-105) that a law must fulfill in order for it to be consistent with the common good. Serious reasons are identified for doubting that laws prohibiting and punishing abortion can fulfill Aquinas’s three conditions. There are also serious reasons based on Catholic teaching, i.e., that we are always obliged to follow our conscience, for concluding that, contrary to the common good, many conscientious persons would be mistakenly punished by such laws. For these reasons, the article proposes that American Catholics and their bishops should reexamine their support for laws punishing abortion and should consider instead actively opposing such laws.

This paper argues, in response to scholarly criticism, that Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of humility in the Summa Theologiae does not undermine the importance of humility in the Christian moral life. While the Summa’s classification of humility as a ‘potential part’ of temperance, which results from Thomas’s reliance on classical sources, has been blamed for this work’s perceived belittling of humility, an understanding of the Summa’s overall scope and Aquinas’s system of organizing virtues therein helps demonstrate that this categorization does not imply a lesser significance of humility either than other virtues in the Summa or than humility as treated in his Bible commentaries. Furthermore, even if the Summa’s structure creates limited space for an extensive discourse on humility, the establishment of humility’s reciprocity with magnanimity and absolute contradiction of pride leave no doubts as to the magnitude of this virtue. Thus, the ‘humble’ portrayal of humility in the Summa not only adequately but aptly expresses this uniquely Christian virtue, capturing the way it disposes human beings to ‘creaturely’ reverence before the Creator, and invites a more holistic understanding of Aquinas’s virtue ranking in the Secunda Secundae.

This paper proceeds from a discourse analytical perspective and asks what we can learn from Hebrews 1-2 concerning the relationship of humanity to creation through Christ. First, the exordium is examined to reveal a descent–ascent motif for the incarnate Son who is the one through whom God creates (1:2) and who sustains everything by his powerful word (1:3). The paper then explains how the Son’s sacrificial activity is subsumed within this theology as we look at the catena of scriptural citations found in the rest of chapter 1, where the catena deepens the theology of the exordium by presenting the same events in reverse order. However, towards the end of the catena, when we would expect a reference to the Son and his having inherited a name greater than the angels (1:4), we instead hear about how the angels are sent to serve humanity who inherit salvation. This enables the discourse to move on to chapter 2 and the purpose of Christ’s descent to lead humanity heavenward to glory (2:10). This paper uncovers how that glory is the Son’s own glory and posits a process of theosis by which humanity shares in the Son’s sustaining role over creation.

Graham Greene’s novella Loser Takes All has been unfairly ignored in the critical literature. Rather than the mere frivolity it is taken to be, it is a humorous examination of some serious theological issues. By means of an inversion of Pascal’s Great Wager, Greene makes the case that attempts to rationalize the mystery that is the object of our faith will cheapen and diminish that faith. In the course of so doing, he alludes to and has fun with his earlier works, particularly Brighton Rock, and critiques the inversion of the Wager by Albert Camus. He shows the influence of Miguel de Unamuno, who years later would influence Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. Greene also invokes a poem by Charles Baudelaire, which Greene has quoted in many works, that the possibility of damnation adds meaning to life, though it may drift into what von Balthasar called Greene’s indulgence of the mystique of sin.

This article explores Richard Fishacre’s (1200–1248) thinking on the relationship between theology and philosophy. It shows how, despite constructing what, on the surface at least, appears to be a traditional understanding of theology’s relationship to philosophy, Fishacre in practice offers a very creative interpretation of how the two sciences interact. For Fishacre, theology does not simply illumine philosophy by guiding it away from error. Instead, it steps into the fray of ordinary philosophical dispute so as to uncover novel ways of reading natural phenomena, ones which philosophy, by itself at least, is blind to. To demonstrate how this is so, the article explores how Fishacre appeals to Christ’s resurrected body to justify some of his most controversial arguments in the field of natural philosophy. Two specific areas are considered: Fishacre’s claim that light in medio is a body and his assertion that the stars and planets are made from the terrestrial elements as opposed to the celestial quintessence, as Aristotle claims. Each of these aspects of Fishacre’s physics show how, for the Dominican, theology can, when appropriate, step onto the philosophical plane and help the natural philosopher to discover truths that go against the philosophical consensus.

This paper examines, from a Thomistic perspective, the possible consequences of the twentieth-century reform of the ‘Kyrie eleison’ from ninefold set of invocations to a sixfold call-and-response structure. First, we present Aquinas’s distinctly Trinitarian exegesis of the ‘Kyrie’ in light of the history of troped liturgical texts. Next, we will account for the historical diversity of the troped ‘Kyrie’ genre while emphasizing importance of the Trinitarian elements. The third section recounts recent work on Aquinas’s theory of the passions and their effects of language formation; this leads to the fourth section, which casts a philosophical eye on the role of melisma in the liturgy. To conclude this study, we suggest the restoration of some troped ‘Kyrie’ texts in the Roman Rite.

McNabb and DeVito have recently argued that Graham Oppy’s objections to the First Way are found wanting. In response, McNabb and DeVito restructured the First Way on behalf of St Thomas. More recently, Joseph Schmid and Daniel Linford argue that the restructured argument given by McNabb and DeVito is problematic, claiming that it is either valid but unmotivated or it is plainly invalid. In this paper, I argue that McNabb and DeVito’s schematic glossing of the First Way is both valid and motivated.

Gregory of Nyssa’s critiques of various forms of social injustice hinge on his rigorous theological anthropology. For Gregory, slavery, the accumulation of wealth, and the mistreatment of the poor are evil because they deny the freedom proper to human creatures created according to the divine Image. However, Gregory’s anthropology also contains, we will argue, a distinct account of the ways in which humanity’s difference from God – particularly its poverty and limitation – reveals important aspects of the particular and ultimately Christological mode in which finite humans imitate the infinitude God. The aim of this present essay is to articulate how both likeness and unlikeness to God – mirrors of God and mirrors of death – are integral to Gregory’s theological anthropology as it pertains to various forms of social critique.

While ‘the meaning of life’ has grown in prominence as a topic of philosophical inquiry, few Thomists have addressed it. Joshua Hochschild has recently offered a plausible explanation, arguing that ‘the meaning of life’ is a late modern ‘invention’, at home in a conceptual framework both philosophically problematic and incompatible with the principles of St. Thomas’ thought. He, therefore, counsels Catholic intellectuals to avoid the question of life’s meaning. I argue in contrast that St. Thomas offers the kind of metaphysical perspective that originally made ‘the meaning of life’ intelligible. First, I show that closer attention to the context in which the phrase emerges (that of German Romanticism) can clarify why much of the modern discourse on ‘the meaning of life’ succumbs to Hochschild’s critique. I then show that, even in the writings of its earliest modern proponents, we find compelling reasons to hold that ‘the meaning of life’ was always more at home within a Christian conceptual framework. Finally, I argue that St. Thomas’ account of providence and divine art in particular explain the purposefulness and significance of the world, such that Thomists who appeal to these notions are well positioned to address the question of life’s meaning in contemporary philosophical debates.

‘The Sequence on the Virgin Mary and Christ’, by the poet and martyr St Robert Southwell, S.J. (1561–95), is a beautiful work that is generally still undervalued. The sequence explores the physical, moral, and emotional unity of Mary and her Son in the work of our salvation. The larger context is the Protestant devaluing of hyperdulia. In its historical moment – it was written sometime in the 1580s – it is a subtle exploration of the theme of kenosis and of what a ‘prince’ or ‘queen’ should really be. While being relatively inexplicit, Southwell seems to poise the Virgin Mary against that other ‘empress’, Elizabeth I, and writes with intimacy from the perspective of his own self-understanding as ‘Beatae Virginis filius’ (a son of the Blessed Virgin). The sequence’s modern, editorial title needs to be replaced with one that matches its devotional aims and content. As he faced up to the almost certain prospect of his own martyrdom, Southwell looked to Mary as true mother and queen to sustain him in his sacrifice.

Given the peculiarly linguistic approach that contemporary philosophers use to apply St. Thomas Aquinas’s arguments on the immateriality of the human soul, this paper will present a Thomistic-inspired evaluation of whether artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) chatbots’ composition and linguistic performance justify the assertion that AI/ML chatbots have immaterial souls. The first section of the paper will present a strong, but ultimately crucially flawed argument that AI/ML chatbots do have souls based on contemporary Thomistic argumentation. The second section of the paper will provide an overview of the actual computer science models that make artificial neural networks and AI/ML chatbots function, which I hope will assist other theologians and philosophers writing about technology, The third section will present some of Emily Bender’s and Alexander Koller’s objections to AI/ML chatbots being able to access meaning from computational linguistics. The final section will highlight the similarities of Bender’s and Koller’s argument to a fuller presentation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument for the immateriality of the human soul, ultimately arguing that the current mechanisms and linguistic activity of AI/ML programming do not constitute activity sufficient to conclude that they have immaterial souls on the strength of St. Thomas’s arguments.

This paper will offer a new defense in response to the problem of natural evil, called the Perfect Will defense. The defense argues that in sustaining the universe, God conforms the system of physical laws to his intellect and will. Yet, God could not fully conform the system of laws (for our universe) to his intellect and will without simultaneously forcing people into a loving relation with God. Yet, since God would not force people to love him, God must thereby initially create people in a universe that has a system of laws that is only partially conformed to God’s intellect and will. However, while a universe with a system of laws that is only partially conformed to God’s intellect and will allows for people to exercise their freedom over their relation with God, it also results in the occurrence of natural evils. The paper will argue that once this defense is fully developed, it is able to account for why God allows for natural evils to occur within the universe. The paper will outline the defense, as well as respond to the defense’s major objections.