This paper explores Aquinas’s ethics. For Aquinas, the moral life begins with a surrender to God on the part of a person who comes to faith. That surrender includes a change in the person’s will from the state of resisting God’s love and grace to quiescence, the cessation of resistance. Once a person’s will is in this quiescent state, God infuses grace into his will. On Aquinas’s views, in an instant this grace moves the person’s will to the will of faith. In that same instant, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell in him and also brings into him also all the infused virtues, as well as all the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. The paper explores Aquinas’s claims about the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, and it argues that for Aquinas the moral life is first and foremost a matter of having a right second-personal relationship to God.

While various parts of St Thomas’ work have been suggested as places to discern a Thomistic ecclesiology, this article tries to situate the Church in a discussion of creation and the communication of divine goodness that is at the heart of the mystery of providence and predestination. Despite the assurance that God works for good with those who love him, our understanding of divine providence must begin with the frank admission of a tension between our intuition that creation must be ordered, and our experience of contingency. By understanding the Church’s place within creation, in a hidden and shadowy way from Abel until its manifestation in the Lord’s Paschal Mystery, we can see how God’s loving purposes are worked out both in the implicit faith in a Mediator, which finds its expression in a belief in God’s providential care of creation, and in the life of the visible Church where the mystery of predestination is worked out in the lives of the faithful until all is at last made manifest at the end of time. Such an ecclesiology allows us to see the fundamental importance, and mystical meaning, of the visible hierarchical Church.

While many people think of self-knowledge as about having particular knowledge of oneself, and contemporary philosophers think of self-knowledge as about knowing one’s own mental states, historically, many thinkers have thought about self-knowledge as about knowing one’s nature. This is clear in Thomas Aquinas’s account of self-knowledge. Yet how is knowing one’s nature, which is one of the least individual aspects of oneself, self-knowledge rather than more general anthropological knowledge? This article defends the idea that there is a knowledge of one’s nature which qualifies as self-knowledge and not just anthropological knowledge. In particular, it defends Aquinas’s conception of self-knowledge in dialogue with contemporary epistemology and Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’. It is argued that Aquinas’s account of self-cognition describes a first-personal knowledge of our nature which is self-knowledge insofar as it is acquired through reflection on one’s experience of oneself in contrast to third-personal anthropological knowledge.

In recent years, a large amount of scholarship has been written about St Thomas Aquinas’s views on free will and determinism. This paper is an attempt to bring some Thomist views of libertarian free will into dialogue with analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen and his ‘mysterianism’ about free will. The thesis of this paper is that Thomist libertarians about free will are committed to Peter van Inwagen’s mysterianism about free will. The paper intends to accomplish this aim by showing how recent accounts of Thomist libertarianism cannot defeat the intuitive strength of van Inwagen’s ‘Replay argument’. The significance of this conclusion is that some Thomists are committed to mysterianism and that mysterianism is a legitimate position a Thomist can hold. This also provides evidence that the Thomist tradition can grow and be nourished by engagement with contemporary analytic philosophy.

One of the most enduring criticisms of papal infallibility is that it seems to set the pope apart from the Church. Much has already been done to correct this impression, but the current ‘synodal moment’ offers a unique opportunity to substantially further this ecclesiological integration. Along such lines, the present article first proposes that the teachings on infallibility in Lumen gentium be read through the chapter on the People of God (LG25 through LG12), thereby treating the pope as a member of the faithful and drawing out the charismatic dimension of infallibility. The article then pivots to exploring the widely overlooked Eastern Catholic reception of Vatican I. Specifically, it details the dogmatic importance of a clause added to Pastor aeternus by two patriarchs as part of their conditional acceptance – something drawing from a deeper tradition of synodal examination of papal teaching. These two sections converge to reveal a more synodal infallibility at the level of initial discernment and reception. More so, these genuinely synodal elements of papal infallibility are discovered as existing within the previous tradition. Elements that, going forward, can fruitfully be given a new hermeneutical priority.

The once-popular thesis that non-Christians who are inculpably ignorant of the gospel can be saved through ‘implicit faith’ in Christ has fallen on hard times. In this paper, we consider objections raised against this position by a range of Catholic critics, including Thomas Crean, Augustine DiNoia, Gavin D’Costa, and Stephen Bullivant. In our judgement, criticisms of ‘implicit faith’ often suffer from a lack of clarity about the nature of such faith, although admittedly this ambiguity was present even in original Scholastic uses of the term. However, in the past few decades, analytic philosophers have explored many forms of belief, which one might call ‘implicit’. Accordingly, we draw on both Scholastic and analytic epistemology to arrive at a more attractive characterisation of implicit faith. We argue that once implicit faith is understood in this way, recent objections to the claim that non-Christians can be saved soluble.

Aquinas’ anthropology is commonly believed to prevent the mind–body problem by treating the human being as one substance, and the soul as a formal cause. Thomists’ descriptions of Aquinas’ anthropology tend to understate or even omit its more dualistic elements, e.g., that the soul is an agent cause that moves the body, and that acts through the mediation of the ‘corporeal spirits’. More importantly, these descriptions overlook that Aquinas himself recognizes a problem of mental causality and even argues for some solutions to it. This paper aims to show that there is such a problem within Aquinas’ conceptual frame, and that contemporary Thomist anthropologies are also vulnerable to it.

This article considers the claim that miraculous healings are essential to present-day evangelization. I contrast this perspective with that of the Baroque scholastic theologian John Poinsot. Like his contemporaries, Poinsot is concerned with offering a robust defense of the Christian faith but is rather circumspect with respect to the role that the miraculous should play. I argue that Poinsot’s reasons are not only valid, but the positive framework he develops for defending the articles of the faith helps contemporary evangelists successfully navigate the pitfalls of postmodernity.

In his 2019 essay, Arthur Kleinman laments that medicine has become ever-competent at managing illness, yet caring for those who are ill is increasingly out of practice. He opines that the language of ‘the soul’ is helpful to those practicing medicine, as it provides an important counterbalance to medicine’s technical rationality that avoids the existential and spiritual domains of human life. His accusation that medicine has become soulless merits considering, yet we believe his is the wrong description of contemporary medicine. Where medicine is disciplined by technological and informational rationalities that risk coercing attention away from corporealities and toward an impersonal, digital order, the resulting practices expose medicine to becoming not soulless but excarnated. Here we engage Kleinman in conversation with Franco Berardi, Charles Taylor, and others to ask: Have we left behind the body for senseless purposes? Perhaps medicine is not proving itself to be soulless, but rather senseless, bodyless – the any-occupation of excarnated souls. If so, the dissension of excarnation and the recovery of touching purpose seems to us to be an apparent need within the contemporary and increasingly digitally managed and informationally ordered medical milieu.

The explosive increase in life expectancy over the 20th century led to the formulation of multiple gerontological theories. Of these, it is the evolutionary theories of senescence that enjoy the greatest theoretical and empirical support today. It is striking that these models put reproduction at the center of their postulates, an emphasis shared with the Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrines of the living being; this meeting point inspires our model. In particular, we hypothesize that the corporeal living being, precisely because of its mortality, can only fulfill the universal vocation to similitudo Dei through the generation of another living being of the same species. Once this purpose is fulfilled, its biological organization – understood here as a minimal entitative disposition that allows the actualization of matter by substantial form – decays and is exposed to random damage, as predicted by evolutionary models. This gradual decline is what is known as senescence. Such an approach opens up the possibility of addressing aging positively, with an emphasis on organizational prolongation resulting in a healthier old age. At the same time, such a perspective could illuminate our current understanding of biological organization and the pathologies that affect it.