Dennis Michael Ferrara

To what extent did St. Thomas faithfully synthesize nature and grace, "Aristotle" and "the Bible"? To throw light on this question, the present work studies Thomas's teaching on imago Dei as it unfolds within the ordo doctrinae of the Summa Theologiae, arguing the complex hypothesis that: the axis of Thomas's thought moves from objective knowledge in the Ia Pars to personal love in the IIa Pars; this development springs from his fidelity to revelation and grace, the dominant horizon of the IIa Pars; this development is unthematic and coexists with his basic intellectualism, causing an essential ambiguity in his thought; and this ambiguity is due to the historically unresolvable conflict in that thought between spirit and its initial point of contact with the real: matter. ;The study is in two parts. The first, relying on Thomas's own divisions of the text, follows the internal progression of the Ia and IIa Pars to marshal evidence for the study's first three hypotheses. Stressed formally are the horizon shift from efficient to final causality between the Parts and the corresponding emphasis on the will; the teachings on the grace of the Holy Spirit and on caritas and its natural analogue, amor; and the distinction between merely speculative knowledge and the connatural knowledge that flows from love. The second part attempts, in light of Thomas's philosophy, especially the theorem of actus immanens and its mediation by its proper and proportionate object, a horizon analysis of the formal teaching on imago Dei to demonstrate the extent to which Thomas, thinking his revolutionary and forward-looking incarnationalism within the cosmocentric horizon of the Middle Ages, interprets the image hierarchically and abstractly, the latter both cognitionally and, foundationally, existentially . A concluding analysis of the tract on human love points to the una caro amoris as the missing link in the structure of Thomistic wisdom. ;The main conclusion is that Thomas was unable to complete unambiguously his revolutionary "turn to the world" due to the cosmocentric horizon which he, standing at the beginning of the "modern turn to the subject,"could not have overcome