Stephen L. Brock

The vision of man offered by St Thomas Aquinas is sometimes criticized for being too “cosmological” or too “physical” and for failing to do justice to the transcendence of human subjectivity. It is not a new criticism. Already in the 17th century, Malebranche attacked the Scholastics for considering the human soul more as “form of the body” than as image of God and knower of truth. Yet an attentive reading of St Thomas finds that on his view, the human soul’s “physical” status – its nature as the substantial form of the human body – is entirely in function of its specific way of knowing the truth and of representing God. This essay seeks to explain this position, by way of a detailed study of Thomas’s account of the human soul. The general conclusion is that the fundamental issue between Thomas’s philosophy of man and the modern “turn to the subject” is not merely about man. It is about the metaphysics of corporeal reality as a whole.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Causality of Prayer and the Execution of Predestination in Thomas AquinasStephen L. BrockIntroduction: The Question of the Reasonableness of Petitionary PrayerIn a lucid and witty essay published in 1945, C. S. Lewis addressed a common objection to the practice of petitionary prayer.1 This practice is not confined to Christianity, of course, but at least in relation to the Christian conception of the deity, it can seem to make little sense. The problem is simple. If God is all-wise and all-good, what is the point of asking him for things? He is already perfectly aware of our true needs, and he already wants to provide for them. Many of our requests are ignorant and misguided, and the others, it seems, will be at best superfluous. Nevertheless, as Lewis observes, petitionary prayer is part of the whole Christian tradition. Jesus himself practiced it, urged his followers to do so, and taught them how. Lewis wanted to explain that the real purpose of the practice is not to inform God of our needs or to twist his arm. Rather, petitionary prayer functions as a kind of cause, a way of bringing things about. It does so by divine institution and as a kind of share in God's own causality. And so understood, it makes perfect sense. I think Lewis is right about this.Another matter, however, is Lewis's particular way of conceiving the causality of petitionary prayer, especially as to its relation to God's own causality and care for the world. I grant that his conception is quite [End Page 15] straightforward and clear, and that it even has a strong initial plausibility. Indeed, I suspect that it gives voice to the way in which many thoughtful people who pray for things conceive of what they are doing. This is why, even though it is not the main focus of the present essay, I think that it serves as a good way of entering to the topic. But I do hope to show that it contains some serious problems.In what follows, I shall first set out Lewis's answer to the question of the reasonableness of petitionary prayer. Then I shall raise one of the problems that I think it faces. This has to do with another attribute that has traditionally been ascribed to the Christian God; namely, omniscience, the knowledge of all things, including all temporal events, past, present, and future. In the essay on prayer, Lewis does not address this problem. But from things that he says elsewhere about temporal events and how God knows them, I think we can gather how he would have solved it.Rather than evaluating this solution myself, I shall turn next to another twentieth-century British thinker, the philosopher Peter Geach. Although Geach agrees with Lewis in ascribing a causal function to petitionary prayer, Geach's way of understanding temporal events and God's knowledge of them contrasts sharply with Lewis's. In fact, Geach argues—I think persuasively—that a position like Lewis's actually ends up making petitionary prayer unable to function as a cause, and therefore renders it pointless. At the same time, however, Geach's own account of how petitionary prayer fits into God's overall plan has something very important in common with Lewis's. And in my opinion, what they have in common is very problematic.This will bring me to my main theme, which is Thomas Aquinas's view of the matter. Like Lewis and Geach, Thomas does regard petitionary prayer as a divinely instituted way of causing things. On their temporal status, his position is similar to Geach's. But on how prayer and its effects fall under God's providential plan, Thomas differs greatly from both authors. I find his account far more satisfactory. Unfortunately, it is also considerably more complicated and philosophically challenging, and my presentation of it will have to be correspondingly longer.The distinctive features of Thomas's view mostly pertain to the metaphysics of divine transcendence. My main task will be to show how, in his account, the full determinacy of God's eternal plan, including that part of it called...

If there is any one author in the history of moral thought who has come to be associated with the idea of natural law, it is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Many things have been written about Aquinas's natural law teaching, and from many different perspectives. The aim of this book is to help see it from his own perspective. That is why the focus is metaphysical. Aquinas's whole moral doctrine is laden with metaphysics, and his natural law teaching especially so, because it is all about first principles. The book centers on how Aquinas thinks the first principles of practical reason, which for him are what make up natural law, function as laws. It is a controversial question, and the book engages a variety of readers of Aquinas, including Francisco Suárez, Jacques Maritain, prominent analytical philosophers, Straussians, and the initiators of the New Natural Law theory. Among the issues addressed are the relation between natural law and natural inclination, how far natural law depends on knowledge of human nature, what its obligatory force consists in, and, above all, how it is related to what for Aquinas is the first principle of all being, the divine will.

If Saint Thomas Aquinas was a great theologian, it is in no small part because he was a great philosopher. And he was a great philosopher because he was a great metaphysician. In the twentieth century, metaphysics was not much in vogue, among either theologians or even philosophers; but now it is making a comeback, and once the contours of Thomas's metaphysical vision are glimpsed, it looks like anything but a museum piece. It only needs some dusting off. Many are studying Thomas now for the answers that he might be able to give to current questions, but he is perhaps even more interesting for the questions that he can raise regarding current answers: about the physical world, about human life and knowledge, and (needless to say) about God. This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas's philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations.

"Both Thomistic scholars and analytic philosophers interested in theories of human action and accountability will find this book a welcome addition to their libraries. Truly a substantive addition to both Thomistic scholarship and the ongoing analytic investigation into human action and responsible agency."—American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly "A first-rate book...Brock's lucid and illuminating analysis offers much of value to both intellectual historians and theologians, as well as philosophers."—Theological Studies"Brock's treatment of Aquinas's account of action exhibits a rare combination of rigor and learning. It is, no doubt, the best we have."—The Thomist.

Focusing mainly on two passages from the Summa theologiae, the article first argues that, on Aquinas’s view, an individual substance, which is the proper subject of being, can and normally does have a certain multiplicity of acts of being. It is only “a certain” multiplicity because the substance has only one unqualified act of being, its substantial being, which belongs to it through its substantial form. The others are qualified acts of being, added on to the substantial being through accidental forms. Having established this thesis, the rest of the article uses it as a basis for an approach to the so-called real distinction between act of being and essence or between act of being and substantial form. This approach is meant to be effective even in an Aristotelian setting where there may seem to be no place for a substantial act distinct from substantial form.

Size is not always a gauge of significance. The issue that I propose to address here centers on a single clause from the Summa theologiae. But it goes nearly to the heart of St Thomas's teaching on natural law. It concerns the way in which Thomas thinks the human mind comes to understand good and evil. The specific question raised by the clause is the role played in this process by what Thomas calls "natural inclination." This question leads to an even more basic one: what it is, for Thomas, that constitutes a truly intellectual grasp of the good.

Does St Thomas Aquinas have anything to teach us on the subject of atheism? We might doubt it, even if we share his basic outlook. The reason would be the very fact that in his day there were so few who did not share it. It was, as they say, an age of faith. The profession of some sort of religious belief, indeed monotheism, was virtually universal, not just in Europe but in practically all of what Europeans then knew of the world. No doubt there were individual cases of "godlessness". The learned would also have known something about atheistic philosophies in pagan antiquity. But on the whole, the medievals seem to have had little incentive to take atheism very seriously. It hardly comes as a surprise to find that St Thomas's own writings contain no thematic treatment of it. Only in modernity does "serious" atheism seem to resurface.

Aquinas describes transubstantiation as a “conversion” of one substance into another. Yet he denies any common substrate underlying the succession of substances. Germain Grisez finds this unintelligible. The article's thesis is that Aquinas saw and resolved the basic issue contained in Grisez's objection. The key text stresses a “nature of being” common to the two substances. This nature, it is argued, is univocal. As such it constitutes a continuous object of signification that is both necessary and sufficient for the sacramental action of the words of the consecration. That action can only be understood as a supernatural kind of conversion.

The general aim of this paper is simply to draw attention to a certain theme in St Thomas' psychology of human action, one not often treated at much length in discussions of Aquinas on action. This theme is his notion of usus, "use", as a stage or component in the accomplishment of a complete human act. I shall begin by indicating some possible reasons for the general disregard of the theme, and shall then briefly note some rather striking affirmations by Aquinas concerning use, affirmations which suggest that it is probably more interesting, both for him and for us, than it might at first seem. The core of the paper focuses upon a set of problems about the coherence of Aquinas' notion of use. There my interlocutor will be Professor Alan Donagan, who has been one of the few writers on action-theory in Aquinas to dwell on this subject. The proposed resolution of these problems will, I think, make it at least plausible to assign to the act of use a rather central role in the account of Aquinas' mature way of conceiving the human will, as a faculty distinct from the intellect and as primarily a faculty of agency. The paper closes with a nod to one of the more significant features of Aquinas' moral philosophy that I think his doctrine of use helps us to keep in mind.

Enrico Berti and others hold that Aquinas’s notion of God as ipsum esse subsistens conflicts with Aristotle’s view that positing an Idea of being treats being as a genus and nullifies all differences. The paper first shows how one of Aquinas’s ways of distinguishing esse from essence supposes an intimate tie between a thing’s esse and its differentia. Then it argues that for Aquinas the (one) divine essence differs from the (manifold) “essence of esse.” God is his very esse. This somehow “contains” all esse, but it also transcends it, because although simple, it also “contains” all forms and differentiae.