Loving Knowledge: Connatural Knowledge of God in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

The idea animating my book is that “affective knowing” is a foundational category for Aquinas’s theology. I propose that, for Aquinas, love for divine things generates a distinct type of knowing—connatural knowledge—and that this underappreciated feature of his epistemology is the key to grasping the unity of his overall theological project. One could distinguish (with admittedly insufficient subtlety) two broad methods of human cognition in Aquinas’s writings: one by way of study and learning, which Aquinas signals by terms such as per modum cognitionis (by way of cognition); the other by way of connaturality, that is, by way of experience and affection, signaled by terms such as per modum inclinationis (by way of inclination).

My book provides a detailed theological account of this latter “science of the saints.”

Loving Knowledge puts forth the proposition that, for Aquinas, Divine love (charity) grants the believer an apprehension of divine things in an affective, experiential, contemplative, non-discursive, and unitive manner, which is proleptic of beatific knowing. As such, this book advances what I believe to be an ambitious, new conception of Aquinas’s theological method and proposes a newfound unity to the whole of his theological vision. An appreciation for the mystical and participatory character of Aquinas’s theology has grown in last thirty years. Nevertheless, the prevalence of connatural knowledge as a unique, wide-ranging, and essential epistemological category for the believer’s knowledge of God has not been sufficiently appreciated. Loving Knowledge is the first book-length study on connatural knowledge in Aquinas’s theology.