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An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Aquinas’s exegesis of Romans 8:16, John 14:21, and Philippians 1:9 invert the typical order of classical (and Thomistic) metaphysics in which knowledge causes love. Here, instead, love causes knowledge. An intuitive, experiential knowledge of (1) God as “Abba Father,” (2) Christ’s divine nature, and (3) the demands of the moral order are consequent upon the gift of God’s own love (caritas). Aqu

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas The gift of understanding has a preeminent place in Aquinas’s account of the Christian’s knowledge of the mysteries of the faith. By this gift, the mind apprehends the mysteries of the faith in a penetrating, experiential, and connatural manner. As such, the gift of understanding is intimately tied to the virtue of faith. Faith regulates the gift of understanding, since faith first unites the s

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Despite human agency under the direction of the Holy Spirit being likened to the instinctive behavior of animals, Aquinas affirms a critical difference, namely, that free will (liberum arbitrium) remains. Indeed, for Aquinas, man becomes more free when so “led.” This introduces a critical feature of Aquinas’ doctrine of the divinus instinctus that is absent in Aristotle. Such “moved freedom” is

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Aquinas defines the gifts “as something given by God according to the order of His own motion (datur a Deo in ordine ad motionem ipsius), something, to wit, that makes man to follow well the promptings (instinctus) of God.” The decisive feature of the gifts, then, is their unique moving principle, namely the Holy Spirit. The classical image that expresses the dynamism of this Spirit-led action

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Moral reasoning about the practical order (agibilia), maintains Aquinas, is the work of an active intellect that proceeds discursively and by way of speculative inquiry. It is otherwise with the connatural knowledge of prudence. The “gut feeling” about a practical truth is not, in the first case, active, but passive and receptive. A particular reality can elicit a response from the appetites—a

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Both in the early Scriptum and in the mature Summa, Aquinas draws on Dionysius the Areopagite to express how amor is a “unifying force” (vis unitiva) that seeks its connatural good. In distinction 27 of the third book of the Commentary on the Sentences, this Dionysian definition of love serves as the framing structure for his whole theology of love. In this regard, Aquinas emphasizes how love e

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Despite the stark difference Aquinas articulates between his own Aristotelian account of the mode of knowing and that of the Platonic tradition, he maintains with the same insistence that what is known is the reality itself. While knowledge is possessed according to the mode of the knower—and in our case the knower is a hylomorphic composite—it is a genuine possession of that intellectual reali

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas In the opening chapters of the commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas makes clear that the ground of all human knowing is sensation, which mediates the external world to our intellects. I see a four-legged creature. Its lugubrious brown eyes stare intently up at me. Its tail wags furiously. An elongated tongue dripping saliva dilates from its mouth. Such a portrait can only be apprehe

Dionysius has a ubiquitous presence in Aquinas’s corpus. The Areopagite is directly referenced in nearly 2,200 texts. Citations of Dionysius exceed those of every other author apart from Augustine and Aristotle. Moreover, the influence of Dionysius goes far beyond explicit citation. Dionysius was a substratal influence on Aquinas— contributing to much of his theological posture. Dionysius served as the vital tributary mediating the Christian Platonism that inundates Aquinas’s

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas The word “knowledge” has a broad semantic range—it describes epistemic realities that are quite diverse. Knowledge can mean information, for instance, the knowledge of analytical geometry or of communal life in medieval Italy. Knowledge also describes a skill, for example, the knowledge of bread-making or clock-repair. I remain distinct from both knowledge possessed as information or as a skill

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