Aquinas Studies Collection (4 vols.)

Applying the ethical concepts of Thomas Aquinas to contemporary moral problems, this book both presents new interpretations of Thomist theology and offers new insights into today’s perplexing moral dilemmas. This volume addresses such contemporary issues as internalized oppression, especially as it relates to women and African-Americans; feminism and anger; child abuse; friendship and charity; and finally, justice and reason.

The collection revives Aquinas as an ethicist who has relevant things to say about contemporary concerns. These essays illustrate how Thomistic ethics can encourage and empower people in moral struggles. As the first book to use Aquinas to explore such issues as child abuse and oppression, it includes a variety of approaches to Aquinas’ ethics. Aquinas and Empowerment is a valuable resource for students of classical thought and contemporary ethics.

All of us want to be happy and live well. Sometimes intense emotions affect our happiness—and, in turn, our moral lives. Our emotions can have a significant impact on our perceptions of reality, the choices we make, and the ways in which we interact with others. Can we, as moral agents, have an effect on our emotions? Do we have any choice when it comes to our emotions?

In Aquinas on the Emotions, Diana Fritz Cates shows how emotions are composed as embodied mental states. She identifies various factors, including religious beliefs, intuitions, images, and questions that can affect the formation and the course of a person’s emotions. She attends to the appetitive as well as the cognitive dimension of emotion, both of which Aquinas interprets with flexibility. The result is a powerful study of Aquinas that is also a resource for readers who want to understand and cultivate the emotional dimension of their lives.

In this comprehensive anthology, 27 outstanding scholars from North America and Europe address every major aspect of Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of morality and comment on his remarkable legacy. While there has been a revival of interest in recent years in the ethics of St. Thomas, no single work has yet fully examined the basic moral arguments and content of Aquinas’ major moral work, the second part of the Summa Theologiae. This work fills that lacuna.

The first chapters of The Ethics of Aquinas introduce readers to the sources, methods, and major themes of Aquinas’ ethics. The second part of the book provides an extended discussion of ideas in the second part of the Summa Theologiae, in which contributors present cogent interpretations of the structure, major arguments, and themes of each of the treatises. The third and final part examines aspects of Thomistic ethics in the twentieth century and beyond.

These essays reflect a diverse group of scholars representing a variety of intellectual perspectives. Contributors span numerous fields of study, including intellectual history, medieval studies, moral philosophy, religious ethics, and moral theology. This remarkable variety underscores how interpretations of Thomas’ ethics continue to develop and evolve—and stimulate fervent discussion within the academy and the church. This volume is aimed at scholars, students, clergy, and all those who continue to find Aquinas a rich source of moral insight.

This appraisal of two of the most fundamental terms in the moral language of Thomas Aquinas draws on the contemporary moral distinction between the goodness of a person and the rightness of a person’s living. Keenan thus finds that Aquinas’ earlier writings do not permit the possibility of such a distinction. But in his mature works, specifically the Summa Theologiae, Thomas describes the human act of moral intentionality, and even the virtues in a way analogous to our use of the term moral rightness. To Thomas, only the virtue of charity expresses moral goodness. And, although Thomas describes vices and sin as wrong conduct, he never really develops a description for moral badness.

Keenan compels us to carefully examine Thomas’ central moral concepts and to measure them against contemporary standards for meaning and correctness. As a result, any student of Thomas will find here a forceful argument that his notion of the good is considerably different from ours. Similarly, ethicists and moral theologians will find in the Thomas presented here a consistent-virtue ethicist concerned with descriptions for right living. Any student of theology will also find here a Thomas whose critical and concrete thinking enabled him to develop and even abandon earlier positions as his comprehension of the good evolved.

This analysis prompts a re-examination of our own concepts. Measuring Thomas’ standards against our own, Keenan obliges us to ask whether we sufficiently understand rightness and moral intentionality. He also asks whether we correctly describe what it means to will or to desire something. He further questions whether we have surrendered our understanding of the virtues to the voluntarism and subjectivism which Thomas relentlessly critiqued. This historically sophisticated reading of the Summa Theologiae both allows Thomas to speak again as he once did, and affords us the chance to evaluate the way we describe ourselves and one another as being good and living rightly.