Results by title

Focusing on the Summa theologiae, Nicholas Lombardo contributes to the recovery, reconstruction, and critique of Aquinas's account of emotion in dialogue with both the Thomist tradition and contemporary analytic philosophy

The Metaphysical Foundations of Love: Aquinas on Participation, Unity, and Union offers a systematic treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of the metaphysical relations of unity-to-union and unity-to-participation in God as the key structuring elements to the nature of love and friendship. In general, Aquinas identifies love as the source and summit of the life of each human being. Everything in the created realm issues forth from God’s creative love, and the ultimate end of all human persons is the greatest possible union with God. Aquinas contends that the love of friendship allows for the greatest union between two persons; thus, the greatest union with God takes the form of friendship with him.

The “Suffering Servant” text of Isaiah 53 is a perennial topic of debate within Jewish and Christian biblical theology. Is the Suffering Servant an individual, a group, or both? How and why did he suffer? What role did God play in his suffering? How is his suffering related to human salvation? The answers to these questions often divide Jewish and Christian readers of Scripture as well as Christians across different denominations. In particular, Isaiah 53 tends to inform different Christian accounts of the origin, nature, and saving value of Christ’s Passion. The Suffering Servant in Aquinas contributes to the debate on the meaning of Isaiah 53 and its bearing upon the Passion of Christ by examining how St. Thomas Aquinas engaged this biblical text. This book examines every explicit reference to Isaiah 53 that Aquinas makes in his biblical commentaries, Commentary on the Sentences, Summa Theologiae, and Opuscula. It analyzes how and why Aquinas interprets Isaiah 53 in the ways that he does. It focuses especially upon how Aquinas draws upon Isaiah 53 to shed light on the saving mystery of Christ’s Passion. Readers will see how Aquinas articulates the relationship between God’s will and Christ’s suffering, the diverse forms of Christ’s pain, the degree to which the Passion can be considered a “punishment,” and the saving functions of the Passion as example, merit, satisfaction, and sacrifice. This book makes an original contribution to the growing field of Biblical Thomism. It examines Aquinas’s exegetical methods as well as the role of Scripture within his speculative theology. And it properly contextualizes Aquinas’s exegesis by considering the differences between his Latin version of Isaiah 53 and contemporary renderings of Hebrew and Greek versions. Readers will see that Aquinas’s Christological interpretations of Isaiah 53 are both exegetically intriguing and theologically rich.

The Wayfarer’s End follows the human person’s journey to union with God in the theologies of Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas. It argues that these seminal thinkers of the 13th Century emphasize scriptural notions of divine rewards as ordering principles for the graced movement of human viators to eternal life. Divine rewards emerge as a fundamental category through the study’s emphasis on Thomas and Bonaventure as scriptural commentators and preachers whose work in sacra pagina structures the content of their sacra doctrina. Shawn Colberg places Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’s scriptural, dogmatic, and polemical works into conversation and illumines their mutually edifying depictions of the way to eternal life. Looking to the journey itself, The Wayfarer’s End demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the roles played by God and human beings in the movement to full beatitude. To that end, it explores the relationships between grace and human nature, the effects of sin on the human person, the vital themes of predestination, conversion, perseverance, and the place of “reward-worthy” human action within the overall movement toward union with God. While St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas both stress the priority of grace and divine action for the journey, the study also illustrates their distinct frameworks for human action, unpacking Bonaventure’s preference for the language of acceptatio versus Thomas’s emphasis on ordinatio. This difference inflects their language of rewards, their exposition of scripture, and the scope of free human action in the movement to union with God. This study places the two most seminal theologians of the 13th Century into conversation on central and enduring topics of Christian life. Such a comparative study has been sorely lacking in the field of studies on Aquinas and Bonaventure. It offers insight to those interested in high scholastic thought, Franciscan and Dominican understandings of human salvation, and Thomist and Franciscan theology as it pertains to questions of the Reformation, including biblical exegesis on justification and sanctification. Above all, the study appreciates and foregrounds the richness of Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’s vocations: mendicant theologians concerned to share the fruits of contemplation with fellow friars and others seeking the goal of the wayfarer’s end.

This collection of essays considers a variety of themes in philosophy, theology, and poetry, three ways of thinking that share a certain openness and comprehensiveness. The essays show how philosophy, theology, and poetry are ways of thinking in the medium of words—in large part in the medium of written words—against the background of all things and from the point of view of all of human life. As the essays make clear, philosophy, theology, and poetry are special ways of thinking and speaking, but they are the contrary of specializations. Many of the themes are perennial preoccupations in philosophy: being, time, number, friendship, pleasure, purpose, choice, reason, and order. Others are particular concerns of theology and poetry, such as the divine presence and absence in the world, and poetic form. The volume is divided into two parts: a first part consisting of eight essays on themes in Aquinas’s work, and a second part consisting of five essays on other authors whose thought, in one way or another, has an affinity with the thought of Aquinas: Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Dante, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Sokolowski. The volume’s title pays homage to Aquinas’s use of the Latin word consideratio, a favorite term of the scholastics that could refer to any careful attending to what one knows. The essays illustrate ways in which considerations undertaken in philosophy, theology, and poetry provide points of survey from which to take in, to the extent we can, the great panorama of the whole of things.