The papers collected in this issue of New Blackfriars were delivered at Aquinas Seminar series in Oxford and represent research interests of the Aquinas Institute. This article contextualises them by giving an impression of areas of contemporary research to which they contribute or to which they point. These areas concern animal psychology, the human being as complex rational animal, body-and-soul, and human evolution. Some of the many possible issues are identified, so as to suggest that in all these areas the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition can enter into a real and fruitful conversation with modern discoveries in biology and psychology; it can take them on board and at the same time pose questions and offer perspectives that stand to be illuminating.

Catherine Pickstock's After Writing sets out to provide an account of liturgical time, subjectivity, and worship which is capable of surpassing the deconstruction of each of these in modernity and postmodernity. Her account of the way in which each of these is treated in the old Roman Rite, however, accentuates elements of ambiguity and deferral which erase two significant elements of traditional Catholic treatments of eschatology. The iterative element of growth and progress in holiness and Christian virtue is subsumed by continuous emphasis on ambiguity and deferral, while the promise of real eschatological novelty - that God seen now only in signs will be seen later face to face - is dissolved by an excessive valorisation of liturgical presence in the mode of signs. In order to avoid a postmodern reduction, then, it is better to embrace the liturgical vision of Joseph Ratzinger, in which liturgy and eschatology are both separated and united as different modalities of the presence of Christ, in which temporal liturgical life not only participates in but is directed towards a greater future fulfilment in the eschatological presence of God.

When we examine ‘who ministers what to whom’ in the church we have to look at our expectations of what the church should do for those inside and out of the church, as well as the expectations of what society should offer. Such an examination of expectations has to consider the structure of this takes place in a relationship between agency and structure: who acts and in what context? This at a time when the place of the individual in the church has changed hugely since the beginning of the twentieth century, from passivity to participation. The article finally relates this theoretical analysis to the current crisis in the church.

Animalism, according to its strongest proponents, is the view that human beings are ‘essentially or most fundamentally animals’. Specifically, ‘we are essentially animals if we couldn't possibly exist without being animals’ (Olson 2008). Although contemporary animalism offers an account superior to its Lockean competitors, Olson's ‘biological approach’ has certain limitations, particularly in its denial of any psychological continuity whatsoever as either necessary or sufficient for individual persistence through time. I propose a number of amendments towards a Thomistic variety of animalism that avoids these difficulties. Although prone to misinterpretation, animalism understood properly is compatible with Aquinas's theory of subsistent intellect. Against recent challenges, I defend the view that Thomistic animalism not only is intelligible, but is indeed crucial for understanding Aquinas's view of human nature and rationality.

The latest sex abuse scandal in the American Catholic Church involving Cardinal McCarrick is compared with that of 2002 in the archdiocese of Boston, and that of 2012 involving Cardinal O'Brien of St Andrews and Edinburgh. Attention is given to aspects of the latter in part because of the privileged perspective of the author. Thereafter, sociological and other reasons are proposed as to why the Catholic priesthood has been afflicted with cases of sexual abuse and sexual impropriety. The issue is considered of the genesis of homosexuality, and apriori assumptions are rejected taking it instead to be an empirical question. There is analysis of the common distinction between (homosexual) orientation and activity, and of its relevance to the issue of admission to seminary formation. Noting that Vatican documents and statements do not refer to ‘orientation’ but to ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies’ (tendenze omosessuali profondamente) these notions are related to those of disposition and activity, and it is argued that the important distinction is between orientation and the rest. Finally, it is noted that both traditional and progressive Catholics are often given to idolatry about the Church and to Pelagianism about their faith and practice.

This commemorative article, drafted for the 75th anniversary of Vincent McNabb's death in 2018 (it was also the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth), re-tells his story, visits the unresolved question of his sanctity, and, by considering his themes, seeks to point up his amor intellectualis, and not just cordialis, the generosity of a many-sided man.

The purpose of this essay is to explore, and clarify, some key features in Aquinas’ account of the virtue of temperance, with an eye to answering some common objections raised against a positive evaluation of temperance. In particular, I consider three features of Aquinas’ understanding of temperance: First, the role of the rational mean in temperance; second, the role of rightly ordered passions in temperance; and third, the ‘despotic’ control of reason over the passions in temperance. Along the way I consider three common objections to Aquinas’ account of temperance: the objection that temperance can be misused for evil, the objection that temperance devalues effort, and the objection that temperance devalues strong passions and thereby implicitly devalues the goodness of sexuality. In responding to these objections on behalf of Aquinas, I take the opportunity to clarify and slightly extend Aquinas’ account of temperance.

Properly interpreted, Aquinas supports a transformative rather than an additive understanding of how the human intellect relates to the capacities human beings share with other animals, an understanding founded in a metaphysics. The soul (‘life-form’) is the substantial form that maintains an organism as a single being throughout life, and Aquinas holds that the human soul is the only substantial form in the human being. He respects the variety of appetitive and apprehensive capacities displayed by different animals, and has a high view of the perceptive (even inductive) powers of the higher animals: they ‘share somewhat in reason’. It is no surprise that we cannot easily identify a rigid boundary between our intellectual powers and the cognitive and conative powers we share with other animals; rather, the powers not only interact, they qualify each other. As Stephen Brock put it, ‘Rationality is a mode of intellect … intrinsically connected to the life of the senses, and therefore to the sense-organs … and to matter itself.’

Pope Francis has brought a fresh style of ministry, including his own, to the Catholic Church. This reflects the accounts of ministry in the New Testament, which eschews privilege and position, and focuses on ministry on service and sees ministers as servants and slaves.

“Aesthetics” is mainly devoted to the description of an assumed aesthetic experience. My intention is to try to show that this modern account, defining a large part of Aesthetics as a discipline, does not allow a correct description of our aesthetic life. Criticism of this modern and contemporary conception will be followed by the defence of a completely different thesis according to which we are made to apprehend in natural things and works of art those properties by which they signify, and in particular their aesthetic properties. Apprehension and appreciation of works of art presuppose the ability to respond to the aesthetic properties of things and works of art. We need to exercise virtues, intellectual and moral ones, to answer appropriately to aesthetic properties of works of art and natural things. Good in general, and good in our aesthetic life and in art, can be understood according to what Aquinas calls “the gradation to be found in things”. I will try to show that it is a reason to think that a successful aesthetic life is a form of desire for God as the source of all perfection.

This article addresses three questions: Is there time in heaven? If so, what is it like? and How does it relate to time in this universe? In dialogue with modern science, this paper argues that since Christianity believes in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, it should also affirm that there is time and space in heaven. Thus, rather than picturing heaven as a changeless, eternal moment, it is better to picture is as an everlasting experience of advancing from glory to glory. The time and the space in heaven is not the same as the time and the space in this universe, but the relationship between spacetime in heaven and spacetime in this universe in shrouded in mystery. While in this universe time always advances in one direction, in heaven, we might be able to move both forwards and backwards in time, though always moving forward in glory. It is also possible that the saints in heaven could revisit different times on earth, making for a complex interaction between heavenly and earthly timelines that could explain how the saints in heaven can hear and respond to earthly prayers.

While friendship with God is an important theme for Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas never explicitly delineates what such friendship looks like. In this article, I present a systematic description of friendship with God according to Thomas Aquinas. I examine three dynamics (mutuality, benevolence, and communicatio) and two effects (mutual indwelling and union) which Aquinas attributes to human friendship, and I show how they can exist analogically in friendship with God. Such a presentation reveals that friendship with God effects the deification of the human person, and such a deified condition is the intended state of the human person, in which he or she can be most fully human. This conclusion allows me to propose a way to define a human person as a relation (using the term deificatus), analogous to Aquinas's definition of person for the Trinity. In turn, I show how this reality impacts a Thomistic understanding of genuine human friendship, whereby one friend loves the other qua deificatus.

This essay examines the image of the Eucharist in the poetry of the Peruvian writer César Vallejo (1892-1938). I argue that unlike his modernista forebears, Vallejo regularly employs the Eucharist not as an image of the ecstasy of sexual union, but instead as an image of guilt, melancholy, frustration, and loss. In one sense, such images can be read as deliberately blasphemous distortions of the Christian picture of the Eucharist Vallejo imbibed as a child. My central thesis, however, will be that the same images can also be read, perhaps in part against Vallejo's own intentions, not as distortions of the Eucharist but as offering insights into the nature of the sacrament itself. I develop this thesis in two parts. First, I argue that despite the centrality to eucharistic theology of the themes of communion, spiritual intimacy, and “real presence”—themes that made it an almost irresistible poetic symbol of sexual desire—the Eucharist itself is also and fundamentally a sacrament of absence, delay, and failure. Second, I suggest that by drawing, however implicitly, on these latent elements of eucharistic theology, Vallejo's poetry opens up a space to think about certain aspects of the sacrament which the modernistas’ erotic exuberance tended systematically to obscure.

Owen Flanagan takes his claim that ‘we are animals through and through’ to imply ‘our animal side is our only side’. But ‘Cartesianism’ is not the only alternative available: Aquinas’ view of the human soul as a spiritual reality that is essentially the form of the body means that animality characterizes humans in an especially intimate way.

Aquinas recognizes degrees of unity. Homogeneous inanimate substances have an accidental unity; living organisms are essentially one: the self pervades the whole, and the form is closely related to this particular matter. The human soul communicates to the body the being the soul possesses, hence it is more intimate to the body than any bodily quality, while the body is more intimate to the soul than any of the soul's powers. In isolation from the body the soul cannot exercise its own proper activity, which is to know sensible reality.

This high degree of metaphysical unity is manifest at the level of action and experience. Robert Sokolowski's account of speech as a defining feature of human beings illustrates how bodiliness is needed for the soul's intellectual activity. Syntactical speech is formed by and expressive of intelligence as embodied and temporally conditioned.

The human being's superior ontological unity is not refuted by experiences of disintegration. Our soul, in its simplicity, needs to originate a unique gamut of powers; hence the human being can go wrong in many ways. The tension among our powers is experienced acutely because it is within the one soul. Human death is not really unnatural, but is more violent than in the case of the other animals. However, as a final mortification it allows us to offer our selves in conformity to Christ.

Rémi Brague in On the God of the Christians gives a defence of the validity of faith against modern presumption that science supplies the model for all knowledge. Brague argues that since God is superpersonal, faith must know God in the way we know persons. Personal knowledge requires the connaturality of a loving will: hence faith in God requires love, utterly unlike any scientific knowledge. In criticism, it is suggested that love is essentially motivated by its object's value, and so presupposes knowledge of the object. What is crucial in faith is not the love the subject brings but the demands of a supremely valuable reality. Since faith is, in the broadest sense, experiential, it has points of contact with scientific rationality.