This chapter draws out the sacrificial implications of Aquinas’s account of love. By combining Aquinas’s theory with ideas from Philip Pettit about the robustness of love’s behavioral implications across possible worlds, the chapter presents a metaphysical framework for understanding why human love is essentially sacrificial. It is argued that the sacrificial dimension of human love is not contingent on the existence of sin and evil.

In this chapter, a theodicy that addresses the hard questions about innocent and horrendous suffering is presented and defended in dialogue with analytic philosophers of religion. It is argued that, possibly, every case of innocent, nonsacrificial suffering will retrospectively be transformed into sacrificial suffering that enables a greater intimacy with God. This could take place if God were to offer all innocent sufferers the opportunity to present – if necessary, from a postmortem state – their previous suffering to God as a sacrifice that perfects their love and unites them closely with him.

This chapter focuses on the nature of love, and especially on the relationship between love as self-regarding and other-regarding (eros and agape). It is argued – in dialogue with authors such as Anders Nygren and C.S. Lewis – that Aquinas’s theory of love can account for and harmonize these two aspects of love.

In this chapter, the Christological and soteriological ideas that have tacitly informed the theodicy are made explicit, and it is argued that the theodicy strengthens the coherence of the Christian web of beliefs. It is also argued that the analysis of love that the theodicy builds on enables a deeper understanding of Christ’s atoning and sanctifying work.

Approaching the issue of theodicy, this chapter reflects – in dialogue with John Hick – on the external conditions necessary for love’s perfection. It is contended that if human love is essentially sacrificial, it follows that the perfection of love requires the actualization of love’s sacrificial aspect. This means that God has reason to permit suffering and death to the extent that these evils are natural for humans as embodied and vulnerable creatures.

This chapter anchors the insights gleaned from John of the Cross and Thérèse of Lisieux in biblical perspectives on sacrifice, as developed by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Contemporary criticism of sacrifice (proposed by René Girard, feminist authors, and Robert Daly) are also addressed.

In this chapter I trace the problem of killing in Christian thought. I then raise the question of whether any intentional killing can be justified; in the remainder of the book I argue that the answer to this question is “no”.

The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

According to Charles Taylor, the modern notion of the self is closely related to the notion of inwardness, for the self is taken to be something inside of us, accessible through introspection. Some medieval authors paved the way for this conception by identifying the self with the immaterial soul that somehow resides in the body. However, other authors clearly rejected an interiorization of the self, as this chapter argues. They took it to be a set of powers that is essentially related to external things and that becomes manifest in this relation. The chapter presents two case studies to spell out this alternative conception. It first analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that the self is present in bodily activities: whenever we perceive material objects, we become aware of ourselves as being directed toward them. The chapter then examines Peter of John Olivi’s thesis that the self is present in emotions: whenever we experience them, we cognize ourselves as being related to other people. It is therefore a bodily, relational, and social self that is at the core of two medieval theories.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

At first glance, Thomism and feminism seem like unlikely bedfellows. In spite of the apparent incongruity, I argue that a fruitful dialogue can exist between Aquinas and feminism, particularly regarding the relationship between the body and reason. To this end, I make three points. First, I argue that Aquinas’s anthropology provides a fertile ground for a discussion of women’s nature and flourishing. Second, I argue that there is surprising degree of similarity between the attitude of Thomas toward the female body and the attitude of certain contemporary feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone. All three of these authors recognized that women are more affected by their bodies than men are, and all three saw this as a source of inequality between men and women. Third, I argue that, while Aquinas is wrong to conclude that women are less rational than men, it may nonetheless be true that women experience more frequent interruptions to their ability to exercise fully their highest powers because they experience more pain and fatigue related to their biology. Finally, I consider how the nature of the female body may dispose women to exercising their reason slightly differently than men do.

Divine Truthmaker Simplicity (DTS) avoids collapsing God into a metaphysical property by arguing that, to identify God with God’s wisdom, goodness (etc.) is not to identify God with a property, but rather to claim that God is the truthmaker for the predication “God is wise” (etc.). DTS has been the target of a number of recent objections. This chapter explains how Aquinas’s often overlooked distinction between two ways in which a thing can have a perfection – essentially and by participation – enables a response to these objections.

The earth’s shadow darkens the initial Heavens of Dante’s ascent, the shadow waning the nearer a Heaven is to that of the Sun.The inhabitants of the last earth-shadowed Heaven turn to that Heaven hoping to be free from the imperfections of terrestrial existence.But these Heavens’ vestigial earthiness exerts an effect.Each focuses on a particular imperfection: the fragility of moral vows; the defect of human law as a vehicle of justice; and the reign of “mad love.”These produce an urge to transcend this region.

But Dante has readers assess the losses as well as the gains that accrue when we leave our world behind.This assessment puts reason on trial, its inadequacies seeming to sanction reason’s subordination to faith as provided in the vision that beckons above.But these Heavens ask not only whether that’s possible but desirable.Reason’s inadequacies are shown to be inseparable from moral responsibility, from more just politics, and from the desires that generate the Comedy.Asking whether the transcendence of terrestrial existence makes for a happier life, Dante gives readers cause to consider the possibility that these earth-shadowed Heavens are more than merely a necessary step on the way to perfection.

Dante encounters a convention of famous minds moving circularly in unison, like the sun, an image of perfect intelligibility. He focuses on Aquinas’s synthesis of faith and reason, which purports to resolve those perplexities that vex previous Heavens. Dante’s doubts disrupt the harmony; he wonders how it’s possible to err, to “wander” from “the straight way,” as he had done. “Thomas of Aquino” addresses Dante’s wonder.

Dante’s verdict on Aquinas’s synthesis turns on the difference between the “Angelic Doctor” and Solomon. Their relative rank reflects the capacity of prudence and poetry versus law and deduction from abstract principle to understand and guide humanity. These alternative views of wisdom rest, in turn, on the question of happiness or the true good, the prior, shared concern that both faith and reason address. Aquinas’s thought answers to a particular view of good, one that makes this Heaven’s inhabitants exult on hearing that their “desire for their dead bodies” will be fulfilled.Dante thus brings readers to ask if the intrinsically individual good of resurrection can be the supreme good for a being that can ask the question of happiness, a being that can “wander.”