By knowledge & by love: charity and knowledge in the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas

4. Intellect and Will in St. Thomas’ Theology of Faith

c h a p t e r 4 Intellect and Will in St. Thomas’ Theology of Faith At this point in our study it will be helpful to review the itinerary we have thus far traveled. We began our investigation by posing the question of charity’s relationship to knowledge. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, what is charity’s relationship to knowledge in human action? In our introductory remarks we saw that this question touches on charity’s status as a virtue. In order to live a virtue one must have knowledge of the virtue’s object and of its proper acts. Does charity as a divinely infused virtue have this same relationship to knowledge? Some scholars argue that it does not. Moreover, as we noted in chapter one, they maintain that in his later works St. Thomas recognized charity’s independence from conceptual knowledge. Specifically, they hold that in St. Thomas’ mature estimation, charity’s act is antecedent to and independent of conceptual knowledge and practical reasoning. Yet, if this is the case, in what sense is charity anything like other human virtues? Indeed, if charity’s act is antecedent to and independent of practical reasoning, in what sense is charity’s love for God a freely chosen human act? Consequently , our stated purpose has been to analyze St. Thomas’ theory of charity’s relationship to knowledge. The first step in this analysis, however , has been to study St. Thomas’ conception of the natural principles underlying charity’s activity. In chapter two we considered Thomas’ theory of the will as a rational appetite. In those pages we discovered that Thomas maintains throughout his career that intellect and will together form the dual prin119 ciple of human action. At every stage of practical reasoning, the intellect brings the informing light of human intelligence to bear upon the particulars of human action, while the will directs the intellect in the consideration of those particulars. The intellect specifies the will’s object , while the will moves the intellect to exercise its act. We also learned that Thomas’ theory avoids falling into an infinite circularity—where every act of the will depends on reason, while every act of reason depends on the will—by placing the ground of practical reasoning in nature and ultimately in God. Thomas affirms that reason specifies and commands all of the will’s acts, except the will’s first act which is instilled in it by nature, while the will moves the intellect to engage in all its acts except the intellect’s first act which is instilled in it by nature. Since God is the author of nature, this means that “what first moves the will and the intellect is something above the will and the intellect, namely God.”1 Next, after having established in chapter two the character of the will’s relationship to intellect in practical reasoning, in chapter three we undertook a closer analysis of the will’s primary act, which is love. Without undertaking a full presentation of Aquinas’ psychology of love, we probed Aquinas’ view of the relationship between knowledge and love in human action. We discovered that, following St. Augustine, Aquinas affirms both that love depends on knowledge (because nothing is loved unless it is known) and that our moral knowledge depends on love (because our loves shape how we view things). Aquinas resolves the tension inherent in this twin affirmation by distinguishing the types of causality exercised by knowledge and love, and by grounding our knowledge and love upon the natural principles of intellect and will: knowledge has priority in attaining the beloved, while love has priority in moving toward the beloved. These discoveries have brought us to the threshold of our treatment of charity. They have prepared us for an analysis of Aquinas’ theology of faith. A study of the Thomistic conception of faith provides an invaluable preface to our analysis of charity, because, in Aquinas’ view, 120 Intellect and Will in St. Thomas’ Theology of Faith . De malo . faith itself contains both cognitive and appetitive components. Indeed, Aquinas regards charity as perfecting the appetitive component of faith. Thus, in order to grasp the true character of Aquinas’ theology of charity , it will be helpful first to consider his theology of faith. This is especially true because of the development his theology of faith undergoes. As with his general analysis...