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By Knowledge and by Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas

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It is in the context of an interpretive dispute over the virtue theory of St. Thomas Aquinas that our author, Michael S. Sherwin, enters the fray as a new voice in the conversation. A school of thought within Catholic moral theology that Sherwin calls the "theologians of moral motivation" have appropriated Aquinas's complex Aristotelian moral theology to give added credibility to their peculiar Rahnerian notions of "option fondamentale" and transcendental freedom (xix). In particular, Josef Fuchs and James Keenan have developed the Rahnerian doctrine of transcendental freedom in a way that views the will's motion in transcendental freedom as antecedent to, or independent of, practical reasoning and objects of choice. Hence a separation is made between one's goodness (one's fundamental orientation) and one's rightness (one's concrete moral judgments and actions); one's wrongness in actions therefore may be seen as not necessarily undermining their goodness on the transcendental level (which is more important).

Sherwin's book is nothing short of a penetrating polemic against theologians of moral motivation (Keenan in particular) who claim that such a distinction is implied in Aquinas's mature thought on the will and charity. The author argues that although there was indeed development in Aquinas's mature thought, nevertheless there remained in Aquinas a basic continuity on the point in question: knowledge always has a structural priority over the will. The strength of Sherwin's book is surely his rigorous analysis of Aquinas's virtue theory (building on Henri Bouillard and Max Seckler) that consequentially yields a more intelligible view of human action that leaves little wanting. His is also more faithful to the Christian tradition's Augustinian insight that one cannot love what one does not know. The book has a helpful index and contains figures that depict the dynamics and principles of human action.

* A more believable interpreter of Aquinas, Sherwin's Aquinas helps us see the folly of spoiling the proper relationship between the intellect and will and between knowledge of God and love. *