Book contents
- Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas
- Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations of Aquinas’s Works
- Introduction
- Part I Virtue and the Developments in Grace
- Part II The Conditions of Virtue Simpliciter
- Part III The Conditions of Virtue Secundum Quid
- Part IV Confirmations and Conclusions
- 10 The Suitability of Thomas Aquinas’s Definition of Virtue
- Conclusion
- Selected Works Cited
- Index
10 - The Suitability of Thomas Aquinas’s Definition of Virtue
from Part IV - Confirmations and Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas
- Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations of Aquinas’s Works
- Introduction
- Part I Virtue and the Developments in Grace
- Part II The Conditions of Virtue Simpliciter
- Part III The Conditions of Virtue Secundum Quid
- Part IV Confirmations and Conclusions
- 10 The Suitability of Thomas Aquinas’s Definition of Virtue
- Conclusion
- Selected Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Throughout our study, we have remained close to the texts of Aquinas and emphasized accepting those texts as a whole. The treatise on good habits (i.e., virtue and gifts) must be read in light of the treatise on bad habits (i.e., sin and vice). This latter treatise, again, must be read in the light of the treatise on grace. To approach our investigation with our own modern criteria of the kind of texts and arguments we would accept from Aquinas would do nothing but reveal what we implicitly expected to find. Despite the attention we have given to these texts, until now we have failed to discuss Thomas’s most obvious declaration on virtue, his formalized definition of it. In closing our examination, then, we turn finally to this formal definition not as a point of departure but as a point of arrival. It acts as a confirmation of what we have now worked out.
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- Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas , pp. 291 - 306Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020