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This chapter examines the contributions of Aquinas, arguing that his work remains trenchantly pertinent, though it stands in need of three retrievals to prevent contemporary distortions. The first considers the meaning of ‘nature’in Thomas's thought, which is a way of asking about God's relationship to the world. The second retrieval concerns the ultimate meaning of ‘form’ in Thomistic thought. Aquinas spoke of grace as an accidental modification of form (ST I-II q. 110 a. 2). The fact that very few words in that phrase mean anything to the modern ear explains an ‘upward ontological drift’ in popular recapitulations of the saint's work. The chapter concludes with a third retrieval, an examination of the neglected, noetic character of grace in the thought of Aquinas, or how it is that what Wittgenstein called ‘the world’ begins to speak.

Theologians such as Rasmussen, Northcott, and Moltmann ground normative respect for creation in the experience of God's love. Each in his own way suggests that as humans are conformed to God's love for creation, they perceive and can respond to creation's integrity. As it brings them into friendship with God, grace brings humans to their creaturely senses, opening them to a world of normative value. But those theologians left unexplained why conforming ourselves to creation could be part of becoming friends with God, or why life with God might make us more at home on earth. This chapter turns to Thomas Aquinas to look for an explanation, seeking the soteriological conditions for ecojustice.

This chapter is about arguments for the existence of God. It shows how grammatical Thomists like Herbert McCabe and Denys Turner make proving that God exists into a matter of proving that it is rational to question whether God exists. Their leading question, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ assumes rather than proves that the world is contingent: it takes us around the ‘story’ of God's existence from the inside of faith, and does not refer to any specific creative action of God. Circulating thus within human psychological acts, the grammatical Thomist argument is focussed on the act of questioning rather as a movie holds our attention by repeatedly posing new questions, causing us to suspend disbelief but not to credit it with real agency. The way in which story Barthians use the ‘ontological argument’ makes the Biblical stories about God into an evidential basis of God's existence. Robert Jenson's ‘story Thomism’ takes Thomistic and Barthian narrative theology to a logical conclusion by making ‘God’ a character within a wider story, whose plot requires ‘contingent’ and ‘Creator’ characters.

Although an uneasy peace was maintained in the years after Photius, during the tenth and eleventh centuries political, cultural, and religious factors rapidly drove East and West further part. The mutual excommunications of Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius in 1054, often called the beginning of the “Great Schism” between East and West, reignited the filioque debate, as its omission from/addition to the creed came to be seen as sign of the other’s heretical ways. While the Greek-speaking East continued to rely heavily on the claims put forward in the Mystagogia, Latin scholastic theologians like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas advanced an entirely new series of arguments in favor of the doctrine. Theological encounters between the two sides (with some notable exceptions) only exacerbated the tension, and following the Fourth Crusade there seemed little chance of healing the breach that had grown up between Christian East and West.

Chapter Two articulates, in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas, Balthasar's understanding of the structure of the analogy of being as a relation of Giver and gift. The key to understanding the relationship between God and creation as neither a juxtaposition of two things nor a negation of creaturely existence is the non-substantial fullness of being as gift and the consequent "real distinction" between being and essence. Balthasar develops this metaphysical scheme unfolding the meaning of the act-character of being in light of interpersonal relations.

This chapter uses the narratives in the preceding chapters as well as the worldview of Aquinas outlined in earlier chapters to present Aquinas's theodicy. Taken in the context of the biblical narratives and encompassed in Aquinas's whole worldview but especially his account of love, Aquinas's theodicy is the heart of the defence promised at the outset of the book. On Aquinas's theodicy, God is justified in allowing the suffering of a mentally fully functional adult human person by one or the other or both of two possible benefits, where Aquinas's scale of value is the measure of the benefits. For a person whose suffering is entirely involuntary, suffering is defeated in virtue of its contributing to warding off a greater harm for her. For a person whose suffering is involuntary only in a certain respect, suffering is defeated in virtue of its contributing to providing a greater good for her. The chapter concludes with an argument that Aquinas's theodicy is incomplete as it stands and in need of further development.

In the previous chapter, looking at Thomas Aquinas showed us rudiments for an adequate ecojustice strategy: the integrity of creation intimately connected to Christian experience. This chapter discusses the development of the practical forms of that connection, the habits of graceful inhabitation on earth. In particular, it shows how ecological habits of friendship with God respond to natural evils. It turns to Aquinas on justice and virtue not for specific environmental prescriptions but for closer articulation of human membership. His virtues show humanity's natural agency set within creation's orderliness. The virtues report what John Bowlin calls “a kind of human moral ecology...a description of our species in its natural environment”. They comprise a set of successful responses to our habitat, ways toward flourishing in the midst of opportunity and difficulty.

This chapter provides an introduction to Congar’s life and work. It recounts Congar’s remarkable life story, describes his theological method, offers a brief overview of his vast corpus of writings, and discusses some of the primary influences on his theology of the Holy Spirit, including Thomas Aquinas, Johann Adam Möhler, the ecumenical movement, and the Second Vatican Council.

This chapter examines the fundamental hypothesis of the True Wealth of Nations project—that the economic and cultural criteria identified in the tradition of Catholic social thought provide an effective path to sustainable prosperity for all—from a Thomistic perspective. After pointing out some key features of Thomas's theological framework and contrasting it with the modern day more secular perspective, it focuses on three issues. First, it discusses how Thomas understood the end of this-worldly (earthly) human flourishing in relationship to our final end, which for Thomas lies in the beatific vision. Second, turning to the question of how prosperity is understood, it discusses Thomas's understanding of the relationship between material well-being and virtue, which Thomas identifies with human flourishing. Third, it examines Thomas's understanding of material well-being in itself. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the degree to which we could or should incorporate Thomas' s perspective.

This chapter offers an account of Aquinas’s teaching on relations in the context of Thomist general metaphysics and Trinitarian theology. Aquinas’s account will serve as the main sounding board for judging the different interpretations of Thomism throughout the discussion and, by the same token, the extent of Durandus’s dissent.