Book contents
- The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions
- The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas
- Copyright page
- For our teachers
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- A Select List of Aquinas’s Works
- Introduction
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Metaphysics and the Ultimate Foundation of Reality
- Part III Epistemology
- Part IV Ethics
- 10 Grace and Free Will
- 11 From Metaethics to Normative Ethics
- 12 Infused Virtues, Gifts, and Fruits
- Part V Philosophical Theology
- Bibliography
- Index
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions (continued from page ii)
12 - Infused Virtues, Gifts, and Fruits
from Part IV - Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2022
- The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions
- The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas
- Copyright page
- For our teachers
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- A Select List of Aquinas’s Works
- Introduction
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Metaphysics and the Ultimate Foundation of Reality
- Part III Epistemology
- Part IV Ethics
- 10 Grace and Free Will
- 11 From Metaethics to Normative Ethics
- 12 Infused Virtues, Gifts, and Fruits
- Part V Philosophical Theology
- Bibliography
- Index
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions (continued from page ii)
Summary
Aquinas’s writings on normative ethics are vast, with 1,004 articles on virtue ethics and related matters in the Summa theologiae (ST) alone. These writings constitute an extraordinarily intricate picture of the kind of human life that Aquinas considers normative, but they also contain plenty of surprises, especially for those who assume that Aquinas is guided principally by the virtue ethics of Aristotle. Arguably the greatest of these surprises is that Aquinas’s writings on virtue ethics are not, in fact, simply about virtues. Instead, Aquinas’s virtues in the ST are integrated into a fourfold system of perfective attributes, namely virtues, gifts, beatitudes, and fruits (VGBF). In this chapter, I present a brief summary of this system and my interpretation of its meaning in the light of recent research.
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- The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas , pp. 285 - 306Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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