This article outlines one way in which Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology could contribute to reducing the risk humanity now creates to its own survival. Studies of ‘Existential Risk’ warn that hazards arising from Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Engineered Pathogens require mitigation to safeguard the future of the human race from a calamitous end. Preventative measures, however, entail sacrifice, and there is no shortage of resistance to regulation of behaviours and technological development. Ethics of empathy, utility, and duties reach breaking point when stretched to overcome the temporal and moral gap between present agency and future well-being.

This article proposes that Ratzinger’s theology of history and commitment to eschatological realism offers an intertwined double benefit: his warning about the danger of conflating hope in God’s Kingdom with hope in a future world humanity could perfect for itself opens up the uniquely rich ground of a trans-historical hope in Jesus Christ, in which an impactful relationship of love for humanity’s future can put down roots today.

In recent years, a considerable amount of interest has arisen in the topic of existential inertia (henceforth EIT)and its relation to the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas. While contemporary Thomists have engaged with proponents of EIT, strangely enough, no literature has focused on Aquinas’s own response to the objection(s) from an EIT-like position. The intention of this article is to (1) lay out the basic thrust of EIT and then (2) articulate how Aquinas’s own metaphysical commitments dissolve the problems that EIT raises. After formulating an argument based on Aqunias’s own texts and paying attention to the metaphysical commitments it involves, I then level three objections and respond to them.

The debate concerning whether Aquinas changed his view on the perfection of the separated soul’s natural cognition, i.e., the cognition not elevated by God’s supernatural grace, remains to be settled. Anton Pegis has argued that according to Aquinas’s earlier view, a separated soul ‘will function perfectly as a separate substance’. However, according to Aquinas’s mature view, it ‘does not have the intellectual power to function properly as a separate substance’, so Aquinas changed his view. In contrast, John Wippel has denied that Pegis showed any radical change in Aquinas’s works on this issue. In this paper, I intend to advance this debate by arguing that, in his Commentary on Sentences IV (1252–56) d. 49, q. 1, a. 4, qc1, Aquinas expounded a view on the perfection of the separated soul’s natural cognition that is incompatible with his view in Summa Theologiae I (1265–68), q. 89, a. 1, co. I will also identify two markedly different views on the implication of the human soul-body union for the perfection of the separated soul’s cognition in these two texts. I contend that the incompatibility between the views in these two texts suggests that Aquinas changed his view.

In recent years, a large amount of scholarship has been written about St Thomas Aquinas’s views on free will and determinism. This paper is an attempt to bring some Thomist views of libertarian free will into dialogue with analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen and his ‘mysterianism’ about free will. The thesis of this paper is that Thomist libertarians about free will are committed to Peter van Inwagen’s mysterianism about free will. The paper intends to accomplish this aim by showing how recent accounts of Thomist libertarianism cannot defeat the intuitive strength of van Inwagen’s ‘Replay argument’. The significance of this conclusion is that some Thomists are committed to mysterianism and that mysterianism is a legitimate position a Thomist can hold. This also provides evidence that the Thomist tradition can grow and be nourished by engagement with contemporary analytic philosophy.

This paper explores Aquinas’s ethics. For Aquinas, the moral life begins with a surrender to God on the part of a person who comes to faith. That surrender includes a change in the person’s will from the state of resisting God’s love and grace to quiescence, the cessation of resistance. Once a person’s will is in this quiescent state, God infuses grace into his will. On Aquinas’s views, in an instant this grace moves the person’s will to the will of faith. In that same instant, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell in him and also brings into him also all the infused virtues, as well as all the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. The paper explores Aquinas’s claims about the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, and it argues that for Aquinas the moral life is first and foremost a matter of having a right second-personal relationship to God.

The majority of studies on ‘faith’ (fides) in the thought of Thomas Aquinas consider it in a religious or theological context: fides as the theological virtue by which one assents to the truths of divine revelation. The focus on theological faith is appropriate, given its central importance as a theological virtue, but this is not the only sense of fides that Thomas identifies. The present study investigates two non-theological senses formulated in his commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius: first, fides as the proximate cause of assenting to principles within a given science (‘epistemic faith’) and, second, fides as an indispensable element of society (‘societal faith’). These senses have been largely overlooked in secondary literature but, I argue, might help to dispel mischaracterizations of faith as fundamentally unreasonable.