The term “grace” refers to unmerited gifts of God, among which might be gifts of knowledge. Does God offer knowledge over and above what we could have learned just through the still earlier gift of our inbuilt reasoning powers? At stake is the authenticity of the deeds, and the truth of the teachings, recorded in Holy Scripture. Thomas Aquinas always takes natural reason as far as he can before turning to what God has revealed by grace; he wants us to trust Revelation, but only authentic Revelation. Now, though, he turns the inquiry around. In order to know all that we need to know about God, do we need His grace at all? This inquiry amplifies the one in Question 1, Article 1.

This chapter calls into question the longstanding notion that early Franciscans simply systematized or rehearsed ideas from Augustine and highlights instead how they employed Avicenna and Arabic philosophy to forge a completely new understanding of the bishop’s thought. Although this version of Augustinianism was initially passed off as a reading of the Aristotelian tradition as well, it became disassociated with Aristotle as the next generation came to a more authentic understanding of the Greek philosopher’s thought. By contrast, the Augustinianism invented by early Franciscans continued to be widely promulgated and defended for generations and thus impacted conceptions of Christian Platonism that remain influential to this day.