The idea of ‘connatural knowledge’ is attributed to Aquinas on the basis of passages in which he distinguishes between scientific and affective experiential knowledge of religious and moral truths. In a series of encyclicals beginning with Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris, popes have celebrated and commended Aquinas as the supreme guide in philosophy and theology and in some of these cited his discovery of connatural knowledge. The course and context of his ‘elevation’ are explored before proceeding to a discussion of moral knowledge in which different forms of non-theoretical cognition are identified. This leads to an examination of work by Elizabeth Anscombe on the factuality of ethical judgement and connaturality. Aquinas and Anscombe offer important insights but more work remains to be done. Moral knowledge is a many-faceted thing. More accurately, it is not one thing but many things analogously related both by their modes and by their objects.

The sensus fidei is a crucial concept which has assumed growing importance during recent years of theological enquiry, however, it is not so easily defined. This article examines a section of the document. Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church. (ITC, 2014, Chapter 2, no. 48-65) and explores the underlying anthropological-epistemological assumptions which seem to be inherently shaping the idea of the sensus fidei fidelis (the sense of faith of the individual believer). What is the site of such a sense of faith in the personal life of the believer? Is there an adequate theological anthropological framework for imagining the operation of this special ‘faculty’? After commenting on the various definitions of the concept, I focus on the four classical theological key elements the document draws on in articulating a modern account: the Thomistic understanding of faith, virtue, connaturality and instinct. The third section of the article highlights inherent tensions between the traditional Thomistic scheme and a post-Enlightenment, anti-rationalist agenda which call for a more systematic elaboration of an adequate current anthropology of the human person.

Human existence entails that our encounter with the world is mediated by the context, historicity, and concrete particularities of that existence. Consequently, this situatedness, which contributes to our pre‐understanding, makes us more or less capable of “seeing” the truth of the world we encounter. The hermeneutical principle of pre‐understanding is sometimes presupposed to be ambivalent toward, if not in opposition to, traditional metaphysics. The present essay shows how traditional metaphysics, specifically of a Thomistic sort, need not be pitted against hermeneutics, but rather, offers the ground for understanding the way in which pre‐understanding, as our habituation into and connaturality with truth, and ultimately, God, is that means by which right interpretation is made possible.