Chapter 11 - Thomas Aquinas on the Connatural, the Supernatural, Love and Charity

Summary

This essay offers an account of Thomas Aquinas’s very complex understanding of love (amor) and related concepts, such as delight (delectatio) and divinely infused charity. It acknowledges the many Platonic influences on Aquinas’s thought in these regards, influences that come to him especially through Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius – both of whom he occasionally criticizes, however, for adhering too closely to Platonic doctrines. Aquinas is intent upon tying all human love in some sense to nature, acknowledging that this entails that in many regards human love is necessitated. To the extent, however, that the rational appetite (the will) is involved, love is not necessitated. The divinely infused virtue of charity brings in further complications, for it is a love that is not natural but comes to a person from above: it is supernatural. And yet it too, according to Aquinas, is not wholly necessitating but affects man in a way that leaves his will free.