Thesis advisor: Jeremy D. Wilkins / This dissertation draws upon the work of Thomas Aquinas and Bernard J. F. Lonergan in order to put forward an integrated theorem of the imago Trinitatis. The theorem of the imago Trinitatis, in Catholic theology, is a theorem about how human persons imitate and reflect the triune God. In Aquinas and Lonergan, the imago Trinitatis is identified with the intelligent emanations of word and love that occur within the human mind. But, according to Aquinas, the imago Trinitatis can be considered in two respects: first, as a likeness by analogy—that is, an analogical likeness—and, second, as a likeness by conformity between the human and the divine. The first two chapters explain each of these likenesses in Aquinas, and the next two chapters explain each of these likenesses in Lonergan. The final chapter of this dissertation proposes a complementary analogical likeness of the Trinity in humans: an analogical likeness based upon shared intentionality. It further explains how this likeness is related to the analogical likeness based upon intelligent emanation in Aquinas and Lonergan. In doing so, this dissertation defends an integrated conception of the analogical likeness of the Trinity in human beings, as it unites the analogical likeness based upon intelligible emanation occurring in the human mind and the analogical likeness based upon shared intentionality as interpersonal, coordinated activity. The imago Trinitatis, then, is at once personal and interpersonal, and the analogues for the Trinity in humans are both psychological and communal. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Boyd Taylor Coolman / This dissertation investigates Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the charisms (gratiae gratis datae) as distinctly social or ecclesial graces in light of his critical engagement with the Franciscan Summa Halensis. It first looks at the Summa Halensis’s christology and theology of the charisms to show the theological inseparability of charismatic grace from the threefold grace of Christ (the grace of union, capital grace, and the grace of the singular man). I then trace the development of Aquinas’s understanding of Christ’s humanity (in terms of the grace of Christ’s humanity) as a conjoined instrument of the Word and show how at every step Aquinas critically engaged the christology of the Summa Halensis. I bring that historical development in christology and its application to the sacraments to bear on Aquinas’s understanding of the charisms as social or ecclesial graces, graces given to one person for the sake of another’s salvation. Instrumental causality provided Aquinas a new conceptual framework with which to understand what it might mean for the charisms to be social graces, placing the charisms within a wider array of created causal agents in the economy of grace. I place this development within the context of the rise of Joachite prophecy as well as the secular/mendicant conflict at Paris, factors that motivated Aquinas to conceive these graces as distinctly mendicant charisms. Just as the development of instrumental causality in Christology propelled Aquinas’s understanding of charisms as social graces, so this application of instrumental causality reciprocally informed Aquinas’s account of the charismatic Christ in the Tertia Pars of the Summa Theologiae. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

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Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / Johannine literature explains the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth and our relationship with God in terms of logos and agape: the Logos is Theos (Jn 1) and Theos is Agape (1Jn 4). The goal of this dissertation is to relate these two, understanding and love, to develop a master analogy for the revelation of God to human beings. This is elaborated through close reading and commentary on classic texts by two Doctors of the Church, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, in an attempt to reconcile voluntarist and intellectualist approaches to the question of God by showing how the act of understanding is analogous with the act of love. Augustine would integrate his understanding of Scripture and philosophy into his theory of the inner word (verbum mentis) as the image of the Triune God. This consummate theological achievement is also a meta-analysis of personal communication by a master of the art of rhetoric, defined as “the good man, skilled in speaking” (vir bonus, dicendi peritus) by Cato the Elder in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. The Bishop of Hippo affirms the words of a wise person as the ideal of communication, as perfected in the life of the Christian evangelist. A systematic exegesis of Augustine’s personal, rhetorical, and theological synthesis, the first part of this dissertation is a study of several key texts to explore how the Doctor of Grace relates love with understanding, the words of Scripture with those of the philosophers. Thomas Aquinas develops Augustine’s insights in the theological system of his Summa theologiae, expanding the theory of the inner word into a theoretical synthesis uniting reason and faith, scientia and sapientia, which the Doctor of Grace was not able to achieve. The second part of the dissertation analyzes and complements the reading of Augustine in the first part by testing it in dialogue with Aquinas’ treatment of the same themes—understanding and love—in the First and Second Parts of the Summa as representative of his mature thought. The study of these two figures is intended as an attempt to apply Lonergan’s Method in Theology. By developing the relationship between knowing the truth and loving it, this project expands upon his efforts to sublate the linguistic phenomenology of Heidegger’s hermeneutic revolution within a theological system. Lonergan formulates his own hermeneutic as four levels of knowing: experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding. Having his insight on the centrality of love late in life, however, he would leave his interpreters with the question of how to integrate knowing with loving. The exigencies of publishing Method would also mean leaving the problem of communication as a challenge for his successors. This dissertation seeks to propose a solution with the retrieval of Augustine’s hermeneutic of caritas as a model for communicating Christian self-appropriation through a phenomenology of how we realize the logos. We understand the meaning of a whole by recognizing the order in which all its parts fit together. In this way, judgment operates analogically as a determination of the fittingness of a logical proportion. And so, as Logos, God is the order into which all things fit together, revealed to us as a complementary pattern, which is expressed through analogy. In the Catholic tradition, this pattern of grace is consummated by receiving bread and wine sacramentally, and recognizing in them the essence of our relationship with God as well as one another, as we realize this loving relationship as the form of all our acts. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This thesis examines Charles Hartshorne's critique of classical theism, as it relates to the subject of divine power. My specific aim is to evaluate whether Hartshorne's critique applies to Thomas Aquinas' concept of divine power. Chapter One undertakes an exposition of Thomas' conception of the power of God and its implications for the human power of free choice. Chapter Two explores Hartshorne's critique of the classical concept of God, focusing on the negative implications he draws from the classical concept of omnipotence. In Chapter Three, I apply Hartshorne's critique of classical theism to Thomas' concept of divine power, in order to judge whether Hartshorne has an accurate understanding of the classical position and whether his critique reveals serious problems in Thomas' concept of divine power. My evaluation centres around Hartshorne's objections to Thomas' claim that God possesses purely actual power, and his insistence that God's omnipotence, as construed by Thomas, robs human beings of the power of free choice. Chapter Three also compares the similarities and differences between their approaches to the knowledge of God as determined by their basic metaphysical principles and their use of analogy. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

In his account of the intellectual cognition of singulars, Aquinas claims that the intellect cognizes singulars by way of mental images. Some recent commentators have claimed that Aquinas' appeal to mental images is inadequate to account for the intellectual cognition of singulars because mental images considered in terms of their qualitative character alone have content that is general and are, therefore, insufficient to determine reference to a singular. That is, if Aquinas takes mental images to refer to singulars because those singulars perfectly resemble the mental images, then his account is deficient. In my paper, I argue that the critical interpretation above is predicated on a misunderstanding of Aquinas regarding the intentionality of images. I investigate Aquinas' account of the intentionality of images in order to show that Aquinas understands the reference of mental images to be determined not by their qualitative character alone but also by the causal relation that obtains between the cognizer and a singular. / Master of Arts

Cette thèse est consacrée à une analyse doctrinale et philologique du commentaire de Thomas d'Aquin sur la distinction 35 du premier Livre des Sentences de Pierre Lombard. Le sujet de cette distinction est la science que Dieu a de lui-même et des autres choses. La première partie de notre travail est une présentation conceptuelle et historique de l'arrière-fond de cette distinction. Elle est divisée en quatre étapes. Dans la première, nous nous sommes interrogé sur la science divine dans une perspective linguistique. Dans la seconde, nous avons discuté le rôle de l'autre, en tant qu'objet, dans la connaissance divine. Dans la troisième,nous avons étudié la synthèse chez Thomas des éléments aristotéliciens et pseudo-dionysiens, comme la notion d'actus purus et la notion d'esse. La quatrième étape, présente brièvement le contexte historique pour comprendre la méthode du commentaire des Sentences, ainsi qu'un bref panorama de l'Université de Paris au XIIIe siècle. La deuxième partie de la thèse offre une édition critique de la distinction 35. Après avoir collationné les témoins manuscrits selon les critères de la Commission Léonine, nous avons présenté le texte avec une introduction où nous établissons les différentes familles de la transmission textuelle. / This dissertation provides a doctrinal and philological study of Aquinas' Commentary on Book I, dist. 35 ofPeter Lombard's Sentences. At issue is the knowledge that God has of Himself and of the things other thanHimself. The first part of the dissertation investigates the conceptual and historical background of dist. 35. Itdivides into four sections. First, we approach the topic of the divine science from a linguistic perspective.Secondly, we examine the role of things other than God as objects of the divine knowledge. Thirdly, we drawattention to Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotelian and pseudo-Dionysian elements, namely the notions of actuspurus and esse. The fourth section provides an overview of the historical context and the XIIIth-centuryUniversity of Paris, in order to better understand the method of commentaries on the Sentences. The secondpart of the dissertation intends to provide, for the first time, the critical edition of Aquinas' Commentary onBook I, dist. 35 of Peter Lombard's Sentences. The manuscripts are collated according to LeonineCommission's criteria. The critical text is introduced by a philological study in which we investigate the textualtransmission of dist. 35 and we propose a stemma.

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My dissertation reexamines Chaucer’s debts to the Consolation by reconciling Boethius’s Neoplatonic distaste for the material world with Chaucer’s poetic celebrations of the variety and sensuality of human life. I revise the understanding of Chaucer’s poetry by recontextualizing it within a new Boethianism that stems from Chaucer’s interaction with the scholastic commentary on the Consolation by Nicholas Trevet. Although critics have long known that Chaucer’s Boece extensively borrows from, glosses, and cross references with Trevet’s commentary, very little attention has been given to what effect this had on Chaucer’s Boethian poetry. My dissertation argues that through Trevet’s immensely popular commentary, Chaucer received a predominantly Aristotelian-Thomist reading of the Consolation, one that reinvents Boethius’s Neoplatonic rejection of the sensual world as an apologetically materialist philosophy. The Aristotelian-Thomist influence of Trevet’s commentary is most visible in Chaucer’s treatment of the human interactions with the temporal world: in the functions of sense perception, the working of memory, and the desire to foresee the unknown future. / text

of the Paper The goal of submitted paper is to show Suárez's proof of the existence of God as the main task of his metaphysics and to show the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus on his own system of metaphysics. As will be shown, the importance of this preeminent thinker of so called second scholasticism is in his synthesis of relatively incompatible doctrines of thomism and scotism. This paper will therefore deal with main problems of precedening tradition of Aristotelian metaphysics, especially with analogy of being as applied to God and creatures, then with theory of causality and other connected questions. Keywords Suárez - Thomas Aquinas - Duns Scotus - metaphysics - proof of existence of God