Divinization and the Gradation Of Freedom | Fr. Ephrem Reese, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2020

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's intellectual retreat, "Virtuous Autonomy: Freedom and Independence in a Technological Age," August 7 - 10, 2020.

Speaker bio:

Fr. Ephrem Reese, O.P., was born in Harrisburg, PA. He received a B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD in 2010, and was confirmed in the Catholic Church around the same time. He entered the Order of Preachers in the summer of 2013. In the spring of 2020 he was ordained a priest, and received an S.T.L. from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Divinization and the gradation of freedom.
0:05.0	For the sake of an inclusio with the first talk about the image of God,
0:13.0	I want to start with a citation from St. John Damascene, the Greek theologian who was very important to St. Thomas.
0:19.0	I mentioned that he quotes John
0:21.2	Damascene at the beginning of the Secundapars, which is about man's motion back into God.
0:28.0	In question 93 on the image of God in the prima pars, St. Thomas quotes Damascene saying this,
0:37.3	man's being in God's image signifies his capacity for understanding
0:42.3	and for making free decisions in mastery of self,
0:46.7	that he is in his likeness refers to the likeness of divine virtue
0:52.6	insofar as it can be in man. Divine virtue. One of the
0:59.9	major questions of this talk is, what is divine virtue? And is it something that belongs on a scale with
1:07.5	human virtue? And what does that mean? We could start by interrogating the
1:15.0	concept of divine virtue by asking, who has divine virtue? Presumably it means that God has virtue,
1:23.2	but does God have virtue? In one simple sense, yes, God has virtue.
1:30.9	You could look at the Latin word, virtus, which means power.
1:36.1	So we heard how the Greek concept of Aratei for virtue means something more like battlefield courage.
1:43.1	In Latin, it's more associated with power, virtus.
1:46.9	God has power.
1:49.4	You can think, for example, of Christ, the power of God, from the letter to the Romans.
1:57.4	But in moral discourse, we consider virtue in a special sense.
2:01.6	Virtue is a settled disposition of the rational soul.
2:06.6	It's a disposition to act in accord with reason.
	...

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