Identity vs. Nature: Aquinas on Who Creates Me – Prof. Jacob Wood

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Jacob Wood contrasts Aquinas’s account of nature, cause, and purpose with modern identity theory, showing that human nature—created and ordered by God—grounds authentic freedom and common purpose in contrast to the fragmentation of expressive individualism.

This lecture was given on September 10th, 2025, at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the speaker:

Jacob W. Wood was born and raised in the New York City area, where he grew up in the Episcopal Church, learning to contemplate the love of the Lord in the beauty of the liturgy. After an initial period of theological study at the University of Saint Andrews, he followed the path of St. John Henry Newman into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2008. Since earning a doctorate in Systematic Theology from the Catholic University of America in 2014, he has served as a theologian at Franciscan University of Steubenville, focusing his teaching and research on the theology of creation, sin, and grace. He lives with his family in the Ohio countryside, where he continues to cultivate the love of the Lord through liturgical beauty, and has followed the call that many a young Catholic family has answered to sanctify Creation through the work of homesteading. Visit his website at www.wisdomoftradition.com.

Keywords: Aristotelian Causes, Divine Creation, Expressive Individualism, Freedom For Excellence, Gender Theory, Heidegger, Judith Butler, Nature And Identity, Order Of Creation, Shared Human Nature

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.
0:05.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	to mystic institute.org. As Maria mentioned, I'm going to talk about identity versus nature.
0:27.6	So we're going to be looking at what Thomas Aquinas has to say about nature and putting that in
0:33.6	conversation with some contemporary identity theory.
0:38.3	Nowadays, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess, more people are familiar with identity
0:42.9	theory than Aquinas' account of nature, so we're going to spend a little more time there.
0:46.7	This is the Thomistic Institute after all.
0:51.5	And then we'll turn to identity theory at the end, so let's begin. In order to understand what it
0:56.5	means to be human, we first have to ask what it means to be anything at all, why there's such a
1:01.4	diversity of creatures on earth and what it means to be one creature rather than another.
1:06.5	In the physics, Aristotle describes four ways in which we can talk about what makes a thing to be what it is.
1:12.6	We can talk about what it's made of, we can talk about the shape into which it's made,
1:16.6	we can talk about who or what made it into that shape, and we can talk about what its purpose is.
1:22.6	So to take one classic example, you could imagine a bronze statue of a horse.
1:28.0	First we can talk about what it's made of.
1:30.0	Aristotle describes this as its material cause, and in this example, the answer is bronze.
1:35.6	Not bronze already fashioned into the shape of a horse, but bronze without any shape or form
1:40.6	at all.
1:42.8	It's impossible to imagine this perfectly because in this world matter never
	...

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