As I understand it from Father Albert, my invitation was occasioned by a seminar in which a number of you were privileged to participate,

and he asked me to consider coming last semester to speak on the influence of the fathers of the church on St. Thomas,

which is a huge topic, and I suggested talking about the role of grace in the spiritual life, specifically,

grace is still too large a topic to handle with integrity.

But I'll say a little bit in a minute about why I'm taking the approach that I am

by really focusing more on conversion, the idea of conversion, as we see it

discussed in the confessions, but to defend not only the presence, but the value of Augustine

as really the primary source for St. Thomas, Augustine is cited by St. Thomas more than any other author in his works,

except for Sacred Scripture, of course. He's cited more than 50% times, more often than Aristotle,

who is a figure so important to Thomas that he is known to him simply as the philosopher.

So looking at the questions on grace at the end of the prim secundi, for those of you who were in the seminar last semester with Father Albert,

Augustine is his presence there and the interplay between Augustine's text and scripture is simply determinative and very obviously central.

I'll allude to certain texts of Thomas explicitly at the end, but most of the time I will spend

with Augustine because my, as I said, the topic of conversion is my way into the vast question

of the nature of grace.

And I pick the confessions because in thinking about the experience of conversion,

Augustine gives us this disturbingly close.

It's a piece of literary art, of course, but he gives us a very naked, so to speak, exposure into the state of his

soul at every point. Working between Augustine Thomas is a little tricky, though. You'll notice that

Thomas very rarely pays any attention to confessions. He's always citing works that were more relevant

in theological controversies at different times in Augustine's life. But even more interestingly, it's just how

different the genre of these two writers is. Augustine's confessions is in some sense all about

...