So I have four lectures in which I want to show you what I think Aquinas understands by the nature of life in grace, the nature of a life of faith.

I want to show you what he thinks excellence in Christian life is, but for him that is also identical to the Christian life. That is, he doesn't

think there's mediocre Christians and excellent Christians. He thinks everyone is called to glory.

And this state that we are called to has to do with the indwelling Holy Spirit. So it's basically what I want to show you.

So what I'm going to do today is, in a sense,

prepare the ground for what I want to show you

about why this is a good image for the Christian life.

I'm going to prepare the ground.

I want to tell you what Aquinas thinks about how you should live your life, but for that I first have to tell you what I don't think Aquinas is saying.

So let's start there. It is customary. It's become almost scholarly dogma to take Aquinas' ethics as Aristotelian.

So Tony Kenny, a famous philosopher at Oxford, he says, he has kind of a snotty line about Aquinas' ethics.

He says, Aquinas' endeavor to bring together the evangelical,

the Christian approach to ethics, and the Aristotelian text can hardly be regarded as successful.

What's remarkable about Aquinas' attempt to bring the Christian and the Erstitian together

is not that it's done successfully, but that he thinks he can do it at all. It's noteworthy, Kenny goes on to say,

that the Christian text, the Christian approach to ethics are distorted to fit the Aristotelian

context rather than the other way around. So that's Tony Kinney on Aquinas' ethics.

And there are a number of interpretations that follow suit.

Now, what you have to understand is if you take Aquinas as an Aristotelian in ethics, then this is what you've got.

You've got a virtue-based ethics, an ethics centered in the virtues.

And on this approach then, if this is right, a moral virtue is a habit, it's acquired through practice,

it disposes the will to act in accordance with reason and the passions, anything that counts as an emotion, is at best kind of a caboose on the train of moral virtue and at worst gets in the way of moral virtue.

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