Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-29-2024
Abstract
The majority of studies on ‘faith’ (fides) in the thought of Thomas Aquinas consider it in a religious or theological context: fides as the theological virtue by which one assents to the truths of divine revelation. The focus on theological faith is appropriate, given its central importance as a theological virtue, but this is not the only sense of fides that Thomas identifies. The present study investigates two non-theological senses formulated in his commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius: first, fides as the proximate cause of assenting to principles within a given science (‘epistemic faith’) and, second, fides as an indispensable element of society (‘societal faith’). These senses have been largely overlooked in secondary literature but, I argue, might help to dispel mischaracterizations of faith as fundamentally unreasonable.
Original Publication Citation
Peters, C. (2024). Thomas Aquinas on Non-Theological Faith. New Blackfriars, 1–14. doi:10.1017/nbf.2024.5
Publisher Statement
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Digital Commons @ LMU & LLS Citation
Peters, Catherine, "Thomas Aquinas on Non-Theological Faith" (2024). Philosophy Faculty Works. 342.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/phil_fac/342
