Aquinas and the Will to Believe

Aquinas and the Will to Believe

I want to discuss the idea that faith is voluntary. This is a traditional teaching, at least in the catholic tradition that I know better. Many things can be meant by such a general statement, but one privileged interpretation, offered by Thomas Aquinas, has received a very large welcome, and is given as an expression of the Magisterium in the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. There, Aquinas is quoted for this quasi-definition of the act of faith : “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.” (Ipsum autem credere est actus intellectus assentientis veritati divinae ex imperio voluntatis a Deo motae per gratiam) . The voluntariness of faith is then the voluntariness of the act of believing (credere) the divine revelation. Now, though this sentence is not exactly Aquinas’s definition, nor his main statement about what faith is, it certainly contains what Aquinas thinks is necessary and sufficient for the existence of faith. Version préliminaire du texte paru dans D. Lukasiewicz & R. Pouivet (eds.) The Right to Believe. Perspectives in Religious Epistemology. Ontos Verlag, Frankfurt, Paris, Lancaster, New Brunswick, 2012

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