URBAN HANNON

Our Lord played a great many different roles at the Last Supper. Inasmuch as he was celebrating a Passover seder, he was just another observant Jew—whereas foretelling his betrayal, he played the prophet, and offering sacrifice, the high priest. He was a parting friend to his apostles…

After presenting the “first and more manifest way” of proving the existence of God by reason alone (without the aid of God revealing himself in Sacred Scriptures), in Summa Theologiae Ia, 2, 3, Saint Thomas Aquinas continues this project by turning in the “Second Way” to what he somewhat enigmatically calls “the nature of the efficient cause.” The greatest obstacle to understanding his Second Way, though, is determining precisely what Aquinas means by “the nature of the efficient cause” and “an order of efficient causes,” and how the Second Way is distinct from the First and Third Ways. This essay attempts to do so.

By WILLIAM MATTHEW DIEM, S.T.D.

Although David Bentley Hart admits we can reject God, he insists that “we cannot do so with perfect knowledge and perfect freedom.” Although it’s true that no sane person is able to choose eternal misery as such, that is not relevant to the question: one need not choose misery to merit misery.

JOHN O’NEILL, PhD Cand.

Thomas has already identified four relations in God and defined a divine person as a subsisting relation. Why, then, are the four real relations not four persons? Or why are there not only three real relations that subsist?