The most recent issue of The Thomist now available through online indexes (Vol. 83, no. 3, 2019), includes various articles of possible interest to readers of this site.

The main articles feature three devoted to explicating points of natural law, all balanced by one article on the spiration of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. Opening his “Retributive Justice and Natural Law” with a consideration of C. S. Lewis’s defense of the essentially retributive character of just punishment, Peter Karl Koritansky argues that retributive justice is intelligible and defensible only on the principles of Thomistic natural law. His article criticizes the shortcomings of the “unfair advantage” theory of punishment, a contemporary alternative attempt to justify retributive justice. St. Thomas’s account is incompatible with the unfair advantage story, provides a sounder basis for understanding punishment, and successfully distinguishes retribution from revenge.

Stephen L. Brock, in “The Specification of Action in St. Thomas: Nonmotivating Conditions in the Object of Intention,” considers the intricate details of the principle of double effect. He argues that “head on effects,” nonintended effects that are per se to intentional actions, escape and bode ill for the typical division between intended effects and side effects. His central claim is that “for Thomas, features of an action that do not motivate the agent, or do not provide reasons for acting, can fall within the agent’s intention, and can sometimes even specify the action.” Defending this thesis allows him to correct mistaken readings of St. Thomas, including some proposed by adherents of the New Natural Law theory.

“Lawrence Dewan, Legal Obligation, and the New Natural Law” finds Charles Robertson also raising various points of debate with the New Natural Law theory, all while expanding upon Fr. Dewan’s metaphysically-rooted account of the legal character of the natural law. Advocates of the former, such as Grisez and Tollefsen, source the obligatory character of natural law in the prescriptions of practical reason. By contrast, Robertson follows St. Thomas and roots the obligatory character of the natural law in the binding force of conscience, itself derived from the divine ordinance that also orders the human good within the common good of the universe as a whole. His exposition allows Robertson to partially correct and extend Dewan’s original account. Robertson mentions as a key source in his considerations the doctoral dissertation of Stephen L. Brock, and so I note that a revised version of that dissertation has been published this year as The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Natural Law.

The human intellectual soul, participating in the light of the truth of eternal law by knowing the natural law, is a mirror of the divine in other ways. “The Spiration of Love in God according to Aquinas and His Interpreters,” by Jeremy D. Wilkins, aims to polish theoretically that created speculum in which we find theological analogies to contemplate the Holy Trinity. He focuses on the exegetical questions surrounding St. Thomas’s understanding of “whether the will emanates an operatum, parallel in some way to the procession of the inner word within the intellect.” The exegesis examines St. Thomas’s understanding of the psychological side of the analogy—the activity of the will and love in the human case—for the sake of theological clarity, and adjudicates between available interpretive options. John of St. Thomas and Gilles Emery represent one line of interpretation, Bernard Lonergan and followers (and possibly Cajetan) another; the latter view, Wilkins contends, “succeeds better than the alternative in ascertaining the spiritual structure of contemplation and the spiration of contemplative love, which is Aquinas’s analogue for the spiration of love in God.”

- Reviewed by John Brungardt, PhD