An Analytical Understanding of Thomas Aquinas' Moral Philosophy: - Centered on the Relation of Love and Knowledge
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Thomas Aquinas agrees with Augustine arguing that love is the movement of the will and has the mutual relationship with knowledge where each depends on the other, and holds that the perfect fulfillment of morality is the full realization of the Christian faith in God. The earlier Aquinas sees love as the affective transformation of the will in which the lover and the beloved are united by the lover's reception of the beloved's form. Yet the later Aquinas regards love as requiring not only the lover's natural appetite toward the beloved, but also the lover's cognitive knowledge of the beloved. Morality calls for the discipline of habits as the second nature, by which rational knowledge and the will's love are virtuously acted out. This points to the habitual process of moral dispositions that pursue good yet avoid evil, and that involve the cognition of practical reason and the free choice of the will based on the human connaturality. It orients toward the sanctification of the lover who is united with the absolute God as well as the actualization of the moral good in the ultimate receiving state of God's revelation. Hence the human fulfillment of morality for Aquinas indicates both the full formation of virtue through the perfect use of reason and the will, and the successful termination of the faith journey where the believer and God are united in his or her acts of love.
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