ABSTRACT
Faith is the first of the theological virtues, and Aquinas’s account of it is both rich and puzzling. The puzzles center on justification, one might say, where justification is to be understood in two different ways. According to Aquinas, a person who acquires faith forms an assent to a group of propositions under the influence of a volition which has the effect of moving the intellect to an assent it otherwise would not have formed. Because the intellect arrives at the beliefs of faith through the influence of the will, there is some question about whether a person is justified in holding those beliefs and if so, why. On the other hand, on Aquinas’s views, the volition in virtue of which the intellect is moved to assent to faith is produced in a person by divine grace, and God alone is responsible for it. Nonetheless, this volition and the faith it engenders justify a person in the theological sense of ‘justification’: a person’s combined act of will and intellectual assent is the necessary and sufficient condition for her salvation and it renders her acceptable to God. If there seems to be too much influence of a person’s volitional control for epistemological justification, on Aquinas’s account, there seems to be too little of it for theological justification. In this chapter, I will look at Aquinas’s account of faith in order to show its resources for dealing with both sets of puzzles.
