Christianity and the Natural Virtues

Ethics ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 286
Author(s):  
George Tyrrell
Keyword(s):  
Natural Virtues

Christianity and the Natural Virtues

1903 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-297
Author(s):  
George Tyrrell
Keyword(s):  
Natural Virtues

scholarly journals Grace Presupposes Nature: The Structure of the Summa and an Illustration by the Virtue of Patience in Light of Christ

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Tyler Pellegrin
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Summa Theologiae ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Natural Virtues

Abstract The first part of this essay argues that the very structure and ordering of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae manifests a departure from the typical theological position of his time regarding natural acquired virtues. Resting on a conviction that grace presupposes nature, Aquinas uniquely holds that natural virtues perfective of human nature can be acquired prior to grace, which can be elevated and incorporated by grace into the properly Christian life. The second part of this essay offers a case study of the virtue of patience that illustrates the argument of the first part of the paper.

Wordsworth's River Duddon Sonnets

PMLA ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
Stewart C. Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Main Stream ◽  
Early Memories ◽  
High Part ◽  
Final Development ◽  
Historical Reflection ◽  
Natural Virtues

Because none of Wordsworth's later poems has been so neglected as his sonnet cycle The River Duddon, the pleasant task remains of doing it critical justice. O. J. Campbell has used it as an illustration of Wordsworth's later symbolic art, and the geographical features of the landscape through which the Duddon flows have been adequately described. Furthermore, the English river is a happier symbol than the deer in The While Doe of Rylstone and has simpler, more natural virtues than the mystic Holy River which is the life-stream of pure religion in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Most of the Duddon poems, it is true, fall less sublimely upon the ear and have less nobility and perfection than the finest he composed before 1806. Even so, their level is consistently high, part of their attractiveness being a sometimes bleak austerity. In several ways too, as Wordsworth generously says in his “Postscript,” the sequence is related to Coleridge's project, The Brook, outlined in Biographia Literaria. More important, however, is the final development of an extended theme based upon water imagery, for after 1797 Wordsworth's profoundest insights are often associated with it. We have also Robert Arnold Aubin's comment that “the greatest river-poem of all is Wordsworth's River Duddon (1820)… . With its use of apostrophe, local pride, historical reflection, catalogue, moralizing, genre scenes, episode, early memories, prospect, ruin-piece, and Muse-driving ( On, loitering muse—the swift stream chides us—on!'), it is not wonderful that a reviewer perceived that the work belonged in the main stream of topographical poetry.”

The natural virtues.

2010 ◽  
pp. 113-138
Author(s):  
T. F. Randolph Mercein
Keyword(s):  
Natural Virtues

Luther's ‘Scholastic Phase’ Revisited: Grace, Works, and Merit in the Earliest Extant Sermons

1982 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-289
Author(s):  
Peter Iver Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Willingness To Accept ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Effort ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Natural Virtues

By 1516 Luther charged that the Schoolmen had grotesquely inflated the significance of natural virtues. Thereafter, he increasingly was provoked by the suggestion that human effort—touched only lightly, if at all, by grace—could accomplish more healing than harm. But it is commonly supposed that opinions Luther then condemned were opinions he had condoned in his earliest works, in which he is said to have assumed God's willingness to accept the best efforts of sinful persons as virtuous preparation for grace. Certainly Luther's ambitious remarks about partial merit (mentum de congruo), which found their way into his marginal notes on Lombard'sSentences(1509–1510) and into hisDictata super Psalterium(1513–1515), contrast with his later repudiation of the “sufficiencies” of natural powers for moral achievement and of moral achievement for divine acceptance and reward. Luther himself conceded his schoolboy admiration for Ockham, who probably inspired the semipelagianism of much of the late medieval soteriology that Luther came to detest. Understandably, Luther's early apparent endorsements of semipelagian features of scholastic soteriology have attracted considerable scholarly attention. His passage from nominalism to Protestantism, choreographed variously with leaps and stumbles or as an orderly march, has been a topic for debate ever since new fragments of Luther's early theology surfaced and were pieced together in the nineteenth century. Yet two early sermons have generated comparatively little discussion. Copied together from a manuscript in Erfurt and published twice before 1900, they are clearly witnesses from Luther's early career and their contribution to the determination and evaluation of his early semipelagianism ought not to be undervalued.

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