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God's Grace and Human Action

'Merit' in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Joseph P. Wawrykow

” . . . there is much to be learned from this very intelligent book. The author’s insistence on the evidence for development in Thomas’s understanding, his broad reading, his alertness to the interconnectedness of Thomas’s ideas, and his willingness to grapple with the details of a text all combine to yield a wealth of insights. Wawrykow has gone a long way toward recovering the “essential spirit” of Thomas’s motion of merit, and any serious discussion of the doctrine of merit or of Thomas’s theology of grace will have to come to terms with his achievement.” The Thomist vol. 62, 1998

Offering a fresh approach to one significant aspect of the soteriology of Thomas Aquinas, God’s Grace and Human Action brings new scholarship and insights to the issue of merit in Aquinas’s theology. Through a careful historical analysis, Joseph P. Wawrykow delineates the precise function of merit in Aquinas’s account of salvation, revealing that the attainment of salvation through merit testifies not only to the dignity of the human person but even more to the goodness of God.

Wawrykow accounts for the changes in Thomas’s teaching on merit from the early Scriptum on the Sentences of Peter Lombard to the later Summa theologiae in two ways. First, he demonstrates how the teaching of the Summa theologiae discloses the impact of Thomas’s profound encounter with the later writings of Augustine on predestination and grace. Second, Wawrykow notes the implications of Thomas’s mature theological judgment that merit is best understood in the context of the plan of divine wisdom. The portrayal of merit in sapiential terms in the Summa permits Thomas to insist that the attainment of salvation through merit testifies not only to the dignity of the human person but even more to the goodness of God.

God’s Grace and Human Action addresses two audiences: scholars of medieval theology who seek to understand more adequately this important part of Thomas’s theology-the issue of merit viewed in its own terms-and students and scholars of the Reformation, who may wish to reconsider the reception of Thomas in sixteenth-century debates about justification and merit.

Joseph P. Wawrykow is an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. God’s Grace and Human Action is his first book.