Ryan J Brady, Ph.D.

The following provides some essential resources pertaining to the value of celibacy (with an emphasis on priestly celibacy) and the testimony for it in Sacred Scripture, the early Church, and the Magisterium. I have removed some of my surrounding comments I originally made in order to emphasize the documents I quoted. In that way, they can speak for themselves. Particularly noteworthy is the evidence I provide that celibacy was mandated even for married priests in the early Church.

Many contemporary scholars doubt Aristotle ever arrived at a notion of God’s efficient causality. They are often willing to accept that his first mover is a final cause, but they wholly reject the view that this mover is the efficient cause we call God.  According to Aquinas, however, even if the pre-Socratic materialists were forced by their ideas to absolutely reject that there is an efficient cause, Aristotle’s consideration of universal being made it possible for him to see there must be one first efficient cause; namely, the one we call God.  The goal of this essay is to defend Aquinas’ reading of Aristotle. In light of Thomas’ teaching that all creatures only exist because of God’s causative knowledge of them,  we will initially investigate his teaching regarding God’s knowledge of creatures and then that of God’s efficient causality (doing so in both cases vis-à-vis the thought of Aristotle and the observations of modern scholars). In doing so, I hope to establish the viability of Aquinas’ interpretation of the Aristotelian corpus on this question.

This essay on the Moral Precepts of the Old Law serves as a primer for understanding the nature of the Old Law as law, its relation to the natural law, and the role of the moral precepts in distinction from the judicial and ceremonial precepts of the Old Law.

This dissertation, which is to be published in the summer of 2021 as "Conforming to Right Reason" by Emmaus Academic (with translated footnotes, an introduction by Steve Long, and an index, etc.), investigates St. Thomas Aquinas' account of what appoints the end to the moral virtues. Given that the moral virtues are located in the appetites (either in the rational appetite known as the will or in the sensitive appetite), the question that arises is whether the end these virtues point an individual towards are antecedently cognized in virtue of some other habit or power or whether, on the contrary, they are responsible for all virtuous action independent of the intellect. Some renowned theologians have argued that the knowledge the virtuous man has regarding the ends he pursues comes about merely by inclination. There is, on this account, reasoning about means but little to no reasoning about ends themselves. One might think of certain New Natural Law theorists who think that prior to choice, there is no morally significant order of goods to be pursued (because such goods are incommensurable) or of the moral motivation theorists such as Keenan who maintain that "strivings" of the will are "antecedent to questions of intention and choice."  One of the reasons their theories are sometimes considered consistent with Aquinas is that he says the moral virtues, which are present in the appetitive part of the soul, provide the ends to prudence, which uses those ends as the beginning of its deliberation. What I intend to show, however, is that the notion the prudent man subjects everything he does to the inclinations of his appetites (even if those appetites have been purified by the presence of grace) is not consonant with St. Thomas' view. This is because in the final analysis, that which appoints (praestituit) the end to the moral virtues is, strictly speaking, a form of understanding or reason that is distinct from prudence.

After an initial chapter on the end in general and what it consists in, the second chapter will explore the kind of causality exercised by the intellect while investigating the claim that Aquinas had a somewhat radical progression towards a more voluntarist attitude as he matured. The third chapter turns to the specific way in which synderesis and prudence exercise causality in regard to their appointing of the end and proposes a way of understanding Aquinas to be accurate both when he says in I-II, q. 66 that prudence appoints the end to the moral virtues and in II-II, q. 47 when he denies it does while insisting the natural reason (synderesis) does so instead. In that chapter, both faith and conscience will be discussed as other indispensable elements involved in the appointing of ends.

In this reply to Bassiano de Lodi, a Dominican friar in Venice, Aquinas addresses a variety of issues raised in 36 various articles ranging from the influence of the Angels over everyday activities (articles 1-16 or so) and their knowledge of human thoughts (36) to the sacramental presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharist (29-35) and the location of Hell (21). It is dated to the year 1271. Forthcoming, with a parallel Latin column, as part of the Aquinas Institute's Opera Omnia,  Volume 56: Opuscula II. 

In order to shed light on the meaning of John 1, St. Augustine would turn to “that image which the creature is, that is, to the rational soul for a more careful questioning and consideration” of the procession of the Son from the Father. He would do so by seeing a link between the way the mind “beget[s] its knowledge when it knows itself” and the way the Father begets the Son;  in other words, the way a word is spoken by man and the way the Divine Word is ‘spoken’ by the Father. In this essay, I investigate both the way this ‘analogy of the word’ was used by thinkers prior to Augustine and also the thought of the Latin Father himself. I have also added an appendix on the subsequent thought of Aquinas on this point.

St. Augustine's City of God XIX, 19 is the 'locus classicus' for Augustine's ideals regarding the need to balance both one's zeal for contemplation and the needs of the active life. St. Thomas famously quotes this passage while in his effort to demonstrate that the mixed way of life (sharing with others from the fullness of contemplation) is objectively the best way of life in II-II q. 188. However, the standard translation of this essential text is that one 'must' devote himself to contemplation unless some necessity is imposed upon the contemplative. In this article, I argue that this is a mistranslation and that the phrase 'vacandum est' should be understood as emphasizing the freedom to either contemplate or to serve others (which freedom St. Paul speaks of in Galatians 5:14). In the nineteenth chapter of book nineteen of the City of God (the Latin text of which can be found in the appendix), Augustine discusses the tension that Christians can experience when they feel drawn towards the contemplation of God and yet find themselves in need of attending to other duties. After making a division of the kinds (genera) of life Christians can validly dedicate themselves to (the active, the contemplative and the way of life that combines both),1 Augustine provides succinct practical norms for dealing with the occasionally conflicting pull that can be experienced in regard to external acts. In order to most fittingly investigate this chapter in which Augustine's " classic statement on this problem " 2 can be found, we will occasionally consider some other writings found in the Augustinian corpus. Nevertheless, our focus will be on the locus classicus itself, to which we now turn.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews argues there is no possibility for repentance in the case of those who have "once been enlightened." This essay provides an analysis of this teaching in light of Patristic, Medieval and Modern commentators and does so in view of the surrounding context.

This is a translation of Aquinas' letter to a fellow brother of his order that has never been translated into English. It contains six unconventional articles which are responses to five questions that Aquinas rightly considers somewhat frivolous in addition to another pertaining to the sacrament of Confession, which he appropriately dedicates more time to. Observing the way he responds to the first five questions sheds light upon the way he lived out the ideals of the Christian life and also provides some theological principles. The sixth one, however,  provides the most substantial theological content. 

I provide the Latin in the second part of the document.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the saving significance of grace in the writings of the first Century bishops, Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch. On account of their frequent emphasis on knowledge and the need for upright habits of morality – as well as the human role played in attaining them – it is possible to overlook the fact that they presupposed grace as the principle that brings about their attainment. It is doubtless true that they saw no dichotomy between the activity of God and that of man and that they did not, therefore, shy away from highlighting the human dimension of justification given the needs of their times and their pastoral sensitivity. As I hope to show, however, this emphasis in no way implies that they failed to appreciate the Pauline principle that God is the one working (ὁ ἐνεργῶν) in man both to will and to act according to God's good pleasure (καὶ τὸ θέλειν καὶ τὸ ἐνεργεῖν ὑπὲρ τῆς εὐδοκίας) as the latter works out his salvation with fear and trembling (μετὰ φόβου καὶ τρόμου; cf., Phil 2:12-13).

The following is the text of a lecture I gave at a conference entitled, "Hope and Death: Christian Responses" at Ave Maria University on February 13, 2021. After treating the substantial tradition regarding limbo and the hope we have for infants who die without baptism in general, I speak more particularly to the Catechism's assertion that we are allowed to hope for the salvation of such infants.