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To: lockeliberty
In the article's commentary on Aquinas, we read Thus the directional antithesis between judgment and redemption as taught in Scripture was turned once again into a structural antinomy between rival sectors of reality held together in bipolar tension. The end product was a split-level view of reality, with nature as a lower and grace as a higher order.

I suspect this reads Aquinas through the lens of nominalism. Here's a commentary on the natural and supernatural in Aquinas:

"At any rate, in Aquinas's thought, "nature" refers to human nature as it concretely exists, that is, as already integrated within the context of grace but as formally considered independently of what revelation teaches of that context. Viewed from that perspective, nature possesses a transcendent openness to grace and, some Thomists would claim, a desiderium naturale toward fulfillment in grace. Sixteenth-century theologians, however, tended to take the natura pura to be a full reality in its own right. On the basis of Aristotle's principle concerning the proportion of ends to means, they declared this nature incapable of any supernatural desire of God. Their theological dualism was complete but remained hidden behind a traditional terminology--"natural" and "supernatural--whose meaning it subverted. In Aquinas, the term supernatural does not refer to a new order of being added to nature but to the means for attaining the one final end for which the power of nature alone does not suffice. He calls God agens supernaturalis to distinguish the order of the Creator from that of creation(in which nature and grace appear together). Nature thereby becomes the effect of a supernatural agent."
-Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity

5 posted on 02/16/2004 2:33:51 AM PST by Dumb_Ox
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To: Dumb_Ox
Interesting commentary.

Thanks.
7 posted on 02/16/2004 7:38:52 AM PST by lockeliberty (Heilsgeschichte)
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To: Dumb_Ox
Have you read Lubac's Mystery of the Supernatural? The book sketches out the problem quite well.
8 posted on 02/16/2004 7:51:24 AM PST by cornelis
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