Hmm

... and kind of saying, "Well, there's also grace and charity, and it kinda, like, makes all this stuff glow or something." Like, that, that just seemed inaccurate to me, right? Because Aquinas is pretty clear that he thinks that the most important virtues in the moral life are bestowed on us by God, that the virtues that God bestows along with saving grace, right, in baptism, are not just faith, hope, and love, but that Aquinas thinks that in baptism we get a God-given courage, a God-given temperance, a God-given prudence, et cetera, and we also get the gifts of the Holy Spirit, um, that make us amenable to the Holy Spirit's prompting.

So we get all this stuff, uh, in, along with grace, and it also increasingly became clear to me that it would be inaccurate to say that those virtues given in grace were just kind of somehow, like, sitting on top of Aristotelian virtues, right, and, like, directing them to a further end or something like that.

I mean, it's pretty clear that Aquinas thinks, um, [lips smack] you can be completely vicious, receive God's saving grace, and do, um, extraordinary Christian deeds, right? The thief on the cross, for instance-

Mm-hmm.

So the second gift that Augustine and Aquinas thinks that God gives us is the elevation and transformation of our rational animality to enable it to participate in the divine life.

So the, the human nature that we have, and this is, I've found is a really kind of a, a tricky point in the Protestant world.

When we talk about nature in Aquinas, we're talking about that first gift, right, our rational animality, but because God does not owe us salvation, if we're going to become the adopted sons and daughters of God and have a relationship with Christ, that rational animality needs to be transformed.