In pursuit of human flourishing

This project considers personal violence and a possible remedy in conversation with Thomas Aquinas's anthropology and pneumatology. That is, we start with Thomas's account of human nature, and go on to examine what violence against such a nature might entail. A distinctive feature of Thomas's account of human nature, in the view of this project, is the fundamental sensitivity to intelligibility that shapes human life and experience as personal agents – i.e., on a basic level we expect things to proceed in an understandable manner, and often experience the chaos and violence of life in terms of things not 'making any sense.' Given Thomas's account of how the Holy Spirit moves among human beings (i.e., in support of, or collaborating with, human agency rather than supplanting it), we can then consider the movements of the Holy Spirit as providing models of contra-violent behavior that we can imitate. This use of Thomas's thought is grounded in his Thomas's notion of grace, where we can see an ambiguity with regard to divine and human agency present in human actions. Such a reading of Thomas Aquinas is not inevitable, however. This project considers Thomas through the lens of his inheritance of Aristotle and of Proclus, and their influences upon his thought. Thus, the project employs an Aristo-Proclean reading of Thomas Aquinas. A further layer of the problem of violence that the project considers is the experienced reality that people of good will can and do commit acts of violence against others (or themselves), even when they hold values to the contrary. The thesis considers that problem as an issue of mis-alignment with the good that is one's principle, and examines the role of gratitude in accomplishing the re-alignment with the good that helps a person live in accordance with their contra-violent values.