Thomas Aquinas College Lectures & Talks "Rational Mind and Non-Rational Agency: Aquinas’ Augustinian Account of the Sinning Will"
Mar 4, 2026
Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis, a scholar-prince who lectured on Augustine and Aquinas, explores the will and the soul. He contrasts Augustine’s mens with Aquinas’ Aristotelian powers. He traces how reason, intellect, senses, and passions interact in choice. He examines sin as inordinate action, the will’s causal role, and how rational faculties can be morally non-rational.
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Rational Soul As Principle Of Agency
- Both Augustine and Aquinas locate human agency in a single rational soul that seeks truth and orders action by reason.
- This makes the will a rational appetite: its object is goodness and its function is to love toward beatitudo (happiness).
Free Choice Is Judgment Plus Appetite
- Aquinas defines liberum arbitrium as free choice that originates action and names both the act and the will's power.
- Choice (electio) is a will-act grounded in deliberation and judgment: intellect judges expedience, will appetitively accepts it.
Reason Shapes Choice Without Determining It
- Reason exercises formal and final causality over the will by presenting objects and the final end (happiness), thereby constituting choice.
- The will completes choice by appetitive acceptance, preserving non-deterministic freedom within reason's causality.