The year 2025 marks the eighth centenary of the birth of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thought continues to stand at the center of the Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Few thinkers have articulated with greater clarity the intelligibility of being and the mind’s natural orientation toward the knowledge of God. Yet the enduring significance of Aquinas lies not only in the historical authority of his thought, but in the way his work continues to illuminate the fundamental questions of theology and philosophy. For Thomas, the intelligibility of the world reflects its origin in divine wisdom, and the human mind is ordered by nature toward the knowledge of truth and ultimately toward the vision of God. Together, the essays of this issue of Communio explore themes central to the Thomistic vision: the relation between contemplation and action, the intelligibility and giftedness of being, the meaning of analogy in theological speech, and the human desire to know God.

In “Beauty as the Wellspring of Human Action in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas,” D.C. Schindler proposes a reconsideration of the role of beauty in the account of human action. For Aquinas, every action—not only of rational creatures but of all beings without exception—proceeds from love. Within this context, moral acts are specified by the fact that the love that governs them expresses the particular faculties of intellect and will, which direct the agent from within toward being in its intelligibility and goodness. It is the rational faculties of the human person, within the unity of body and soul, that render him receptively open to an encounter with reality that awakens love and directs him toward the good. Yet it is precisely with regard to the role of the good in human action that Schindler believes many proponents of Thomistic moral thought do not go far enough. Although Aquinas states that the good alone is the cause of love, he also holds that the good moves the appetite only insofar as it is apprehended, which is in fact the very definition of the beautiful. On this basis, Schindler argues that beauty should be understood as the origin of love and, in this sense, the source of action. Human action therefore begins not first in willing but in contemplation, and the freedom of the will presupposes a prior reception of reality that first moves man to love. 

Matthew Kuhner addresses an ongoing debate concerning the character of theological language in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar in “Theological Discourse, Analogical Language, and the Impact of the Incarnation: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Aquinas on Divine Naming.” Readers of Balthasar frequently note his distinctive style, which is at times technically precise and at other times richly metaphorical. This approach has raised questions whether Balthasar adequately preserves the distinction, central to the theological tradition, between analogical and metaphorical predication in speaking about God.

To address this, Kuhner examines Balthasar’s own account of theological language, especially as it arises from the revelation of God in Christ. For Balthasar, theology begins not from human reflection alone but from the self-expression of the Father in the Word, who for our sake became incarnate. Kuhner then turns to Aquinas’s treatment of divine naming in order to clarify the genuine Thomistic understanding of both analogy and metaphor. Kuhner argues that the Incarnation provides the decisive theological context for understanding how human language can truly speak of God while preserving both the transcendence of the divine mystery and the intelligibility of theological language: the Word incarnate is revelatory both of the Father and of the way in which human words can truly speak of him. Balthasar’s language, argues Kuhner, is properly theological, because God’s self-disclosure occurs in the concrete but inexhaustible form of Christ, and theology must therefore inevitably unite precision and metaphor to be faithful to the mystery revealed.

In “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Aquinas on the Discovery of Being,” Nicholas J. Healy reflects on the manner in which the mystery of being presents itself within human experience and thought. Building on Balthasar’s reading of Aquinas, Healy argues that metaphysics begins not from speculative construction but from the lived discovery of esse as the act that grounds and sustains every existing thing. Within this discovery is the recognition that created being, in the simultaneity of its goodness and contingency, always points beyond itself to its infinitely good and necessarily self-subsisting origin—which is to say, the discovery of being is the discovery that it is gift. Philosophy reflects on being’s intelligibility and goodness only insofar as these are first encountered and received within experience. In particular, the experiences of gratitude and wonder are central to Thomistic metaphysics, on Balthasar’s reading.

In “Can Aquinas and Balthasar Be Reconciled? On a Disputed Question in Trinitarian Theology,” John Betz takes up the question whether the kenosis of the Son in time points to a corresponding kenosis within the immanent Trinity as its eternal archetype. Hans Urs von Balthasar answers this question in the affirmative, arguing not only that the Son’s temporal humility and obedience reveal an eternal humility and obedience in relation to the Father, but also that this filial self-emptying reflects the Father’s own primordial self-gift in begetting the Son. Contemporary Thomists, by contrast, have often resisted this conclusion, arguing that such language risks importing into the divine life categories proper to the economy of salvation.

Betz addresses this question first by situating Balthasar’s kenotic theology within the broader German tradition from Hamann and Schelling to Soloviev and Bulgakov, while also emphasizing that Balthasar engages this tradition from within his Catholic and analogical framework. Betz then turns to the Thomistic criticism itself, especially the concern that Balthasar illicitly transfers into the immanent Trinity realities proper to the economy of salvation, such as humility, suffering, obedience, and self-emptying. Against this reading, Betz argues that Balthasar remains fundamentally governed by the analogia entis, which safeguards the distinction between Creator and creature while also making possible meaningful theological speech about God himself. With the help of Erich Przywara, Betz further suggests that Thomas’s own teachings on divine power and simplicity may be more hospitable than is often supposed to Balthasar’s central claim, namely, that the humility revealed in Christ discloses something proper to God as love.

In “God the Son’s Humility according to von Balthasar: Analogy or Contradiction? A Response to John Betz’s ‘The Humility of God’,” John Baptist Ku takes up the same disputed question from the opposite side. While appreciative of Betz’s attempt to place Aquinas and Balthasar into closer conversation, Ku argues that the attempt does not in the end succeed. The decisive issue, for Ku, is not simply whether Balthasar’s language is qualified by the analogia entis, but whether it functions as analogy in the Thomistic sense at all. Proper analogy, as Ku understands it, attributes to God a perfection that belongs primarily and truly to him and only secondarily to creatures by participation. Metaphor, by contrast, transfers to God a creaturely image whose literal meaning cannot be properly said of the divine nature and must therefore be purified.

On this basis, Ku argues that, at the crucial points of the argument, Betz’s defense of Balthasar relies not on analogy in the Thomistic sense but on metaphor and paradox. Terms such as humility, suffering, wound, obedience, self-sacrifice, and even death, Ku contends, cannot be predicated of God properly in the way that goodness, wisdom, or charity can. When such terms are applied to God, they function poetically and paradoxically rather than analogically in the strict Thomistic sense. Ku maintains that an appeal to the analogia entis does not by itself justify attributing to the divine essence realities that imply creaturely limitation, nor does patristic language of divine condescension amount to humility in God’s very nature. He concludes that while Betz does not finally reconcile Balthasar with Aquinas in Thomistic terms, his work clarifies how Balthasar’s theological vision may still contribute to contemporary reflection through poetic metaphor and paradox.

In “Wonder and the Longing for the Face of God,” John M. McCarthy reflects on the natural human desire to know God and the way this desire unfolds within the philosophical and biblical traditions of the West. Beginning from Aristotle’s claim that “all men by nature desire to know,” McCarthy argues that wonder, the passion that gives rise to philosophy, is ultimately a desire to know the first cause of all things. Because the deepest questions of wonder seek the ultimate “why” of reality, they implicitly direct the human intellect toward God.

Yet this philosophical recognition also reveals a paradox. While the human person naturally desires to know the first cause, the divine essence exceeds the proportion of human understanding. Both sides of this paradox are reflected in the universal tendency to portray the divine after man’s own image, with all of its cultural and ethnic specificity and therefore with all the limitations that prevent it from attaining its intended object. The result is that even the highest achievements of pagan philosophy leave wonder unsatisfied. McCarthy therefore turns to the biblical tradition, where the desire to know God takes the form of a longing to behold the “face of God,” a desire not only for knowledge of what God is but for personal communion with him. In light of this development, McCarthy argues that Christ fulfills both the philosophical search for the first cause and the biblical longing to see God’s face. In the incarnate Word, the human desire to know God finds its ultimate answer.

Finally, in “Retrieving the Tradition,” the English-language edition of Communio is pleased to present for the first time the work of Étienne Gilson, with a 1964 essay entitled “On the Thomistic Problem of the Beatific Vision.” In this study the great historian of philosophy seeks to recover the question of the “natural desire” to see God as Aquinas himself poses this question, prior to the later theological disputes that have so often shaped its interpretation. Returning to the Thomistic context in which the problem first arises, Gilson recalls that for Thomas the whole order of creation is directed toward the divine likeness and that intellectual creatures attain this end most properly through the knowledge of God. The beatific vision thus appears not as an extrinsic addition to the creature’s destiny but as the fulfillment, by grace, of the intellect’s deepest orientation toward the first cause of all being.

It is precisely this point that has again become the focus of intense debate in contemporary theology, especially in disputes concerning the relation between nature and grace and the question of whether man possesses a natural desire for the supernatural. Without attempting to resolve these controversies directly, Gilson offers something more fundamental: a recovery of the Thomistic problematic itself prior to many of the conceptual oppositions that later came to dominate the discussion.

—The Editors