These ads have popped up on buses all over New York City.

bus-poster

Now where have I heard that before . . .

Dawkins?  No.  Hitchens?  No.  Saint Thomas Aquinas?  Yes!

The poor atheists.  They’re not very original with this one.  Nearly eight centuries ago, St. Thomas said basically the same thing.  Grounded in his appreciation of the the integrity of human nature even after the fall, he taught that man does not require the help of faith or grace to do good things.  Though he did doubt whether many persons could fulfill the whole of the Decalogue without God’s help, St. Thomas in principle affirmed its possibility.  Check out his thought here and here.

Unfortunately for its sponsors, this ad renders itself ineffective not only by agreeing with Christianity’s greatest thinker, but also by making a simple mistake. It presumes that believers treat faith simply as a tool of the moral life.  Maybe some believers do this, but as St. Thomas demonstrates one need not believe in order to receive an education in virtue.  Faith enables the believer to do something else.  As the assent to revelation that leads to charity, faith opens human life to the gift of love that can pervade the moral life and change it qualitatively.  A supernatural gift given in baptism, faith elevates the moral life to the pursuit of a supernatural end—the everlasting vision of God.

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