Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

to mystic institute.org. So a first difficulty, eustitia or justice. In order to appreciate

tomorrow the difficulty of attributing mercy to the act of creation, it's important to understand how Aquinas first

solves a difficulty with attributing justice to the act of creation. According to Aquinas,

there are two broad kinds of justice, commutative and distributive. This is not surprising. These are

traditional distinction that pretty much everybody holds.

Commutative bears upon the relation of persons one to another as either individuals,

in which case it is particular justice, or to the common wheel, that is, political body,

in which case it is legal justice. Questions of punishment fall under

this form of justice, since punishment addresses wrongs done by one person upon another

or a person upon the common good of the political community. Distributive justice bears upon the

distribution of common goods to particular individuals

proportionate to some measure of what is due to those individuals.

With that distinction in mind, we can turn to what Aquinas says about how divine justice

is expressed in creation. The question he pursues in the first part of the Sumo Teologi, question 21.

In Article 1 of that question, Aquinas had attributed distributive justice to God.

Insofar as God acts to provide for his creatures what is due to them according to the measure of their natures.

So the proportion described in the general description of distributive justice is here found

vis-à-vis God and creatures according to the measure of a creature's nature, human versus

...