Thomas Aquinas on Non-Theological Faith

The majority of studies on ‘faith’ (fides) in the thought of Thomas Aquinas consider it in a religious or theological context: fides as the theological virtue by which one assents to the truths of divine revelation. The focus on theological faith is appropriate, given its central importance as a theological virtue, but this is not the only sense of fides that Thomas identifies. The present study investigates two non-theological senses formulated in his commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius: first, fides as the proximate cause of assenting to principles within a given science (‘epistemic faith’) and, second, fides as an indispensable element of society (‘societal faith’). These senses have been largely overlooked in secondary literature but, I argue, might help to dispel mischaracterizations of faith as fundamentally unreasonable.