Nature, Grace and the Eucharistic Foundation of Fides et Ratio

In 1993, Donald J. Keefe, S.J. was asked by the Vatican to offer a critical response to a document on the relation between faith and philosophy then being prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and which would later form the core of Pope John Paul II's encyclical, Fides et Ratio. Chief among the points Keefe made was that any metaphysics adequate to Catholic faith would have to keep Christ at the center. This paper provides a brief study of the texts to which Keefe refers in his observation that even Aquinas found himself having to undertake a revision of his earlier view of the grace of faith as an Aristotelian accident after being alerted during his first Italian period (1259–1268) to the teaching of the Second Council of Orange.