This Friday at 3:30pm in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum will host John O’Callaghan, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. In his talk entitled “No Mercy from a Distance”: Aquinas on Compassion and Natural Friendship, O’Callaghan will discuss Aquinas’s account of mercy which differs from forgiveness and necessarily involves compassion for those who suffer.
Mercy is often thought of in our culture as an act of forgiveness of some offense, whether civic or personal, that reduces or eliminates punishment that is due for that offense, and is dominated by questions of justice. That sense of mercy is hard to square with other uses of the term that suggest something more like assistance to those in need, as in the religious notion of “works of mercy” directed to the poor and suffering. It is also hard to square with the sense that mercy requires compassion, suffering with another, a compassion that is not necessarily required by forgiveness, and may even be at odds with the justice of punishment. Thomas Aquinas provides an account of mercy that helps us understand how it differs from forgiveness and necessarily involves compassion for those who suffer. The ground for his understanding of mercy is that such compassion is grounded in natural human friendship. But the idea of natural human friendship is perhaps even more at odds with our modern sensibilities in which we typically think that while justice binds us, we are nonetheless free to choose our friends as we like. If Aquinas is correct, we do not have such freedom, and are more bound by mercy grounded in natural friendship than we are by justice.
John O’Callaghan is associate professor of Philosophy and Director Emeritus of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame. He was educated at St. Norbert College where he majored in physics and mathematics, and the University of Notre Dame (PhD, 1996) where he studied philosophy, writing on the philosophical work of Thomas Aquinas. He has taught at Creighton University, the University of Portland, and the University of Notre Dame. He has written or edited a number of books and articles in the area of Thomistic studies, including Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn (2003), and Recovering Nature (with Thomas Hibbs, 1999). He is a past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (2013) and is a permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas appointed by Pope Benedict XVI. He is a recipient of the Aquinas Medal from the University of Dallas. He is currently working on a book on Misericordia.
