Aquinas’s Unity Thesis and Grace: Ingredients for Developing a Good Appetite in a Contemporary Age

Megan Heeder

Abstract: Contemporary American society is pervaded by images of thinness such that one’s perception of one’s beauty and value are often linked to how skinny one is. Numerous women (and men) struggle with society’s focus on thinness and its impact on their perception of themselves and their bodies. This struggle has been an area of focus for moral theologian Beth Haile who turns to Aquinas’s conception of virtue, connatural knowledge, and grace as she engages the moral theological tradition to suggest how women might respond to the consequences of living in a society supremely focused on thinness. While Haile’s work is groundbreaking and visionary, the burgeoning storm of social media in the eleven years since her dissertation’s publication necessitates returning to Haile’s work both to plumb its riches and consider how it might be implemented in and expanded for a contemporary age.

In this paper’s first section, I survey the eating disorder landscape in the United States. Next, I analyze the strengths and potential for growth in Beth Haile’s Thomistic treatment of eating disorders in the contemporary age. The third part of the paper reviews current literature on Aquinas’s unity thesis which offers a response to the contemporary age’s challenges. Aquinas’s thesis presents the virtues as growing together, moderated by prudence, in the larger context of God’s grace. Attending to the collective growth of the virtues provides a way to respond to the difficulties and effects of living in a society hyper-focused on thinness as a marker of beauty. The final section of the paper applies the unity thesis contextualized in grace to the process of navigating eating disorders in a contemporary context, particularly as a response to the challenges presented by thin-ideal images present on the internet and social media. Examples in this paper’s fourth part illustrate the role of unified virtue and grace in women’s struggles with eating disorders.

Keywords: Thomas Aquinas; virtue ethics; eating disorders; body image; connatural knowledge; Grace.