St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John Paul II on the State of Original Innocence

This article examines the relationship between the theologies of St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope St. John Paul II with respect to their accounts of the state of original innocence or “original justice.” The author contends that, in his “Theology of the Body,” John Paul II presumes and builds upon the Thomistic account by demonstrating their continuity of thought; the second contention is that the pontiff develops the Thomistic account by emphasizing the teleological nature of the self-mastery characteristic of the prelapsarian state as ordered toward self-gift as well as in the interpersonal dimension of that primitive beatitude.