Divine <i>Instinctus</i> and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Abstract The principal way Aquinas comes to articulate the movement proper to the gifts of the Holy Spirit in his mature corpus is with the term divinus instinctus . Aristotle is the source for this articulation. For Aristotle, a “divine instinct” explains how some fortunate souls seem consistently to move through life in the right direction. They are impelled by an external, supernatural force. Aquinas discovered in Aristotle’s “divine instinct” a fruitful way to articulate the external, divine agency that belongs to gift movement in the life of the believer. I argue that Aquinas radically transforms the Aristotelian conception of “divine instinct” making it amenable to the Christian doctrine of the graced movement that belongs to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the divinus instinctus provides Aquinas with a strong account of divine agency ( auxilium ) necessary to move the believer towards divine things. However, Aquinas shears this doctrine of the deterministic associations it has in Aristotle. Rather than short‐circuit free will, the divine instinct elevates human freedom.