Offering a fresh approach to one significant aspect of the soteriology of Thomas Aquinas, God's Grace and Human Action brings new scholarship and insights to the issue of merit in Aquinas's theology. Through a careful historical analysis, Joseph P. Wawrykow delineates the precise function of merit in Aquinas's account of salvation. Wawrykow accounts for the changes in Thomas's teaching on merit from the early Scriptum on the Sentences of Peter Lombard to the later Summa theologiae in two ways. First, he demonstrates how the teaching of the Summa theologiae discloses the impact of Thomas's profound encounter with the later writings of Augustine on predestination and grace. Second, Wawrykow notes the implications of Thomas's mature theological judgment that merit is best understood in the context of the plan of divine wisdom. The portrayal of merit in sapiential terms in the Summa permits Thomas to insist that the attainment of salvation through merit testifies not only to the dignity of the human person but even more to the goodness of God. "Recommended with great enthusiasm to historians of medieval and Reformation theology." ― Religious Studies Review “In his scholarly study God’s Grace and Human Action, Joseph Wawrykow seeks to remedy the failures of his predecessors. Wawrykow is sensitive to Aquinas’s intellectual development and offers useful insight into the reasons Aquinas altered his views as he matured as a theologian. What emerges is a ‘big picture’ of Aquinas’s discussions of grace and merit, not just as independent treatises, but as contributions to a larger theological project.” ― Speculum, April 1999 ". . . there is much to be learned from this very intelligent book. The author's insistence on the evidence for development in Thomas's understanding, his broad reading, his alertness to the interconnectedness of Thomas's ideas, and his willingness to grapple with the details of a text all combine to yield a wealth of insights. Wawrykow has gone a long way toward recovering the "essential spirit" of Thomas's motion of merit, and any serious discussion of the doctrine of merit or of Thomas's theology of grace will have to come to terms with his achievement." ― The Thomist Joseph P. Wawrykow teaches medieval theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Westminster Handbook to Thomas Aquinas (2005), and co-editor of Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans (1998) and The Theology of Thomas Aquinas (2005). In the following pages, I have examined 'merit' in the theological writings of Thomas Aquinas. Medieval discussions of merit are important for at least two reasons. Taken in itself, the treatment of merit can provide an important barometer of central theological and anthropological convictions-about medieval notions of the dignity and possibilities of human existence, about the seriousness with which different authors consider the fact of sin and its lingering effects even in the life of the justified, and about the ways in which God can come to figure in human existence through grace. But the medieval discussions have taken on added significance because of their use in the Reformation and since. Luther's insistence on "justification by faith alone" was at the same time an attack on Catholic claims about the religious value of morally good acts; the sixteenth-century Catholic rejection of Luther also entailed the re-affirmation of the notion of merit, with its official proclamation at the Council of Trent. It is thus not surprising that modern scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, have shown a certain fascination with merit. Some of the medieval analyses of merit, so significant in the working out of the divisions between the churches during the Reformation, have as a result been studied in considerable detail and indeed adequately. One might cite here the researches of Werner Dettloff into the teachings on merit of Scotus and Ockham and their followers, work that has found its echo in other scholars such as Bernd Hamm.1 But while the topic of merit not been wholly neglected, it is the underlying conviction of this book that the teachings of Thomas Aquinas about merit have only imperfectly been understood. Indeed, that Thomas had more than one teaching on merit, corresponding to different stages of his theological development, has itself not been sufficiently appreciated. The imperfect state of research on Thomas's approaches to merit has thus had a twofold effect. The main lines of Thomas's soteriology, including his sense of the precise roles played in human salvation by God and the human person, remain only partially sketched. And lacking a precise depiction of what Thomas himself taught or an explanation of the version of merit that had evolved by the time of the Summa Theologiae , evaluations of the reception of Thomas-in the later middle ages, during the Reformation, indeed, even in the present remain stuck at a somewhat elementary stage. The presen