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of many contingencies and challenges. This leads Aquinas to develop his theology of marriage as a way of consolidating and stabilizing parental commitment, especially paternal commitment, to their dependent children. ** Although neither Aristotle nor Aquinas presented the full intergenerational scope of Cacioppo’s interpretation of kin altruism and inclusive fitness — that it must extend to our children’s children and not just our own — both perspectives comprehended the interlocking nature of kin altruism and the well-spring of care, long-term human commitment, and hence some of the rudimentary energies of human morality. Of course, Aquinas and those who followed him supplemented these naturalistic observations with additional epistemological presuppositions that may seem strange to scientists. These included the idea that God works through nature as well as grace, hence God is present in the kin altruistic inclinations of parents and grandparents. He also assumed that in order for kin altruism to be stable, the additional social reinforcements of institutional marriage and God’s strengthening grace and forgiveness were also needed. In addition, he held - and Christianity has always taught - that Christian love includes more than kin altruism and the care of our familial offspring; it must include the love of neighbor, stranger, and enemy, even to the point of self- sacrifice. For the Christian, this was made possible by the idea that God was the creator of all humans and hence each person was a child of God and made in God’s image (imago dei). For this reason, as Kant would say on different grounds, each individual should be Page |37 treated “always as an end and never as a means only.”*° In Aquinas’s view, acting on this belief, and with the empowering grace of God, made it possible for Christians to build on yet analogically generalize their kin altruism to all children of God, even those beyond the immediate family, their own children, and their own kin. These wider assumptions may be beyond the competence of science to assess. They entail a step toward metaphysical speculation of the kind science would do better to avoid. Nonetheless, in the view of Christian love developed in Aquinas, the seeds of a religious humanism — in this case a Christian humanism —began to form. I have tried to illustrate how insights from Aristotle and Aquinas can join with insights from evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience to refine the Christian understanding of love. In pursuing this course, I join the work of Stephen Pope and others in presenting this option. 7” The kind of Christian humanism found in Aquinas makes it possible for Christianity to be enriched by the modern sciences of human nature. Aquinas’s view is strikingly different from Nygren’s representation of Paul and Luther when Nygren contends that Christian love does not build on our own natural energies, but “has come to us from heaven.”** Or again, it is very different from Nygren’s view when he writes that the Christian is “merely the tube, the channel through which God’s love flows.””” The complete discontinuity in this statement between the downward love of God and the natural extension to nonkin of human kin-altruistic impulses is stunning. And such a view as Nygren’s precludes the possibility of a religious humanism of the kind I have been describing. And it HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021283