Eleonore Stump

1. Introduction

Eleonore Stump (b. 1947) is a contemporary analytic philosopher and philosophical theologian whose work sits at the intersection of medieval thought, especially Thomas Aquinas, and late‑20th‑ and early‑21st‑century analytic philosophy. Writing largely within the Anglo‑American tradition, she has been central to the development of analytic Thomism, a movement that employs the tools of analytic philosophy to reconstruct and assess classical theistic doctrines.

Stump is best known for three interlocking areas of contribution. First, she offers detailed, philosophically sophisticated interpretations of Aquinas’s metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and theology, presenting them in a way accessible to non‑specialists. Second, she has developed influential positions on the problem of evil, free will and moral responsibility, and the nature of divine–human relations, often emphasizing God’s goal of loving personal union with human beings. Third, she has argued that narrative and empathy provide forms of experiential (Franciscan) knowledge essential for understanding persons and God, a view elaborated in Wandering in Darkness.

Within the broader history of philosophy, Stump’s work contributes to a revival of robust classical theism in analytic philosophy of religion and to renewed interest in medieval sources as live options rather than merely historical curiosities. Her writings are widely cited by philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion who engage topics such as divine simplicity, the metaphysics of the Incarnation, atonement theory, and the epistemology of religious experience.

While reception of her positions is diverse, her oeuvre is generally regarded as a major reference point for contemporary debates about God, suffering, freedom, and the role of narrative in philosophical theology.

2. Life and Historical Context

2.1 Biographical Outline

Eleonore Stump was born on 9 August 1947 in New York City. She completed her PhD in philosophy at Cornell University in 1975 and pursued an academic career in North America and the United Kingdom, eventually becoming Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University in 1988. From that position, along with numerous visiting appointments and lecture series, she became a prominent figure in international discussions in philosophy of religion and medieval philosophy.

Key biographical milestones relevant to her intellectual development include sustained engagement with Thomistic scholarship from the mid‑1980s onward and the publication of several landmark monographs in the 2000s and 2010s.

2.2 Historical and Intellectual Setting

Stump’s career unfolds against the backdrop of several broader developments:

Her work on Aquinas is often associated with the late‑20th‑century Catholic intellectual revival, especially in Anglophone contexts, and with efforts to articulate classical Christian doctrines in forms compatible with contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. At the same time, her emphasis on narrative and empathy arises in a period when analytic philosophy began to take more seriously literature, emotions, and first‑person experience as philosophically significant.

3. Intellectual Development and Education

3.1 Analytic Formation

Stump’s doctoral training at Cornell University in the early 1970s placed her firmly within mainstream analytic philosophy. Her early work reflects interests in metaphysics, causation, and action theory, shaped by prevailing concerns about modality, physicalism, and the nature of explanation. This background underlies the logical rigor and argumentative structure characteristic of her later, more theologically engaged writings.

3.2 Turn to Medieval Philosophy and Aquinas

In the mid‑1980s, Stump’s focus moved decisively toward medieval philosophy, especially Thomas Aquinas. Influenced by both historical scholarship and contemporary debates about divine attributes, she began to argue that Aquinas offers sophisticated resources for current problems concerning freedom, foreknowledge, and the nature of God. This period sees the emergence of her role in analytic Thomism, as she applies analytic tools to interpret texts such as the Summa Theologiae and to defend doctrines like divine simplicity and eternity.

3.3 Integration of Narrative and Personal Knowledge

From the late 1990s onward, Stump’s reading in biblical studies, literature, and moral psychology led her to emphasize the philosophical importance of narrative and empathy. This development does not replace her Thomistic metaphysics but adds an epistemological layer: in addition to propositional knowledge, she highlights experiential knowledge of persons as essential for theology. Wandering in Darkness crystallizes this stage, integrating her earlier views on God and suffering with a methodological shift toward case‑study narratives.

3.4 Mature Integrative Phase

In later work, particularly Atonement, Stump brings together analytic Thomism, narrative epistemology, and a focus on love and personal union into a comprehensive philosophical theology. This phase is marked by cross‑disciplinary engagement with biblical exegesis, psychology, and contemporary debates on free will and moral responsibility.

4. Major Works and Themes

4.1 Principal Monographs

4.2 Recurrent Themes

Across these works, several themes recur:

• Divine Love and Personal Union: Stump consistently interprets salvation and the divine–human relationship in terms of deep interpersonal union rather than primarily legal or institutional categories.
• Free Will and Moral Responsibility: She engages debates over libertarianism, compatibilism, and Frankfurt‑style counterexamples, frequently drawing on Aquinas to articulate a view of freedom as acting from one’s own, rightly ordered will.
• The Problem of Evil and Suffering: Rather than focusing solely on logical or evidential arguments, she explores how particular lives and stories can show how suffering may be integrated into a person’s ultimate good.
• Divine Attributes: She offers detailed defenses and reconstructions of doctrines such as divine simplicity, eternity, and omniscience, often responding to analytic critics.
• Narrative and Knowledge of Persons: Stump argues that narratives can convey a kind of understanding of God and human beings that abstract arguments cannot fully capture.

These themes interlock: her account of atonement presupposes a Thomistic metaphysics of God, a specific view of freedom and the will, and a narrative‑inflected understanding of how persons come to know and love God amid suffering.

5. Core Ideas: God, Freedom, and Suffering

5.1 Conception of God

Drawing on Aquinas, Stump characterizes God as a simple, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being whose central aim is loving personal union with human creatures. She maintains that God’s actions are best interpreted through this relational goal rather than through primarily legalistic or deistic frameworks. Defenses of divine simplicity and eternity play a crucial role in her accounts of providence and grace, though critics argue that such doctrines risk making God too metaphysically remote or incompatible with responsive personal relations.

5.2 Freedom and Moral Responsibility

Stump’s work on freedom, often labeled Thomistic libertarianism by commentators, holds that morally responsible action requires that an agent’s choice flow from the agent’s own will in such a way that alternative possibilities are, in some sense, genuinely open. She interprets Aquinas as rejecting both hard determinism and purely indeterministic choice. Proponents see her view as mediating between classical libertarianism and compatibilism; critics question whether her account secures enough metaphysical independence from divine causality or whether it ultimately collapses into sophisticated compatibilism.

Her writings also address divine foreknowledge, arguing that God’s atemporal knowledge of temporal events does not threaten human freedom, since God’s knowing does not causally determine human choices.

5.3 Suffering and the Problem of Evil

In Wandering in Darkness, Stump develops a distinctive theodicy centered on God’s aim of union with human beings. She proposes that God may permit suffering when it contributes to the healing of damaged wills and the deepening of personal union with God, either in this life or beyond. She employs detailed narrative cases (e.g., biblical figures like Job and Mary of Bethany) to illustrate how, on this view, even severe suffering can be integrated into a person’s ultimate good.

Supporters find this approach sensitive to the complexity of lived experience and less abstract than standard free‑will or soul‑making theodicies. Critics contend that it may still be vulnerable to objections about horrendous evils, cases where union seems implausible as compensation, or concerns that the view risks instrumentalizing sufferers for a theological end.

6. Narrative, Empathy, and Knowledge of Persons

6.1 Franciscan vs. Propositional Knowledge

Stump distinguishes between propositional knowledge (“knowledge that”) and what she, following medieval usage, calls Franciscan knowledge, a kind of experiential knowledge of persons or realities. Franciscan knowledge involves direct, often first‑person acquaintance and is closely tied to empathy and shared experience. She argues that understanding persons—especially God and suffering individuals—requires this experiential mode, which cannot be reduced to sets of propositions.

6.2 The Role of Narrative

In Wandering in Darkness, Stump contends that narratives can convey Franciscan knowledge by allowing readers to “enter into” the perspectives of characters. Through detailed case studies of biblical and literary narratives, she claims that stories show how God might be at work in particular lives in ways that standard argument forms cannot adequately represent.

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“Stories can sometimes be cognitively and morally superior to abstract argument, because they can convey the inner structure of a person’s suffering … in a way that propositions alone cannot.”

— Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness

Proponents see this as widening the epistemic toolkit of philosophy of religion, aligning it with developments in moral psychology and narrative ethics. Some critics worry that narrative understanding is too subjective to bear the weight of theodicy or that it blurs the line between literature and argument.

6.3 Empathy and Theological Understanding

Stump assigns an important role to empathy as a mode of access to another’s inner life. She maintains that cultivating empathic attention to narratives about God and human beings can yield a better grasp of divine love and the dynamics of faith under suffering. This approach has been linked by commentators to movements in virtue epistemology and to debates over the cognitive value of literature.

Others, however, question whether empathy can reliably track truth about God or whether it may simply reproduce the reader’s own projections. The extent to which Stump’s narrative‑empathic methodology can be formalized or generalized across diverse religious traditions remains an area of ongoing discussion.

7. Aquinas and Analytic Thomism

7.1 Stump’s Reading of Aquinas

Stump’s Aquinas offers a systematic reconstruction of Aquinas’s thought on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and theology, framed in contemporary analytic terms. She emphasizes Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human persons (soul as the form of the body), his understanding of intellect and will, and his doctrine of God as ipsum esse subsistens (subsistent being itself). Her interpretations aim to show that Aquinas anticipates or enriches current debates on substance, causation, consciousness, and freedom.

7.2 Contribution to Analytic Thomism

Within analytic Thomism, Stump is often grouped with figures such as Norman Kretzmann, John Haldane, and Brian Davies. Her distinctive contributions include:

Supporters hold that she demonstrates the contemporary philosophical viability of key Thomistic doctrines, often clarifying misunderstandings in modern critiques. Some historical scholars question aspects of her exegesis, suggesting that certain reconstructions risk anachronism or over‑systematization, while some analytic philosophers remain unconvinced by her defenses of simplicity and hylomorphism.

7.3 Dialogue Between “God of the Philosophers” and “God of the Bible”

In essays collected in The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers, Stump explores the relationship between Aquinas’s classical theism and biblical depictions of God. She argues that, properly understood, Thomistic metaphysics can undergird rather than undermine the personal, responsive God of Scripture. Critics debate whether her harmonization underestimates tensions between classical attributes (immutability, impassibility) and scriptural narratives of divine emotion and change.

8. Methodology in Philosophical Theology

8.1 Analytic Tools and Historical Exegesis

Stump’s methodology combines analytic argumentation with careful historical work on Aquinas and biblical texts. She employs standard tools—formal distinctions, counterexamples, thought experiments—while grounding them in close readings of historical sources. This dual commitment positions her work between purely systematic analytic theology and purely historical scholarship.

8.2 Integration of Narrative Case Studies

A distinctive methodological feature, especially in Wandering in Darkness and Atonement, is the use of extended narrative case studies as part of philosophical argument. Stump treats stories not merely as illustrative but as sources of data about how persons experience God, suffering, love, and transformation. She maintains that such cases can function analogously to case studies in medicine or law, informing and sometimes challenging general theoretical claims.

8.3 Personalism and Relational Categories

Her methodology is also marked by a personalist orientation: central categories are love, union, will, and interiority rather than primarily legal or institutional notions. This shapes how she frames questions of atonement, grace, and justification, often preferring relational language (mutual indwelling, healing of the will) over juridical metaphors (penalty, debt, imputation).

8.4 Reception and Critique of Method

Advocates see her methodological synthesis as enlarging the scope of analytic philosophical theology, making room for historical sources, narratives, and affective understanding without abandoning argumentative rigor. They also note affinities with developments in narrative ethics, virtue epistemology, and analytic biblical theology.

Critics raise several concerns:

• That narrative and empathy may lack the intersubjective checkability associated with analytic standards of evidence.
• That strong dependence on Aquinas could limit engagement with non‑Thomistic or non‑Christian perspectives.
• That the personalist focus might underplay structural or communal dimensions of religious life emphasized in other theological traditions.

Debate continues over how far Stump’s methodological innovations can or should be generalized within philosophy of religion.

9. Impact on Philosophy of Religion and Theology

9.1 Influence on Analytic Philosophy of Religion

Stump’s work has been influential in reshaping several key debates:

Her writings are frequently used in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, and her positions are standard reference points in handbooks and companions to philosophy of religion.

9.2 Contribution to Philosophical Theology and Atonement Debates

In theology, Atonement has become a major interlocutor in discussions of the meaning of Christ’s work. Stump’s personalist, healing‑of‑the‑will model interacts with, and in some respects reconfigures, traditional theories (penal substitution, satisfaction, moral influence). Theologians sympathetic to classical theism often draw on her integration of Aquinas with contemporary concerns, while others critique her account for privileging individual over communal or political dimensions of salvation.

9.3 Cross‑Disciplinary Resonances

Stump’s appeal to narrative, empathy, and personal knowledge has resonated beyond philosophy of religion:

• In moral psychology, her work is cited in arguments about the role of empathy and narrative understanding in moral deliberation.
• In literature and religion, scholars engage her claims about the cognitive value of stories.
• In pastoral and practical theology, some authors use her analyses of suffering and divine love as conceptual frameworks for counseling and spiritual care, while also questioning how easily her philosophical accounts translate into practice.

9.4 Critical Reception

While widely respected for rigor and breadth, her work faces ongoing critical engagement. Objections focus on the adequacy of her theodicy to horrendous evils, the coherence of divine simplicity, and the universality of her narrative‑based methodology. These debates themselves attest to her role in setting much of the contemporary agenda in analytic philosophical theology.

10. Legacy and Historical Significance

10.1 Place in Late 20th–21st‑Century Philosophy

Stump is often regarded as one of the key figures in the late‑20th‑century revival of classical theism within analytic philosophy. Her sustained engagement with Aquinas helped reposition medieval thought as a living resource rather than merely historical background. Commentators frequently list her among the principal architects of analytic Thomism and among the most influential contemporary philosophers of religion.

10.2 Methodological Legacy

Her integration of analytic rigor, historical scholarship, and narrative case studies has contributed to a methodological broadening of philosophical theology. Subsequent work on narrative theodicy, the epistemic value of stories, and the role of empathy in religious understanding often takes her proposals as a starting point—either to be extended or contested. In this sense, she is seen as part of a wider movement that challenges earlier, more narrowly argumentative conceptions of analytic philosophy of religion.

10.3 Lasting Themes

Several themes are likely to remain central to discussions influenced by her work:

10.4 Assessments and Open Questions

Assessments of Stump’s historical significance vary with broader views about classical theism and analytic theology. Supportive voices portray her as a major consolidator and innovator, whose synthesis of Aquinas, analytic philosophy, and narrative will shape philosophical theology for decades. More critical perspectives suggest that future developments may move beyond some of her commitments (e.g., strong simplicity, individual‑focused models of salvation) while still drawing on her methodological insights.

In either case, her work is widely expected to remain a standard point of reference in discussions of God, suffering, freedom, and the epistemic role of narrative in religious thought.