THE CURIOUS CASE OF IVAN KARAMAZOV: A THOMISTIC ACCOUNT OF WISDOM AND PRIDE ALINA BEARY Baylor University Thomas Aquinas famously argues that it is not necessary to be virtuous in order to be wise. To many contemporary moral philosophers, this claim signals Aquinas’s failure to address the inter- relatedness of our moral and intellectual life. I conduct a case study of Ivan Karamazov to dem- onstrate that this view is mistaken. After sketching Ivan’s character, I present Aquinas’s accounts of wisdom and pride and their nuanced relationship. I argue that Ivan illustrates the Thomistic view that pride, though not an insurmountable obstacle to one’s acquisition of some intellectual virtues, makes it impossible for anyone to achieve wisdom. The vice of pride there- fore proves truly devastating to one’s intellectual life, since wisdom, for Aquinas, is the highest and most important of intellectual virtues. INTRODUCTION In Summa Theologica IaIIae.58.5, Aquinas claims that someone can have the virtues of under- standing, science, art, and wisdom, while completely lacking moral virtues. 1 On the one hand, this strikes us as intuitively right: we can easily come up with several examples of morally defi- cient but brilliant people whose work is well respected and received. On the other hand, it seems equally obvious that someone’s ability to achieve intellectual excellence is affected by (at least some of) the excellences or deficiencies of her moral character. Does this second intuition signal Aquinas’s failure to account for the interrelatedness of our moral and intellectual life? Many contemporary ethicists seem to think so. 2 Against this assessment, I argue that Aquinas accom- modates both of these seemingly conflicting intuitions. Even though Aquinas holds that moral virtues are not required for the possession of intellectual virtues, I suggest that he could consis- tently say that perfect and imperfect moral virtues can assist the acquisition of intellectual vir- tues. 3 Likewise, I argue that he could consistently say that specific moral vices can prevent someone from acquiring intellectual virtues. I begin to construct a Thomistic account of the way in which moral vices can affect intellec- tual virtues by concentrating on pride’s effects on the intellectual virtue of wisdom. I use Ivan Karamazov, a character from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, as a case study for my investigation. 4 After sketching Ivan’s character, I present Aquinas’s accounts of wisdom and pride. I then explore some relations between wisdom and pride as these are illustrated in Ivan’s intellectual character. I argue that pride, though not an insurmountable obstacle in the acquisi- tion of understanding, science, and art, makes it impossible for someone to achieve wisdom. Thus, pride proves truly devastating to one’s intellectual life, since wisdom, for Aquinas, is the highest and most important of intellectual virtues. V C 2017 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. HeyJ •• (2017), pp. ••–••