Craig Boyd IS THOMAS AQUINAS A DIVINE COMMAND THEORIST? T WO of the most able defenders of the divine command morality (here- after, DCM), Janine Marie Idziak and Philip Quinn, have cited Aquinas as an authority in their behalf as they defend the divine command account of morality.' Their two approaches focus on different aspects of Aquinas' thought, yet they both appeal to Aquinas as an authority in defense of their own positions. Idziak finds in Aquinas' treatisezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYWVUTSRQ De Veritate grounds for a di- vine command account of justice. Since justice is a virtue of the will, and God is justice itself, divine commands must be founded upon the divine will. Quinn, however, appeals to the more traditional texts in Aquinas' treatment of divine law, Summa Theologiae PIP' .100, 8. In this question Aquinas considers the three problematic cases of God's commands that appear to violate the pre- cepts of the decalogue: God's command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God's command for the Israelites to despoil the Egyptians, and God's command to Hosea to have sexual relations with an adulteress. As Quinn sees it, it is the di- vine command that alters the nature of the situation. Quinn concludes "divine commands make a moral difference in all three cases. More recently, Paul Rooney has used Aquinas as an authority for his de- fense of the DCM.^ For Rooney, Aquinas simply represents the mainstream of Western Christian thought on how there is in ambiguity regarding God's power to command anything, and yet Rooney apparently sees Aquinas as em- phasizing the divine will. He asserts that "God's will is in a sense not subject to the eternal law."^ In the course of his discussion, Rooney appeals to Aquinas in defense of a kind of contemporary moral voluntarism. In this paper, I challenge the use Idziak, Quinn and Rooney make of Aquinas in defense of their own views on the DCM. I contend that these thinkers distort Aquinas' views by ignoring the broader contextual evidence. 1. IDZIAK ON AQUINAS ON JUSTICE In her article "In Search of Good Positive Reasons for an Ethics of Divine Commands: A Catalogue of Arguments" Janine Marie Idziak claims that "The defense of any ethical theory operates on two levels: the refutation of objec- tions which may be brought against the theory, and the presentation of reasons in support of the position and for preferring it to other ethical systems."^ In her The Modern Schoolman, LXXV, March 1998 209