Not much escapes the intellect and imagination of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. Whether it be love, children, education, moral reasoning, happiness or the proper dispositions for human existence, St. Thomas seems an expert in all of it. Crime and criminal conduct are no exceptions to this general tendency with him. Not only does he have much to say about it, what he relates is perpetually fresh and surely the bedrock of what is now taken for granted. In this short treatise, the focus targets St. Thomas’s criminal codification – his law of crimes.

Indeed the magnanimity of his crimes code is a subject matter not yet treated in any detail in the scholarly literature. While parts and pieces are covered in many quarters, the literature has yet to develop a systematic, codified examination of Thomistic criminal law. The essence of the endeavor is threefold: first, how does St. Thomas factor the nature of the human person into the concept of criminal culpability and personal responsibility; second, what types of criminal conduct does St. Thomas specifically delineate and define; and lastly, what is Thomas’s view of mitigation and defense, as well as the corresponding punishment meted out for criminal conduct? This short commentary zeroes in on Thomistic Criminal Law – a project which will illuminate the root, the heritage and the foundation of modern criminal codification.

After a career of teaching law, ethics, and the relationship between criminal activity and the moral imperative, Charles Nemeth wants to revisit the post-modern 'caricature' of the God who is so loving and merciful that one overlooks the urgency of the human requirement to be good at all times.
            Nemeth traces the modern shift in considering God as judge to the God who just wants to wipe away tears. If we look in Scripture, there are harsh words for the person who dismisses moral action as less than a continual call to evaluation and conversion. One also sees the detrimental effect of granting political underpinnings to all interpretations of the Bible and its indications of what righteous action is. Nemeth asserts that not only is the measure of law worthless without a kind of hardness toward offenders, but charity itself has no backbone without justice. Restoration requires judgment, but the Judge who speaks harshly is the one who cultivates the desire for his softness. Post-modern scholars don't worry about receiving God's mercy, but they really ought to define the parameters of human responsibility. Any human attempt to define mercy and compassion on the part of God will always fall short, we ought to save our energies to live up to the moral life and take Christ as a perfect example and proof of the possibility.