14. Is moral goodness conformity to God's will?
Moral Goodness
actually or virtually proceeds from the virtue of charity. Thus a sinner, lacking grace and the supernatural virtue of charity, could still perform an act that is naturally good, or even morally good, because it is in accord with right reason, without necessarily acquiring sanctifying grace. Or a person in the state of grace might perform a similar action without meriting an increase in the supernatural virtue of charity if an actual or virtual intention of doing such out of love of God is a necessary condition for merit. Hence Scotus' conclusion:
There are many indifferent acts, therefore, which are such not merely because of the being they have as a specific nature, but also according to the being they have as something moral. And there are also acts that are indifferent as regards the goodness that is meritorious or the evil that is demeritorious, for one individual good can be of this sort and another of that sort. Many individual elicited acts can also be indifferent, because they are neither the meritorious sort nor the other, and we are not speaking here of nonhuman acts, such as stroking the beard or brushing off a bit of straw and suchlike, acts which originate with the sense imagination and not from any free impulse, for freely elicited acts can also be indifferent.
The selection is a translation of a revision of the Wadding edition based on Codices A, V, and S.
14. Is moral goodness conformity to God's will?
This question occurs only in the Ordinatio and not in the earlier Lectura. To understand what prompted it, we must look at dist. 48 of the first book of the Sentences, where Peter Lombard explains in what way our will ought to conform to the divine will. He writes:
You should realize that sometimes the will of man is bad when it wills what God wills and the will of man is good when it wills something other than what God does. For to recognize what makes the human will good, you must look to what it ought to will and for what purpose. For there is a difference between God's will and man's will, such that in certain matters what it behooves God to will is different from what it behooves man to will. Hence
Augustine in his Enchiridion says, "Sometimes a man in the goodness of his will desires something that God does not desire, even though God's will is also good, nay much more fully and more surely good (for his will never can be evil): for example, if a good son is anxious that his father should live, when it is God's good will that he should die. Again, it is possible for a man with an evil will to desire what God wills in his goodness: for example, if a bad son wishes his father to die, when this is also the will of God. It is plain that the former wishes what God does not wish, and that the latter wishes what God does wish; and yet the filial love of the former is more in harmony with the good will of God, though the son's desire is different from God's, than the want of filial affection of the latter, though the son's desire is the
Introduction same as God's. Thus, in determining whether a man's desire is one to be approved of or disapproved of, it is so necessary to consider what it is proper for man and what it is proper for God to desire." For one can will some good that it is not appropriate for that person to will and one can will some good that it is appropriate to will, and yet will it for some purpose that is not right; and therefore, the will in such a case is not good.
Peter Lombard, paraphrasing Augustine, cites the case Scotus quotes in the initial argument to the contrary:
The Jews willed that Christ suffer and die, something which Christ also willed; and still they sinned ("Forgive them, Father," he said, "for they know not what they do").
Obviously Lombard and Augustine have in mind the fact that man has been elevated to a supernatural state and destined to share the inner life of the Trinity. Consequently, actions are called "good" or "bad" not merely from the standpoint of moral goodness, but also from that of meritorious goodness. To be meritorious, however, the act must also be morally good, and Scotus restricts his discussion to this level, reiterating the point he made in the earlier selections that in order for an act to be morally good, it is not enough that the object of the act be good. For this only confers what he previously called "generic goodness." Before the concrete action can be morally good, all the circumstances must be good. "A defect in anyone suffices to make the act morally bad." As he says in answer to the counterargument at the beginning, "Goodness depends not solely on the object, but on all the other circumstances as well, particularly upon the end." If one performs an otherwise good action out of love of God, for example, it is clear that the moral and meritorious goodness of the action stems from the fact that it represents a fulfillment of that primary moral law,
"God should be loved."
The Latin original is from the Vatican edition VI, pp. 387-89.
PART IV: GOD AND THE MORAL LAW
IS. God's justice This question occurs not in the explicit treatise on God in the first book of the Sentences, but in the last portion of Bk. IV, where the "Master" (Peter Lombard) deals with the "four last things" -death, judgment, hell, and heaven. As Scotus says at the beginning:
Because the forty-sixth distinction treats of how both justice and the mercy of God concur in the punishment of evildoers, therefore four questions are raised here: first, whether there is justice in God; second, whether there is
God and the Moral Law
mercy in God; third, whether in God justice is distinct from mercy; and fourth, whether in his punishment of evildoers justice and mercy concur on God's part.
We have translated only the first and most important of the four questions, because it has the most bearing on this section. Justice refers primarily to God's dealings with creatures in rewarding and punishing them-in short, in giving them what is their due. In the present question, Scotus first discusses the nature of justice, initially in terms used by St. Anselm of Canterbury. The saint was concerned with showing, first, that freedom is not primarily or even essentially the power to sin, but rather the power to preserve justice, and second, that the will is able to do so because of its affection for justice, which frees it from the need to seek everything other than self only insofar as it serves the interests of self or nature. Anselm went on to define the justice that the will seeks in the words Scotus quotes here: "Justice is rectitude of will observed, preserved, served, for its own sake." The Latin "servatus" has all three connotations. It means simply that our will loves things objectively for what they are in themselves, and not just for what they are in relation to ourselves. When the will does act in this way, that act is just, upright, and honest, and the will acquires the virtue of justice.
Scotus goes on to specify "this most general notion" (ratio gener, alissima) by adding to it Aristotle's notion of justice, viz., that "it has to do with others," namely, with rendering them what is their due. He spells out briefly some of the main divisions of justice that Aristotle gives and then turns to the question at issue. How much of all this is applicable to God in his dealings with creatures?
As we shall see again in the subsequent question, Scotus will not accept the Averroistic necessitarianism that was current in the arts faculty at Paris, and had sparked the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris. God, the theologians contended, was not necessitated by his nature to create at all, and was free to create otherwise than he did. This freedom introduced a radical con' tingency at the basis of the whole natural order, something that seemed to be the very antithesis of what one could logically reason to about God's relationship to creation. Scotus, however, was concerned to save both the freedom of God and the contingency of his relationship to creatures, and at the same time show he was ordinatissime volens, i.e., one who willed first things first and each honestly in accord with its intrinsic value.
In spelling out how this Anselmian-Aristotelian conception of justice he had worked out in his own mind can be applied to God, he also