84. Holy subjective intentions or holy objective deeds?
84. HOLY SUBJECTIVE INTENTIONS OR HOLY OBJECTIVE DEEDS?
Which of the two is the key to holiness?
. . . [F]or a thing to be evil, one single defect suffices, whereas for it to be good . . . it is not enough for it to be good in one point only, it must be good in every respect. . . . [I]f the will be good from its intention of the end, this is not enough to make the external action good. . . (I-II,20,2).
To ask whether objective deeds or subjective motives are the key to holiness is like asking which is the key to health, the heart or the lungs?
Morality is like a work of art, or like bodily health: all the dimensions must be good for the work to be good. An otherwise healthy body can die if any one of its systems fail.
. . . [T]he difference between good and evil is applicable to both the interior and external act. . . . [T]he interior act of the will and the external action, considered morally, are one act . . . these two goodnesses or malices (evils), of the internal and external acts, are ordained to one another (I-II,20,3).
There is an inherent oneness between motive and act, whether good or evil. You can’t murder or rape out of love, and you can’t give your life for another out of hate. If you do a bad deed out of a good motive, the badness of the deed will pollute your motive too, if not immediately then in its future consequences; and if you do a good deed out of a bad motive, the bad motive will pollute the deed too, and what comes from the deed. No compromise with evil is possible.
We often wonder why a good intention is not enough. “Isn’t sincerity of heart the only thing God cares about?” No. And here is the very simple reason why: If . . . by the external action no further goodness or evil be added, it is to no purpose that he who has a good or an evil will does a good deed or refrains from an evil deed—which is unreasonable (I-II,20,4).
Nobody thinks sincerity alone is enough in his surgeon, his financial advisor, or his airline pilot. Only when we’re not dealing with anything objectively real do we reckon good intentions sufficient. If good and evil are objectively real, then good intentions are not sufficient.
They are, of course, necessary—absolutely necessary. Good intentions are like roots: crucial beginnings, but not the whole plant. Good intentions are like babies: we start there, but we don’t end there. In fact, it is only babies that we admire when they merely have good intentions, because we don’t expect them to be able to do much else yet in the real world.
If you walk off a cliff sincerely believing that it is a swimming pool, you will not find water, you will find death. If you try very, very hard and very sincerely to make an odd number by adding only even numbers, you will not succeed, ever. But there are real moral roads as well as real physical and mathematical roads, and they lead to really different destinations. That’s why God cares so much about deeds as well as intentions. Only three of the Ten Commandments (the first one, about adoring, and the last two, about coveting), define subjective intentions; the rest define objective deeds.