III. Is there goodness or praiseworthiness in the exterior act in addition to that in the interior act?
QUODLIBETAL QUESTIONS Q.
One difference between what is imputable in the first way and what is imputable in the second way is that all that is required for something imputable in the first way is the power of the will and what is required for the will's act, such as understanding.
And the reason is that something imputable in the first way is immediately the effect of the will; we can understand what Augustine says in Reconsiderations I.8.3 and 22.4—"nothing is so much in the power of the will as the will itself"—as applying to this sort of act. (Take 'will' as meaning not the will's being but rather the will's eliciting its own act.) By contrast, some power other than the will that carries out the act is required for an act that is imputable in the second sense.
From this it follows that there is, in one sense, greater contingency or indifference with respect to an act that is imputable in the first way, because nothing other than the will is required for such an act, given a sufficient presentation on the part of the intellect. Hence, no posterior causes can prevent that act from being elicited.
By contrast, an act that is imputable in the second way depends on some other power, and that power can be prevented by its own weakness from executing that act. So the contingency of that sort of act does not derive solely from the indifference of the will, as the contingency of the first sort of act does. So since the contingency of any other cause or power in its acting is further removed from the contingency in an unqualified sense that characterizes the will in its acting, it follows that the contingency of an act that is imputable in the first way is greater than the contingency of an act that is imputable in the second way.
Yet to the extent that an act that is imputable in the second way depends on more things, and a deficiency in any one of them can prevent that effect from coming about, it can be said that such an effect is more contingent—or, more properly, contingent in more ways.
III. Is there goodness or praiseworthiness in the exterior act in addition to that in the interior act?
Concerning the third main topic, it can be said, first, that an exterior act—that is, a commanded act—has its own moral goodness, distinct from that of the interior, elicited act. And second, we shall see in what way the exterior act does or does not have its own imputability.
A. The exterior act has its own moral goodness
The first claim is proved in two ways.
First, from Augustine, On the Trinity XIII.5.8: "An evil will by itself makes someone unhappy, but the power to fulfill the desires of his evil will makes him unhappier still. Truly, though someone would be unhappy in virtue of his evil willing, he would be less unhappy if he could not have any of the things that he wrongly willed." Now clearly this cannot be understood to be true of the unhappiness of
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punishment, since someone who desires but cannot have what he desires is punished more than someone whose desire is fulfilled. So it is understood in terms of the unhappiness of fault. Therefore, a bad exterior act adds to the unhappiness of fault that already existed in the bad interior act.
32 Second, the same conclusion is proved by argument. We established in the first article that the moral goodness of an act is the completeness of those features that the agent's right reason dictates should characterize the act. Now the completeness of the features that ought to characterize an interior act according to right reason is distinct from the completeness of the features that ought to characterize an exterior act.
Therefore, there is a distinct moral goodness and consequently a distinct moral badness, whether merely privative (because the act lacks one of the features that ought to characterize it) or contrary (because there is something in the act that is incompatible with some feature that ought to characterize it).
33 Proof of the minor premise: Right reason does not dictate that some feature characterize an act if it is impossible for that feature to characterize the act. And in fact it is impossible for what does or can characterize an interior act to characterize an exterior act—understanding this claim to apply to both acts as they exist in real being, and to what characterizes those acts as they exist in real being. For although what characterizes an interior act in reality could in a certain way—denominatively, by extrinsic denomination—characterize an exterior act qua object willed, not qua elicited, the same feature does not characterize both the interior act and the exterior act in the same way. For the operative powers do not have the capacity for one and the same act, or even for an act of the same essential nature, and consequently their respective acts likewise do not have the capacity to be characterized by suitable features of the same essential nature. Or at least—and this is all I need to establish the claim at issue here—what is suitable to one can be distinct from what is suitable to the other.
On this basis it is clear how to reply to objections raised against what I said above.
34 Objections:
First, the truth of an act of understanding is one and the same as the truth of the object understood. Therefore, by parity of reasoning, the goodness of an act of willing is one and the same as the goodness of the object willed. The antecedent is clear from examples: just as the truth of a principle is immediate, so also the cognition of a principle can be said to be immediate, and the cognition of a conclusion mediate.
Similarly, cognition of a principle is on the basis of its terms, and the cognition of a conclusion is on the basis of principles; and truth characterizes such cognitions accordingly.
35 Confirmation: where one thing is on account of another, there is only one thing.
And an exterior act has goodness only on account of the interior act. Therefore, the goodness of the exterior act is not distinct from that of the interior act.
QUODLIBETAL QUESTIONS Q.
Moreover, according to Anselm in On the Virginal Conception [c. 5], sin is the lack of required justice. Now there is only one lack of required justice in an interior and an exterior act, since, according to Anselm, it is only in the will that there can be justice or injustice.
Moreover, where there is one turning-away and one inordinate desire, there is evidently one formal character of sin. And there is only one turning-away in the interior and exterior act, since only the will can turn away from the end, just as only the will can turn toward it. And inordinate desire, which Augustine sometimes calls
"cupidity," is, as he says in 83 Diverse Questions, question 36, properly the destruction of charity. Therefore, it exists properly in a power in which charity is apt to exist, which is the will alone.
Reply to the first [n. 34]: Granted that one and the same truth that is formally the truth of an act of understanding is in another way—objectively—the truth of the object understood, insofar as the object has being in the intellect itself, and similarly that the goodness that is formally the goodness of an act of willing is in some way— denominatively—the goodness of the object willed insofar as it is willed, nevertheless that act can very well have its own goodness as brought into real being outside the will, as that act in its real being has a required conformity or suitability of its own.
As for the confirmation [n. 35], that argument can be used to support the opposite conclusion. For the exterior act has its suitability to its rule through the interior act
(in other words, by the mediation of the interior act). Therefore, it has a distinct suitability from that of the interior act, since a given thing is not its own cause or an intermediate with respect to itself, nor is anything the cause or basis for being an intermediate with respect to itself.
Acts of intellect provide an example of this: although a conclusion has its truth from a principle, it does still have its own truth, because it has its own conformity between what is affirmed and what is in fact the case, or between the conclusion's own terms. For a conclusion is not formally true by the truth of the principle; rather, it is true by a mediated and demonstrated truth, and thus it has a mediated, demonstrable truth.
Similarly, many conclusions that follow in an ordered way from the same principle have their own distinct truths, and perhaps a prior truth is truer and more necessary, since it does not depend on a posterior truth for its necessity, but rather the reverse.
Similarly, false conclusions that contradict the same truth have their own falsities, since each has its own incompatibility (disconvenientia) between what is expressed and what is in fact the case.
Something similar is true of acts of will. It is not only an act of willing that is apt to have its own suitability or lack of suitability to a correct dictate; a commanded act is likewise apt to have its own suitability and conformity, through an act of willing. And although the elicited act and the commanded act ought to be conformed to one and
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the same thing, the acts that are to be conformed are distinct, and so the acts have distinct conformities or suitabilities, albeit to the same thing.
40 You might object that truth does not characterize anything outside the intellect: it characterizes only an act of the intellect or the object as it exists in the intellect. So, by analogy, goodness does not characterize an exterior act as elicited externally, but5 strictly as the object of an act of willing.
I reply: the inference can be denied in keeping with the claim in Metaphysics VI, near the end [1027b25–30], that "False and true are not in things, as if what is good were true and what is bad, false, but rather in the mind."
Alternatively, the antecedent can be denied on the grounds that if some intellect is the rule for what is understood—as is the case for the divine intellect as exemplar and rule for a creature—the latter can be called true not merely as it is actually cognized but also as it is in itself, since in itself, according to its very being, it is modeled on and in conformity with its exemplar.
41 To the second objection [n. 36] I say that justice can be understood in one way as habitual correctness—in other words, as a habit of the will—and on the basis of justice in this sense a will is said to be right habitually, even when it is not actually willing anything. In this sense someone who has such a habit is called just, and someone who lacks such a habit or has a contrary habit of injustice is called unjust, even when asleep. In another way, correctness is understood as actual correctness, or correctness in actuality, which is the conformity of an elicited act to its rule.
The first alternative is pretty well generally conceded. Proof of the second: an act is not said to be formally correct or just on the basis of habitual justice in the will, since the will could have an act of venial sin or an indifferent act, neither of which is a just or correct act, while retaining habitual justice. Instead, the correctness on the basis of which an act is said to be formally correct must be present precisely when the act itself is present. Indeed, perhaps it is not present immediately in the will but rather in the act, and it is present in the will through the act, since the will is apt to be the immediate subject of a habit and an operation, and actual justice is neither a habit nor an operation, but only a certain feature of the act itself, namely, the act's conformity to its rule.
42 This would be more obvious if an act did not pass out of existence straightaway but instead endured for some time. For example, a motion that is numerically one and one in species can be fast in one part of its duration and then slow in the next part; from this it follows that neither fastness nor slowness is altogether identical with the motion itself. Similarly, an act could at first be elicited in conformity with a correct rule, and that very same act, continued, could afterward be elicited in a way that does not conform with that rule. Thus, one and the same act would be correct as to its first part and incorrect as to its later part. But since in fact an act passes out of existence
5 Reading sed (MSS), as the sense requires, for seu (Alluntis, Frank).
QUODLIBETAL QUESTIONS Q.
straightaway—or, if it does endure, its correctness typically endures along with it, so that it is not the case that one and the same enduring act changes from correct to incorrect or that a correct part is succeeded by an incorrect part—the difference between an act and its correctness is not as obvious. Nonetheless, the difference is in fact established by the foregoing arguments and by the fact that a relation that does not follow necessarily from the nature of its foundation is not altogether identical with that foundation. And indeed correctness does not follow necessarily from the nature of an act.
And although primary actual justice exists strictly in an act of willing, there can be secondary actual justice in a commanded act through an act of willing. For a commanded act has a correctness of its own, though that correctness is dependent on the correctness of an act of willing.
So the claim that there is no justice except in the will is true of habitual justice, which is correctness preserved for its own sake, as Anselm defines it. For preserved properly characterizes a habit. Extending its scope further, it is also true of primary actual justice, since the will preserves primary actual justice for its own sake: that is, it retains justice in its act, which habitual justice elicits as correct. But if we're talking about secondary actual justice, we should say that it is not in the will subjectively, but only causally. Thus Anselm's definition of justice can still be upheld as applying to secondary actual justice in a certain way: it is "correctness of the will," not as formally inhering in the will, but of the will as cause and as commanding, and it is "preserved for its own sake" as an effect brought about voluntarily.
Certain corollaries, which further clarify the claim at issue, follow from this.
One corollary is this. With one and the same habitual justice remaining present, there are as many actual justices as there are actual elicited acts. And one of these justices can be more intense than another, if one act is elicited with greater effort than the other—yet even so, the habit would remain equal. Indeed, a prior act can be elicited with greater effort and accordingly have actual justice corresponding to the intensity of the act, and a later act can be elicited with less effort, even though clearly at that point the habit is certainly not less.
Another corollary: each individual bad act has its own actual badness. For just as each act is apt to have its own goodness because it is apt to have its own suitability or conformity—whether to the same rule or to different rules—so too each individual bad act has its own lack [of goodness].
Another corollary: Badnesses differ in the same way in which the goodnesses that ought to be present differ: if the goodnesses differ in species, the corresponding badnesses differ in species; if the goodnesses differ numerically, the corresponding badnesses differ numerically. For privations are distinguished in the same way as the positive features of which they are privations. For example, deafness and blindness are specifically different privations, just as the power of hearing and the power of
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sight are specifically different positive features; and this blindness and that blindness are numerically different privations, just as this power of sight and that power of sight are numerically different positive features.
46 From this it is clear that the object toward which one turns is not the basis on which both vices (speaking naturally [physice]) and sins (speaking theologically) are distinguished—in species, in number, and even in genus—since such turning toward some particular object does not of itself constitute sin as sin or distinguish one sin from another.6 Instead, the distinction is based on the distinctive character of this particular privation, which is the formal basis for distinguishing privations, just as the distinctive character of this positive feature would be the formal basis for distinguishing positive features.
47 It is also clear how one sin is more serious than another, whether we understand this in terms of one species being more serious than another or of one sin in a given species being more serious than another sin in that same species. For in whatever way an act ought to have a greater goodness—whether in terms of its species or in terms of its intensity within its species—it is privatively worse if it lacks the goodness it ought to have; and if it has some positive characteristic incompatible with that goodness, it is contrarily worse.
48 Third, it is clear how sins can continue to infinity in the damned and yet their nature is not consumed, nor is any natural capacity or anything else in their nature. For no created nature can corrupt an intellectual nature or anything natural in such a nature; and if some created nature could diminish any such thing in an intellectual nature, it could eventually totally corrupt that nature.
49 Similarly, a contingent effect does not necessarily accompany its cause, so the opposite of that effect, or of some condition in that effect, does not destroy or diminish such a cause. Now badness in an act is a privation in something that is a contingent effect of the will. Therefore, it does not in any way diminish the will itself.
50 Then what does one sin perpetually added to another take away?7 After all, according to Augustine in the Enchridion [4.12], a sin "is bad precisely to the extent that it takes away some goodness."
I reply: actual badness in an elicited act does not take away a good that is present together with it at the same time—that much is obvious—and it need not be the case that it takes away a good that was previously present, since, as I said earlier [n. 42], an act that passes out of existence straightaway does not change from good to bad. And if you should suggest that the good taken away by sinning is the habit of grace that 6 See Ordinatio II dd. 34–7 q. 2 n. 59.
7 Reading Quid igitur (or ergo) adimit peccatum semper additum peccato (MSS). Both Alluntis and Frank omit semper, but since what is at issue here is the infinitely accumulating sins of the damned, the reading of the MSS makes sense.
QUODLIBETAL QUESTIONS Q.
was previously present, that cannot be true of every sin, since a subsequent sin does not take away that habit, because it has already been taken away. Nor does the first sin by its very nature take away that habit more than a subsequent sin does: for if it did, the first sin would be unqualifiedly more serious than a subsequent sin because it would take away a greater good. But in fact it sometimes happens that a subsequent sin is, in its own right, more serious than the first sin; and thus it would be apt to take away a greater good. Thus, it takes away that actual good in its own right, and it would also take away that habitual good in its own right, if that habitual good were present.
So sin in general takes away the good that ought to be present, just as in someone who is born blind, blindness does not take away the sight that was once present, but the sight that ought to be present. Thus, as Augustine says in Literal Commentary on Genesis XI.23.30 concerning the angel who sinned, "He fell, not from what he had received, but from what he would have received if he had willed to be subject to God."
And if sin were added to sin unto infinity, each sin would take away the goodness that ought to be in each particular act. And just as there is nothing untenable about one finite good's virtually containing infinitely many effects elicited successively, neither is there anything untenable about its virtually containing the infinitely many correctnesses that ought to belong to those effects.
As for the third objection, about turning away [n. 37]: Turning away from the end can be understood as actual willing-against the end. It is clear that not everyone who sins turns away in this sense, since perhaps quite frequently people sin without actually thinking about the end—or if they do think about it, they do not regard it as something bad in itself.8
In another sense, turning away can be understood not as formal but as quasivirtual. This sort of turning away can be said to characterize the will's acceptance of something incompatible with a volition—at least an efficacious volition—of the end or with the attainment of the end, as when the will wills something that is altogether inordinate and interferes with one's attainment of the end: for example, something contrary to a divine commandment that must be observed if the end is to be attained.
Even in this way of understanding it, turning away belongs only to the will.
In a third and broader sense, any badness that separates one from efficaciously willing the end or from attaining it can be called a turning away. And this sort of badness can be in a commanded act of will, since commanding an act that is bad in this way is incompatible with the will's efficaciously willing the ultimate end or even attaining it.
So just as the possibility of an act's being referred or ordered to the end can be called a turning toward the end, the impossibility of an act's being ordered to the end can be called a turning away. So the claim that there is only one turning away in the interior and exterior act is true if you understand turning away in the first two ways: there is
8 non illum in se ex malitia [peccans] respicit.
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in fact such turning away only in the interior act. As for the further claim that turning away in this sense is the formal characteristic of sin, that must be denied. Indeed, the fact that the commanded act cannot be ordered to the end is sufficient for that act to be a sin; the impossibility of its being ordered to the end could be called a turning away in the third sense explained above.
53 As for the additional point about inordinate desire [n. 37], if "inordinate desire" is understood as a bad will, that is, as immoderate willing, inordinate desire is not formally present in every sin; rather, it concurs in the sin either formally or causally.
So if inordinate desire or cupidity is to be convertible with sin, one will have to extend the former notions so that they apply not only to an immoderate interior act of will but also to a commanded act.
B. The exterior act is imputable 54 What we should say about the second topic in this article [n. 30], imputability, is clear from the distinction made in the second article [n. 27]. For if we take 'imputable' strictly, only what is immediately in the will's power is said to be imputable, and thus it is clear that only willing and willing-against are imputable.
But if we take 'imputable' more broadly, so that what is unqualifiedly and fully in the will's power is said to be imputable, then a commanded act is properly imputable, since although it is not in the will's power immediately, it is nonetheless in the will's power mediately, through an act of willing. That act of willing is in the will's power not only in its own right but also as the principle of the exterior act, since the will can bring about the exterior act through the interior act. Example: a slave kills when his master commands him to. That killing is imputed to the master because the slave's act was in the master's power, though mediately, through his act of commanding.
55 Suppose someone argues, as before [n. 36], that the exterior act is imputable only mediately, through the interior act. I reply: that establishes precisely the claim I mean to defend, namely that the imputability of the exterior act is distinct from that of the interior act. For one and the same thing is not an intermediate or a basis for mediating with respect to itself. And this point can be elucidated in the same way that the corresponding point about the distinct goodness [of the interior and exterior acts] was elucidated earlier [n. 36]. For although the terminus is the same, in distinct foundations there are distinct relations to the same terminus. The interior act and the exterior act are distinct foundations. Therefore, although imputability characterizes both acts in relation to the same will, they are distinct imputabilities, just as there are distinct relations of being-causable or of being-subject-to-the-power-of-the-cause, even though the cause is the same.9
9 At this point there is an additional text found (with some variation) in Clm 23572 and 26309 and included in a footnote by Frank: