Chapter 6: Ends
Ends
Metaphysics in Moral Philosophy, the Question of the Last End, and Natural Law
Thomas’s Metaphysics of Morals
At the beginning of the proem to his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Thomas offers a rather striking explanation of the dominant role of metaphysics in human knowledge, and indeed in human life. “As the Philosopher teaches in his Politics,” he says, “whenever many things are ordered to one end, one of them must be regulating or ruling (regulans sive regens), and the others regulated or ruled (regulata sive recta). . . . But all the sciences and arts”—all the human disciplines—“are ordered to one thing, namely the perfection of man, which is his bliss. And so it is necessary that one of them be to all the others as the ruler (rectrix), which rightly merits the name of wisdom. For it belongs to the wise man to order things.”450 Of course, Thomas goes on to identify this wisdom with metaphysics. What does its ruling function consist in? It is just what we saw in chapter 4. Metaphysics is the architectonic science. A passage from Thomas’s Ethics commentary sums it up: “wisdom directs all other sciences, inasmuch as all others assume their principles from it.”451 To repeat, metaphysics is the science of truth. All sciences are ordered toward truth, and that is how, as sciences, they contribute to man’s end. Each science confers mastery over a certain field, disposing the mind to reason rightly to true conclusions about the field. The reasoning starts from certain first principles. Each science, then, is ordered toward truth by virtue of its principles. But metaphysics judges and confirms the principles themselves. In doing this, it orders or directs all the sciences toward truth.
We may tend to think that Thomas is talking only about the speculative sciences. But that remark about directing all the sciences is in the Ethics commentary, after all; and the Metaphysics proem speaks not only of the sciences, but also the arts, which for Thomas are mostly practical disciplines. What I shall wish especially to focus on in this chapter is the role, or set of roles, that Thomas gives to metaphysics in ethical science and in practical thinking generally. First let me give just a little information about his work in this area.
Thomas’s writings on moral matters span his entire career. The major ones include large portions of both the Sentences commentary and the De veritate; the (unfinished) De regno ad regem Cypri; the last third of Book III of the Summa contra gentiles; the Disputed Questions on Evil; the commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics (the latter breaking off at Book III, chapter 6); the Disputed Questions on the Virtues; and the Secunda pars of the Summa theologiae, which is Thomas’s most complete treatment of the moral life. Much of this material is theological, but as usual, it also contains a great deal of philosophy.
On the whole, Thomas’s chief philosophical source in morals is surely Aristotle. In fact, the commentaries on the Ethics and the Politics, as well as the Tabula Libri Ethicorum, seem to have served as direct preparation for the Secunda pars.452 Aristotle figures noticeably even in Thomas’s treatment of the theological virtues, especially charity. Thomas understands charity as a kind of friendship—friendship with God—and his conception of friendship in general owes much to the account of human friendship offered in Nicomachean Ethics VIII and IX.453 On the other hand, Thomas organizes the moral virtues around the four so-called cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance; and in this he knows that he is not following Aristotle.454 He is following Christian authors such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. On particular moral topics, other important sources include Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurists, Macrobius, Nemesius’ De natura hominis (which Thomas attributes to Gregory of Nyssa), and Maimonides.
Thomas makes significant contributions on many specific issues in moral philosophy. If there is anything that especially characterizes his overall handling of the field, however, I think it would be the tendency to adopt an overtly metaphysical viewpoint.455 This is especially visible in the Secunda pars, but it is also present in his other moral writings, including the commentaries on Aristotle. Of course, important connections between ethics and metaphysics can be found in Aristotle himself. For instance, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle relegates the most accurate treatment of the good to “another part of philosophy,” which is surely metaphysics.456 And in the Metaphysics itself he treats two very fundamental elements of his moral thought: the fact that rational powers are open to opposite ways of operating and are determined to one or another by choice, and the distinction between transitive action or production (poiēsis), and immanent action or conduct (praxis).457 Nevertheless, metaphysical treatments of ethical matters are far more abundant in Thomas. This is not very surprising, since he has so much more to say about man’s relation to God.
Man’s relation to God is in fact so fundamental for Thomas’s understanding of the moral life, and revelation is so crucial for his understanding of that relation, that some interpreters have wondered whether his thought really even allows for a purely philosophical science of morals. Later we will take a look at this question. But as a matter of mere fact, it seems undeniable that he considers moral philosophy a valid discipline. Indeed we find him giving it a quite explicit role of “leading by the hand” in theological matters. He applies its order to the account of what we might even call the morality of God Himself. “Having considered the things that pertain absolutely to the will”—he means God’s will and its possession of such perfections as love and mercy and justice458—“we must go on to those that regard intellect and will together. But providence is of this sort . . . . For in moral science too, after the moral virtues, prudence is treated, to which providence seems to pertain.”459 By moral science here he can only mean moral philosophy. For the order that he invokes is that which is observed in the Nicomachean Ethics, and it is the very opposite of that which he himself observes in the Secunda secundae of the Summa, i.e., in moral theology. There he treats prudence prior to justice and the other moral virtues.
But not all of the metaphysics in Thomas’s morals directly regards God. For example, he applies the metaphysics of being and goodness in created substances, which he lays out in the Prima pars, extensively to the analysis of the morality of human actions.460 Likewise, he applies his metaphysics of evil to the treatment of sin.461 This is all the more striking because, in the order of philosophical learning, he puts morals before metaphysics, not after.462 He almost seems to think that, in moral matters, theology gives the deliverances of reason more weight than philosophy itself does; or at least, more than Aristotle does. He says that whereas Aristotle only calls bad someone who harms other—and not, e.g., one who is prodigal with his wealth—“we call bad, in a general way, everything that is repugnant to right reason.”463
The following presentation of Thomas’s thought in the area of moral philosophy must of course be very partial and sketchy. Thomas says that sketchy or general discussions are not of much use in moral matters, because actions are in particulars.464 So I shall not even attempt to give a complete overview of his thought in this field. Rather, for the reasons just indicated, I shall focus mainly on what can be called, for lack of a better expression, his metaphysics of morals. Along the way I shall hazard some inferences about his relation to Aristotle in this area. I do think that this discussion can be of some use. It may not provide much guidance for concrete moral thinking, but it addresses the question of the very possibility of intelligibility and truth in moral matters. Today that is certainly a question, and not just a theoretical one.
Moral Philosophy among the Sciences
At the very beginning of his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Thomas lays out a broad division of the human sciences. Governing the division is the notion of order. Grasping order, he says, is proper to reason, and setting things in order belongs above all to reason’s foremost perfection, which is wisdom. This is the idea that he invoked in the proem to the Metaphysics commentary. But here he develops the point in a different way. Order, he says, is related to reason in four different ways. First, there is order that reason only considers and does not make. Considering this sort of order belongs to what he here calls natural philosophy. He is taking this expression broadly, as the Stoics did, to cover not only the science of mobile things but also mathematics and metaphysics. These are the sciences that Aristotle calls theoretical or speculative, regarding things that we can look at and think about but cannot make or do. Then Thomas cites three fields in which reason both considers and makes order: (a) its own operations, which pertain to logic; (b) the operations of the will; that is, voluntary actions—also called human actions—which pertain to moral philosophy; and (c) the external things that reason causes, which pertain to the mechanical arts. Moral philosophy, then, is not speculative or theoretical, but rather active or practical.
Thomas also observes that order is twofold. There is the order among the parts of a whole or a multitude, and there is the order of the whole or the multitude to its end. The order to the end has priority, because the other is for its sake, as the order among the parts of an army is for the sake of the whole army’s order to its commander. Further on, Thomas reasons that just as the subject of natural philosophy—now taken in the narrower sense—is motion or (to put it concretely) mobile reality, so the subject of moral philosophy is human operation ordered to an end or (to put it concretely) man insofar as he acts voluntarily for an end. In making this comparison, perhaps Thomas has in mind that motion too involves order to an endpoint.
Thomas then divides moral philosophy itself into three parts. The first concerns the actions of individuals. He calls this monastica (from Greek monos, single). This is not a reference to monasticism; he says that it is what the Nicomachean Ethics is about, and ethics is just what we would call it. The other two parts of moral philosophy concern the multitudes to which human beings naturally need to belong, on account of their lack of individual self-sufficiency: the family or domestic community, which is the concern of oeconomica (from oikos, household), and civil society, the concern of politica (from polis, city). These multitudes, Thomas says, have only a qualified sort of unity, unity of order. In a multitude with this sort of unity, not all the operations of the parts are operations of the whole. This is why oeconomica and politica are distinct from each other and from monastica.
The bulk of Thomas’s writings on moral matters pertains to ethics. Most of what he has to say about domestic life is in his treatments of the sacrament of matrimony, the longest being that of the commentary on the Sentences.465 His two overtly political works, the commentary on the Politics and the De regno, are unfinished and do not offer anything close to a complete political theory.466 However, the Secunda pars of the Summa theologiae devotes much attention to topics with obvious political bearing: law, the virtue of justice, the common good, commerce, etc.467 And the treatment of the Old Law contains lengthy discussions of the political conditions in ancient Israel.468
Returning to the fourfold division of the sciences, clearly this is itself an ordering. Each science considers order in some field, but there is also order among the sciences. Here they are distinguished by the relations between their subjects and reason. And the order in which Thomas lists them also seems to be the order in which he thinks that, on the whole, their subjects fall under reason’s apprehension. In other places, Thomas indicates that reason first considers the things whose order it only knows and does not make; among these, the very first are mobile, sensible things. Then reason considers its own operations; then voluntary or moral actions; and finally, external things to be produced through and for the sake of moral actions. At least in this respect, then, natural or speculative philosophy has priority over moral philosophy.
Which science is it that considers this fourfold division and order? It is surely not moral philosophy. In that case, it would be an order pertaining to voluntary activity, one that reason not only knows but also makes. This cannot be right. Reason itself is not the cause of the fact that what it considers relates to it in this fourfold way. It can only consider this fact. The fourfold division pertains to reason’s very nature, which reason does not make. The division is something natural, in the sense of something speculative. Moreover, as a whole, the division covers absolutely everything that reason can consider, which is to say, all beings. Its consideration pertains to metaphysics. The things that reason causes—its own operations, voluntary actions, artifacts—are beings too, and they fall within the metaphysical domain. Evidently, then, it is no accident that Thomas begins the discussion with a reference to wisdom, this being—within philosophy—just another name for metaphysics. In the Ethics commentary, it is Thomas the metaphysician who is introducing us to moral philosophy.
What has just been said should not be taken too far. Thomas does recognize a way of considering all the sciences, including metaphysics, that belongs to moral philosophy itself. Both the Nicomachean Ethics (in Book VI) and the Secunda pars of the Summa theologiae (in scattered places) offer extensive discussions of the intellectual virtues. These are qualities of mind that enable us to hit upon truth in a reliable way, and among them are the sciences. What ethics teaches about the sciences is not what their subjects are or how these relate to human reason, but how the sciences themselves relate to the human will. All intellectual virtues are human perfections or human goods, which is to say, suitable objects of the human will; and their acquisition and exercise, being voluntary activities, are subject to the direction of practical reason.469 Reason both considers and causes an order in the pursuit and use of truth, and this is a topic for moral philosophy. The question of how to give metaphysics itself its due place in human life as a whole is a moral question.
On the other hand, addressing this question presupposes a judgment as to what that due place is. The beginning of the Ethics commentary gave us Thomas’s judgment: wisdom is reason’s, and hence man’s, foremost perfection. He likewise regards wisdom’s exercise, sapiential contemplation, as the very best human activity. The life that is most humanly satisfactory, or that achieves the happiness most fully proportioned to human nature, is the philosophical life. The active life, dedicated chiefly to external affairs, does lead to a sort of happiness, but it is only a secondary sort. Thomas’s main reason for this view, gotten from Aristotle, is that wisdom considers beings that are better than man, divine beings.470 This is as much as to say that if there were nothing divine, the value of purely speculative thought in human life would be much reduced. Along this line, Thomas says that if man were his own ultimate end, his happiness would lie in the activity of practical intellect considering and ordering his actions and passions.471 The reason why man is not his own ultimate end is that there is something higher, the divine, and he is ordered to it.
Notice, moreover, that the task of judging wisdom in this way—as to how its object compares with that of the other virtues—belongs to wisdom itself. It is not moral thought that determines wisdom’s object or that ranks its object in relation to those of other habits of mind. Moral thought only receives this ranking and uses it to formulate rules of action.
Moral philosophy, then, is not the most excellent science. In fact, it is not even the most excellent intellectual virtue concerning human action. That virtue, which we can call a sort of wisdom, but only qualified and practical, is prudence. For moral science, in itself, is confined to universal considerations, whereas action is realized in particulars. Prudence is the quality that perfects reason’s ability to put order into action. However, prudence too is outranked by metaphysics. Prudence does not rule over wisdom, Thomas says (again following Aristotle), but only “leads into it, preparing the way to it, as the doorkeeper to the king.”472
If anything, then, it is wisdom or metaphysics that rules over prudence, and hence over moral philosophy. In part, this is simply because it rules over all human disciplines, as we saw. To be sure, that is not a practical sort of direction. It only regards the content of the sciences, not their pursuit or exercise. Unlike theology, metaphysics is a purely speculative science.473 Speculative thought aims at nothing but the consideration of truth. Evidently, however, this does not mean that the ruling or directing function of metaphysics extends only to other speculative disciplines. Practical disciplines also seek truth. What distinguishes them is that they seek truth, not for its own sake, but in order to guide action by it. But with respect to the nature of truth, this difference is accidental. The intellect may work speculatively or practically, but its nature is the same, and so is the nature of truth, which is its proper object and perfection.474 Metaphysics can very well have a role in directing practical disciplines toward truth, insofar as they too have principles whose truth it can judge and confirm.
In the case of moral philosophy, such principles are manifold. One is the very existence and nature of its subject, voluntary or free action. Thomas offers extensive analyses of the nature of the human will and of its freedom—quite metaphysical analyses, leading all the way back to the causality of God. Another principle of moral philosophy is the will’s object, the good, along with its opposite, evil. Moral philosophy takes the notions of good and evil for granted. Taken absolutely, these are metaphysical notions, and determining their nature—determining whether there even is such a thing as their nature, whether they are anything objective—is a metaphysical task to which Thomas devotes considerable effort; and, as mentioned earlier, he also treats the good and evil proper to human actions, moral good and evil, from a highly metaphysical viewpoint. He does the same with principles of human action other than the will, such as the passions, the habits (virtues and vices), and law. More will be said in the following sub-sections about Thomas’s handling of moral principles.
Moral Philosophy and Moral Theology
Moral philosophy is a practical science. As we saw, this means that it is not only about order in action, but also a source of such order. It consists in knowledge by which to guide or direct the actions that are in our power, those subject to our will or choice. As with any science, this knowledge is reached by reasoning, and the reasoning has starting-points.
Now, the starting point of any practical reasoning, Thomas holds, is an end or a goal. Having a goal in mind, one reasons about what is involved in attaining it, so as to order one’s actions accordingly. In particular fields of action there are particular goals. But moral philosophy treats the entire field of voluntary action, insofar as reason can shed light on it. But if this whole field can be approached as a unity and in a practical way, it is because there is an end to which all human actions are ordered, an end that we are seeking by the sheer fact of acting voluntarily at all. This overarching goal constitutes the most fundamental practical principle. Thomas calls it the last or ultimate end—as it were the endliest end. Its attainment is what he calls happiness (felicitas) or bliss (beatitudo). We all want it. We differ, however, as to what it consists in. Moral science depends above all on the truth about the last end.
Any moral theory that does not give absolute primacy to the last end, then, can hardly be considered Thomistic. The Secunda pars could hardly be clearer about this, beginning as it does with no less than five Questions on man’s last end. At the same time, however, Thomas’s actual teaching about the last end raises a problem for the very possibility of a Thomistic moral philosophy. In fact, the problem is already implicit in the very first article of the Prima pars. There Thomas says,
it was necessary for human salvation that, besides the philosophical disciplines, which are built up by human reason, there be a teaching according to divine revelation. This is chiefly because man is ordered to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason, as it says in Isaiah (64:4): “The eye hath not seen, O God, apart from Thee, what things Thou hast prepared for them that wait for Thee.” But the end must be pre-known by men, who have to order their intentions and actions to an end.475
Being voluntary agents, we cannot but order our actions to some end or other; there is no such thing as acting voluntarily with no end at all in view. But if we do not know what the true end is, we will likely adopt a false one, thereby obstructing the attainment of the true one.
As a way of bringing out the problem that this passage raises for moral philosophy, let me try to forestall two objections that it might raise. One is what we saw in the previous chapter: Thomas thinks that reason can know God. How then can he say that God is an end that surpasses reason? The other is that God obviously exists quite independently of anything we can do. How then can He be an end of our action?
The second question can be answered easily with a distinction. God can be an end of our action, not as a product or result, but as a target to which we can move and cling. Thomas is seeing God as a target whose attainment brings human life to perfect fulfillment, and life is inseparable from activity. Its perfect fulfillment cannot consist in a transitive action or production, since this is itself fulfilled in a product or result; nor can it consist in a motion, since this is fulfilled in a completion that coincides with its cessation. The fulfillment must be in immanent and complete activity. But this can still have an object distinct from it, and God can be our end as an object of immanent and complete activity.476 This, we said, is cognitive and appetitive activity. Bliss lies here, in a union with God by knowledge and love.
This brings us back to the first question. How is God an end unknown to reason? He is so as the object of a knowledge and a love that are themselves unknown to reason. Thomas, we saw, holds that God as He is in Himself, in His very essence, surpasses reason’s grasp. But since the actuality of knower and known are the same, this means that the knowledge of His essence, and the love that such knowledge elicits, likewise surpass it. What Thomas argues in the first five questions of the Prima secundae is that the perfect bliss promised by God, that which goes by the name of eternal life, must consist in this knowledge and love. The point that Thomas is making in the Summa’s very first article is that natural reason lacks not only the experience of this end, but also the power to envision or preconceive it, at least with enough determinacy or concreteness to guide action. An end that is not grasped in itself can be concretely envisioned only in the causes by way of which it can be realized, and nothing within reason’s grasp is sufficient to cause this end.477 Without revelation we do not even know that an order or way to this end exists. The article’s argument for revelation rests on revelation.
This, however, means that moral philosophy, which is a work of natural reason, proceeds in ignorance of our true last end. Here lies the problem. As practical, moral philosophy must assume an end. As bearing on human action as a whole, it must assume an end that is quite global or universal, and in that sense quite ultimate. If it is ignorant of our true last end, will it not assume a false one? Readers of Thomas do not seem to have worried much about this question until the last century, when it received a good deal of attention, as well as a rather wide variety of answers. Without tracing all of the ins and outs, here is a sketch of the debate.
The first to raise the issue, as far as I know, was Jacques Maritain.478 On his view, for the reason just indicated, a “moral philosophy adequately considered” must be one that is “subalternated” to moral theology. That is, it must suppose a principle taken from moral theology: the truth about man’s last end. Otherwise it will assume a false end and be vitiated at the root. It will nevertheless be distinct from moral theology, because it will be confined to the partial or imperfect direction, toward the last end, that natural reason can furnish.
In sharp disagreement with Maritain was the great Dominican master, Santiago Ramírez.479 As Ramírez saw it, Maritain’s moral philosophy would be nothing other than those portions of Thomas’s moral theology that fall under reason’s competence. In favor of an independent moral philosophy, Ramírez invoked Thomas’s repeated assertion of a twofold last end. There is the unqualifiedly last end, which is the perfect bliss of the supernatural vision of God in Himself, and which is attainable only in the afterlife. But there is also an end that can be called last in a qualified sense: the full perfection that man’s own nature enables him to attain. Thomas seems to regard this qualified, natural end as more or less identical with the this-worldly bliss that Aristotle’s ethics has in view. As Aristotle himself indicates, it is an imperfect bliss. Its possessors are blissful, not simply or unqualifiedly, but “as men.”480
With this distinction, Ramírez held, moral philosophy can assume a last end that is other than the revealed, supernatural end, but nevertheless is not false, because it is only qualified. Rather than directly opposing the true unqualified end, it merely abstracts from that. In practical as in speculative science, abstracting does not yield falsehood.481 Besides, Thomas sees the natural end as essentially a likeness of true bliss and as quite fit to be ordered to it. For it too has God for its principal object; not, of course, according to His own form or essence, but through and in terms of His naturally knowable effects. The natural last end, in fact, consists chiefly in philosophical contemplation. Secondarily, it consists in morally virtuous action; this is a share in bliss insofar as it too is according to reason and driven by truth. Thomas even calls the exercise of the speculative virtues an inchoatio, a germ or rudiment, of perfect bliss.482 On this account, Thomas’s moral philosophy would on the whole coincide with Aristotle’s, with additions on specific topics from the other authors mentioned at the beginning of the chapter.
More recently, however, there has been a great deal of discussion about the correct way to understand the very distinction between the natural and the supernatural in Thomas. To many, it has seemed that views like Ramirez’s make nature and grace too accidental or too extrinsic to each other and overlook the passages where Thomas refers to an openness in human nature itself toward grace and the supernatural.483 And this has led to doubts about whether the mere presence in Thomas of the concept of a natural last end, or the mere validity of the concept in itself, suffices to justify the idea of a whole practical order or practical science that is distinct from that of moral theology. Thus, Denis Bradley holds that Thomas’s view allows for no distinct moral philosophy at all.484 Against Maritain, he argues that a science subalternated to theology is theological, and that it is arbitrary and artificial to isolate the direction toward bliss that natural reason can furnish and make it a distinct science. Against Ramírez, he argues that Thomas’s imperfect bliss is not formally distinct from perfect bliss. It is only the closest approach or approximation to perfect bliss that is possible in this life. It is not really an ultimate of any sort, even qualified. So it does not generate a distinct science.
Now it seems to me that, as a reading of Thomas on moral philosophy, Bradley’s view is not tenable. Nowhere does Thomas suggest that revelation or moral theology simply supplants moral philosophy. As we saw, he draws upon moral philosophy in his very discussion of God in the Prima pars. He also acknowledges its distinction from moral theology in the Secunda pars itself.485 Most importantly, he comments on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, separately and as a whole, without ever expressing theological doubts about its legitimacy. Moreover, there are places where he indicates that there is a sense—even if merely qualified—in which what is naturally attainable is indeed a formally distinct perfection from the supernatural end and not just an imperfect share therein.486 This suggest that it can function as a genuine principle of practical ordering.
At the same time, I think it would be wrong to say that Thomas’s own moral philosophy, if he had written one, would differ from Aristotle’s only by the addition of certain details taken from other authors. I think we can identify at least two points of difference that are quite fundamental: what the rational (and so philosophically sound) outlook is on natural or this-worldly bliss, and what the rational way is for God to function as a motivating factor in human action. These points will be the focus of the next section. I hope the discussion will serve to allay the fear that positing a distinct moral philosophy must be tantamount to making the natural order closed or to making the supernatural order merely accidental to it.
The Time of Bliss, the Love of God, and Moral Philosophy
There is at least one place where Thomas explicitly pronounces Aristotle’s conception of bliss erroneous. It appears in his commentary on the discourse on the Beatitudes in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.487 In this discourse, Thomas says, the Lord repudiates several false opinions about bliss. Among these is the view held by some, “such as Aristotle,” that it consists in the virtues of the contemplative life. Against this is the eighth verse, Blissful are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. Thomas argues that the future tense (“they shall see,” not “they see”) shows that Aristotle’s view errs “with respect to the time.” Aristotle rightly located man’s bliss in the contemplation of divine things, but he erred by identifying this with the exercise of the speculative virtues, which pertain to this life.
Now, Thomas cannot mean that Aristotle thought that a vision of the divine essence could be reached in this life through the speculative virtues. Thomas often ascribes to Aristotle the view that knowledge in this life, starting as it does from sensible things, cannot reach the essence of any immaterial substance, let alone God’s. The bliss that is attainable through the speculative virtues is imperfect, consisting in a true but deficient knowledge of the divine in light of its effects, rather than a vision of it in its own essence.488 Yet, even though Matthew 5:8 speaks of seeing God, the error in Aristotle’s conception of bliss that Thomas finds signaled there is not its falling short of the beatific vision, but simply its time. Why is this? My suspicion is that Thomas is thinking that whereas Aristotle’s ignorance of the promise of the vision of God was invincible, his placing man’s final bliss—whatever it consists in—in this life rather than in the afterlife was an error that could and should have been avoided.
This suspicion is supported by a remark in Thomas’s Ethics commentary, regarding the passage where Aristotle calls those who are blissful in this life blissful “as men.”489 Again, Thomas calls it an imperfect bliss. However, he does not compare it with supernatural bliss or the vision of God, but with the general conditions of happiness that Aristotle himself had previously laid down, particularly the condition of stability. In this life, Thomas says, men are subject to mutability, and so they cannot have perfect happiness. But since we naturally desire perfect bliss, and “since natural desire is not idle, it can be rightly supposed (recte aestimari potest) that perfect bliss is reserved for man after this life.” This last remark reflects nothing in Aristotle’s text. Indeed, it is hard not to see the remark as a muted criticism of the Philosopher. It is Aristotle, after all, who teaches that nature does nothing idle.490 And Thomas thinks Aristotle proved the immortality of the human soul.491
Elsewhere Thomas leaves no doubt that, on his view, it is not only contrary to the Christian faith but also unreasonable to suppose that the ultimate perfection possible for man is in this life.
The last end of man, which all naturally desire, is bliss. Some have held that man is able to attain it in this life, and so they had no need to admit another life after this, wherein man would attain to his final perfection . . . . But this opinion is confuted with sufficient probability by the changeableness of fortune, the weakness of the human body, and the imperfection and instability of knowledge and virtue, all of which hinder the perfection of bliss, as Augustine argues at the end of The City of God [XXII, 22].492
Even within the limits of natural reason and philosophy, then, to identify the perfection attainable in this life, or man’s natural last end, with his unqualified last end, is unwarranted. Although the possibility of a more perfect happiness in an afterlife cannot be strictly proved, it is the most reasonable thing to suppose. At least in this respect, Thomas would evidently have found Plato more satisfactory than Aristotle.493
There also seems to be another way in which, from Thomas’s perspective, Aristotle’s conception of human happiness looks defective, even philosophically. As we saw, Thomas agrees with Aristotle that sapiential contemplation is the best human activity because its object is the best reality. This agreement, however, should be seen alongside a rather radical distinction that Thomas draws between two possible motives for this contemplation.494 In the contemplative life of the “philosophers,” he says—meaning by this term the pagan lovers of wisdom—knowledge was attractive as a perfection of the knower, and the attraction to it proceeded from self-love (ex amore sui). By contrast, in the contemplative life of the “saints,” knowledge is attractive because of the object in which it terminates, and the desire to contemplate proceeds from the love of the object—that is, the love of God.
Thomas is not saying that the philosophers only wanted to contemplate and did not care what the object contemplated was. They wanted to contemplate the best object. But they did so only because that is the best contemplation and best activity of the one contemplating—because it is, so to speak, the best way to “enjoy oneself.” Of course, the saints enjoy it too, and even more. But their chief motive is rather to unite themselves to the one contemplated and, so to speak, to render themselves enjoyable to Him.
The issue here is even more fundamental than that of the time of bliss’s attainment (now or in an afterlife), or even that of its object (God as represented by His effects or God in His own essence). It regards the very end of human bliss—the end in the sense of the person out of love for whom it is desired. To use the example cited at the start of the Ethics commentary, it is in this sense that an army’s end is its commander. Obviously the commander is not the goal to be effected by military action. That is victory. Nor is he even the action’s target, which is the enemy. But he can be the army’s end in the sense that the army fights for victory over the enemy out of love for him.
Thomas did not invent this example. He got it from Aristotle. It appears in Book XII of the Metaphysics, in the account of how the first unmoved mover is the highest good—the primary end—of the universe. Thomas identifies the unmoved mover with God.495 He finds Aristotle conceiving God as the provident commander and lord of all things.496 He even finds Aristotle holding that it is out of love for God that the lower separate substances execute His command to move the celestial spheres.497 Such readings of Aristotle are, to say the least, controversial.498 But the point is that, despite them, Thomas never ascribes to Aristotle, or to any pagan, the idea that one should act more from love of God than from love of oneself. On the theme of God’s due role as a motive of human action, Thomas’s debt to Aristotle is slight.
But is the requirement of loving God above oneself—of acting as saints do—a matter for moral philosophy at all? Is it not revealed, theological? Thomas’s answer does not seem to be simple. On the one hand, he holds that loving God above oneself is a demand of nature and natural reason. It is a primary precept of the natural law.499 It flows from the truth, naturally knowable, that one’s whole being is from Him and that one’s whole good, including one’s very self, is more His than one’s own.500 But on the other hand, Thomas holds that in man’s fallen state, fulfilling this precept is impossible without grace.501 He also judges that sin has so obscured the natural understanding of it that a revealed expression of it was needed.502 Perhaps he would say it is a topic on which revelation can guide and stimulate philosophical thought; he does not seem to hold that philosophy, to be genuine, must shun such influences. However, as far as I know, he nowhere indicates how the love of God, or for that matter the practical implications of the immortality of the soul, should figure into moral philosophy.
But in any case, since he thinks that even philosophy, if it is fully rational, looks to a bliss beyond this life, his view allows for a distinct philosophy of morals that is ordered to the natural, this-worldly end but that does not treat it as though it were man’s unqualified last end. Neither does it make grace look merely extrinsic or accidental to the natural end. However, this moral philosophy would no doubt look somewhat more metaphysical than Aristotle’s.
We might still ask what need a theologian would have for moral philosophy, even a highly metaphysical one. I think Thomas’s answer would be the same as for philosophy generally: strictly speaking it is not necessary, but it can be very useful. It can help to lead us by the hand toward the things lying beyond natural reason. Thomas is convinced, and astonishingly consistent with his conviction, that being more rational, as such, means being better disposed, not worse, for adhering in thought and action to the mysteries of the faith. As we have seen, the root of the soul’s immortality is its rational nature; and the root of our capacity for faith and grace is reason’s natural understanding of universal being and good.503 And what favors living according to reason in this life favors life in the hereafter too. Of course, it is not that moral philosophy can order us directly to the supernatural end. Even with grace, reason never really masters that order.
This point emerges briefly but strikingly in a passage within Thomas’s treatment of suicide. Here we also see those two crucial truths—that of the afterlife and that of our being more God’s than our own—working together. Unlike the affairs of this life, he says, the passage out of this life to a happier one is not subject to man’s free choice, but only to divine power.504
Similarly, the virtues that natural reason can generate, the so-called acquired virtues, are not fully proportioned to the absolutely last, supernatural end, but only to an end that is ultimate in some particular field or other. All the virtues proportionate to the absolutely last end, whether regarding the end itself (theological virtues) or regarding the means to it (moral virtues), must be infused by God.505 But among the demands of the order to the supernatural end are many things that reason does master, things that it sees for itself. These are the dictates of natural law, which for Thomas are in no way abrogated by revealed law, but rather confirmed and revitalized.506 Moreover, the acquired virtues have one feature that the infused lack. The process of acquiring them involves the suppression of contrary dispositions, such as unruly passion.507 They do not move directly toward the last end, but they do remove some obstacles to it, quelling certain kinds of temptation. Finally, moral philosophy presents likenesses to things treated in moral theology, such as that of human friendship to charity.508
Practical Reason, the Natural Order, and Politics
A striking instance of Thomas’s taking a metaphysical viewpoint on the moral order is the proem of his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. As usual, he starts with an Aristotelian dictum: “art imitates nature.”509 But then he goes on to account for it in a way that Aristotle never does: as a result of the human mind’s relation to the divine mind. The human intellect’s intelligible light, he says, derives from the divine intellect according to a likeness. Hence there is a proportional likeness between the works of the human mind, which are works of art, and those of God’s mind, which are natural things. Thomas compares natural things to examples fashioned by a master artisan for his apprentices to imitate. The human intellect “must be informed by the inspection of things done naturally, so as to work similarly.” In effect, Thomas is explaining why, as Chesterton said, the artist is more intelligible than other men. As we saw, natural things contain our intellect’s proper object—their whatness or nature—and this is nothing other than a conception of divine art instilled in things.510 And so the works of the supreme artist are to us the first and supremely intelligible things. The human artist is the one who succeeds in harnessing that primordial intelligibility.
Thomas’s proem goes on to remind us that the human mind cannot make natural things. It only knows them. They are objects of speculative science. The things that it both knows and effects, things that are by art, are objects of sciences that are “practical or operative according to the imitation of nature.” Further on, he distinguishes between reason operating in the mode of production (factionis—Aristotle’s poiēsis), i.e., transitive action, which passes into exterior matter and is properly the business of mechanical art, and reason operating in the mode of conduct (actionis—Aristotle’s praxis), i.e., immanent action, such as deliberating, choosing, and willing. Conduct is the sphere of the moral sciences, among which is political science.
Here too the imitation of nature is at work. This is rather remarkable, because the natural actions that we can inspect are those of physical nature, and these are productions, exercised by physical agencies upon exterior matter. Nevertheless, Thomas finds moral and political action imitating them.511 Nature, he observes, proceeds from simple and imperfect things to composite and perfect things, and so does practical reason; and this holds not only of reason’s disposal of the things that man uses, but also of its disposal of men themselves, who are ruled by reason. Reason orders men into communities, and of these, the most composite and perfect, and the end of the others, is civic community. He is explaining why, among the practical disciplines, politics is highest.
Implied here is a metaphysics of civic community, a conception of its mode of being, that merits consideration. A city is a composite whole whose elements or simplest components are human persons. It is, as he said in the Ethics commentary, a multitude with a “unity of order.” The ordering principle is reason. But even though human persons are the elements, the “matter” of this whole (the form being its order), we should not think of this as a case of reason working in the mode of action that passes into exterior matter, the mode of production. This whole exists, not through production, but through action remaining in the agent, conduct. This entails that the whole’s own form remains in the agent. But here the form is an order, and the subject of an order is each of the things ordered.512 Hence, each of the persons out of which this whole is formed is also an agent of it. Indeed, each is a voluntary agent, the sort that moral science considers. Evidently, then, there is no such thing as a person’s being a citizen, or a multitude’s being a city, involuntarily. A city’s unity, and therefore its very being, reside chiefly in the citizens’ souls, the dispositions of their wills.
This is not only to say that the city is an effect of their wills. It is also to say that their having the unity of a city is chiefly their very wanting to have it. The city is an effect of their wills, but not a product, in the strict sense. A product can go on existing after the action of producing it has ceased. If the city were a mere product of the citizens’ wills, its continuance would not necessarily depend on their wills. It might even continue against their wills, by despotic force (whether wielded by one man or by several). But in that case they would be slaves, not citizens. They would be human tools, “things that man uses.” And such a multitude would be, not a city, but the corruption of a city.513 Civil unity is an order seated in the ongoing action of the citizens’ wills. It is a kind of friendship.514 A friendship is not a product, and neither is a true city.
On this point it is instructive to set the proem to the Politics commentary alongside the Introduction to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes, too, starts from the idea that art imitates nature. But he does not distinguish between action and production—nor, for that matter, between complete activity and motion. These distinctions seem to have no place in his thought at all. He speaks wholly in terms of production and motion. And the likeness that he signals is not in the orders according to which nature and art operate, but in their products. His city is an “artificial man,” with parts like human parts, and whose “soul” or giver of “life and motion” is the sovereign.515 Further on, Hobbes says that a sovereign and a despot have the same rights, and that they differ only in how they are instituted.516 Strikingly, but not too surprisingly, Leviathan contains no treatment of friendship at all. The very word scarcely appears. By contrast, about a fifth of Aristotle’s Ethics is on friendship.
It would be hard to overstate the role that Thomas assigns, as a constitutive factor not just of politics but of the moral order generally, to the natural human need for friendship or to man’s natural sociability. The dominant human goods are all “common” goods, apt to be shared by many, and on the whole they take priority over purely individual goods.517 To a large extent, rendering judgment on the good or evil of human conduct is a matter of determining its relation to the true common goods to which the person is ordered.518
Metaphysical Resolution of Practical Principles and a Natural Law Leading to God
For Thomas, the expression imitation of nature does not always refer to the production of copies of natural products in different materials. As it applies to the moral field, it refers to principles of order that reason first discerns in the actions of physical nature and applies to voluntary actions. The reason why voluntary action can be ordered in ways similar to those of nature is evidently that its intrinsic condition, as he calls it, is at least analogous to that of natural action. This condition consists of the features common to all voluntary action, whether morally good or bad—that is, whether falling within or outside the order of reason. Thomas subjects the condition of voluntary action to a lengthy analysis.519 Both there and elsewhere he draws numerous comparisons between voluntary and natural action.520 For instance, both voluntary and natural agents act for the sake of ends. This feature is common to them only by analogy, not univocally, because it belongs to them in unequal modes. Natural actions are naturally determined to their ends, whereas voluntary actions are ordered to their ends by the free determination of their own agents, typically through deliberation.521
Quite frequently, Thomas presents basic principles of order or rectitude in human conduct as applications to the voluntary domain of principles that also apply to natural things. Thus, in many places he determines rules for specific virtues, or against specific vices—habits of acting according or contrary to reason—by appeal to orders commonly observed in natural things.522 Even the general principle that moral goodness consists in following reason, and moral badness, in deviating from it, is an application of the general principle that “for each thing whatsoever, that is good which suits it according to its form, and bad, that which is outside the order of its form”—man’s form being reason.523 In a famous passage, Thomas presents practical reason’s first, “naturally apprehended” rules as functions of the objects of man’s natural inclinations, many of which are common to man and non-rational things.524 The most basic rule of all, “good is to be done and sought, and evil, avoided,” is founded on the conception of the good, which is “what all desire”; and the word for “all,” omnia, being neuter, means absolutely all beings.525
Another such principle is the love of God above all else. “Each and every thing, in its own mode, naturally loves God more than itself.”526 This is the primary instance of the still more general principle that insofar as a thing belongs to another according to what it naturally is, it naturally seeks the other’s good more than its own. Non-rational things do so, and “the natural inclination in things without reason manifests the natural inclination in the will of intellectual nature.”527 Here, in fact, the topic is the love that angels have. But in the same text Thomas also points to an analogous principle at work in the political order, which he explains by the fact that reason imitates nature.
In these discussions, Thomas is not saying that we ought to act in this or that way because natural things do. To say this would be to posit, as the fundamental practical principle, that human actions ought to conform to the actions of nature. It would be as much as to say that such conformity is practical reason’s own end. Thomas posits no such principle. Rather, he is analyzing practical reason’s fundamental principles into more general truths, seeing them as applications of these truths. The general truths also apply to natural things. He is considering the practical order from a more universal, metaphysical perspective. The true measure to which human reason should conform is not physical nature itself, but the divine reason from which nature’s order derives.528
Moreover, in presenting the fundamental practical principles as applications of more general principles, Thomas is not demonstrating them. He regards them as indemonstrable, per se nota—known in virtue of themselves.529 This means that their truth is secured immediately by the understanding of their own terms. They are, so to speak, too true to be demonstrable. A demonstrable truth about a given matter is one whose truth is accounted for by means of a different truth about that same matter. For example, the moon’s being eclipsed is accounted for by means of its being blocked from sunlight by the earth. But even an indemonstrable truth may be a particular application of a more general truth. The more general truth is not a different truth about the same matter; it is almost the same truth, only taken more abstractly, as bearing upon a more general matter. For example, a properly practical principle would be that the simpler communities to which people are apt to belong should be formed prior to the more complex ones. The more general principle would be that the simpler wholes to which a set of elements are apt to belong should be formed prior to the more complex ones. This principle applies to everything, including natural things.
Again, the idea is not that the reason why the principle is true and applies to human action is that it applies to natural things. Once we get the idea of starting from simple, imperfect things and proceeding to composite, perfect ones, we see at once that it makes sense, in any application. We do not have to go back and check to make sure that natural things work that way. On the other hand, even though Thomas is not demonstrating the practical principles, in resolving them into more general formulations he is indeed confirming them, exhibiting foundations upon which they rest. On the whole, more general considerations are better known to us, prior in our understanding to more particular ones. To say that truths are per se nota does not mean that there is no order among them or that grasping some of them does not suppose grasping others. None is demonstrated by means of others, but some may still be understood in light of others. Thus, in Summa theologiae, I–II, q. 94, a. 2, Thomas orders the first practical principles themselves, from the more general to the more particular. The one upon which all others are founded is that good is to be done and sought, and evil, avoided. This is the most general practical principle of all. In the other principles, it is applied to particular goods and evils. The other principles are not demonstrated by means of it, but grasping them supposes grasping it.
In the same article, Thomas also refers to the principle of non-contradiction, saying that upon it are founded all of our other truths whatsoever, whether speculative or practical. An example involving this principle may make the overall idea clearer. Take the proposition, “being a citizen is incompatible with not being a citizen.” This is true, and there is no other truth about being a citizen on account of which it is true. It is an immediate truth about being a citizen, per se nota, indemonstrable. Nevertheless it is also an application of the utterly general truth that being such-and-such is incompatible with not being such-and-such. And we know the general truth better. We knew it long before we even had the concept of a citizen.
The reason why the more general principles are better known is the very fact that their terms are more general, more abstract, and hence simpler. Their formation in our minds is thus naturally prior to the formation of the more concrete or particular truths in which those terms are implied.530 To be sure, Thomas thinks we are born not knowing anything. And in order to grasp even the simplest, most general principles, we have to experience singular instances from which their terms can be gathered.531 But he is sure that practical principles are particular applications of general principles that we first gather, not from practical things that our own reason causes, but from things that we only observe—sensible, natural things. By pointing to the presence of the general principles in the commonly observed natural world, he shows that our access to them is itself quite natural. No special instruction is needed. In this way he shows that their applications to the practical domain are practical principles known “commonly to all.”532 Moral science can therefore take them for granted.
The general principles rest upon general terms, and there is order also among the terms. The very first term, as we considered in a previous chapter, is being. Truth is close on its heels. The good is a little farther behind, though not much. Between the notions of being and true, on the one hand, and good on the other, lies the notion of perfect; for the good is what all desire, and the desire that is common to all things is desire for their perfection. Perfection is “fullness of being.” Of course the perfection of one kind of thing differs from that of another. What perfection is, for this or that thing, is a function of what the thing itself is, its nature or form. Think of the inner shape or boundary of a container; this sets the measure for what the container’s being full amounts too. So in this way too, nature is a principle of practical thinking. It is a principle of the very notion of the good.
With regard to this, something should be said about the so-called is-ought fallacy that Hume is said to have exposed. Now, even if Hume did expose a genuine fallacy, the larger argument that he was engaged in is itself nothing short of sophistry. What he showed was that the notion of according to nature does not contain the notion of good. But what he actually needed was the sophistical inference from this, which he leaves tacit, that the notion of good does not contain the notion of according to nature. For it is really only this inference that provides grounds for his main thesis, which is that the notion of good has no rational or intelligible basis at all—that it is a mere function of sentiment or feeling.533
As for Thomas, he is certainly not guilty of the fallacy, because he does not present the notion of the good as implied by that of nature or even that of perfection, as though one could simply derive the good from these other notions by some kind of conceptual analysis. It is the notion of the perfect that is included in the notion of the good, and the notion of nature that is included in both of those notions. The notion of the good adds something new to the notions of a being, the nature of a being, and the fullness of a being according to its nature. It adds the final causality, the aptitude for being desired and pursued. However, this novelty definitely has the status of an addition, a “natural growth” in the human intellect. The good is intelligible because nature and being, to which it points, are intelligible. And all of these notions are first grasped in natural things, objects of speculative understanding.534
The work of ordering principles, confirming the posterior ones on the basis of the prior ones, and tracing the very first ones and the concepts upon which these are based to their origins in our common experience, is a metaphysical task. Thomas’s ultimate justification for considering speculative and practical things together in this way, as falling under a common order, is also eminently metaphysical: their both proceeding from the highest cause, divine wisdom. The actions of all things are naturally subject to the ordination of divine providence, which is called the eternal law, and they all somehow share in it. Thomas sees the first principles of practical reason as human nature’s proper share in the eternal law. It results from the natural light of reason, which, as he said in the Politics commentary, derives from the divine light according to a likeness. It is as seen in this way, rational derivations from the eternal law, that the principles are properly called precepts of natural law.535
It is not that grasping the truth of these principles depends on having grasped their divine origin. In the case of those that do not refer to God, grasping them may not even suppose having yet considered Him. Nevertheless, the natural understanding of them does lead toward considering Him and tending to Him. How naturally it does so, even for our fallen nature, comes out in Thomas’s account of what occurs when a child first reaches the “use of reason” and becomes morally responsible.536 At that time, the child experiences a peremptory need to “deliberate about himself.” This means that he understands himself to be something “for an end.” That is what deliberation investigates: things that are for an end.537 He perceives that he exists for some purpose, and he wonders what it is and what it requires of him. Pursuing this question or not, however, is up to him. Having reached the use of reason, he now has some voluntary control over his own acts and even over his own thoughts. But if he does decide to seek the truth of the matter and “orders himself to his due end” as well as he can—according to his best lights—then he will, in effect, be “turning toward God.” This is so true that, if he is unbaptized and was, until this moment, in the state of original sin, that will now be remitted through supernatural grace.538
This of course is Thomas the theologian speaking. He is by no means discounting sin’s tendency to weaken the will’s natural disposition to follow the truth. But he finds the natural light of reason still orienting us all in the right direction, Godward.
450. In Meta., Proem. The Politics reference is I.2, 1254a27–31. The last remark, that ordering belongs to the wise man, is an allusion to Metaph., I.2, 982a17–19.
451. In Eth., VI, lect. 6, §1184.
452. See Torrell, Initiation, 331–37, 341. On Thomas’s Aristotelian approach to moral thinking, see Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts. For an illuminating reflection on how contemporary, analytical virtue ethics stands in relation to Aristotle and Aquinas, see Vogler, “Aristotle, Aquinas, Anscombe and the New Virtue Ethics.”
453. See Torrell, Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel, ch. 12, 367–409; Torrell, Christ and Spirituality, 45–64.
454. See In Eth., I, lect. 16, §193.
455. See Dewan, Wisdom, Law and Virtue, passim.
456. I.4, 1096b30–35.
457. On rational powers, IX.5, 1047b31–1048a24; on action and production, IX.6, 1048b18–36; IX.8, 1050a23–b6; and see above, 71.
458. STh, I, qq. 19–21.
459. STh, I, q. 22, Proem.
460. STh, I, qq. 5–6, & I–II, qq. 18–21.
461. STh, I, qq. 48–49, & I–II, qq. 71–89.
462. In Eth., VI, 1ect. 7, §1211, quoted above, 83.
463. STh, I, q. 18, a. 9, ad 2.
464. STh, II–II, Proem.
465. IV, dd. 26–42. Much of this material, somewhat rearranged, makes up STh, Supplementum, qq. 41–68.
466. On the need for caution in reading the De regno, see Torrell, Initiation, 247–49.
467. On Thomas’s legal and political thought, see Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory.
468. STh, I–II, qq. 98–105.
469. See STh, II–II, q. 47, a. 2, ad 2.
470. In Eth., VI, lect. 6, §1189.
471. STh, I–II, q. 3, a. 5, ad 3.
472. STh, I–II, q. 66, a. 5; In Eth., VI, lect. 11, §1290–91. See also the more general considerations in In Eth., I, lect. 2, §25–31.
473. See STh I, q. 1, a. 4; II–II, q. 45, a. 3, obj. 1.
474. STh, I, q. 79, a. 11; see I–II, q. 64, a. 3, and above, 85.
475. STh, I, q. 1, a. 1.
476. This is why wisdom is higher than prudence. It does not determine the means to happiness, but it considers the very object that defines happiness itself, that object being the highest intelligible: STh, I-II, q. 66, a. 5, ad 2.
477. We might put it thus: John 1:18—“No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him”—goes with John 14:6—“No one comes to the Father except through me.”
478. Maritain, De la philosophie chrétienne, esp. par. 3 & Note II, and Science et sagesse, Deuxième partie.
479. Ramírez, “Sur l’organisation du savoir moral” and “De philosophia morali christiana.”
480. NE, I.10, 1101a14–21. See STh, I–II, q. 3, a. 2, ad 4; a. 6, ad 1.
481. Physics, II.3, 193b35.
482. STh, I–II, q. 57, a. 1, ad 2; q. 66, a. 3, ad 1; q. 66, a. 5, ad 2; q. 69, a. 3.
483. Man is naturally capax Dei: STh, III, q. 4, a. 1, ad 2.
484. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good. Bradley relies heavily on Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel and its famous interpretation of Thomas’s notion of a natural desire for the vision of God (cf., e.g., STh, I, q. 3, a. 8). This interpretation has been contested in an exhaustive study by Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God. For a summary of the general issue, see McInerny, Praeambula Fidei, 69–90. Personally I find Feingold’s arguments persuasive, but I shall not address the question here (except regarding a small point: see below, 158n37).
485. STh, I–II, q. 71, a. 6, ad 5.
486. See In Sent., 3, d. 14, q. 1, a. 3, qc. 1, ad 1; De ver., q. 8, a. 4, ad 13. Notice that what is in man’s natural power differs from the supernatural end, not only as imperfect from perfect, but also in kind; see STh, I–II, q. 5, a. 5, ad 3 (and cf. I–II, q. 63, a. 4). I think it is clear that Thomas would not call man’s capacity for the vision of God a natural potency; it is a specific “obediential” potency (the obedience being to God); see De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 10, ad 13. This reading is sometimes rejected on the grounds that it would make grace miraculous and so in some way accidental to human nature. But obediential potency is not only for miracles. Miracles are effects of natural causes operating outside their natural order (STh I, q. 105, a. 7, ad 1; q. 110, a. 4, obj. 3). Grace is the work of no natural cause at all. And it pertains to God’s role as man’s naturally immediate superior: see STh, II–II, q. 2, a. 3.
487. Lectura super Matthaeum, cap. 5, lect. 2. This work probably dates from around 1269–70; see Torrell, Initiation, 81–82.
488. See Scg, III, cap. 48, §2254–61. Here he says Aristotle “seems” to have judged that man can have only the imperfect bliss of this life.
489. In Eth., I, lect. 16, §202.
490. Aristotle, De caelo, I.4, 271a33.
491. In De an., III, lect. 10, §743. In one place Thomas imagines a philosopher taking the consideration of the soul’s immortality as the occasion for adopting some course of action: De ver., q. 14, a. 4.
492. STh, Supplementum, q. 75, a. 1 (= In Sent., IV, d. 43, a. 1, qc. 1).
493. However, he finds Aristotle’s view of the hylomorphic relation between soul and body both more rational and more in support of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body (ibid.).
494. In Sent., III, d. 35, q. 1, a. 2, qc. 1.
495. In Meta., XII, lect. 12, §2663.
496. De subst. sep., cap. 3.
497. In Meta., XII, lect. 7, §2529; lect. 8, §2536.
498. See my “The Causality of the Unmoved Mover.”
499. STh, I–II, q. 100, a. 3, ad 1.
500. See STh, I, q. 60, a. 5; II–II, q. 26, a. 3.
501. STh, I–II, q. 109, a. 3.
502. STh, I–II, q. 100, a. 5, ad 1.
503. STh, II–II, q. 2, a. 3, quoted above, 97.
504. STh, II–II, q. 64, a. 5, ad 3. Here too, Thomas’s thought is reminiscent of Plato; see Phaedo, 61c–63c.
505. See STh, I–II, q. 63, a. 3; q. 65, a. 2; II–II, q. 23, a. 7; II–II, q. 47, a. 13.
506. STh, I–II, q. 91, a. 4, ad 1; q. 99, a. 2, ad 1 & 2; q. 100, a. 1, & a. 3, ad 1; q. 106, a. 1, ad 2; q. 108, a. 2, ad 1.
507. STh, I–II, q. 65, a. 3, ad 2. On Thomas’s account of the passions, see the excellent study by Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions.
508. More generally on the integration of Thomas’s philosophy into his understanding of charity, see Sherwin, By Knowledge and by Love.
509. See Physics, II.2, 194a21–22.
510. See above, 124.
511. Thomas also sees imitation of nature in the operation of reason itself, as falling under reason’s own direction and pertaining to the art of logic; see In Post. an., I, Proem., §5[5].
512. See STh, III, q. 75, a. 4, ad 1.
513. In Polit., III, lect. 5, §390.
514. In Eth., VIII, lect. 9–11.
515. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction, xviii.
516. Ibid., II.20, 139–44. The soul’s having a kind of despotic rule over the body is actually an Aristotelian idea; see Aristotle, Politics, I.2, 1254b4–5.
517. See De Koninck, De la primauté du bien commun.
518. STh, I, q. 90, a. 2, ad 3; see Jensen, Good and Evil Actions.
519. STh, I–II, qq. 6–17. On the important distinction between interior and exterior acts of the will, see Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 83–88. On Thomas on how voluntary actions are specified, see Pilsner, The Specification of Human Actions in St. Thomas Aquinas.
520. This is the general theme of my Action and Conduct.
521. STh, I–II, q. 1, a. 2; q. 6, a. 2.
522. Examples: STh, II–II, q. 50, a. 4 (military prudence); q. 64, aa. 1 & 2 (killing); q. 65, a. 1 (mutilation); q. 104, a. l (obedience); q. 108, a. 2 (vindication); q. 130, a. 1 (presumption); q. 133, a. 1 (pusillanimity).
523. STh, I–II, q. 18, a. 5. See I–II, q. 21, a. 1; I–II, q. 94, a. 3; In Eth., I, lect. 10.
524. STh, I–II, q. 94, a. 2.
525. Ibid.; see I, q. 5, a. 1.
526. STh, I, q. 60, a. 5.
527. Ibid.
528. STh, II–II, q. 31, a. 3; q. 130, a. 1.
529. STh, I–II, q. 94, a. 2. For a thorough study of Thomas’s notion of per se notum, see Tuninetti, ‘Per se notum.’
530. See STh, I, q. 85, a. 3.
531. STh, I–II, q. 51, a. 1.
532. STh, I–II, q. 94, a. 2.
533. See Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section i, esp. 469–70, and Section ii, 470–76. For Thomas, the appetite or desire to which the notion of the good most properly or adequately responds is the will, intellectual appetite. This differs from sense-appetite, which is the seat of the passions, inasmuch as its activity presupposes reason’s grasp of the universal notion of the good and the application of this notion to the judgment of something. One implication of this is that when Thomas associates precepts of natural law with natural human inclinations, the inclinations that he has in mind must be inclinations of the will, and they must follow, not give rise to, the understanding of the goodness of their objects or the knowledge expressed in the precepts. I discuss this in “Natural Inclination and the Intelligibility of the Good in Thomistic Natural Law.”
534. I argue for this point at some length in “Natural Law, the Understanding of Principles, and Universal Good.”
535. STh, I–II, q. 91, a. 2. On reason’s grasp of the precepts of natural law, see Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law. On natural law as a juridical principle, see Hittinger, “Thomas Aquinas on Natural Law and the Competence to Judge.”
536. STh, I–II, q. 89, a. 6.
537. STh, I–II, q. 14, a. 2.
538. Needless to say, grace was also helping (not forcing) him to reach that decision; see STh, I-II, q. 109, a. 6.