4 Summa Theologiae : Second Part
Chapter 4 Summa Theologiae: Second Part
Thomas Aquinas had composed nothing quite like the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae. Unwilling to leave his students with only the confessors’ handbooks of the day, he wanted these future pastors to have their ‘practical theology’ inserted between the two mysteries of faith: God as Creator (in the First Part) and Christ as the way to ultimate beatitude (in the Third Part). Moreover, instead of a checklist of sins, determined by conformity with the Ten Commandments, he drew copiously on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to develop an ethics based not on obedience to commandments but aimed at formation of character, envisaging formation as the actualization of the individual potential, the fulfilment of the believer’s natural desire for the good under the inspiration of divine grace and (of course) in obedience to divine law.
Invoking the authority of John Damascene again, he reaffirms that the human creature is said (in the Bible he means) to be made to God’s image, in the sense (as the tradition maintained) of being ‘an intelligent being endowed with free-will and self-movement’. That is to say, ‘having treated of the exemplar, namely God, and of what has come forth from the power of God in accordance with his will, it remains for us to treat of his image, inasmuch as the human creature too is principle of his actions as having free-will and control of his actions’ (ST 1/2 Prologue). And then, since ‘the end is the principle in human operations’, as Aristotle says, meaning that the goal is what instigates human activity, and the goal is of course the good, this study of the formation of the moral agent will unroll under the heading of human desire for happiness as conceived principally by Aristotle, which meshes harmoniously with creaturely desire for participation in divine bliss, as in Christian tradition, represented by Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite.
Purpose and happiness (ST 1/2.1–5)
The first part of the Second Part sets out the general structure of the moral life; the second part of the Second Part, much longer, offers a systematic account of as many of the virtues and corresponding vices as Thomas can encompass. Ironically, within 20 years of his death, summaries of his treatment of the virtues and vices were in circulation, which suggests that his intended readers were quite content with checklists, more of sins than of virtues, while happily ignoring the analysis of action, intention, choice, and so on, which Thomas regarded as essential for would-be spiritual guides and pastors.
The ultimate goal of human life will always transcend any natural good or set of goods (ST 1/2.1–5). Nothing but God, as known and loved in the promised beatific vision, can fully satisfy the human desire for knowledge of the truth and union with the good. None of the goods of this life will ever satisfy us, desirable and worthwhile as they of course are (no concessions to Catharist contempt of the material world). This is one of Thomas’s fundamental convictions. If we required argument to convince us that human beings desire to be happy, Thomas would have been quite baffled – he took that for granted.
Later versions of Christian ethics would highlight such concepts as duty and obligation; but Thomas (and medieval theologians in general) inherited Augustine’s conception of happiness as the goal of human life. Aristotle, of course, did not anticipate anything like the face-to-face vision with God, which is central for Christian eschatology. True and lasting happiness, for Thomas, lies ultimately in participation in divine bliss. However, there is a happiness or beatitude that we can attain by our natural powers. Augustine, as well as the preponderance of the theological and especially the monastic tradition, not to mention the Cathars, did not value material well-being highly. While granting that earthly happiness is precarious, Thomas denies that it is impossible – health, wealth, and so on he regards as positive features of ordinary life. His sense of affinity with Aristotle allows him to entertain the possibility of natural happiness, transformed of course but certainly not diminished or negated by the demands of Christian ethics. Even material goods, if not indispensable, are not to be despised, and a certain fulfilment is achievable using our God-given natural powers.
Human acts (ST 1/2.6–17)
‘Since we cannot come to happiness save through some activity, we have now to attend to human acts, so that we may learn which of them will open the way and which of them will block it’ (ST 1/2.1 Prologue). While Aristotle’s philosophical psychology and naturalistic ethics are constantly referred to, much of the material on which Thomas draws he takes from Nemesius (as he thinks: actually Gregory of Nyssa) and John of Damascus. Indeed, the latter’s description of the operation of the human will provides the groundwork for the account that Thomas offers.
One point to remember throughout what becomes an extremely complicated analysis is that when Thomas thinks of the will, voluntas, he does not mean a power that one exercises freely and autonomously and even arbitrarily on things, but rather the susceptibility to be attracted to and drawn by the objective goodness of things as such: ‘the most basic act of willing is the desiring of what is in itself desirable, namely goals or ends’ (ST 1/2.8.1–2). The exercise of will is more like consenting to the good that one most deeply desires, rather than imposing oneself on something indifferent or recalcitrant.
The analysis is quite formidable. We are taken step by step through the phases of a fully human act: apprehending the good as the goal or end; wanting it; judging its attainability; resolving to achieve it; deliberating; approving and promoting the process of accomplishing the desired end; the practical judgement that selects which course of action to take; the choice; and the execution of the act. Readers familiar with analytic philosophy might want to translate Thomas’s account into an analysis of the concepts which we use without thinking whenever we intend and choose and so on. He is not constructing a theory, let alone engaging in metaphysical speculation. To the contrary, he clearly thinks he is only describing what happens when we perform a moral act.
Certain actions are inherently or inevitably wrong, Thomas thought, whatever the agent’s intentions, the circumstances, and the consequences. For Christians, many think, including good Christians, it does not ultimately matter what one does, what matters is one’s intentions. One way in which we differ from the Greek world is that we place more emphasis on intention than on act. Thomas belongs to Aristotle’s world. More specifically, though he does not name him in this connection, Thomas must have been well aware of Peter Abelard’s moral treatise Know Thyself (composed before 1140), in which morality is held to consist in intention alone: what we do, the actions that we perform, apart from our intentions, are entirely neutral. Ultimately, if you have the right intention, it does not matter whether you fulfil it by doing anything, or not. Thomas could not be more opposed to any such notion. Of course our motives matter, but for him a bad intention is enough to vitiate an action that considered in itself is good in kind, while no intention, however noble, that can make an action evil in kind is a good one, under any circumstances or with whatever foreseeable beneficial results. It would be easy to compose a list of actions that Thomas regarded as intrinsically evil: theft, adultery, lying, and the killing of the innocent. The central defining feature of an action – what makes it the kind of action it is – is the objectum, its object or objective – namely, what the person actually does.
Emotions (ST 1/2.22–48)
What we do as moral agents is often affected by emotion. Often, the effects of emotion or passion have been regarded largely, if not exclusively, as disorderly and ‘sinful’. The ‘passions of the soul’ (passiones animae) to which Thomas devotes a good deal of attention – love, hatred, concupiscence, pleasure, pain and sorrow, hope and despair, fear and anger – only partly equate with what we think of as emotions today. While of course we feel pain, we don’t think of pain as an emotion, and so on. Moreover, so much has happened, culturally, since the 13th century, that Thomas’s account of the emotions, very interesting as it is, remains rather thin and schematic, wanting in complexity, in the light of explorations by (say) Shakespeare, Freud, and many modern novelists.
The ‘passions’ with which Thomas is concerned always involve some bodily change: a man goes red with rage or pale with fear, his pulse quickens with desire, his muscles tense with hate, and so on. ‘Passion, strictly so called, cannot be experienced by the soul except in the sense that the whole person, the matter-soul composite, undergoes it’ (ST 1/2.22.1). ‘The bodily change may be for the better or for the worse’, Thomas immediately says: ‘it is in the latter case that the term passion is used more properly – sorrow is more naturally called a passion than is joy’. Feeling is the basic animal response to the stimulus of the environment: affective responses by which we are attracted to the good, aggressive reactions to obstacles, and so on. Emotions have to be integrated with the dispositions of reason and will if we are to live a good life. While well aware of the dark side of some reactions, Thomas’s account is nevertheless predominantly positive, with little sign of the suspicion that a committed ascetic might have been expected to show. To the contrary, this respect for natural physiological reactions to items in the world around us, including our fellow human beings, is only an implication of Thomas’s conception of human beings as animated bodies, embodied souls. It is another indication of his rejection of Catharist hostility to material reality.
Virtue (ST 1/2.49–70)
Thomas distinguished between automatic reactions on the battlefield, which were the result of training, and acts of valour, which were rooted in a man’s character. Sometimes we speak of someone acting ‘out of character’; at other times, someone just acts as we should expect. By this point in the Summa, Thomas was surely hoping to get his readers – if they were young Dominican friars – to reflect on the practices of virtue, contemplation, asceticism, and so on, which constituted their way of life.
The English word ‘habit’ means a good deal less than Thomas’s word ‘habitus’, or, lying behind it, Aristotle’s ‘hexis’. As Thomas notes (ST 1/2.49.1), the words, in Greek as well as in Latin, are rooted in some kind of ‘having’: isolated acts of generosity or whatever, are one thing; what Thomas and Aristotle have in mind are stable dispositions which a person acquires over the years, enabling him or her readily to act in this or that way. Discipline and self-control strengthen one to resist being misled by disorderly emotions, but they are not virtues (ST 1/2.58.3). For Thomas, there is a difference between a disciplined man and a virtuous one.
It seems unlikely that Thomas was explaining anything that his students did not know. They may not have been aware that what the philosophers of antiquity aimed at (Plato and the Stoics, as well as Aristotle) was exactly what the monastic and academic institutions of his day provided. The ‘schools’ of learning that were gradually becoming the universities were all collegial, in the sense that everyone shared in community life, eating at the common table, sleeping in dormitories, and so on; while those who were also vowed members of one or other institution of the Christian religion were practising life-long ‘conversion of morals’, in the old Benedictine phrase. People lived collectively and in public, to a much greater extent that we do in the West today.
Before considering the specifically Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, Thomas embarked on an exhaustive description of virtue (and vice) in general. It is as if he wanted to remind his students that they were human beings, endowed with reason and free will, as well as divinely called and inspired, and so perhaps inclined (as pious people sometimes are) to superstitious beliefs and indifference to intellectual challenge. In these considerations Thomas builds up what might be called a Christian humanism.
The main school of theological thought at the time held that the only true virtues were the ones that God works in us without us. This radically anti-Pelagian view obviously sought to highlight the indispensability of divine grace in any moral or spiritual endeavour. The School of Poitiers, on the other hand, inheriting this from Peter Abelard, was more reserved: Thomas comes down on their side (e.g. at 55.4 and again at 63.2). The divine or ‘deiform’ virtues of faith, hope, and charity come about in us without our initiative (they are ‘infused’, in the jargon) though not without our consent:
for there is a happiness, a beatitude, surpassing our nature, which we can attain only by the power of God, by a kind of participation of the Godhead, as Scripture says, 2 Peter 1:4, ‘by Christ we are made partakers of the divine nature’. This beatitude goes beyond the reach of human nature; the inborn resources by which we are able to act well according to our capacity are not adequate to directing us to this. Rather, to be called to this supernatural bliss we must needs be divinely endowed with additional sources of activity – the theological virtues, so called because God is their object, inasmuch as they direct us rightly to him, and because they are infused in us by God alone; and because they are made known to us by divine revelation contained in sacred Scripture.
People can acquire many of the moral virtues, Thomas contends, by performing good acts that are directed to ends that do not exceed our natural powers. These acts are performed without the effects on the agent of the divine gift of charity. When people perform much the same acts but in awareness of the last end, then these acts count as virtuous, truly and perfectly. At this level, these moral virtues are imbued by charity.
Only the infused virtues are perfect, and deserve to be called virtues simply: since they direct man well to the ultimate end. But the other virtues, those, namely, that are acquired, are virtues in a restricted sense: for they direct man well in respect of the last end in some particular genus of action, but not in respect of the last end simply.
Thus Thomas makes room for people who have moral virtues, which are not permeated by the divine gifts of faith, hope, and charity – ‘virtues in a restricted sense’, yet not completely empty, as many of his colleagues and predecessors (including Augustine) seemed to say. After all, ‘Reason and will relate us naturally to God as beginning and end of our nature, but not to him as the object of a happiness out of proportion to our nature’ (ST 1/2.62.1).
Just as real knowledge of God’s existence and nature can be – has been – achieved by natural reason, while knowledge of God as Trinity depends entirely on divine revelation, so, as we should expect, for Thomas, though a truly virtuous life requires the supplement of the divinely given virtue of charity, there are humanly achievable virtues which are not null and void.
Sin
The starting point for this lengthy consideration of sin and its kinds, degrees, and effects (ST 1/2.71–89) is the attractive thesis that doing wrong, committing this or that sin, is a matter of going against reason, which is the same thing as going against human nature. ‘Vice goes against human nature by going against reason’ (ST 1/2.71.1). However, while obviously everything that Thomas says is affected one way or another by historical context, what he has to say about sin is heavily dominated by the doctrine of original sin. The problem is that Thomas’s explanation of the doctrine depends on a biology – the will of Adam carried on through the male active partner in procreation from generation to generation, excepting only the one who was born without a human father – now unbelievable.
Parts of the discussion may perhaps be salvaged. Thomas distinguishes between venial and mortal sin: these are not species of the same genus, one might commit umpteen venial sins but that would not add up even to one mortal sin. Venial sins, as the word suggests (venia = forgiveness, related to venus = love), are no doubt regrettable, and damaging if they become habitual, but they do not deprive the sinner of God’s grace and favour. Mortal sin (mors = death), Thomas believes, consists in a deliberate turning away from God as last end by seeking satisfaction in something created. This ensures eternal damnation unless adequately repented. On the other hand, to break with God in this way requires clear knowledge of the sinfulness of what one is doing and full consent. While Thomas of course believes in the possibility, and no doubt the likelihood, of our committing mortal sin, one might wonder how easy it would be for a person to reject God deliberately, fully knowing what he or she was doing – given Thomas’s doctrine of God.
Even in connection with original sin, at least one thesis is salvageable. In the state of Adam before the Fall, which Thomas regards as historical, he distinguishes ‘pure nature’ from the supernatural gifts which perfected it. When Adam fell (not much reference to Eve!), these supernatural gifts were lost, by which human beings would have been drawn to their supernatural end, enabling us to keep our natural powers in submission to reason. On this view, then, their natural powers are left to human reason, will, and the passions. They constitute the human nature, which, as Thomas supposes, stands in need of healing and reordering by the grace of Christ – but they are not worthless, even in our fallen state we are not deprived of our natural powers.
Law
Immediately after this consideration of sin, Thomas turns to consider law (ST 1/2.90–114). That might suggest that he takes it that we have laws because we are prone to doing wrong – not an unfamiliar view in Christian ethics. However, apart altogether from our propensity to do evil, which certainly requires laws, punishments, and so on, it belongs to our nature as rational and social animals, so Thomas holds, that we shape aspects of our life together in written or (more likely) unwritten laws. Law is an ‘exterior principle’ moving us to good, namely, God, who ‘instructs us through law’. God’s schooling us by law, that is to say, is not only – let alone mainly – to prevent our doing wrong and to punish us if we do; Thomas sees law in a positive light, as customs and conventions that articulate our natural desire to know truth and desire the good.
Given that by nature we are drawn to the good, as Thomas thinks, we have a ‘natural law’, which, in particular cases and circumstances, requires us to think what we should do. For Thomas, ‘natural law’ ethics is another attempt to find middle ground, this time between the doctrine that ‘it’s right because we judge it so’ and ‘it’s right because God tells me so’. No doubt he would have found the idea that we human beings create whatever moral values there are unintelligible – but he certainly does not want to settle for the idea that we simply have to submit to divinely revealed ethical standards.
He devotes one question to natural law (ST 1/2.94), in the middle of nineteen (90–108), of which three deal with human law, eight with the Mosaic law, and three with the New Law of the Gospel.
Human beings are empowered to ‘direct themselves to an end … through free will, because they can take counsel and they can choose’. ‘Granted that the world is ruled by divine providence’, as Thomas assumes we believe, ‘the whole community of the universe is governed by God’s mind.’ The kind of creature that we human beings are ‘is subject to divine providence, inasmuch as it becomes a sharer in providence, providing for itself and for others’. Thomas redescribes this: ‘there is in us a participating in the eternal reason, by our having a natural inclination to our due activity and end’.
Moreover, this is what the Psalmist means, in one of Thomas’s favourite mantra-like texts: ‘The light of thy countenance, Lord, is signed upon us’ – ‘as if the light of natural reason by which we discern what is good and what evil is nothing other than an impression of the divine light in us’. Thus it is clear, Thomas concludes, that ‘natural law is nothing other than the sharing in the eternal law in the case of rational creatures’.
Some might be tempted to think that natural law is a superfluous idea; the eternal law surely suffices for the government of the human race. Thomas rejects this line of thought: it would work very well if natural law were something quite separate from eternal law, but that is just what he refuses to accept: natural law is ‘participation in eternal law, in some sense’. He would not endorse the idea of a natural law ethics which is autonomous and independent of theological considerations.
Turning more specifically to ourselves, Thomas maintains that we all have ‘some notion of the eternal law’, and secondly we all have within us some bent, inclinatio, towards what is consonant with the eternal law (93.6). Citing Aristotle – ‘we are adapted by nature to receive virtues’ – Thomas insists that we have a natural inclination to virtue, which may indeed be ‘spoilt by a vicious habit’, just as our natural knowledge of good is ‘darkened by the passions and habits of sin’ (93.6). It may be noted, however, that ‘sin never takes away the entire good of [human] nature’ (ST 1/2.93.6).
The same point is repeated, this time explicitly referring to natural law: as regards the commonest principles of the natural law, recognized by everyone, the natural law ‘can never be deleted from the human heart’ (ST 1/2.94.6). We may be prevented from doing the right thing in this or that particular instance, for example by lust or some other passion. As regards the less commonly recognized principles (not that Thomas spells out what these are), he allows that they may indeed be ‘deleted from the human heart’, ‘either by evil counsel or by perverse customs and corrupt habits’. Robbery is not counted as sin among some people; sins against nature are not always recognized as such. It is perfectly possible that legislators have passed wrongful enactments against secondary precepts of the natural law. Here, clearly, for Thomas, legislation may, at least in some instances, run against the requirements of natural justice.
When he considers the ‘content’, or the ‘extent’, of ‘the order of the precepts of the natural law’, he equates it with the ‘order of the natural inclinations’ (ST 1/2.94.2). These turn out to be, first, ‘the tendency towards the good of the nature which we share with all other beings’ – to preserve our lives; second, at the level of the life we share with other animals – ‘nature has taught all animals to mate, to bring up their young, and suchlike’; and third, as rational animals, we have a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in community, which means that ‘it is a matter of the natural law that we have an inclination, for instance, to avoid ignorance, not to offend those with whom one ought to live amicably, and other such related matters’.
As created in God’s image, fallen and sinful as they are, human beings retain an innate capacity for ultimately enjoying the bliss of eschatological communion with God. The soul is naturally open to a face-to-face communion with God, which can only be granted supernaturally:
In one way, beatific vision or knowledge is beyond the nature of the rational soul in the sense that the soul cannot reach it by its own power; but in another way it is in accordance with its nature, in the sense that by its very nature the soul has a capacity for it, being made in God’s image.
(ST 3.9.3 ad 3)
Theological virtues (ST 2/2.1–46)
In the second part of the Second Part, Thomas goes into detailed analysis of the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, and then the four cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, together with the corresponding sins. These lengthy and fascinating analyses are essentially a Christian revision of Aristotle’s ethics, richly documented, and drawing on an immense range of philosophical as well as theological sources. Only a few of the more controversial theses can be highlighted here.
One of Thomas’s proposals is that we should think of the specifically Christian form of love – charity – on the analogy of friendship: a friendship inaugurated and maintained by God’s establishing a way of life in order to share with us the beatitude of Trinitarian life.
Thomas rejects the thesis, standard in his day, that charity on the human being’s part simply is the Holy Spirit inhabiting the human being (ST 2/2.23.2) – if the divine love which is charity is in us only as the Holy Spirit that means that we ourselves are not charitable people, or ever actually acting charitably and lovingly. That is tantamount to saying that we are mere puppets. Thomas, characteristically, fears that this implies that charity would not be human but that the human being would merely be the locus of purely divine activity, as if divine love ‘uses the Christian as its tool and instrument – like a vessel or pipe through which the stream of divine bounty should flow unceasingly to others’. Thinking to honour the excellence of charity, the thesis only diminishes charity, Thomas holds. Humans are moved by the Holy Spirit in such a way that we actually perform whatever act of love. This returns us to the central insight – human freedom does not rule out divine causality – rather, human and divine causality work together in such a way that God moves the human will to act so that it acts freely – see Wisdom 8:1, a favourite authority: God moves all things to their goals by endowing each with a form that inclines it to its goal.
Cardinal virtues (ST 2/2.47–170)
The four cardinal virtues predate Aristotle, Thomas’s source: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. With these ‘hinge’ virtues (Latin cardo), Thomas is in a position to catalogue and categorize four great clusters of virtues and their corresponding vices.
Thomas pays much attention to the virtue of prudentia – much more than our word ‘prudence’. In the English language, at least, the word has the wrong connotations; sometimes a virtue, more often perceived as a vice, it means a habit of being canny and circumspect, determined above all to avoid risks and undesirable consequences of a decision. For Thomas, on the other hand, prudence is a virtue of the utmost necessity for human life (ST 1/2.57/5):
A good life consists in good deeds. Now in order to do good deeds, it matters not only what people do, but also how they do it; namely, that they do it from right choice and not merely from impulse or passion. However, since choice is about things in reference to an end, rightness of choice requires two things: namely, a due end, and something suitably ordained to that due end…. For people to be rightly adapted to what fits their due end, however, they need a disposition in their reason, because counsel and choice, which are about things ordained to an end, are acts of reason. Consequently an intellectual virtue is needed in their reason, to perfect the reason, and make it well adjusted towards things ordained to the end; and this virtue is prudence.
Thus prudence is an indispensable virtue for leading a good life. Thomas means ‘good judgement’, the skill of grasping the salient features of a situation, relying on long experience of resourceful and responsive decision making – we might say practical insight, even common sense. It is nothing abstract or abstruse. Rather, it is a familiar feature of many people’s character.
By far the most space in the second part of the Second Part is dedicated to the cardinal virtue of justice and its many allied and satellite virtues and vices. The 6th-century Roman Emperor Justinian’s Code of Law, recovered in the 12th century, was a major influence in shaping the social and political institutions of the West, especially canon law. Though aware of the jurisprudence of the day, Thomas evidently preferred to go back to earlier philosophical authorities. He starts, anyway, from the definition of right, jus, as ‘a certain balance of equality, aequalitas, as its very name shows, for in common speech things are said to be adjusted when they match evenly’ (ST 2/2.58.1). Though allusions are interwoven to the biblical notion of righteousness (justitia in the Vulgate), that is not the focus. The central theme is the lasting and constant will to render to each his due.
The discussion is divided into justice in society as a whole (justitia generalis), justice between private persons (justitia commutiva), and to individuals from the social or political group (distributiva).
The first concerns the common good, which Thomas sees no need to discuss at length.
Distributive justice (ST 2/2.61.1) is concerned with apportioning proportionately to each person his or her share from the common stock – thus tasks, benefits, penalties, and so on. It includes the proper and equitable distribution of the wealth of the community. For Thomas, private property is a reasonable way of caring for things so long as those things when used by their owners are used in accordance with the common good, such that nothing is ever so privately owned that the common good cannot direct its use. Consistent with a long tradition of Christian and Jewish values, what Thomas describes is not widely practised or even accepted and understood in neoliberal capitalism.
Commutative justice occupies most attention: justice between person and person in exchanges, buying and selling, loaning at interest, and so on. The discussion of restitution is typical: returning something to its proper owner and/or making reparation for a loss or injury inflicted, so restoring the balance, aequalitas (ST 2/2.62).
The sins against commutative justice make a graphic picture of the morals of the day (ST 2/2.64–78): murder, bodily injury, theft and robbery, verbal injury in courts of law, inflicted by the judge, the prosecution, the defendant, witnesses and the defending counsel; followed by reviling, backbiting, tale-bearing, derision, cursing, cheating, and usury.
‘Religion’ is the first virtue that Thomas considers under the heading of the cardinal virtue of justice (cf. ST 2–2.81), perhaps surprising to us today. It covers prayer, worship, sacrifice, offerings and first fruits, tithes, vows, oaths, and suchlike; and the related vices of superstition, idolatry, simony, and so on.
According to Thomas, it is ‘a dictate of natural reason that human beings should do something to reverence God’ – though what, exactly, is not determined by natural reason but is instituted by divine or human law (ST 2/2.81.2 ad 3). The practices which display the natural virtue of religion (as he considers it to be) come under justice as rendering what is due: in this case, the debt of worship which creatures owe to God as creator. He places the virtue of religion in the context of honouring one’s parents, honouring the sovereign, and suchlike – different kinds of honouring, as he says; yet clearly, he thinks, with a family resemblance. Piety, for Thomas, is not private feelings of awe; worship is an expression of the public virtue of justice.
Thomas has to make sense of the practice of asking God for such things as good weather, better health, and the like, without implying that God’s will might be subject to change in our favour. As so often he steers between two extremes. God cannot be affected, let alone manipulated, by any creature; while on the other hand, petitionary prayer, no doubt the commonest form, then as now, cannot be pointless. What happens is what God wills from all eternity; nevertheless our asking God to grant this or that favour is not a waste of time. Creatures do not ask God to change his mind whatever they may think they are doing. Petitionary prayer affects, not God, but those who pray. On Thomas’s view, we pray in order to dispose ourselves so as to receive properly what God wills to give us. We pray, so to speak, to change, not God’s will, but our own disposition. ‘We do not pray in order to change the divine disposition, but that we may ask for that which God has arranged to be granted through our prayers.’ What we have to remember, Thomas insists, is that what is disposed by divine providence is not only what effects will take place but also from what causes and in what order they come about – including human acts as causes. We do certain things not that we might change divine providence by what we do, but rather that by what we do we bring about certain effects according to the order disposed by God. In short, putting it neatly: we do not pray in order that we should change divine providence, rather we pray in order to bring about what God has determined would be fulfilled through our prayers. Thomas quotes Gregory the Great: ‘we pray by asking that we might deserve to receive what almighty God decreed from all eternity to give us’. As the allusions to human actions as causes suggests, Thomas regards the relationship between petitionary prayer and God’s unchangeable will as one more instance of the double agency, the relationship between secondary and primary causalities, which lies at the centre of his theology.
Divine providence not only disposes what effects will take place, but also the manner in which they will take place, and which actions will cause them. Human acts are true causes and therefore humans must perform certain actions, not in order by their acts to change the divine disposition, but in order by their acts to fulfil certain effects in the manner determined by God. What is true of natural causes is true also of prayer, for we don’t pray in order that we should change God’s disposition of things; on the contrary we pray so as to bring about what God has decreed is to happen through prayers.
(ST 2–2.83.2)
For Thomas, that would be superstition, a magical attempt to manipulate God, which must have been extremely common in his day. For Thomas, on the contrary, we pray as a way of entering the order of things in which God has decided that certain events will happen as prayed-for effects. As Thomas keeps insisting, there is no conflict between divine freedom and our creaturely freedom – on the contrary, in his view, the more profoundly we exercise our freedom, the more God is at work in us. It scarcely needs saying that this is another insight that cries out for further discussion.
18. Thomas Aquinas in the Demidoff altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli
More copies of the second part of the Second Part survive than of the first, which suggests that early generations of students lacked interest in the admittedly quite demanding discussion of moral agency, and even of law and grace. Potted versions of the second part of the Second Part, as we noted, were soon in circulation: effectively reducing Thomas’s lengthy analyses to something more like the checklists of vice that he wanted to replace.
What his students should have taken away, and what we might highlight today, is an account of the good life for human beings, including reflections on the ultimate end, action, intention and choice, virtue and character – in short, what philosophers have recently labelled ‘virtue ethics’. In addition, in the exhaustive analysis of the divine and then the cardinal virtues, Thomas delineates in detail what it is like to conduct oneself as a moral agent, as a creature endowed with reason and free will. Finally, since faith and reason, grace and nature, should work in harmony, it is no surprise, indeed it is absolutely appropriate, that Thomas could not have supposed he was doing any more than illuminating and reinforcing reflectively the lives that his audience were already leading. He agreed with Aristotle: ‘we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use’ (Nicomachean Ethics II.1). That does not mean that he did not from time to time suggest ways in which his students might reconsider what they were doing. If they were tempted to regard their moral and spiritual growth in terms of sporadic outbursts of heroic virtue or repression of vice – sins or good deeds that one might count – then Thomas was inviting them to think of the moral life more in the light of a vision of the good and in terms of achieving a certain stability of character. If they were inclined to regard themselves as ‘channels of God’s love’, he wanted them to be charitable people. If they were fascinated, as they no doubt were, by the almost endless lists of virtues and vices under the heading of justice, then he was surely hoping that they understood that all this was grist to the theologian’s mill – even if there was little reference to Scripture and even less to Christ. If they thought they could change God’s will by concentrating hard as they prayed, or worse still by attempting to bargain with God, Thomas reminded them once again of the principle of double agency – there is no competition between divine and human causalities: ‘What is true of natural causes is true also of prayer.’