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Introduction
The natural law reconsidered here is the doctrine presented in
theological writings of Thomas Aquinas. The subtitle, suggesting a
continuity with the ideas of Chesterton and the mainly English lay and
literary theologians of the 1940s, is serious in intention. Truth is
indeed what does not lie hidden (aletheia), yet it is the only
proportionate cause of wonder.
The first three chapters hammer home the same point from three
different perspectives, this point being the necessity of transcending
the legal approach. It is argued that the vocabulary of law, while
remaining convenient for Aquinas due to his view of the divine
revelational pedagogy, the Bible, is yet removed by him (and by
implication the New Testament authors) to such an analogical plane that
such discourse cannot be regarded as an essential part of his
philosophical wisdom. A continuity with Nietzsche and modern
speculation then becomes more visible. Aquinas in fact gives the
rationale of these later intuitions in terms of the bonum honestum
itself as ultimately transcending any purely moral good.
This teleological position is distinguished from
utilitarianism (ch.4) and ethical rationalism, opening the way to
creative options as pointed to in the tradition of the virtues and
their unity, this latter (unity of the virtues) being a doctrine of
more use in legitimating apparent aberrations than in discrediting
unconventional virtue. Here the individuality of any existing
substance, such as persons in particular is brought out, with the
implication of the insufficiency of any legal or scientific scheme. A
richer doctrine of vocation in terms of personal inspiration is put
forward.
Three central examples are considered in support of the
thesis of love as the "form of all the virtues", viz. justice (only
"mercy" provides the will to it), the erotic, the requirement never to
murder. Next (ch.10) we consider ultimate happiness as the end uniting
all individuals, going on to consider the Gospel beatitudes as
presented by Aquinas as the charter here and now for full happiness.
This leads to the topic of our natural and hence common inclinations as
reflected in assertions of law, of which, we claim, the order of these
inclinations is the source, all being derived from the urge to personal
fulfilment (salvation). We show the continuity with biological reality,
the necessity for a meaningful ethics of having biogenic roots, thus
transcending all dualism. We end with a stress on creativity as the
sign and effect of love, love itself being the only defensible ethical
response to reality.
NATURAL LAW RECONSIDERED
A Romance of the Obvious
Contents
Introduction
1. Natural Law Reconsidered.
2. Against Atheistic or Any Other Moralism.
3. The New Law, Modernity and Natural Law: a Necessary
Reintegration.
4. Consequentialism and Natural Law.
5. Creative Options.
6. Individual and Analogy.
7. Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas.
8. Eros and the Human Good.
9. Murder Today.
10. Ultimate Happiness.
11. The Beatitudes as our Natural Plan of Life.
12. Natural Inclinations and their Order.
13. Natural Law and Physical Reality.
14. Natural Inclinations Broadcast.
15. The Central Role of Creativity.
Index
Bibliography
CHAPTER ONE
The doctrine of natural law has two poles, that of nature and that
of law. Conservatives use it so as to bind their charges by law,
such law just happening to be "natural", though this circumstance
helps them to claim to present an easy yoke, a light burden. Yet it
is a mere trick of language that suggests that the naturalness of
such law makes it no longer binding or constraining, as "positive"
law might be felt to be. If the real, existing and individually
personal subject does not find such a prescription coming
naturally to him here and now then he or she is without
qualification law-bound, unfree. It is not here that the easy yoke
and light burden is found.1
1
Cf. Mtth.11,30.
In the thought of Aquinas, however, natural law does not
seem to have functioned in this way, much to the annoyance of
the more zealous moralists calling themselves Thomists.2 In
reading him one is forced more and more to see how he focusses
first upon the natural inclinations, understood in an "objective"
sense as being those ends of our specific and generic nature, in so
far as this nature may be taken as common to us all, which evoke
inclination prior to any operation of free choice. For it is precisely
these inclinations that a free agent will consult as part of the
activity of choosing (electio) itself.3 WE do not begin, that is, with
constraints, as calling this ethics a theory of law must often have
suggested.
Thus our guiding, central inclination is to our ultimate end
("ultimate" is to be understood here as in "ultimate reality"; there
is no call to make it exclusively a term to a temporal process). As
being our ideal fulfilment one can only have one such end, just as
a matter of conceptual analysis, Aquinas thinks. We call it
happiness, though Aquinas has two terms for it, felicitas and be-
atitudo, both of which he identifies with God (it can also be called
salvation). Revealingly, he states that these, or this, is more truly
or directly the bonum honestum, or honourable good, than is
virtue. Virtue is only a bonum honestum as leading to happiness.4
This alone shows that Aquinas was not a moralist, in the sense of
an adherent of moralism, i.e. of the doctrine, in whatever form,
that there is a universe of "values" somehow separate from the
human good in general, so that we have to "respect" it or them,
not allow ourselves spontaneously to follow after happiness.
2
Cf. V. Bourke, "Is Thomas Aquinas a Natural Law Ethicist?" The
Monist 1974, pp.5266.
3
Just one short quaestio of the vast Second Part of the Summa
Theologia, the whole of which deals with ethics and moral theology, is
devoted to natural law. This is not even the main concern of the
treatise on law itself, which as serving as a preface to the immediately
following treatise on grace is only there at all out of deference to the
pattern of development in scripture. Law is also dealt with in the
questions on the virtue of justice, which again are more concerned with
this virtue than with natural law. Aquinas's exhaustive commentary on
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics underscores this stress, and cannot be
dismissed as merely retailing Aristotle's views, since Aquinas begs to
differ in a few places. What he does stress (more than Aristotle) are
the ends of human nature, and here the aspect of law as defining an
essence or nature appears, but not as particularly restrictive. For
these ends only oblige us as it were vacuously, or under pain of not
attaining them if we fail to pursue them.
4
Summa theol. IIaIIae 145, 1 ad 1um, ad 2um.
Aquinas explains natural law by a reduction of it to these
inclinations. The order of the "precepts" just is the order, in our
nature, of these inclinations, from which it is obvious that each
inclination is itself a law, a precept. Hence the moralists try to
contest this reading of the text, basing themselves on Aquinas's
saying in one place that the one order is according to (secundum)
the other. But when order A is according to order B then the two
orders are the same, and there are other texts to drive home this
identity in any case.
Even the reference to precepts, in which Aquinas says
natural law consists, belongs only to the super-structure of his
conception. This is because lex naturale is an intellectual
abstraction made from the real ius naturale, which is a proportion
holding between things in reality and not something imposed at
all.5 One acts according to natural law when one's action is in tune
with reality, especially the reality of one's own natural needs.
In so far as obligation is a factor in Aquinas's thought it
rests entirely upon the natural necessity of those ends we call
goods, as being required for our happiness. We are obliged to
pursue them and to avoid what averts from them. But this is what
we anyway naturally do, more or less imperfectly, just as we
naturally try to do it yet more perfectly. This is the bakground to
virtuous effort.(Jan16)
Of course it is true that one of the virtues or habits we
need for success here is justice, the will to bestow what is due (to
the other), and it is under this aspect that moral obligation
appears, a bonum honestum attaching to actions needed, or to
non-performance of actions needing to be avoided, for the
attaining of the ultimate bonum honestum.
Even goodness, or the good, and hence also moral
goodness, is not an ultimate for Aquinas. Good, any good, he
points out, is a being. If some beings become goods then this is
because they are desired by us, i.e. this is what goodness names,
whether they be desired naturally or by a particular choice
indifferently. It is beings that are ultimately real, and a desired
being is a being in a certain relation to will.6 Happiness,
accordingly, is a state of being of a subject which could in
principle be objectively defined and described, as by Boethius, for
example. It is identical with the good, as also with the attainment
of the good, and while one can make some play with this double
aspect of happiness the main point stands, that it is being,
substantial or accidental, which is desired. It was the cardinal
5
Ibid. IIaIIae 57 1, ad 2um.
6
Cf. QD de potentia 9, 7 ad 6.
error of Puritanism to divorce the morally good from what was or
even could be naturally desired, Kant's talk of a "higher or nobler
end than happiness" being just on the face of it a simple abuse of
language, even after allowing for his stipulatively "low" under-
standing of what can be called happiness. Good, in fact, like truth,
is an ens rationis.
There are many further indications of how far Aquinas is
from attaching any literal legality to natural law, which he defines
as a reflected divine light, something rather distant from any
usual notion of law, to say the least. One might indeed want to
say that this is a case of metonymy in the sense of a change of
name, i.e. of a wrong name for such a light. This light, however, as
being God, is identified with the eternal law, lex aeterna, in the
theory one with God in so far as his government of the world, one
with his being like all God's attributes, is considered. For all law
flows from this government, including in itself the divine justice
and mercy, corresponding to the biblical faithfulness. This notion,
however, posits nothing more nor less than the stability of
natures, stipulating that there be real, law-governed essences in
the world, the "laws of nature". Certainly these can be called
decrees, but the sociomorphism, whether or not sanctioned by
scripture, is patent.
Indeed it is only the third type of law in Aquinas's four-
part scheme, viz. human or positive law, that is really or literally
law. And here he has marked his opposition to "legalism", to that
concentration upon will, upon a will to bind, by his situating law
not in the will at all but in the reason7, to the scandal or at least
incomprehension of Suarez and others. Furthermore, in making
human law dependent upon "natural law", i.e. upon ordered
human inclination, for its validity he entirely robs the former of its
sting, as hard-headed jurists down the ages have at once seen.
This is a charter of freedom if ever there was one.
Thus for his fourth category, the divine law of positive
revelation, Aquinas, after a preliminary nod at the Old Testament,
declares that the new or gospel law, the one that counts, is
nothing written at all but, rather, a grace or charity infused into
the human heart. It is interesting that the language of
prescriptiveness is dispensed with here. Not a command to love,
say, but a new nature is what Aquinas states to be a law here, just
as there are the (scientific) laws of the old nature. The way for
such an identification, of moral laws and laws of nature, was
prepared for by situating law in the reason and not the will. It also
elucidates what we were earlier wanting to see as a wrong use of
7
Summa theol. IaIIae 90, 1.
the term "law". Such a wide view of law, however, quite removes
the customary element of restriction attaching to the term, as
Suarez was expressly to object.8 Law in this sense, like a law of
natural being or an essence, guides and characterizes the life and
behaviour of the redeemed in the positive sense of enabling such
a life to be at all. Aquinas is here in agreement with St. Paul (or
Origen), for whom the Old Law (apart from a historical and now
defunct application) was no more than a "figure" of the new and
abiding freedom, a kind of spiritual cipher requiring to be
understood "spiritually".
The legalists among the Thomists often accept very much
of this, as good scholarship requires of them. They then go on,
nonetheless, to press their rearguard action (in favour of forensic
divine commands) within the field of the inclinations themselves.
Not only do they distinguish, rightly, between profound or "true"
inclinations and superficial urges. They go on to identify such a
true inclination with a natural or biological teleology of which the
individual is not conscious, since he or she may even desire the
contrary of such a supposed teleology. This is questionable
indeed, being hostile to spontaneity.
One may not be too categorical in distinguishing
inclinations and urges. A natural impulse, as we call it, is not
properly "blind" if nature itself has been conceded to be the guide.
A preoccupation with a supposed "corruption" of nature may lead
an individual to be more or less mistrustful, but the central
determining role of nature as generally whole and in order, such
that grace is said to build upon it, cannot be called in question
from within a natural law theory.
Nor, secondly, is there any contradiction in positing a
considered inclination as going beyond or negating a natural
teleology, as, for example, civilized cuisine goes beyond the
requirements of simple nourishment, or loving sexuality
transcends its foundations in the need for procreation. It is not,
that is, merely that the estate of marriage has a secondary (sic)
aim of mutual spousal affection, but that sexuality itself goes over
into this, thus transcending its biological teleology. Similarly, one
observes even in the animal world a homosexual enjoyment which
at least genitally is non-teleological.
It follows that natural law theory cannot be used to
outlaw some inclinations by appeal to other inclinations, just as,
our first point, one cannot downgrade any inclination to a "blind
urge" which is somehow no longer an inclination. What one can
do, rather, is to investigate what we really or most deeply want.
8
Cf. F. Suarez S.J., De Legibus (1619), I, 1, i.
Even here a "last ditch" attempt can be made to bolster
the legalist scheme. One can claim to show, with Aquinas indeed,
that we all "really want" one thing, viz. the infinite which is God.
So, once given that, one will not deeply want anything averting
from that end, will in fact be obliged by one's own pondus to avoid
it. Here there are complications, questions. Is this end attainable
at all? If so then what, if anything, averts from or endangers the
attainment of it and why? Even those questions only apply to
those once convinced of the uniqueness, reality and universal
desirability of an ultimate end, though this is in fact built into the
Thomistic account of the natural law, since the latter is even
defined as reflecting the lex aeterna. The divine is not just there
as an extra sanction, which a Grotius might discard. It founds and
makes possible any natural law at all.
If this end does exist, then its attainability (the first
question) can be defended by arguing from natural desire. Thus, a
natural end must be naturally attainable, at least on the premise
that "nature does nothing in vain", i.e. the creation is intelligently
ordered. This particular end, however, will be by its own nature
unattainable, it can be shown. for as infinite it cannot without
contradiction lie passive to anyone's gaze or grasp. Any God is
necessarily "a hidden God". What follows from the argument,
given the premise, is a qualified conclusion as regards the natural
attainability of this unique because infinite end, viz. it is natural
that the infinite being will reveal or give itself in response to its
creature's natural aspiration. One should, then, expect, hope, look
for this, as Newman argued and Plato once indicated. The intellect
itself, after all, according to Aristotle, "comes from outside". This
principle, anyhow, is reflected in the existence of traditions of
revelation (antecedent to their particular truth or falsity), as in the
passive, expectant attitude to tradition generally evinced down
the ages, taken together with people's propensity to offer sacrifice
to beings considered more potent than themselves. This impulse
to sacrifice, as if with all right to elicit (but not compel) a superior
initiative, Aquinas saw as a primary datum of natural law, in line
with what we have been saying.9
Theologians, however, tend to object here. They wish to
protect the gratuitousness of divine intervention. Now certainly
much of what is specific to Christianity must be gratuitous, but
one can still argue in general that an intelligent creature, as part
of the conditions for its creation, will have its natural needs
9
Summa theol. IIaIIae 85, 1. Cf. Lawrence Dewan O.P., "St.
Thomas, Our Natural Lights and the Moral Order", Angelicum LXVII (1990),
pp. 298300.
provided for, including a need for some divine initiative exceeding
any finite creature's active powers, given that this can be shown
to be a need.
It is not convincing to argue that the natural inclination is
only to a natural knowledge of or about God and not to the fullest
conceivable contact with him. For Aquinas it is clear that since
bonum in communi, i.e. goodness without restriction, is the
natural object of any rational will, so there can be no restrictions
upon natural desire. We can and do naturally desire a
supernatural state, once it is conceived and its import
appreciated.10 All the difficulties of the hypothesis of limbo, where
the unbaptized innocents only do not know that they are in hell
because they are kept in ignorance of heaven, derive from this
fact. In general, a Carthusian author has remarked, "what the
spiritual man desires is contact."
So much for our first question. If there is such an ultimate
end, then it will be attainable, but upon its own terms only. For our
second question we asked what might avert from such attainment
and why or how it might do this. That action and the end are in
general related, let us first note, follows necessarily if one accept
that all free action (actus humani) is internally purposeful, propter
finem. The argument (one of them) was precisely that such a final
end was required for actions as a whole to be possible. But if
action is for the end, it cannot also be that the end is bestowed
independently of action. Thus even faith is an act, and otherwise
action would be robbed of its point. But in reality the final end is
pursued in any act whatever and desire for it is hence the motive
force of any activity at all.
Although action has to be for the end, however, this does
not, so far, exclude its attainment or hindrance by other means,
such as fortune, fate or predestination. One would have to argue
further for any elimination of arbitrary or irrational factors from
final human destiny which one wished to make. But certainly here
and now fortune can affect whether an action attains the
happiness it necessarily aims at, and a bad plan might succeed
better than a good one. Prudent action, therefore, has to take
account of this.
Given then that action does affect, is ordered well or
badly towards the end, then there has to be a differentiation
among acts, this being a condition for the choice between actions
which we make out of natural necessity. Hence some acts will
10
The various traditional fantasies as to the Devil's archangelic
intellect having baulked at just this offer are too tenuous and picture
laden, too specific in fact, to form a serious counterargument here.
hinder attainment of the end at least in the sense of slowing down
what a better chosen act could have achieved. Thus far there may
or may not be acts which send one in the opposite or reverse
direction, which avert from the end. They would do this in virtue of
some principal cause making them to be of this class. The
traditional Christian answer identifies this with destructiveness of
the love of God or neighbour. Independent analysis might seem to
confirm this. Thus the last end is sought because loved.11 What we
love we desire (cupiditas) and we love ourselves in desiring good
for ourselves (amicitia) as we might for another, such friendship
however being also a good we ourselves desire to possess, thus
completing the circle which makes up the unity of love, of eros
and agape, of losing one's life to save it.
So to love the ultimate end, however we see it (God or our own
happiness etc.), is already a disposing union of mind and heart for
the real union or possession sought. We should not doubt that to
resolve with energy to be happy is a positive step. We need strong
wants, as even a Buddhist must want strongly to shed his wants, if
he or she is to hope to succeed in that particular quest. It can
anyhow be shown philosophically, it is worth repeating, that God,
any God, whether actual or hypothetical, must itself have and
indeed be love.12 It would then follow that in loving we become
like and hence relatively closer on our way to him, her or it, a view
reflected in the Johannine biblical texts particularly.
But is it possible not to love, or to stop loving? Is
happiness sought with more force by some than by others? This
must be true, and hence an agent's missing the target, so to say,13
is not primarily due to his or her having aimed with an equal
energy at something else, as that sporting image might suggest to
us, even though lack of concentration and indifference are foes of
achievement in sports particularly. For we say that one "aimed at"
self-love in place of love of God or neighbour, or followed a ruling
passion which had usurped the desire for the infinite or "whole".
But the deeper truth is that there was a lack, an absence of the
degree of force or life (of love) needed, leaving a vacuum that
could be filled by particular demonic energies in the negative
sense. Thus the difficult goods of friendship or virtue (Aquinas
11
That there is love in God, such that on his principles the
divine simplicity would thus be identified with (inter alia) love,
Aquinas first argues for at the most general level independently of the
Christian revelation (Ibid. Ia 20, 1).
12
See note 10.
13
This idea is the tymological basis of the biblical Greek word
for sin, hamartia.
sees friendship itself as a virtue) are rejected, fallen away from.
But friendship, seeking the other's good, is itself a need, a good,
required by our own nature, to which we cannot but be inclined
and even inclined to strive for. This is inclusive of that friendship
with God from which theologians often wish to debar what they
call the natural man, who has no right to expect it. Yet he can dare
to hope for it as falling under bonum in communi, this hope
maybe even leading him to aim at the "supernatural". Otherwise
how would he begin that journey. What, conversely, can forbid him
thus to hope, in ways immortalized, for example, in the psalms of
David or the poetry of Emily Bronte?
Thus it is that when Aquinas wishes to characterize sin, in
its traditional division of mortal and venial, he writes:
When the will sets itself upon something that is of its nature
incompatible with the charity that orientates man
towards his ultimate end, then the sin is mortal by its
very object... whether it contradicts the love of God, such
as blasphemy or perjury, or the love of neighbour, such
as homicide or adultery...
But when the sinner's will is set upon something that of its nature
involves a disorder, but is not opposed to the love of God
and neighbour, such as thoughtless chatter or
immoderate laughter and the like, such sins are venial.14
**********************************
For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the highest
hope, and a rainbow after long storms.19
22
Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will I, 6. See also his de Vera
Religione 31, Contra Faustum I.
this down to a deference to Aristotle. Deference, on his part, is
more likely to be operative in the theological realm. But we should
note that even in the commentary, through giving a more central
role to natural inclinations than Aristotle seems to do, he moves
more towards a theory of natural law in the open sense described
above.
Scripture, as deriving from the Jewish tradition, was
bound to speak in terms of law, as if by a divine choice, whether
or not we want to accord divine inspiration to the Old Testament.
It may still, and even a fortiori, be the case that Jesus set out to
raise the tradition of law above itself altogether. It is thus absurd,
it might seem, when Kierkegaard treats the "new commandment"
("love one another as I have loved you") as an old-style precept
addressed to our higher will, in order to exclaim over the paradox
of commanding love (though this is already done in the Old
Testament). Is not Jesus rather pouring a grace into the heart? It is
even more imperceptive, at best, for Kant to argue from the mere
phraseology used (taken from the operative cultural background)
that what we have is an imperative addressed to pure will and
nothing of an affective or above all spontaneous nature. For the
new law, as Aquinas insists, and hence the new command, is
neither written nor spoken.23 The Superman has been anticipated,
the charter of freedom is there, as it was when Augustine
exclaimed "Love and do what you like." There is no call to respond
"Yes that is all very well but..." This, as an attitude common
among believers, would be to make God's word void, and is in fact
a case of applying a restrictive interpretation to what offers itself
as in essence the abolition of restriction, the liberation of captives.
The battle against objectification, legalism, abstract
generalization, is constant as flowing from the ineptness of
thought and language. The evil of giving in to this pressure lies in
the wish for self-justification, wishing to know that one cannot be
faulted, while the whole Christian proclamation centres around not
judging, around being justified by God and believing in this. This is
a bigger thing than God's paying the price (to whom?) for our sins
and so on. For it is a supra-historical declaration against such
objectification and legalism, culminating in the best man, who is
also God, it is claimed, being "made sin" for us. It was the
dynamic of the best Protestantism to have latched on to this so
single-mindedly, and much of our humanity and freedom today, as
expressed in our literary tradition, for example, derives from this,
23
Summa theol. IaIIae 106, 1 & 2. He also says, at 3 ad 3 of this
question that it is only due to man's fallen or sinful state that this
"law" was not given and maintained from the beginning of the world.
of which the ultimate source remains the Gospels as fulfilling the
prophecy and promise of the Jewish sacred writings.
Thus Aquinas did not typically express himself in terms of
a restrictive natural law. The theme of the pars secunda of the
Summa theologica is that of the virtues, habits and graces needed
for attaining the end, and there is, again, little call to argue that
his commentaries upon Aristotle's ethical writings do not
represent his own views.
**************************************
CHAPTER TWO
***********************************
26
See our The End of the Law: Dispensing with Moralism, Peeters,
Louvain 1999.
Still, his good will or will to do one's duty could certainly be called
a virtue in so far as it might become habitual, and that virtue is
clearly justice. But these two aspects of ethical theory need,
anyhow, to be integrated, as is not always the case. It is clear that
for Kant, for example, virtue is not important as a philosophical
concept serviceable for the "metaphysical" (his term) explanation
of ethical reality. In later "analytical" moral philosophy it is even
clearer that the essentially ethical is thought of on the analogy of
giving an order, so that reason, for example, dictates to the
subject after the manner of a universal law-giver.27
The alienation of reason from the self in this manner is
already a departure from the profundity of the tradition. We
remember, for example, that St. Thomas spoke of the order of the
precepts of natural law being according to the order of the
inclinations of human nature,28 a thought quite alien to Kant, and
doubly so when St. Thomas combines this with the repeated
assertion that natural law is in fact the law of human reason, i.e.
just Kant's characterization of it. But St. Thomas gives us an
explanation, a justification rather, of his view, for example where
he asks the question, closely connected with our main enquiry
here, whether all the acts of the virtues belong to the natural
law.29 We remember here, incidentally, that whereas virtues are
habits, natural law is not itself a habit but consists of precepts
concerning things (or bona) to be done (facienda, sc. agibilia) or
pursued (persequenda). Hence it could only be acts of the virtues,
not the virtues themselves, which might coincide with the natural
law (unless we can say that a virtue itself is to be pursued30). St.
27
This was the point of entry of P. Foot's criticism (cf. our
Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Frankfurt 1987, pp. 4349, referring to
her "When is a Principle a Moral Principle?", Aristotelian Society
Supplement XXVIII, 1954). One calls "someone good because of what one
believes one has recognized in him. This that one can recognize can only
be the disposition or habit we call a virtue" (p.51). So one should go
even further than Foot, when she shifts the emphasis in ethics from
principles (judgments, i.e. Aristotle's second act of the understanding)
to concepts (first act). We should focus on the reality conceived, so as
to see that the "collection" of virtues and vices is not, as she says,
"haphazard", but an ordered structure in (human) nature. Otherwise we
still remain at the rationalist level of discourse about morals, i.e. we
confuse truth and being, concept and thing.
28
Summa Theol. IaIIae, 94, 2.
29
Ibid. 94, 3.
30
The distinction between acts and their ends in relation to what
is obligatory is discussed later in the present chapter.
Thomas writes:
Everything in this text (of Ia-IIae 94, 3) falls into place with a kind
of obviousness as natural as the nature described, provided we
accept the substantive, in some way astonishing premiss that
that is, the soul of which intellect and will are the powers, as
flowing from its immaterial substance. This is the view that is
foreign to Cartesian (and hence Kantian) philosophy, according to
which reason is totally and even definitionally separated from the
extended quantities and bodies which it studies, bodies which
need no form outside of their own measurements, least of all an
intellectual and self-subsisting form, in order to make them what
they are.
Reason then, for St. Thomas, gives man his very self
(forma dat esse). It is, as natural, not alien to him. The importance
of this for ethics was stressed again by Pope John Paul II (K.
Wojtyla), himself no mean philosopher, in the encyclical letter
Veritatis Splendor:
So reason unites law and the acts of the virtues. But how does it
do this? Our text in fact refers to just one inclination, that to
acting virtuously or rationally, though it mentions that the natural
law includes the others. In this way the law might seem more
extensive than virtue.
On the other hand we find, in St. Thomas's treatment of
the virtues, that at the end of his treatise on each virtue he has a
section on the precepts of that virtue. In fact, under just one
virtue, justice, he includes all the precepts of the Decalogue in
their specific capacity (ratio debiti) of ordering us to others.31 So
all virtues come under one precept (to act rationally), and all
precepts come under one virtue (justice). How is that possible? It
at least requires a certain coextensiveness of law and virtue after
all (tempered no doubt by a measure of equivocation upon our
phrase "come under").
Before we go any further we should remind ourselves of a
simple fact. Law, for St. Thomas, belongs to reason. The moral
virtues, on the other hand, belong to the will as participating in
reason.32 So how far we are able to distinguish law and virtue
depends in a sense upon how far we are able to distinguish
intellect and will. The distinction is clearer in St. Thomas than in
the great Greeks, and this is largely due to St. Augustine. We
remember that for Socrates virtue was knowledge.
In explaining how precepts fall under a virtue St. Thomas
says that
Since precepts are given concerning acts of the virtues any act
falls under precept insofar as it is the act of a virtue.34
31
Summa theol. IIaIIae 122, 1.
32
Even the intellectual virtues, as habits, are distinct from the
rational principles of the law. Thus the virtue of intellectus, which is
the habitual understanding of first principles, whether speculative or
practical, is in the latter case synderesis, the habit of (the
principles of) natural law, not this law itself (IaIIae 94, 1; cf. Ia
79, 12).
33
IIaIIae 16, 1.
34
Ibid. 44, 4.
place, viz. the treatment of justice:
The basic principles of human action, that is to say, are the ends
pursued, and it is upon these that the Thomistic account of
obligation rests, just as those habits are virtuous, and hence good,
which human beings need to attain their ends.
35
Ibid. 122, 1.
36
We have already referred to N. Berdyaev's ideas on
"sociomorphism", e.g. in his Slavery and Freedom, 1944.
37
IaIIae 57, 4. "In human acts ends play the role that principles
do in speculative matters." It follows immediately that practical
principles do not play this role, and so are not the same kind of thing
as speculative principles. There must therefore be an analogy in
operation in St. Thomas's parallelling of the two sets of principles at
IaIIae 94, 2, sufficiently indicated, after all, by the fact that
practical reasoning employs the principle of noncontradiction, whereas
speculative reasoning does not employ the principle bonum est
persequendum, however this may guide the person choosing to reason.
In distinguishing the necessity of compulsion and the
necessity of obligation St. Thomas speaks of the necessity of an
end, a precept (for its part) only being necessary
quando scilicet aliquis non potest consequi finem virtutis, nisi hoc
faciat.38
id quod est finis, quia habet rationem per se boni (the end itself,
because definitionally this is the good pursued).39
38
IIaIIae 58, 3 ad 2um: i.e. when someone cannot attain virtue's
end unless he acts in this way (according to the precept).
39
The appearance of utilitarianism is illusory. Every action has a
builtin end (its objectum) specifying it, which no programme or more
general end may erase from reality.
40
IIaIIae 44, 1.
41
IaIIae 57, 5. One should note, however, that to speak of a
knowledge of natural law other than that communicated by one's own
present inclinations is to introduce a rationalistic and inert authority
into the heart of morality, in place of the spontaneity of love. Cf.
Aristotle's "As a man is, so does the end seem to him." It is in this
sense that we are responsible for our moral beliefs. The habitus
rationis which we need to exercise, however, is in no sense the same as
having a rationalistic approach to behaviour. Compare the distinction
between a "perfect use of reason" (in the virtue of scientia) and
wisdom, which judges per modum inclinationus (IIaIIae 45, 2).
natural starting-points (inchoationes) of habits, as it were
seminalia virtutum.42 It is they, their hierarchical order in human
nature, which determines the order of our duties, precisely
because inclination and duty coincide in each and every natural
end.43 Prior to legal formulation there is a ius and a iustum within
nature itself, failing which indeed legislative reason would be
falsified or rendered totally irrelevant to any serious praxis:
lex non est ipsum ius, proprie loquendo, sed aliqualis ratio iuris.44
******************************
45
Cf. J. Maritain, Moral Philosophy, Magi Books, Albany
NY, 1990, chapter 5.
moral dispute is about that, and this will include matters of
justice. The demands of justice, while directed to the other, ad
alterum, are not themselves other or alien to us. How is this? Why
do we, as individuals, both want and need to be just? The question
is at least as old as Plato. One can answer it in terms of the
common good where this is rightly understood and distinguished
from what has been called the aggregate or utilitarian good.46 The
common good is shared in common as friendship is shared in
common. Between friends, and they may be more than two, as in
a family, each one fully possesses the good of the friendship or of
the family unity. To fail to give friends or other family members
their due, to defraud them in other words, is to lose the good of
friendship or of familial harmony. The person walking out of his or
her family loses that good totally, while the other injured family
members retain something of the common good damaged; they
have not totally lost it. This example illustrates the Socratic
dictum that the offender against justice is more to be pitied than
the unjustly harmed.
In just the same way, and not merely analogously, one
who destroys another's human life has destroyed human
brotherhood in himself, whether or not repentance is possible. He
is to that extent no longer one of us, one of our society, whereas
the murdered man has simply passed over to the host of our
honoured dead somewhat before his time. The same reasoning
can be applied to theft, deceit and all unjust acts.
Here especially the idea of acting against conscience
comes in, if we take conscience as our knowledge, our becoming
aware through memory, and so on, of what is or was due from us.
We can discount situations of people feeling obliged to this or that
without reference to conscience, when they so feel out of some
kind of fear, for example. The trouble, rather, is the ease with
which conscience can become diseased or neurotic or, in a word,
erroneous.
From what we have said so far, however, it can be seen
that the requirement for justice follows just as much from an
inclination of the agent as does the need for any and all of the
other virtues. This, again, is in general and principally the
inclination to act rationally, but as understood in a philosophy
where the intellect is the form of our human being and nature. It is
not a source of mysterious dicta or maxims before which nature
shrinks in terror, so to say. It shows us, rather, the way to go, as
46
Cf. Thomas D. Sullivan & Gary Atkinson, "Benevolence
and Absolute Prohibitions", International Philosophical
Quarterly, September 1985, pp.247-259.
being in the service of our deepest desires.
How necessary or absolute is justice? This is a root
question for our enquiry, our project of deducing justice from
needs, from what is required for the fullness of (in this case,
human) being. The common good, we are saying, which justice
serves, is needed for each person's good. Were this not so then
justice would not be justice. Yet we would still say, with
Thrasymachus perhaps, that it is not just to be just (this indeed
was part of the triumphant counter-argument). But this refers to
formal justice, as a necessary catgory47, before it receives
material content in terms of equality of proportion. Yet this
equality is still there if we would say that the weaker ought to
defer to the stronger. This debt, signified by "ought", is first cousin
to truth, as Anselm saw so clearly. Justice, the will to discharge it
is rectitudo (voluntatis), as truth is a straight (recta) reflection of
being, of what is, of the world, of how things are, in the mind.
So justice in this formal sense means being true, in
action, in the will (as habit), to the real. It is the real, then, that
requires justice, even or especially formally speaking. Hence the
point stands that if, even though it be unthinkable, the world were
otherwise then justice would be otherwise.48 Due proportion would
remain as formal constituent (just as the lion's unintelligible
utterances would be speech), the content of the due would alter.
The quarrel with Thrasymachus, however, is less radical than this,
being only about what is due to human beings, weak or strong, as
such. It is about human dignity, in the end a question of natural
philosophy, not of conceptual formalities or metaphysical
necessities. The element of "value", anyhow, in the modern
rationalist sense, lies precisely and only in this point of the will's
subjection to, love of, the real. Being, the true, is good, i.e. good is
understood or "defined" in terms of being. But this does not give
us a "separate universe of value". Rather, it binds us in just
homage to the one true universe as enshrined in the intentions of
its infinite creator.
The problem, however, might seem threatened with
47
Not of mind, but of reality, i.e. it is an a posteriori
necessity, intuited with respect to how mind and will have,
by their nature as constituted by their immanent objects
(the true and the good in communi), to respond to this
reality.
48
It would not be otherwise in such a way that we could
describe and understand it in this world. Cf. Wittgenstein's
saying that if a lion could talk we would not understand him.
incoherence in so far as the agent in some way always proclaims
by his very action what seems just to him, as Satan, in one
version, said "Evil, be thou my good." As desired, evil becomes a
good; as chosen, an action is judged proportionate, just, though
there can be error, and even wilful error, in this very judgement, in
this very choice. For it seems one can never choose totally against
all judgment, for "as a man is, so does the end seem to him", in
Aristotle's words.
But this consideration actually buttresses our position. For
the properly just man also does what seems just to him, as his
action too proclaims. He does not, either, act against all desire, as
in the fantasies of secularist altruists, but pursues his highest and
overall aim, assisted by fortitude, temperance and prudence. This
assistance turns our reflections to the question of the unity of
virtue, rather unhelpfully, we shall see, called the unity of the
virtues in the plural.
***********************************
What Kant said about virtue being able to be used in the service of
bad acts was pretty crude and unreflective. For Aquinas this is
only a seeming virtue, like thieves' honour or a murderer's
courage. It is so because of the unity of the virtues which in turn
depends upon the controlling role played by the ends of human
life towards which it is the unifying role of prudence to dispose our
actions.
There is however a truth behind, if not in, Kant's
observations here. This is, that there is no guarantee built into the
concept of virtue that its possessor is going to act in a way
generally considered right. It may please Aquinas to harmonize
the virtues with precepts but this provides no security, as indeed
we can observe in the lives of individualistic saints, against a
person's acting in a way considered reprehensible by society. This,
paradoxically, is a truth also entailed by the thesis of the unity of
the virtues. Either Tom Jones in lacking chastity is not in general
very virtuous or admirable or else what the novel would force us
to say is that in so far as he is admirable his improper acts are not
contrary to the virtue of chastity which he must possess along
with the others. In a similar way St. Thomas, if indeed he was a
hearty eater, could not have been a glutton. Again, one might ask
if the unjust steward was really unjust, if indeed his master
commended him. It seems we in some way assume the unity of
virtue. We find that those monks of whom Gibbon writes who
pictured Charlemagne in heaven except for his "guilty member",
which was variously plagued, badly lacked imagination. They can't
have it both ways. Either Charlemagne was not the saint that
ecclesiastical political mythology required him to be or, if he was,
then his exceptional amorousness was somehow all right, in
character as we say, justified by the general bigness of the man or
however we want to put it.
We can see this in quite simple dilemmas of the moral
life, such as our inability to determine externally whether one man
retreating before a particular danger has less courage than the
possibly foolhardy man rushing ahead. The first man may possess
perfect courage, as time will tend to show. Virtue, that is to say,
does not in these cases have to correspond with an external moral
absolute, since virtue itself is in the will. Of course if there are acts
of themselves undue then the virtuous man will never commit
them, but it is also true, as we are saying here, that any act which
the virtuous man does commit (and which he himself does not
repudiate) is ipso facto not undue, however it may look. Materially
it may merit, or at least incur, some nasty name or other, but
formally it will be free of it.
**********************************
49
Summa Theol. Ia-IIae 65, 1.
50
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, London 1981, p.166f.
In later work MacIntyre appears to have come closer to
Aquinas's position.
virtus moralis potest accipi vel perfecta vel imperfecta.
if a man is manifestly affected with one vice, then any virtue that
he may seem to have along with his vice is only spurious,
and really he is vicious in this respect too.
all the works of unbelievers are sins, and the virtues of the
philosophers are vices,
51
Such inclinations, we saw in the previous chapter, are
mere starting-points (inchoationes) upon which the virtue
can be built.
52
P.T. Geach, The Virtues, p.164.
if a man is vicious and does anything, then he acts viciously.
Yet the former proposition was condemned by Pope St. Pius V, the
latter by the Council of Constance (1415), authorities that
nonetheless had no difficulty with Aquinas's teaching on this
point. In fact he teaches that the acquired virtues (not the
infused) are able to exist without charity53 (just as he and Geach
agree is the case with the theological virtue of faith).
Much depends on the distinction between acquired,
imperfect virtues and infused, perfect virtues which are infused
with charity54 and depend upon it (as its effects55). Now of course
these infused virtues "stand or fall together", for theological
reasons which Geach hardly goes into, though he shows
awareness of the distinction when he says that
all virtues, however, are in the end vain for a man without the
theological virtues (p.168),
or when he asks
But, after all, what good is such imperfect virtue? Is it not really
spurious virtue? Not necessarily...
In other words,
for which is needed not only that inclination to the due end which
is immediately proper to any moral virtue (in its particular
matter), but also the effective choice of whatever is needed for
that end,
Such sin is not the same as habitual vice. One may sin, at least
venially, against an infused virtue63, but it is not possible to have a
habitual vice without total corruption of such virtue. Vice, after all,
depends as much upon settled choice and will as does any virtue,
while repeatedly committed and repented sin does not of itself
amount to a vice (habitus non est simpliciter plures actus64). It is
the contrary vice which destroys the virtue totally (though any
such vice destroys perfect prudence). For the fact that the virtues
are interconnected does not mean that they are all connected in
equal strength:
What has been said here would not be complete without recalling
St. Thomas's teaching66 that all previous gifts are restored in the
sacrament of penance, which might accordingly be viewed as a
return to a lost unity of virtue in whatever degree and not
necessarily as "back to square one". In this way the indelible
62
"Especially if it is considered in its perfection." Ia-IIae
63, 2 ad 2um. The absoluteness of the incompatibility (of
mortal sin with divinely infused virtue) here seems to be
qualified.
63
Ibid. 71, 4. This article speaks more absolutely (i.e.
without the possible qualification noted above) of the
incompatibility of mortal sin, considered as excluding
charity, with infused virtue, of which charity is the root.
64
"A habit is not simply a succession of acts." Ia-IIae 71,
3 ad 2um.
65
"One particular man can be more prompt to the act of
one virtue than to the act of another either by nature, or
through custom, or even through a gift of grace." Ibid. 66, 2.
66
E.g. in the Summa theologica, pars IIIa.
sacramental character and graces on the Christian scheme are
analogous to virtues as forming a character not lost by isolated
but uncharacteristic acts, just as one may note, looking in the
contrary direction, that the moral life is in continuity with the
spiritual or interior67 life, as the doctrine of the beatitudes and
gifts itself suggests. The association, however, is found equally in
traditions, religious or otherwise, not laying claim to a superna-
tural intervention, e.g. it is found in Plato. Such an approach,
indeed, is implicitly endorsed wherever one presents ethics under
the rubric of "the good life". It is endorsed wherever the end itself
is viewed as internal to ethics, i.e. as itself constituting, from the
side of the possessor, at least, a quality of life and behaviour68, as
in the Christian hope of divine friendship or the less ambitious
Aristotelian ideal of "active" happiness.
*************************************
73
2 Moral. 49: In quattuor virtutibus tota boni operis
structura consurgit (the whole structure of good action is
encompassed in four virtues).
74
Cf. 58, 2: omnium humanorum operum principium
primum ratio est.
75
Cf. Ia-IIae 56, 3.
76
Cf. 57, 4; 58, 3 ad 1um.
77
Cf. 58, 2.
participated, i.e. in the will, both with regard to action, the will to
act rightly, which gives us justice, and also with regard to the
passions, either as restraining them, which gives us temperance
(in the "concupiscible" sense-appetite as moderated by reason),
or as holding fast to reason against certain passions, such as fear,
which gives us fortitude (in the "irascible" sense-appetite).
The claim is that all the other virtues are reducible to
these, which are themselves irreducible. This may be meant,
firstly, as by definition alone, in that any virtue, i.e. every habit of
acting well or rationally, when it relates to rational consideration
as such, may be called prudence; but when it has to do with what
is right and due in actions it may be called justice; when it
restrains passion it may be called temperance; when it involves
constancy in adversity it may be called fortitude.
But there is also, secondly, a material or real basis, in
addition to the formal basis, for the reduction of all virtues to
these four, in so far as they refer to what is most prominent in the
defined area. Thus the skill of determining what to do always falls
under prudence, which is "preceptive". All objective debts and
duties fall under justice. All moderation of sense-pleasure falls
under temperance. The facing of death, to which all danger and
adversity tends, falls under fortitude.
Yet we may wonder whether (or how far) these virtues are
really distinct from one another. For, as Gregory the Great says,
there is no true prudence which is not just, temperate and brave,
while the same applies to these three in turn; true courage is
prudent and so on. We often seem to attribute what belongs to
one virtue to another. Thus the temperate man's self-conquest is
rightly called bravery, says St. Ambrose.
Now it is true that in one way the cardinal virtues can be
taken as merely naming the elements which must be found in any
virtuous act. In this way they do not signify a diversity of habits in
reality. Any moral act, again, requires a certain firmness
(fortitude), a certain due order (justice), a certain reasonable
moderation (temperance), plus the initial discretionary judgment
(prudence). When the virtues are so taken then prudence alone
would seem essentially distinct as belonging essentially to the
reasoning prior to the commencement of action.
But, as we have said, these virtues each have a special
object or materia in which, says St. Thomas, that general
condition of virtue described above is specifically praised. So they
are diversified by these objects.
Thus the cardinal virtues are only denominated from one
another by "a certain redundancy". Prudence, for example,
redounds upon the other virtues in so far as they are all directed
by it. Fortitude, since firm against death, is firm against harmful
pleasures and, in reverse, temperance preserves courage from
foolhardiness. This is the redundancy upon one another of habits
in themselves distinct, even if they cannot exist apart from one
another.
Granted their diversity we might ask, firstly,78 how far
these virtues are found in an exemplary way79 in God. The divine
mind, if considered as practical providence, seems then to be
prudence, while the divine self-affirmation corresponds to
conformity of desire to reason (temperance), the divine
immutability to fortitude; divine justice is clear to view. St. Thomas
is here looking in the divine nature for causal analogues of the
virtues as realities.80
Secondly, these virtues can be political, inasmuch as man
uses them in the necessary affairs of society. Thirdly, as virtutes
purgatoriae (purgatorial virtues) they structure man's search for
the divine, the finis ultimus. Here prudence rejects what is less
than this and directs man wholeheartedly to God, temperance
"uses the world as though it used it not" (St. Paul), fortitude helps
us not to be terrified by the Cross, while justice consents to the
whole divine plan.
Fourthly, what of the virtues of the souls in heaven
(virtutes purgati animi), St. Thomas asks.81 He answers: prudence
knows only the divine, temperance knows no earthly desires, nor
fortitude passions, while justice associates with and imitates the
divine mind.
78
As Peter Geach does in his The Virtues (Cambridge
1977).
79
I.e. exemplary in the Platonic sense of a more absolute
way of existing.
80
Geach denies that temperance, in particular, can be
attributed to God. He also denies that chastity and sexual
morality comes under temperance, as it does according to
Aquinas and the tradition.
81
61, 5. If this article is compared with 65, 2 (Whether
the moral virtues can exist without charity) then it would
seem to be the mind of St. Thomas that also the "political"
virtues, i.e. those with which we conduct the affairs of this
life in society, are not truly virtues except where they are
infused, i.e. by grace, without which there is no charity (a
theological virtue, and form of all virtues, even of prudence).
This applying of the general fourfold scheme to four such
specifically different areas (though three of them be in some way
theological) serves to underline its objective basis in a fourfold
reality, this in turn helping to explain the unanimity of the tradi-
tion.
*******************************
82
London 1953.
83
E. Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, New York,
1940,, pp. 325, 473.
theory does not correspond to the truth about man and his
freedom."84 Here we can understand Gabriel Marcel's remark:
Thus in this tradition the virtues are habits which man needs so as
to attain his or her end, and in his theology, for his part, Aquinas
develops and extends this doctrine into a general teaching
concerning supernatural wisdom, as he calls it (theological
virtues, beatitudes, gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit). A
personalist doctrine emerges wholly distinct from individualism,
since individualism has no doctrine of the common good. It is
precisely because certain actions, including offences against
justice committed for utilitarian motives, harm the common good
that, as we noted above, the person thus responsible harms his
own ultimate and personal good in so acting.
This theory of the ultimate end is not the same as the
"one thing needful" of the mystical tradition. Bonum in communi
(actually identified by Aquinas both with happiness and with God),
goodness as such or all that is good, is the specific good of the
rational will and hence of the human being. Yet the various
faculties other than the will have each their own particular goods
which it is natural and hence right for man to desire as well as this
bonum in communi as such. The natural desire for God is just one
of the human desires and our openness to the transcendent, as
touched upon in the first chapter, does not contradict this. There
is a hierarchy of the natural inclinations, including, for example,
such desires as that to marry or that to live in political society. On
the other hand, even the (so-called supernatural) doctrine of
"using the world as though one used it not" seems prefigured in
statements of Plato and Aristotle, as when the latter says that just
a little of divine truth is worth more than all the other goods
together and that the wise person should practise death
(athanatizein) in relation to these things for the sake of gaining
wisdom. Self-transcendence of (human) nature is built into
(human) nature, it seems. Thus Aquinas can transpose this
84
Pope John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, Rome 1993, 48.
85
G. Marcel, Les hommes contre l'humain, Paris 1951,
p.127.
Aristotelian ideal into a doctrine of divine vision as ultimate end of
life. In contrast to Aristotle though he thinks that it is necessary to
know that this is the end in order to be able to live well.
True teleology, all the same, does not require us to deny
that there are intrinsically evil acts, acts, that is to say, which
never lead to the end. One recognizes the traditional Christian
scheme.
*******************************
90
The human will, as participated intellect, has bonum
in communi as its object.
91
Cf. Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, G. Bles, London
1938, passim. It might seem unwarranted to see this hope
as anything more than an action-guiding ideal. This will
depend upon how much weight we are prepared to grant to
the argument from natural desire, and this in turn upon
anterior premisses.
It is anyhow symptomatic that Geach, for example,
rejects the existing arguments for "the traditional view about
sexual vices"92, urging rather that we "hang on to" this view in
blind faith. For there is a clear connection between these
arguments in their appeal to "natural teleologies" and the ideal of
the fitting or decorous (i.e. the natural) which honestas
suggests.93 All the same of course, if an individual argument of
this type happens to be unsound, e.g. in a particular view of just
what is unnatural, then Geach is right to reject it. It could be that
acting freely and spontaneously is more natural and hence more
fitting to man than the following of any rule at all.
St. Thomas, then, speaks of honestas as that through
which one loves the beauty of temperance, adding that it is
especially temperance, i.e. not justice or prudence, to which one
attributes a certain beauty (decorem), just as the vices of
intemperance appear as having an especial vileness (turpitudi-
nem94), as corresponding to the lowest in man, which belongs to
his animal nature.95
Enlarging on the special relation of beauty to temperance
St. Thomas finds the common thread in "a certain moderate and
convenient proportion", this being the essence (ratio) of both the
beautiful and of temperance.96
There is in general a special refinement or subtlety in this
stress upon honestas in the context of a teleological ethics. Even
though moral principles are explained as precepts enjoined as
means to human fulfilment yet we meet here the idea of moral
92
Op. cit. p.141.
93
For exposition and defence of the traditional argument
see our "Natural Law and Humanae vitae", in "Humanae
vitae": 20 anni dopo. Atti del II Congresso Internazionale di
Teologia Morale, Rome 1988; also The Recovery of Purpose,
Frankfurt 1993, Chapter Two.
94
IIa-IIae 143, 1.
95
St. Thomas uses the word bestialem, in contrast to his
general view that human sense-life is nobler than that of the
brutes. With intemperance, however, we are dealing with
sense-life when manifested as without due proportion to
reason or intellectual nature (forma corporis) and as thereby
less properly human.
96
IIa-IIae 145, 2. Aequalitas proportionis, equality of
proportion, is also, we saw, the essence of justice.
beauty, of the goodness of right moral choice, in itself. Nor does
this contradict the overall teleological perspective.
Cicero, whom St. Thomas cites, tells us that the
honestum is that which is desired for its own sake (honestum esse
quod propter se appetitur, Rhetor.II). This was later echoed in St.
Anselm's definition of justice as rectitudo propter se servata,
implicitly criticized, however, by St. Thomas at IIa-IIae 58, 1 ad
2um. For justice, he points out, is not rectitudo essentially97, as he
here (145, 1) says that honestas is in some sense virtue as a
whole, as characterizing human excellence.98
Virtue, however, and hence honestas, he goes on to say,
and we have already noted it above, is a less perfect good than
the last end, happiness (felicitas), which is always desired or loved
only for itself. For honestas is only sometimes loved for itself, as
having in it something (by participation) of ultimate happiness,
and this can be so, therefore, even when it seems to bring us no
further good (etiamsi nihil aliud boni per ea nobis accideret). All
the same it is in general desirable as leading us to the more
perfect good.
St. Thomas therefore states expressly that God and
beatitude (Deus et beatitudo) are to be honoured beyond virtue as
being more excellent than virtue, i.e. as being greater goods. We
do not worship virtue. It is noteworthy here how he seems to use
the terms God, beatitude and happiness (felicitas)
interchangeably, in so far at least as he says the same about all
three, viz. that they are a more perfect good than virtue. This,
indeed, is what we found Gilson stressing about St. Augustine and
the Christians, viz. that they "stood the old pagan philosophy of
virtue on its head."
97
Ad secundum dicendum quod neque etiam justitia est
essentialiter rectitudo, sed causaliter tamen: est enim
habitus secundum quem aliquis recte operatur et vult: i.e.
justice is not essentially but only causally rectitude. For it is
the habit whereby someone acts and wills rightly (recte).
One can hardly find a better example of the precision
employed by St. Thomas in this work of discrimination
among the virtues.
98
Honestum... in idem refertur cum virtute. The
honourable and the virtuous are referred to the same things.
transformed.99
99
Gilson, op. cit. p.474.
100
Frui has a more "substantive" sense than does the
enjoyment of the delectabile, as witness our word
"usufruct". Still, we can enjoy both the honestum and the
delectabile for themselves, but not the utile. In so far as we
did it would cease to be this.
101
The truth in question depends upon the reality of the
analogy of being, according to which finite things truly are
(so that the term for being, "are", is naturally analogous),
and are not, like shadows, things which "both are and are
not", as we find in Plato's univocist account.
102
Honestum concurrit in idem subjectum cum utili et
delectabili, a quibus tamen differt ratione (145, 3).
103
This distinction is found in Summa theol. Ia-IIae 9, 1,
as that between a power's potentiality or need to be moved
quantum ad exercitium (to act or not to act) or quantum ad
determinationem actus. Here, however, it does not seem to
imply Maritain's notion of a separate moral order or
universe. On formal and final causality in this connection cf.
The honourable good is the very first, primordial aspect of the
good, its first apprehension, in the moral order.104
*****************************
110
143, 1: Est autem temperantia circa delectationes
tactus... Quaedam vero ordinantur ad vim generativam: et
in his quantum ad delectationem principalem ipsius coitus
est castitas; quantum autem ad delectationes
circumstantes, puta quae sunt in osculis, tactibus et
amplexibus, attenditur pudicitia.
111
Again, we might keep the substance of this doctrine of
temperance and chastity while developing a different or at
least more nuanced view from those traditionally held as to
what materially exemplifies these virtues. It might be worth
noting, for example, that the earliest church council
enjoined abstinence from "fornication and things strangled",
as if these two were on a par. Yet the ban on the latter is no
longer operative! The word for fornication, however, could
have a built-in sense of intemperance separable, at least
theoretically, from the identification of it as intercourse
between the unmarried. Or it could refer to the partly ritual
prohibitions of Leviticus 15, which would remove it even
further from a material moral prohibition of a non-provisional
kind.
disagreement concerning the role of reason in human nature. For
in Thomism this is seen as by no means an alienating, restrictive
factor but rather as the form of humanity (forma corporis) itself.
This is why canons of goodness do not constrain human existence
and being, open as it is to original impulses of power and
creativity such as Socrates associated with his daimon. "Power is
the morality of those who stand out from the rest and it is mine"
(Beethoven). The doctrine in the Summa theologica (and
elsewhere in the Thomistic corpus) of spiritual gifts and related
matters seems to show this to be a thoroughly Thomistic
sentiment.112
CHAPTER THREE
We have not yet settled our account with what we have called
here rationalist moralism. We have always to strive for further
understanding of how the new insight, as we believe we may
characterize it, relates to a previously established wisdom, so that
what is ever new is, in another sense, ever the same. It is a matter
of paring away the imperfect apprehensions of what has always
lain within the grasp of man, of men and women. Thus in what
MacIntyre calls an epistemological crisis new ways of seeing
things are applied to an old or abiding tradition in such a way as
to explain why the old ways are no longer valid, in his terms, and
so as to keep the riches of the tradition accessible. We can apply
this to moral theology and philosophy.
The whole stress of the revival of natural law doctrine has
been to show how, in one way or another (on a spectrum from the
"deontological" to the "teleological"), the divine commands are
112
St. Thomas attributes these developments towards a
transcendence of constraining or rationalistic morality to the
operation of an extrinsic, supra-natural principle, viz. grace.
But we can focus upon the development without having to
decide as to the cause, all the more so since it seems the
view of Aquinas that nature somehow naturally requires
perfection by grace.
rooted in the inclinations of human nature.113 "This do and thou
shalt live" is the biblical word, understood as saying that this is
intrinsically the way to life, ultimately, in the New Testament, life
eternal.
When one sees this clearly, however, then the time has
come to ask whether the doctrine of natural law was ever, even as
such, more than a middle or holding position. This implies that one
also has to ask whether it is not also time for the divine command
element to drop out of the picture, being recognized as a
metaphor. One way of asking this, as situating the enquiry but
also as of inherent theological and human interest, is to ask
whether this was not the further intention of the preaching and
teaching of Jesus.114 In other words, or to particularize, in saying
"This is my commandment: love one another" what was Jesus
doing? Was he, at least among other things, discreetly discarding
the paradigm of law and obedience, rather than simply enjoining a
"love" at the opposite pole to spontaneity and passion, a
somehow more spiritual attitude of will, this being where
Kierkegaard and MacIntyre's Scotchmen put the emphasis?
We have had the doctrines, biblical enough, of the new
law, the law of the spirit, the law written on the heart115, the law of
113
It is an oddity of the "Scottish Enlightenment" as
discussed by MacIntyre (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?)
that this does not seem to have been so there, a doctrine of
"deontological" moral principles unrelated to "self interest"
being set against English utilitarianism. The natural law
theory of tradition however enjoins morality precisely as the
means to human fulfilment and the religious discussion,
where Christian or post-Christian, must presuppose that God
ultimately wishes us well, wishes us fulfilment, just as we
wish ourselves, only sometimes misidentifying its content.
114
We can apply this enquiry both to Jesus as portrayed
by the evangelists, thus allowing for the particular
theological interests of each, and also to the "historical"
Jesus who can be distinguished from this portrayal (though
not thereby found to differ from it), just as can Socrates from
the Platonic record of him. The Gospels themselves, one
may feel, encourage us to go behind the letter of their text
on occasion.
115
This expression is used of natural law by St. Paul (in
Romans), certainly, but specifically as applied to people who
have no set of divine commands, the Gentiles, and Aquinas,
we saw, defines natural law in terms of a reflected divine
charity poured into our hearts, the unwritten law of grace, the
spirit as opposed to the "letter" of the law, which is nothing
without charity or love. Certain it is, anyhow, that law is an elastic,
an analogical concept, this being what enables it to remain a
concept necessary to any orderly explanation of reality.
But despite analogy, we found in our first chapter these
explanations of law as structuring our essential nature, as man or
as grace-led Christian, can be seen as kinds of reduction (or
transcendent expansion) of the original legal concept naming the
relation of an essential denial of freedom as between an inferior
and a superior. Such expansion, though, has in practice been
forced uneasily to co-exist with the old obedience mentality.
Contraception, say, was against natural law, but nobody could
really see it. Thus in practice loyal believers just had and have to
obey the directive, to knuckle under to an explanation of their
natures they could never have given themselves, since they take
rather like ducks to water to the freedom given by "the pill". In
addition to this, it is not clear how far natural law means or
expresses a demand for a subjection to natural teleologies
apparently contrary to natural inclination, even granted that we
may have deeper desires than those of which we are most
conscious.
This and related situations can of course be explained as
directives given by the wise (sapientes) to those who should be
naturally inclined to listen to them. But what if the wise
themselves do not see the matter clearly, are merely adhering to
a tradition the validity of which is not clear to their unaided wise
perception either? Would this not mean that no one knows any
more (did they ever?) that the practice is wrong? This might
almost (if, perhaps, not quite) seem to have been the situation for
Aquinas himself when writing negatively, but loyally, of
fornication, in so far, at least, as the argumentation appears weak.
It has been well said, to pursue the example as proving
the general claim, that if physiology were different then sexual
morality would be different (e.g. if sex did not produce babies).
But can one accept that, as one can hardly avoid doing, and yet
rule out from the start that other changes in circumstances might
not affect sexual morality, particularly a change approximating
more and more to this very hypothesis, viz. the separation of the
********************************
A close study of Aquinas's ethical theory reveals that for him the
first principles of behaviour are the ends of our nature, known by
synderesis, which is a natural or innate habit. Any moral principles
of a judicial or enuntiative kind, by contrast, are conclusions
drawn by the intellectual (if also moral) virtue of prudence. While
synderesis is not merely analogous to but actually is the virtue of
intellectus in its practical aspect, so prudence, as intellectual,
coincides with practical knowledge (scientia, again an intellectual
virtue) concerning things to be done, agibilia (a distinct
intellectual virtue bearing upon practice, here factibilia or things
to be made, is art, ars or techne). Prudence, for its part, is only
distinct as a virtue from scientia because it is never purely
speculative, but practical, a knowledge ordinata ad opus. Any
purely speculative knowledge of moral systems, such as Aquinas's
own moral theology, comes under scientia, not prudence. Hence
theology is not a practical science, as Scotus was to teach, and
neither are science and prudence distinguished by their matter,
but by the type of knowledge, speculative and practical
respectively. There can arguably be a practical knowledge of
speculative principles or conclusions, just as we have allowed for
a speculative knowledge of practical principles.
If it is the ends of nature which primarily oblige, then
there seems no room for any possibility that a principle concluded
from such ends, as all moral rules must be, should frustrate those
ends. One may believe that a given divine commandment, say,
will never frustrate these ends, but must still grant that if or where
it did then there it would no longer apply. This is a better answer
than just refusing to suppose a counter-instance, at least within
philosophy. One should not wish to defend a greater absoluteness
of enunciated moral principle than that.
To this extent Aquinas appears in agreement with
"situation ethics" if this phrase refers to an agent bringing to a
situation a view of his natural ends, happiness, survival, etc.
These ends, also called goods, have thus to be arranged into a
correct hierarchy, since this very hierarchy it is which gives the
order of the precepts, since they are based on it alone. Finnis's
objection to this hierarchy is thus a massive exegetical error,
whatever else it may be.117
In a similar way Aquinas is thus far in agreement with the
utilitarians or consequentialists. Styling his ethics a version of
natural law theory has obscured this. We should rather see him as
accommodating the natural law tradition to this fundamentally
teleological ethics. He does this very skilfully, as when he points
out that law itself is to some end, comes from reason and not will,
a thought he further emphasises by equating this so-called law
117
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford
1980.
with the divine light. He had a precedent for this in Christian
theology, where the new law is equated with a grace beyond all
law but poured into the heart without measure. But there too law
is only spoken of to preserve continuity with Judaic concepts, just
as here natural law preserves continuity with positive law, which
Aquinas wishes to see regulated by its means.
Once we have settled all this, what remains in Aquinas's
work of significance for gaining ethical insight? On the negative
side, to begin with, it appears that those who have wanted to use
him, and his canonically established prestige in orthodox circles,
in order to strengthen or even found a case for absolute principles
in the sense in which we have said that they are more truly
conclusions, enuntiations of prudence (scientia practica) drawn
from a view of our natural ends as discerned by synderesis - such
people have misused him.
One finds a tendency among the orthodox, such as Geach
or Lawrence Dewan, to associate God with binding law beyond the
evidence. Thus awareness of the general undesirability of an
action-type is interpreted by Geach as the divine promulgation of
a total prohibition118, while Dewan implies that had we the
intellects of angels we would see that at least some (which?) of
society's adumbrated moral norms are in fact absolute laws119.
There is no need to exempt Aquinas from this tendency, especially
when writing in his more ecclesial vein. This is what causes the
confusion, though we have also to consider his account of the
common good in relation to absolute prohibitions. What we are
saying, though, is that the main logical thrust of his account,
whether in the Pars Prima Secundae of his Summa Theologica or
when commenting on Aristotle, exerts itself in the opposite
direction.
There does not, incidentally, seem good reason to thus
associate the infinite being with binding laws. There are
psychological roots for the tendency in fear and lack of trust,
which the progress of Judaic revelation (as it is claimed to be),
inclusive of Christianity, could well be interpreted as increasingly
setting aside.
What Aquinas gives us is a full account of human nature,
of what perfects it (its ends) in the passage through life, and of
the various powers and habits, the virtues, needed to satisfy these
initial potentialities. Precepts, not necessarily absolute or very
specific, are annexed to the virtues as their most obvious
118
P.T. Geatch, God and the Soul, London 1969 p.125.
119
Cp. Dewan, op. cit. p.304.
expression and exercise120, while the contrary vices are also
identified and analysed. The Christian beatitudes and spiritual
gifts, as well as the doctrine of infused virtues, charity above all as
giving the final form to virtue, are harmoniously fitted into this
scheme. Charity, indeed, is Aquinas's main bulwark against the
spectre of legalistic moralism and we can see a link with our own
modern attitude via the eighteenth century doctrine of
benevolence, to say nothing of the more positive or liberating
aspects of Luther's contribution, which the Catholic Church,
despite the external break, has not failed to assimilate.
In association with this thought one might remark that
the ascetic Franciscans who got Aquinas condemned at various
local synods (e.g. in 1277) read him with more understanding (and
appalled rejection) than have those of today and yesterday who
have sought to make him a support for an a priori type of
moralism. These have simply followed the path of all those clerics
who have had to stomach his being made a and even the doctor
of the Church. His canonization by a Pope, indeed, and the late
nineteenth century intensification of this move, was typically far-
sighted and should be classed with the initial papal endorsement
of the Renaissance humanist spirit before the panic after the
violent German revolt, perhaps better called the revolt of the laity
or, rather, a revolt against legalist authority in general, since
many clerics abetted it.121 Is the absolute authority of Christ
120
But also as bringing them all under justice.
121
As a result of the panic one may well feel that the
Church has still to come properly to terms with the
Renaissance and its spirit. This is the view, for example, of
Louis Bouyer in his theological study, Erasmus, published
earlier this century. The past thirty years, however, have
seen new developments, though such things as belated
acknowledgement of Galileo may seem rather damp squibs.
More inspiring is the energetic application of Christian
teaching within the whole range of questions about human
rights, as these derive directly from human dignity, such as
are so urgently raised today, rather than rationalistically
remaining at the second level of the duties consequent upon
them. Such rationalism was connected, again, with the
corruption of philosophy by a decadent theology which had
forgotten that duty is always propter finem, even and
especially in the infinitely wise mind of God, whose being
must be one with his law, with the right (ius coming before
lex as declaring it).
legalist? Or is submission to revealed, to "poured out" spirit of
another kind than a legal submission? This question is posed by
Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which has no
intrinsic connection with Russian separatism.
We may note that also Maritain sees a causative
connection between the revelation of charity and the modern
democratic movement, with its ideal of a "fraternity" (implying
one father, as in the Schiller/Beethoven hymn adopted by the
European Union) transcending classical notions of civic friendship.
But such fraternity is expressed in equality and liberty.
****************************************
124
Cf. S. Theron, Africa, Philosophy and the Western
Tradition, Frankfurt 1995, p.104.
125
This is the abiding lesson of that most Christian play,
The Merchant of Venice. It is merely shallow, and indeed
hard-hearted, to revile it for "anti-Semitism".
such as Maritain, as a compromise.126 One can think again of St.
Francis's Deus meus et omnia. Did he mean having nothing but
God, or did he mean, in accordance with the analogy of being but
also with St. Paul, that in having God he had all things, that all
things were his, "as having nothing and yet having all things"?
Life, it seems, shines with glory whether we be marked with joy or
sorrow. Either may be taken from God's hand, as we take also our
natural impulse to seek first joy, since we could never find
salvation without it. The message is unvarying from Job to de
Caussade and this faith, be it more or less specified, "overcomes
the world" (St. John). It has little to do with a moral code unless at
the most general and noblest level. This judgment itself, however,
is of the highest significance for ethics, which is thus shown to be
able to judge morals, to situate the whole project.
Returning, however, to the at least apparent imbalance
one may note that the scheme of human nature, of the virtues, is
an open one. There is not, indeed, an openness behind this
scheme, i.e. a meta-scheme, in accordance with which one can
pick and chooses among these virtues, discarding courage, for
example (Hare). The virtues form a unity and we should not argue
from the examples that one can have some virtues without the
others, but that such chastity, let us say, as was not needed to
round off the attractiveness of the fictional character Tom Jones
would really not have been a virtue in him given the view of his
situation that he had attained. It would have been, it might be
said, a pusillanimous lack of spirit. Thus we shift his imperfection
to a lack of vision, if we must condemn him at all, a defect of
prudence allowing him not more than, say, eight out of ten for all
or any of his virtues, including chastity, instead of the ten out of
ten of the fully enlightened orthodox Christian saint, fasting and
rolling in his nettles or whatever. Again, a weakness nobly born
can give added virtue, like the "thorn in the flesh".
This open scheme, however, allows for any number of
free projects, choice of which is in fact only intelligibly to be
understood as the main step in pursuit of the invariant natural end
and ends. In the community of love we see the extent of this
choice ever widening as new vocations and interpretations,
126
Cf. Maritain, Introduction to the Basic Problems of
Moral Philosophy, Chapter 5, "Moral Experience and the
Ultimate End". Maritain seems committed to the via
negativa, viewing what we are presenting as a development
of humanity as being in essence a mere sociological
compromise. But this did not seem to be quite the view he
held in his earlier book, True Humanism.
previously often judged negatively, are opened up. Less typically,
but not to be excluded, older vocations can come to be ruled out,
at least for a time. This scheme, then, is no more restrictive than
our nature itself, which is of course not to be confused with that
general material or cosmic nature in which we share.
*******************************************
**********************************
the will would have no life that is radically its own. Its activity
would be that of dictating an end that is recognized as
good independently of the natural exigencies of its own
potency. The principle of its freedom would then be
lacking.
The good is indeed identical with being, but it is as good that the
will pursues it. It cannot just will being as being because the
intellect declares that it should do so. First, at least, such
obedience would have to appear to it as good, but then why would
not its other inclinations do so too? This is what de Muralt means
by saying that a principle of rational order is substituted for the
genuine finality of a voluntary act, so that it
132
Yves Simon, The Nature and Functions of Authority,
p.51.
133
Veatch, op. cit. p.304.
134
Cf. J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford
1980.
itself, to speak in analogically forensic terms, has the force of law
or of the set of human inclinations being themselves laws,
directives, to those who know themselves is that there is no such
passage. There are not two parallel orders in idle duplication and
the existence of our inclinations is one with the existence of the
corresponding ius naturae, which reason expresses as a law or
propositional precept.
The picture of "blind urges" as raw material for moral
codification is a false one, just as de Muralt has diagnosed it,
robbing our will of its free nature. More convincing is Herbert
McCabe's enlistment of D.H. Lawrence's talk about learning to
distinguish our deepest desires from trivial desires of the moment,
so that we don't "miss the mark".
CHAPTER FIVE
Creative Options
138
St. Thérèse of Lisieux offered a doctrine for "little
souls". It was, however, a doctrine of conspicuous
magnanimity in which they were required to believe that
they could participate. The ethical attitude (that of the soul)
the narrow gate, admitting just one at a time and setting
members of families against one another, for example. Thus N.
Berdyaev, in his The Destiny of Man, speaks of an ethics of
creativeness succeeding upon an ethics of asceticism, or of law, in
the development of the good life, as the word as law was fulfilled
in the word as love.139 Connected with this is the idea of personal
vocation, emphatically fostered, one should note, in the Catholic
natural law tradition.
St. Teresa of Avila offers a similar perspective when she
mocks those who seek security too exclusively in a well regulated
life and thus fail to fulfil their potential. One feels she might
almost have approved her English contemporary's notion of
conscience as "making cowards of us all":
They are eminently reasonable folk! Their love is not yet ardent
enough to overwhelm their reason.... How I wish ours [our
reason] would make us dissatisfied with this habit of
always serving God at a snail's pace. As long as we do
that we shall never get to the end of the road... For the
love of the Lord let us make a real effort: let us leave our
reason and our fears in His hands... Our task is only to
journey with good speed so that we may see the Lord.140
142
Cf. Josef Pieper, Begeisterung und Göttliche Wahnsinn,
München 1962, a study of this dialogue. It is significant that
the author chose this topic for his address at his 90th
birthday celebrations in the Münster Town Hall, May 1994.
143
The story of Abraham and Isaac, or the command to
"spoil the Egyptians", was often discussed in this way. It is
as they are related to a more mature wisdom our notion of a
superior, more creative ethics (which does not contradict natural
law) would seem to follow. Aquinas, for example, writes:
145
Confessions VIII, 6,7.
146
As Aquinas remarks, should God communicate to us his blessedness,
which we desire (eros), then friendship with him (agape, caritas) will be
founded upon this, as indeed one should expect friendship (amicitia) to
result in the natural way where the erotic longing of human beings for one
another finds mutual satisfaction. Cf. Summa theol. IIa-IIae 23, 1. A.
Nygren's attempt to separate these two elements from one another, in his
Eros and Agape, is a prime example of that rationalism discussed
throughout the present work. When St. Ignatius said "My eros is crucified"
he did not mean that he denied it. The relation between love and death is
richer than that, as even Wagner gropingly understood, but St. John of the
Cross much better.
147
J. Pieper, The Philosophical Act (Was heisst Philosophieren? in Werke,
Band 3, Hamburg 1996). See also our own review of this volume appearing
in Acta Philosophica, Rome.
pursuit of ethics, and the unity of love must be preserved.148
It is clear that the requirement of creativeness fuses,
most obviously under the ideal of personal vocation, with the idea
of offering one's life in the pursuit of one thing, the one precious
pearl, of making a unity out of the potentialities of one's mutable
being. Nor need, nor should this be purely at the level of action.
Kierkegaard is too restrictive and therefore strained in saying that
purity of heart is to will one thing. It is also to see one thing, as
poets such as Blake make plain,
CHAPTER SIX
in this sense, not the pantheist's, that God is all things, that each
155
Thus "we may dismiss certain kinds of behaviour as obviously
incompatible with the kingdom." Ibid. p.172. Even Sartre preserves the ideal
of authenticity (and one or two others).
156
We had already urged this, in systematic fashion, in our book The
Recovery of Purpose (Frankfurt 1993), e.g. in Chapter Four, pp. 50-51. Now,
however, we present it as less tied to our specific Christian experience,
while still according Christianity credit as prime cause of this approach to
life to which Western man remains committed.
thing is the All.157 Just as nothing, again, exists as God exists, so
that no creature adds to his infinity, so no creature's existence is
communicable with or to any other creature.
This is the analogy of being which is prior to and
causative of any analogical use of language. All universals, all
univocal linguistic usage, is built upon likenesses between
disparate things which often enough derive from a common
causal background, as we call whatever is born of a woman
human. This background, however, includes formal causality, such
as the animality of a rabbit or a dog. Yet rabbit-animality and dog-
animality do not share a common base to which the specific
differences are added, since in reality rabbit-animality is, as such,
totally different from dog-animality. Mere common animality does
not and cannot exist. Similarly animal-body differs toto caeli from
plant-body. We can say then, with Aquinas, that the term "body" is
not treated in the same way by the logician as by the
metaphysician. What binds things together really is not class-
membership, but patterns of likeness, the things themselves
severally being merely like or analogical to one another, bound
together in a common love, ultimately deriving from the fact that
each of them is, that they are all beings, even though there can
be no super-class of things which are, since each thing is, has
being, in the unique way without which it would not be that thing
and no other thing. All that can be common is the proportion of
each thing to its own being, not any being in itself.
We do not now have to apply this to ourselves, in order to
give a ground to our assertions about creative ethics, about the
unique vocation of each person, and so on. It will rather emerge in
whatever way we choose to approach the matter, if we dare to let
things speak, so to say, for themselves, unveil themselves.
We could start by observing that every person's
157
Cf. the paradox Charles Williams liked to quote, "This
also is thou, neither is this thou." The painter's chair is not,
of course, God, but, like God, it is being, which, Parmenides
the "giant" (Plato) rightly saw, is one. Cf. F. Inciarte, Forma
Formarum, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Munich 1970, p. 142,
on participation in esse as understood by Aquinas: "Das
Eigenart dieser Teilname, die sich mit keiner Zerstückelung
verträgt... Denn jeder Aspekt dieses Universums ist insofern
Totalität, als er von der unteilbaren Totalität des esse
durchdrungen ist... Erst wenn der Blick auf das esse inm
Ganzen gerichtet wird, leuchtet in jedem Teil das ganze esse
und erscheint jeder Teil als die Totalität des esse, die er ist."
experience remains his or her own, has to be that.158 Each use in
language of "I", correspondingly, refers to a different being (i.e.
when not used again by the same being159). It refers to it,
however, not just as referring to an individualized nature, of some
type or other, as "man" must refer to some man or other, whether
it be myself or another person being an irrelevancy. Rather, "I"
always refers to the person, to the being of the person, who utters
it. No two men can give "I" the same reference160, as they can with
any other term inclusive of pronouns, though there would remain
a query about "we". It is therefore not so clear either, as Hegel
seemed to think, that different people can use it with the same
meaning, since I can never use it to mean just "the speaker". It
has to mean "I", this unique individual, whom no one else can
mean in the same way ("you" or "he" are very different) and who
only happens to be the speaker. It is not even clear that it is as
being restricted to that capacity (speaker, thinker) that the term
can, so to say, catch me. Here it is important to adhere to the old
meaning-theory according to which terms have meanings open to
simple apprehension (apprehensio simplex) before eventual use in
sentences.
This fact, that "I" does not merely refer to the speaker in
the way that he might refer to someone else, is brought out
especially in some uses of the future tense. I do not know my
intentions in separation from intending them in the way that I
might know another person's intentions. But nor, when I thus refer
to myself, are my intentions (which I do not mention) excluded
from the reference, there being no grounds to exclude them. I do
not, that is, make myself an object (of reference, of my own
consciousness, like any other) when I refer to myself. To do that a
158
For an earlier treatment of this theme, see the
author's "Other Problems about the Self", Sophia 24, April
1985, pp.11-20.
159
Here we see the need for a metaphysics of substance,
in order to be able to speak of "the same being". Cf. F.
Inciarte, "Die Einheit der Aristotelischen Metaphysik",
Philosophisches Jahrbuch 1994, pp.1-21. This forms a
chapter in the author's forthcoming book in English, First
Principles, Substance and Action. Studies in Aristotle and
Aristotelianism.
160
Yet it is not a proper name but signifies, rather, as
Hegel remarks, the most general of universals (cf.
Encyclopaedia I: Logic, parag. 24). It is only its reference or,
better, suppositio, which resembles that of a proper name.
special extra or, rather, different operation would be required, as
when I might speak about "the only man in this room with glasses
on". But here I do not refer to myself qua myself but to a man who
I merely happen to be.
What is it to be this I who I alone am? I can of course refer
also to you (my reader), who alone are yourself. Indeed, it seems
that just as I can ask of myself, and this is my main question, why
am I numbered among, why do I find myself among actual
consciousnesses, so I can ask it of you. It is good that you exist.
You might not have existed. Still, there is a real, an inescapable
sense, in which you are, you have become, quite recently perhaps,
part of my world, though I know indeed that there is more to you
than that. But I, I myself: how is it that the world has become,
quite recently, a world for me? It is entirely that, even though I
know that it existed before me and, I do not doubt, even now
exists apart from me, often all too palpably apart.
Why am I just that child born of just those parents at that
time and place? It is absolutely clear that another might have
done as well, just as, though this might seem less clear to many, I
might have had different parents, a different place or time of
birth, if it were given (it was not) that I was going to be born at all.
I can say, intelligibly enough, of a tree that there just
happens to have come to be this tree in this place. Can I similarly
say, though, that there just happens to have come to be a
consciousness in such and such an ambience such that I am
aware of it and it is mine? Is this, could this be so? We have,
anyhow, simply shunted the problem of "I" into a subordinate
clause.
There is, we said, a world apart from the self. One can
give the year of one's birth; others will know the year of one's
death. Of this world it is legitimate to ask: why is there a world?
Each man may, should, ask this, but it is not the same question as
each man asks or can ask of himself, what is it to be "I"? Why am
just I, again, numbered among those who exist or have existed? I
am to myself something which is, but which is not an object of
experience. For the same reason I cannot know myself directly,
only in some way concomitantly with knowing something else.
There is, it seems, if we might speak in Cartesian terms
for the moment, a class or species of thinking things. Yet each
man can in his own case verify that these thinking things do not
collectively constitute an ideal consciousness with which, like any
other general notion, philosophy could deal in the good old way,
i.e. not exhaustively. Certainly my mind is of the same nature as
all other human minds; indeed it is individuated in just the way
that they are. Traditional sexual morality bases itself upon this
generic consideration, race taking precedence here over
individual and person. But all this could have been so without my
being there at all, not just a given individual's not being there but
just I.
Every actual human being knows that he is part of the
spectacle that he beholds, knows both that the world includes his
or her awareness of it and that it need not do so. This sense of
personal contingency must be the more pronounced in so far as
we are clear that there is not, has not been, an infinite multitude
of men, as natural history studies have indeed made clear, though
we can wonder whether philosophy has assimilated the
implications of such research. When the Greeks looked back and
imagined human nature endlessly reproducing itself against a
static geological background the problem of individual
consciousness not merely could have no importance but could not
easily arise. For to be one of an infinite number (if that were
possible) is not to be at all as we understand it, and the same
might apply, mutatis mutandis to this present life, if we had to do
with an infinite or eternal series of incarnations of the same
individual.
Quite simply, there is a clash between the vista of a
certain number of human beings, at present or at all times, sitting,
standing, making history, living, dying, reproducing, and the
inward awareness, as against the vista, not just of "this individual"
(he belongs to the vista), but of me, not the universal state of
being first person, but me, with my particular name, me not as a
condition without which the world cannot be thought or
experienced or lived, but me who might not have been, me to be
lost or saved, me who is not merely the son or daughter of
particular parents, both of whom might seem more astonishingly
improbable than even myself, but a me who is alone himself,
incommunicably (this is the scholastic mark of personality, though
also of all substance), with an ultimate responsibility, though not
necessarily with ultimate power, for what he makes of himself
(this being, for scholastics and others, peculiar to rational
substances).
The world too, though, appears as highly fortuitous and
finite, as it were besides our own contingency. Why should it ever
become conscious of itself, supposing such an idea to have
meaning (it is of course an attempt to explain away the separate
contingency of the individual from that of the world)? It is really
only we men, in our limited numbers, who can become conscious
of the world, while the efforts we make seem to presuppose, in
apparent disproportion to our fortuitousness, an ability to attain a
knowledge reaching right up to the reality. Nothing less is
knowledge, after all. Yet our belief in, our assumption of this ability
clashes awkwardly with that awareness of our contingency to
which the Greeks, as thinking of an infinite multitude or of an
eternal return, hardly attained. There is a kind of providence in
this, however, in that if they had attained to it it would have been
more difficult for them to reach what is surely a true statement of
Plato's, viz. "All nature is akin and the soul has learned
everything" (Meno), i.e. is from birth capable of that, and even
capable too, therefore, of an understanding of the Darwinian
theory which might seem to make it more difficult to account for
this capacity, though Aristotle too seems quite at a loss in having
to flatly state that the intellect, common or possessed by individu-
als, "comes from outside".161
One came to be, to exist, gratuitously. That is the in some
sense awful truth, which leads us so to despise the hard fates of
multitudes of unkown persons in far off places, those "clowns" to
whom Hume, for example, in unfavourable comparison with
himself, found it absurd to attribute immortality. We lack the
capaciousnes of mind to care for "the fall of a sparrow", just as we
are prone to assume, without scientific backing, that more people
than we can imagine is too many, and this despite our joyous
impulse, the fecundity of which we strive to prevent, to breed and
breed and breed again. The generative movement indeed forms
the basis of all the dancing which crowns our celebrations. There
might seem to be a connection, an analogy, between this
joyousness inseparable from human generation and the
gratuitousness of our being as issuing, we imply, from a divine
creation. For the impulse to love, and love again, is inseparable
from the uniqueness of each new human face. Each person is as it
were a world, potentially the world (quodammodo omnia). Hence
the feeling that "there can never be enough" people (Mother
Teresa of Calcutta), the deep urge to multiply. It is this that must
be reconciled with the demands of personal fidelity, the urge, that
is, to a universal unity, spirit achieving what flesh merely
prefigures, though, again, this is only possible given the reality of
the analogy of being, whereby each person's spouse can truly
stand for and mirror the whole, Christ or the Church, can truly be
being, which is indivisible into parts.
Even here, though, one seems to suggest, as the
language compels, that one was there beforehand although
lacking this particular gratuitous benefit, of existence; which is
161
Relinquitur intellectus solus de foris adinvenire. De Gen. Anim. II 3.
plainly false. It is not a matter of a temporal beforehand but of a
gift, as it seems, being given to an otherwise non-entity.162
Certainly what has life can receive more life, as, in a context of
miracle, what has lost life can be thought of as having it restored.
What has lived, after all, is more than a non-entity. A non-entity
cannot be a "what" at all. As theologians say, in creation the thing
created does not undergo change, is not passive to a divine
action. Hence in creation there is no real relation of God to the
creature. Aquinas generalizes the idea thus:
168
Cp. L.E. Palacios, "La analogia de la logica y la prudencia en Juan de
Santo Tomas", La Ciencia Tomista 69 (1945), pp. 221-235.
169
S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 1847: "only when love is a duty, only
then is love eternally secure." Here there seems no place for creativeness.
Or, we might say, the servant had indeed a duty to trade with the talents,
but that precisely means a duty to act beyond duty, out of creative love.
rather, that there is also an analogy between the ultimate
principles of essence as such and existence as such. They are
indeed really distinct, but not so as to constitute a chasm of
duality at the foundations of the real, leaving us with a bare first
principle of existence, like that at the beginning of the Hegelian
dialectic, devoid of all worth or quality. Existence, rather, is the
most formal of all things, forma formarum, just as it is the most
utterly analogical. This is the truth glimpsed in the Ontological
Argument. By this route we go some way towards rejoining the
Neoplatonic stream of speculation. The ultimate actuality, actus
purus, God, is thereby actual and existent in a different way to his
creatures, whom he knows in his idea of them, as (in this idea)
more like himself than they are when considered in their own
being which is, beside him, nothingness.170 As pure form this actus
purus has something in common with an idea, if only an idea
could be actual. It is super-existent, in perfect freedom, such as
the Neoplatonists tended to equate with unity to the detriment of
existence. But, contrary to this Neoplatonist position, also what is
super-existent is a being, ipsum esse subsistens in fact. It is this
essential formality which gives the First Cause its necessity, its
necessary being. If we think of a being which might not have been
then we are not thinking of God. That is why we say he is like an
idea.171 Ideas abide as possibilities (we should not call them actual
possibilities) eternally, though it is the wrong kind of Platonism to
postulate an existent (third) realm of ideas. But we could not think
that there might be no such idea as that of a so-and-so, and
similar we cannot think, if we are thinking God, that there might
be no God.172 His esse is pure form, and this means that anything
else, as being merely an essence composed with esse, is not
really but only analogously formal. We, using a created language,
make the cause the analogate, but this is in so far as it is an
170
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 14, 5: "Things other than
himself he sees not in themselves but in himself, because
his essence contains the likeness of things other than
himself." But this essence, Aquinas insists, is pure esse.
171
So much is this so that it is in having universal goodness or universal
being (ideas are universal) as object that the soul is directly moved by God
(it does not, of course, then see God, as the ontologists seemed to claim),
who is idem re with bonum universale. Esse, the divine esse, is itself the
most formal thing (perfectio perfectionum).
172
I do not deny the question as to whether such an idea is realised in
reality. What I say is that it is an idea of something which cannot but be
realised in reality and that this something is in this respect imitated by any
idea qua idea.
analogous term, i.e. in language. But what the term173 stands for
(supponit pro) renders the whole created world analogous, and
shows why analogy theory is a matter, firstly, not of logic but of
metaphysics, whether or not we may choose to approach it
through logic.
Ethics, then, is not to be separated from the search for
one's personal vocation. Analogy, however, is not equivocal
disparateness, and so the reality of a common end common to all
these vocations, as unifying life at one further remove still, so to
say, would now present itself for analysis.174
CHAPTER SEVEN
174
On this topic, see our "Happiness and Transcendent
Happiness", Religious Studies 21, 1985, pp.349-367.
necessary for the perfect act of a virtue (on the analogy of the
basic parts of a material thing), and from the subjective parts
(partes subjectivae) or diverse species of the virtue, each of which
will exemplify it in the full sense. In the case of justice the integral
parts are given simply as doing good ("general justice", under the
aspect of what the law prescribes), as constituting justice, and
avoiding evil, as conserving it.175 The subjective parts of justice
include commutative, distributive and legal justice (also called
justitia generalis), but also epicheia or equity, which is prior to
legal justice, St. Thomas says, as directing it by a superior rule.
In the discussion, then, of the potential parts of this
virtue, justice, i.e. of the virtues adjoined to or associated with
justice, one can be surprised to find St. Thomas distinguishing,
even within the ethical sphere, between a legal and a moral debt
or duty (debitum):
For it can be shown that for Aquinas it is the end itself (of actions)
which is above all (i.e. rather than the action as such) due or
obligatory, this being the reason why the theological virtues,
182
Ibid. IIa-IIae 58, 6.
which have the end itself (ultimately, he thinks, God) for their
object, are superior to and more central than justice which merely
ordains (the other virtues) to the end. Now the end to which
specifically justice orders them is bonum commune (the common
good). This, however, in so far as it may be identifiable with
bonum in communi (the good in general or absolutely and hence
the good for the rational creature both personally and collectively,
i.e. also a common good), is itself really one with the finis
ultimus.183
So while on the one hand we, or Aquinas, may seem to
reduce the talk of divine law to an analogy, on the other he argues
for a causal link from above underpinning the reality or, for
Aquinas, legality of both positive human legal enactments (but
also of the unsatisfiable legal debts to God and parents)and of the
various moral obligations to others or to ourselves, however these
be identified, as being themselves legally owed to God. God does
not literally command, but because of God, of the ultimate
spirituality or intellectuality of reality, we are, as free agents, at
some points or levels commanded, obliged. This seems to be his
mind. If it is to the acts of the virtues, i.e. to moral character,
inclusive of course of a readiness to discharge properly legal and
just debts, that we are commanded, rather than to some
materially specified task or omission, then the field is left open to
the acting person as regards the identification of these acts as
and when their possibility arises. For if God does not literally or
positively command then there are no other divine commands
than this, to follow virtue or, more simply, to work in pursuit of the
end as loved above all things, in the execution of which even a
religious obedience may be perfected.
These notions are well illustrated in the discussion of the
virtue, adjoined to justice, of truthfulness (veracitas). This is the
habit whereby one speaks the truth or truly, and since this is a
good act the habit of it is therefore a virtue (IIa-IIae 109, 1), since
virtue is what makes its possessor and his work (opus) good.
Truthfulness makes him good by duly perfecting the ordering of
our exterior words and deeds to reality, sicut signum ad signatum
(109, 2).
Veracity (art. 3) belongs to justice as being other-directed
and as setting up an equality of proportion between signs and
existing things. Yet it falls short of justice inasmuch as the
183
Cf. Ia-IIae 10, 1. Et quia ad legem pertinet ordinare in
bonum commune (Ia-IIae 90, 2) inde est quod talis justitia
praedicto modo generalis dicitur justitia legalis (IIa-IIae 58,
5).
obligation discharged is moral rather than legal, says St. Thomas.
His reason for saying this is that one man owes it to
another to manifest the truth to him ex honestate rather than as
prescribed by law (even if he should owe it more strictly to God, or
to the common good, to be thus truthful, for this is to consider
veracitas not in itself but ut a justitia legali imperatur, i.e. as it is
commanded by legal justice). Honestas is later called by Aquinas,
when discussing temperance, spiritual beauty. It is perhaps a
defect that this ideal should take second place to the more plain
necessity of law, unless of course one can argue that legality,
under the aspect of order, rejoins the domain of beauty and that
at a higher twist of the spiral, so to say. This was implicit, indeed,
in the Anselmian notion, inherited from Augustine, of rectitudo.
In further explanation of the above he says first that
truthfulness attains the proper meaning (ratio) of debt "in some
way" (109, 3 ad 1um), since men naturally owe to one another
that without which society cannot be preserved.184 Something
more than honestas might be at stake, that is to say, even before
we go on to consider, Kant-style, what is owed to our own dignity
in not telling lies. Here the necessity (for the end) proper to
obligation, of preserving society, appears. The picture receives
additional clarification when he goes on to distinguish (from this
so to say consequent obligation of truthfulness) acts of truth-
telling which really belong in the first instance to obligation and
hence require no distinct virtue at all but are particular acts of
justice, the habit which obliges one on occasion to manifest the
truth, e.g. in a court of law.185 In such cases a man principally
intends to give another his due as, it is implied, he does not so
intend in normal truth-telling, by which, rather, in life or words,
one shows oneself to be as one is (ad 3um), the habit of doing
which is associated with but distinct from justice. Here, art. 4, in
showing oneself to be as one is, one need not manifest everything
good that one possesses, though it is untruthful to show oneself
as greater than one is, e.g. by boasting.
One can indeed see that the beauty of gratitude, another
of these virtues associated with justice, would be largely lost if the
184
There is strong indication here of the ambiguity in
Kant's moral theory, inasmuch as he does not distinguish
within morals between legal and moral debt, but reduces the
former to the latter while yet speaking of the latter as if it
were the former ("So act as if you could wish that the
maxim.. were a universal law").
185
See 109, 3 ad 3um.
man showing it felt himself simply obliged, to and by the other, to
manifest it, i.e. if he did not understand, rather, that he owed it to
himself in the way we have described. In this connection St.
Thomas quotes Seneca: qui invitus debet, ingratus est, i.e. he who
is not willing to be in debt or "obliged" (he is too quick in
recompensing the gift he has received) is ungrateful, graceless as
we say. This would not be the case if we were dealing with a strict
legal debt (thus, and by contrast to repayment, only the feeling of
gratitude should be immediate, but often not its external
expression):
186
IIa-IIae 106, 4 ad 1um. The parallel with mercifulness,
the evangelical duty (owed to God) of giving to the needy or
guilty what is not owed to them, is illuminating.
187
IIa-IIae 145, 1 ad 1um.
them as "honest", he says, because the virtues are closer to us
than God or his beatitudo. This is the source of the temptation to
see the morally good as specifically different from goodness in
general, giving rise to the notion of a separate universe of values.
All the same, virtues having this quality of decor
spiritualis (art. 2), but also concerned with what is in some way
due to another, are associated with justice as discharging a moral
debt to that other. They offer him gratitude, truthfulness, affability
and so on. The unity of the virtues is once again illustrated, with
temperance extending the reach of justice. In this vision of things
we can have to others both a legal and a moral debt, while our
moral debts or duties in general are legal, and not merely law-like,
in the internal forum (a legal term) of conscience, both because
conscience is able to apprehend the true and transcendent divine
law and because part of that very law is that we follow conscience
even when it fails to do this. The mere fact that conscience is free,
that we can make up our own minds, could not of itself lead to any
kind of obligation, not even to an obligation to follow conscience,
though we might think it more honest or beautiful to do so. We
might also then think otherwise, however, considering it cowardly,
for example.188
188
The objection might be raised that this conception of legal justice
contradicts our thesis of love as final form of all virtue, which must mean
that love is prior and causative of any relation of owing to another. We
should remember though that law, as belonging to reason, is originally
descriptive, only subsequently prescriptive. It is entirely descriptive as
regards the natural laws of creatures generally. It is only in so far as known
from within, or practically, in our own case, that it becomes prescriptive.
Thus creation flows from the divine love and by nature tends towards, i.e.
loves, its origin and exemplar. This is the actual relationship within which
there arises the consideration that such love is normal, as it is normal for
lions to roar, and hence what we call due within the frame of the divine
government or lex aeterna. This metaphorical notion refers to the divine
love as circulating through creatures and back to the divine, itself creating
our freedom and the formalities of justice which we attach to it. So it is true
of justice as such what is said specifically of divine justice: "The work of
divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy [sc. misericordia,
kindness, love], and is based on it" (in eo fundatur. Summa theol. Ia 21, 4).
Cf. IIa-IIae 120, 1 & 2: equity regulates justice and is thus not only better
than legal justice (melior quadam justitia, scilicet legali) but, as regulating,
prior to it, and in the same way love or mercy is prior to equity, as
instigating it for one thing, equity being, it is stressed, a work of execution
rather than interpretation, already as it were halfway to love in that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
190
V. Bourke, "Is Thomas Aquinas a Natural Law Ethicist?" The Monist
1974, pp. 52-65.
and inclinations proper to men and women, then the vision of
Aquinas can legitimately be called the theory of natural law.
We can, however, make use of another classification
according to which an ethics of law or asceticism is superseded by
an ethics of creativeness.191 This corresponds to the
spiritualization of law as recorded in the New Testament and, in a
reserved kind of way, faithfully documented in the writings of
Aquinas. These bring out the dynamic, living role of right reason
(recta ratio) and above all of love.
We might now see how this approach applies in key areas
such as that of the sources or of the value of human life,
attending, that is to say, to sexuality on the one hand, as source,
and to the preservation of the lives of men, women and children
on the other. What determines actions in these spheres as morally
good or bad, and why? More positively, what creative patterns
might one look for or hope to find inspiration for in these areas? In
this chapter we will focus upon sexuality, going on from there to
consider questions relating to the preservation of and respect for
human life.
**************************************
Within the natural law tradition of ethics, for the most part in the
hands of moral theologians, we find accordingly that sexual ethics
are particularly bound to the letter of traditionally authoritative
treatments, among which are included the texts of Aquinas, and
that of the Pars Secunda of the Summa Theologica in particular.
This is far less so in the treatment of justice and murder, which
one can accordingly consider more on its own merits, so to say.
Regarding sex, however, it seems particularly useful to proceed by
way, initially at least, of a textual dissection. We might begin with
contraception, since this has assumed such a peculiar importance,
if for largely extrinsic reasons, in Roman Catholic and related
academic circles. We are anxious to find whether there is some
canon or shibboleth which holds independently of the new law of
love, dividing the allegiance as it were, or whether, rather,
generally accepted restrictions upon the sexually possible derive
immediately, i.e. non-mediately, from the requirement of love, in
particular from the "new" commandment, which we have
suggested transcends the paradigm of something's being literally
commanded. Any command, in any case, in terms of our general
analysis, will bear principally upon some human end or good as
191
This, we noted, was explored by Nicholas Berdyaev in
his ethical study, The Destiny of Man.
requiring some corresponding action and not primarily upon an
action as such. Thus love also, as inner or outer act, in St. John's
Gospel and elsewhere, is derived as life-principle, so to say, from
the good end of assimilation to God.
Thus we find, to begin with, that in the pronouncements
of Church or Council contraception is altogether forbidden,
absolutely excluded. What we have here seems to be a
pronouncement, rational or philosophical in character, having the
character of an application of natural law to a special case.192 To
this extent it might seem assimilable to Fr. McCabe's analogy with
particular decisions taken as required during a revolutionary
struggle,193 if it did not look too much like the Suarezian inability
to leave commands too general which Westberg mentions. For, if
we look at the reasoning employed, contraception is not explicitly
classified (by the authorities condemning it) among the vices,
among those classes of action seen as impeding the gaining of the
end, even if certain general principles are employed in arriving at
the condemnation. The nature of contraception is not itself set
out.
This might tend to suggest that it is a vice all on its own.
192
On this topic, cf. Daniel Westberg, "Reason, Will and Legalism", New
Blackfriars, October 1987, pp.431-437., esp. p.435: "The development of
legalistic moral science... can thus be seen to be a characteristic of a
Scotist-Suarezian view of human action... Because choice is a matter of the
will, the will needs to obey commands, and the commands cannot be left
too general (see our discussion of de Muralt's argument above, ch. 4)... St.
Thomas, however... could make each individual situation a matter for the
reason.. to judge what principle was to apply. This meant that the principles
could be left general... help from the Holy Spirit becomes not so much a
matter of the desire to obey God's commands... as wisdom to see how the
general principles are to be applied." We would rather say, to see what
virtue requires. Westberg shows how the professed Thomism of G. Grisez's
The Way of the Lord Jesus in does not in fact break free from the voluntarist
orbit which we call rationalist, preoccupied with "moral norms". This will
lead Grisez to find, for example, that "contraception is morally tantamount
to killing" (Persona, verità e morale: Atti del Congresso Morale, Roma, 7-12
aprile 1986; Città Nuova Editrice, Rome 1986, p.293). Paradoxically, this on
the face of it absurd moral inflation might remind us of Jesus associating
fraternal anger with the prohibition on killing. Of course, if one thinks of
Jesus as laying down a positive command, old-style, rather than
transcending legalism altogether, then the resemblance ceases to be
paradoxical.
193
This is not to imply that it has not always been with us,
and always in the consciousness of the Church even, as J.T.
Noonan's monumental study of it (Contraception: a History
of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists,
Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass. 1965) tends to
show.
Yet it seems clear that according to the analysis in Aquinas
contraception would be found to be a subspecies of the sixth and
worst species of lust (luxuria), i.e. it would be one of the unnatural
vices (vitia contra naturam).194 It would not, however, be the
gravest of these sins against nature, according to Aquinas. Let us
now look at his list of them. For him "the sin of impurity
(immunditia) holds the lowest place" among these.195 He also calls
this vice mollities, softness, and explains it as the procuring of
pollutio. This ought to have a wider meaning than the emission of
seed (outside the womb) if female masturbation, or, by analogy,
uncompleted male masturbation is to be included.
The gravest of these sins against nature, on the other
hand, is bestiality, as being contrary to the nature of the human
species196, and not merely, like the others, against our
determinate generic nature (shared with all animals) in so far as
these acts are against "the natural order of the venereal act".197
This opposition to our God-given nature, in fact, makes all of these
sins worse even than incest, for example, i.e. worse than incest as
such (he is not making light of child-abuse and so on, often a
conjoined offence to incest pure and simple). For although incest
is also directed against something natural, viz. the "natural
reverence" which we owe to persons conjoined to us198, yet this is
a lesser violation if it is a case of normal sexual intercourse. This is
to say that the other sins of lust are not unnatural, even though
they can be said, like all sins, to be in some way or other against
natural law. They "only bypass what is determined according to
right reason."199 These so to say natural or non-perverse sins of
lust, in descending order of gravity after incest, are adultery,
violation (i.e. of a virgin or more innocent person: both of these
being merely aggravated by the violence of rape) and, lastly,
simple fornication between unmarried persons (minima inter
species luxuriae).
Returning to unnatural vice, we find that after bestiality
Aquinas places homosexual behaviour as the gravest sin against
nature. For this would of course be a matter of homosexual acts,
194
Aquinas, op. cit. IIa-IIae 154, 1.
195
Ibid. 154, 12 ad 4um.
196
Ibid. 154, 12 ad 3um.
197
Ibid. 154, 11.
198
Ibid. 154, 9.
199
Ibid. Ia-IIae 94, 3.
of which in turn some would be graver than others, so that here
too, as in ethics in general, there is a certain overlapping of
categorization in so far as one has to look to more than one
criterion at the same time. Thus although St. Thomas calls such
homosexuality the vitium Sodomiticum he includes under it
female concubitus or lying together. Below this, in the scale of sins
against nature, he places departure from an assumed natural way
of lying together in any other way, i.e. given that a man and a
woman are here concerned. This might be, he says, through the
use of some unauthorized instrument (what?) or might involve
other monstruous or bestial activities (what we somewhat blandly
call oral sex, perhaps), but the sin is greater, he says, if the right
orifice is not used (si non sit debitum vas), whether at all or for
the deposition of sperm is not quite clear. Buggery seems
principally meant here, which would thus come out as less grave a
sin in itself than homosexual intercourse, even between women,
but more grave than the use of vibrators or than oral sex.200 Some
of these conclusions are already clearly paradoxical.
If one looked for a reason, which Aquinas does not give,
for this greater gravity of buggery in comparison with the other
failures to observe the due manner (debitus modus) of
heterosexual intercourse, then one would have to find it in
something analogous to that abuse of natural reverence which he
says is what makes incest worse than fornication (or even
adultery). Aquinas in fact says here that
201
This in other respects typically emotive language is rather untypical
for Aquinas personally.
intimacy. The Latin word intima means depths. One violates the
depths in a way analogous to wounding or stabbing, instead of
placing the penis in a place created for it.
One could ask, does the evil reside in the depositing of
seed in the anus or in penetrating it at all? Would the author
condemn spouses for any kind of caressing or rubbing of the anal
area during intercourse? Probably these exuberances were all
seen as part of the disorder of concupiscence which marriage in
general should remedy and excuse.
All this, of course, is directly relevant to a consideration of
contraceptive intercourse. Setting the latter in this larger context
helps, for one thing, to free the matter from a too exclusive
concentration upon intention, which, as Aquinas points out, is only
one of the circumstances which may or may not happen
(accidere) to an actus humanus which is naturally of a certain
specific type, even if it be also true that it is intention itself which
specifies this type morally (as distinct from naturally). There are
types of action, after all, which cannot be redeemed by any
intention whatever, as you cannot have loving torture (either it is
not real torture or it is not real loving). This must be so, since it is
according as they exemplify these primary objective types of
action that the intentions themselves, as interior acts, are judged
morally. The reason that they specify the outer, objective act is
that they proceed from the inward, interior sphere of freedom, i.e.
of intellect and consequent will, not so much duplicating the
outward act as projecting it in an intentional species.
The use of a condom, for example, straightforwardly
presents one with one of those acts of mutual masturbation which
we have discussed. Whether or not for the sake of pleasure
(delectationis causa: strictly speaking a matter of intention and
hence second-order) emission is procured outside the body (thus
becoming pollutio) and so not in the due place, this being the
essential effect of a condom. We do not find Aquinas, needless to
say, speaking of what he calls pollutio as being "morally
tantamount to killing". Thus he treats male and female
homosexuality, where no sperm is involved, as on an equal moral
footing.
The taking of an ovulation-preventing pill before
intercourse is therefore a different type of act (from use of a
condom), not in itself easily regarded as unnatural. Hence it is
that much of the reasoning in Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae
Vitae is in terms of the intention. To have intercourse with the
intention, as part of this human action (actus humanus) and as
shown by one of the things one does, of preventing conception, is
against nature, the nature of this act in particular. Hence such
behaviour is judged wrong, an offence against natural law also in
the more specific, stronger sense of a peccatum contra naturam.
Yet viewed naturally or "physically" (physikos) it seems to be a
normal marital act with which we have to deal, at least when
considered phenomenally. This is not the case where a condom
(instrumentum non debitum) is used. The taking of the pill forcibly
creates (sometimes it only guarantees) the condition of infertility
which, however, can otherwise occur naturally (and may and often
should, according to the same moralists, be taken into account
when planning responsible sexual behaviour).
It would seem, therefore, difficult, after all, in a Thomistic
classification, to place use of the contraceptive pill under the sins
of lust or, more specifically, under the sins of unnatural vice,
where use of condoms falls. We must, therefore, try to say what
kind of sin it might be instead. An Augustinian might see it as a sin
of lust in the sense of a seeking of venereal pleasure divorced
from the will to procreate. But not only is it probable that St.
Thomas (however, for his part, we interpret St. Augustine) did not
view the pursuit of this pleasure within marriage as sinful as such,
but we have a sure argument against this theory as follows: a
person "on the pill" or agreeing to use of the pill might not, at
least need not, be seeking precisely pleasure in having such inter-
course (he might think it his or her duty to do it once a week, say).
Nonetheless he is always, according to Catholic teaching, guilty of
a sin if he or she uses contraceptive pills for precisely a
contraceptive purpose. So we can forget about pleasure in this
context.
We notice instead that the sin of contraceptive
intercourse is held to be exemplified as it were indifferently where
either a pill or a condom is used. Yet in the latter case, it seems,
an objective, physical peccatum contra naturam is committed,
whereas it is not plausible to say that previous taking of a pill can
transform normal intercourse into mutual masturbation. We might,
for example, imagine a case where repentance (of the pill-taking)
ensued in between but where intercourse was still humanly and
hence morally required (it may be for some reason the last
opportunity for intercourse), the contraceptive intention
meanwhile falling away. These considerations might show why the
joke about the Irish boy who would not let the prostitute he visited
put a condom on him, because it was a sin, is really no joke at all.
Fornication is seen as much less bad than unnatural vice, as
violating the order of reason, but not the order of nature. Of
course we are prescinding, as does the joke, from non-sexual sins
as involved in many such situations, such as imprudent risking of
disease, which where reaching homicidal proportions amounts to
a sin against justice yet worse than perhaps any of these
unnatural sins. One could even imagine, and one might well
judge, that insisting on intercourse with a spouse for whom
pregnancy would mean death would be a worse sin than this
mutual masturbation. But whether the latter would be worse than
a consequently frustrated husband's adultery we can leave to the
casuists, or rather, in the light of our preferred principles, to the
agent's own creative decision-making, without however setting up
some Hare-type calculus for deciding when such decisions are
"right" or not, this being the old casuistry in a new guise.
This teaching helps to make more understandable the
large-scale reluctance of people in Africa and elsewhere (including
Europe, actually) to use condoms as security against AIDS.
Fornication is part of life, of nature, even if a bit disordered, and is
often experienced as joyous. Sterile perversion, on the other
hand, can be repellant. If, for that matter, the rubber spoils the
experience, spoils the feeling, then it is this same natural feeling
that is spoiled. This, rather than greed for the richest sensation, is
what is more fundamentally involved. So it is merely distracting to
disparage this as the man's point of view. Women, but also men,
are afraid of being infected, but this, again, is a different issue, a
circumstance which may or not attach to those essentially sexual
action-types which we are as such considering. A man or woman
who even suspects he or she is transmitting a deadly disease
commits a great injustice in risking his or her partner in this way,
even, surely, where desire has made the partner willing. We make
these points to forestall misunderstanding, but reiterate that as
accidental circumstances they do not belong to the more
fundamental discussion of sexual morality being conducted here,
but rather to disputes about justice. Even the fundamental
injustice represented by adultery is first to be treated as a species
of lust.202
What is said of condoms would apply equally to coitus
interruptus (the sin of Onan) if we follow the teaching of Aquinas
here. There is today, of course, and doubtless in the past as well,
202
One cannot be too categorical here, however. The reasons Aquinas
gives for the greater wrongness of adultery over fornication (Summa
theol. IIa-IIae 154, 8) all seem to be reasons of justice alone, such as the
harm risked to existing legitimate children and so on. The flexibility goes so
far that Aquinas can say that he who loves his own wife too ardently (at
least as using her dishonourably: inhoneste eo utens) can in some way
(aliqualiter) be called adulterous (ad 3um: the phraseology indicates a
judgment falling short of the literal, though one typical of medieval
sobriety).
a not uncommon feeling that masturbation is perfectly natural in
certain situations, concerning which opinions differ on a scale
from the young person's self-confident decision to release sexual
tension to the sexologist's advice that masturbation helps to
brighten up a marriage. It needs to be remembered, therefore, if
one is inclined to ridicule papal teaching on and, especially,
preoccupation with contraception that this teaching and
preoccupation is occurring in a moral and cultural context where,
as we have been pointing out, all types of masturbation are very
clearly reprobated, as is extra-marital sex. The debate is only
about behaviour between marriage partners.
Aquinas, however, leaves us with the paradox of
something unnatural which is yet, as mollities, very usual and
often the lesser evil among the courses open to a person, it would
seem. One can easily find it a pity, where one is not convinced by
arguments as to masturbation's naturalness (getting to know
one's own body and so on), that young people have to begin in
this way. Those societies might seem better, more joyous, in this
respect at least, where people were married at or around puberty,
a specifically sexual introversion being avoided, even if a lighter
approach to adultery might come to be implied in what would be a
very much longer run. There are, however, figures to suggest that
those marrying very young find fidelity easier. The big objection,
anyhow, would centre around the supposed incapacity of making
an autonomous choice of mate at such an age. Here, however, we
find ourselves involved in a kind of circle, requiring an expansion
of the topic beyond what is appropriate here, while insofar as one
doubts whether masturbation, voyeurism and the rest, to which
we take like ducks to water, are so unnatural after all then the
topic itself becomes somewhat hypothetical. This, however, it
should be clear, would be to give up, or make it impossible to
accept, the papal position on contraception as being, in our
interpretation, a type of masturbation and therefore wrong203,
except in so far as we might say that entering upon the estate of
marriage ruled out masturbation henceforth, whatever exactly our
view of it was in itself. Sex within marriage is bound to the project
of personal union, which must not be divorced from a procreative
potentiality.
It might seem to us, if we return to our original set of
problems, that when Paul VI (in Humanae Vitae) wrote of the
inhibition of the natural purpose of sex either before, during or
203
Cf. our earlier defence of the papal teaching and this interpretation
of it in "Natural Law in Humanae Vitae", Acts of the Congress Humanae
Vitae: 20 Anni Dopo, held in Rome, November 1988.
after the act he was morally equating the two "methods", viz. pill
and condom. In the light of our discussion, however, we can say
that it is rather the case that he was abstracting from the specific
evil of the use of instrumenta, provided, that is, that the pill taken
is not itself viewed as an instrumentum, being an effecting by
chemical means not of a barrier between sperm and ovum204 but
of non-ovulation. The instrumentation is different, however, since
non-ovulation is not in itself unnatural. Hence the same pill, with
this effect, is allowable for therapeutical purposes unconnected
with a contraceptive intention. By contrast, there does not seem
any situation so easily imaginable in which a condom, with its
proper effect, is to be used, provided we assumed the illegitimacy,
as argued by the Church leadership205, of all "harvesting" of
sperm.
It is difficult to see, further, and as mentioned already,
that the couple would be committing a further sin if they should
happen to have intercourse during the time of the pill's
effectiveness, for some good reason. They might genuinely repent
of having taken the pill and still have loving intercourse at that
time for some good reason, e.g. some rare occurrence of mutual
emotion due to the shared repentance and which might help the
husband overcome a potency problem threatening the marriage.
The possibility proves, again, the disparateness between use of
condom and pill. In fact it is only with the pill that contraception
occurs in its pure state, instead of being achieved through a
perverted form of intercourse which is, on the classical view,
independently wrong. So contraception is not necessarily
achieved through perverted intercourse alone. Thus Paul VI
himself mentions abortion, a quite different type of sin, in relation
to contraception. Taking a pill, on the other hand, is not in itself a
sin at all, this lying entirely in the end-purpose of contraception.
This holds, even though one who steals in order to fornicate be
more fornicator than thief (Aristotle's example) and thus the pill-
taking be assimilated morally to contraception. For contraception
204
This amounts to a prevention of a union of bodies, not perhaps
immediately apparent to an observer.
205
Cf. the document Donum Vitae. It might seem too simple to say this,
bearing in mind at least those cases where use of a condom clearly lessens
an existing sin's malice, even, surely, for those who see it as turning the
originally purposed fornication into an unnatural act. In our culture, indeed,
most young people grow up thinking masturbation is less grave than
fornication, but this may be due to a sense, stressed also by Aquinas, of the
dangers to others, even those still to be conceived, inherent in fornication. It
is not, that is, seen as worse qua sexual; indeed it as "naturally" evokes a
certain pride as masturbation often evokes shame, though the naturalness
of this shame may in turn be questioned.
is still not the objectum of the pill-taking qua pill-taking, but rather
in most cases its end or finis, which, as Aquinas says, is a
circumstance of any particular human act, even though it can
specify it morally. Again, even though the sin lies in intending
contraception during intercourse yet such intercourse may be
sinless if the intention changes beforehand. So intercourse after
sinfully taking the pill (because of the intention) is not in itself
sinful, since an act of intercourse cannot itself be directed to
preventing conception, though it may participate in the sinfulness
of the whole initiated course of action.206 Thus Paul VI stated that
any action "specifically intended to prevent procreation" is
"excluded"207 at the same time as he finds it in itself legitimate
that one have an "intention to avoid children and mean to make
sure that none will be born."208 What is condemned, therefore, is
fulfilling this intention by a privative action in relation to
intercourse. Fulfilling it by omission of intercourse at certain times
is ceteris paribus legitimate. At the same time, we have seen, not
all such actions in relation to intercourse make that intercourse
perverted in the moral sense. Hence Paul VI, in the passage
quoted, does not condemn the related intercourse but the action
depriving it of its natural effect.
In pointing out some of the paradoxes of listing absolute
prohibitions here under the theological rubric of sin we have tried
to serve the thesis of the total sovereignty of love, with its
consequent freedom. This might seem to bring us closer to
utilitarianism. Masturbation, for example, seems to come out as
sometimes the best course, and so we can construct the familiar
extreme examples, such as that a person might have to judge it
best on some occasion to lie with some animal, in order to mollify
a tyrant, say, though one could never prove that the stance of
absolute a priori refusal might not be better, and in that case our
premisses would require one to show that such behaviour was as
essentially contradictory of love as we asserted torture to be, King
Cong, Bottom, the Frog Prince and so on notwithstanding, not to
speak of mermaids, though these, of course, were all more or less
rational beasts. But the differences with utilitarianism have been
206
Much of our discussion depends on recognition of a difference
between the natural object of a (type of) act and the more or less
supervening moral intention. This is rejected by Alan Donagan (op. cit.
p.159). Cf. our "Two Criticisms of Double Effect" (The New Scholasticism, Vol.
LVIII,1, Winter 1984, pp.67-83), for discussion of Donagan and Philippa Foot
on this topic.
207
HV 14.
208
Ibid. 16.
specified above. Utilitarian is plainly prepared to sacrifice love and
all human dignity on occasion. It is in fact itself an iron and
inhuman law.
****************************
209
It may be felt that the viewpoint here is decidedly male, and
recognition of this limitation (as in our study, above, of our sources) should
reduce its power for distortion. What is male is also fully human, while the
Aristotelian view that gender is not in the soul as forma corporis supports
there being a deep unity in the experiences of the two sexes in this most
basically human field.
the union thus envisaged, all the same, is accomplished otherwise
though this never provides final satisfaction. One might see it as a
sign of a future union in love of the souls (and bodies) of the
blessed, where through the eyes or the whole body one person is
taken into another, a delight foreshadowed in the sexual
"tightening" but able there, through a more complete spiritualiza-
tion, to reach greater intensity without throwing the glorified
organism into disharmony.
Viewed thus, the opposition between agape and eros is
clearly less than absolute. They have always needed one
another.210 Eros and its illuminations and delights belong naturally
with charity211, as the Christian doctrine of marriage maintains.
One might wonder whether such views and expectations
commit one to thinking that in a general resurrection men will still,
as on earth, seek a more special type of union with women than
with other men, and vice versa. Even such a "spiritual" writer as
Augustine insists that the sexual difference, as integral to the
personality, remains. Alternatively, an erotic dimension in one's
feeling for one's own sex, for most people somewhat subdued
here on earth, might open up, the intellectual aspects of such
unions partaking of the erotic as achieving a richer intimacy than
we attain to now. This, after all, is certainly true in the Christian
tradition as regards relations with the divinity, conceived of as a
unity above the sexual difference (God is maternal as well), even
though this divinity condescended to assume just one of the two
genders in Jesus Christ.212 There will be no marrying because the
general union of all with all is so entire. Jung's doctrine of animus
and anima would here find confirmation.
Such speculation refers us back to the initial idea that
erotic attraction even now is primarily intellectual, of the soul.
One experiences a kinship beckoning to an unguessed intimacy,
where heart speaks to heart, cor ad cor loquitur, the sexes
complementing one another. This phrase was Newman's motto,
though we should remember how he objected, in reference to the
210
Cf. Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, Collins Fount, Glasgow 1974, pp.
260-262. "But when eros and agape are regarded not only as distinct, but as
mutually exclusive, this is at the expense of both eros and agape."
211
This is the burden of Dante's Vita Nuova.
212
This belief might seem to have implications for the relation of the
two genders to one another. A man, anyhow (here Jesus), can be the inner
life-principle of any woman. Yet it is surely not just chance, in the tradition,
that the Word became Son, not daughter, while it seems difficult
convincingly to rest such a weighty matter upon defunct Jewish social
attitudes.
poet Coventry Patmore (The Angel in the House), to the "mixing of
amorousness and religion". Here, however, our prime object has
been rather to distinguish the erotic from a morbid, loveless or
purely instinctive sexuality. The transcendental or religious
potentialities of the erotic serve mainly as illustrations of this
thesis.
*********************************
213
Aquinas, Summa Theol. Ia-IIae 85, 3. Aquinas takes
this list over from Bede, who got it from Augustine.
214
Such pessimism is not uncongenial to modern sensibilities either.
Thus in a recent film a comedienne (played by Sally Field) claims that it was
the first occurrence of sexual feeling, with the corresponding loss of rational
control, that destroyed the harmony of Eden, as Adam shouted to his wife,
"Stand back! I don't know how big this thing gets."
215
Here though Aquinas distinguishes between control over the
initiation of a process, such as deciding when to take a nap, and control
through every moment of the process initiated, not compatible either with
napping or with most worthwhile sexual activity.
love. Where this is not so, as in a "gang rape", the incapacitating
modesty is also absent, which supports the point. One who loves
or adores is vulnerable as exposing his own insufficiency and this
is the deeper source of the inhibition against exposing the sex
organs (or a religious propensity). They are the organs of love,
vulnerable indeed in their very physical, boneless structure.
Eros is thus again, pace Newman, associated with
religion. If the Church and ancient Israel at times have seemed to
fight shy of this, then this is because of the real danger of the
erotic taking over, as in the surrounding cults, swamping the
divine intellect and spirituality. But in actual intercourse with God,
as shown in both Christian and Old Testament mysticism, the
continuity with erotic passion is plain to be seen. An
overwhelming intuition of the absolute or boundless, or of what is
unconditionally desired, is what calls forth the erotic response of a
properly helpless longing, as is manifest from the crudest realms
of erotica up to the highest flights of mysticism.216 Dante, with his
"figure of Beatrice" (Charles Williams) is a central figure for our
culture here. The unconditional desire is explained in terms of an
image, on the pattern of incarnation, rather than in terms of
irrational aberration or enslavement. "This also is thou, neither is
this thou."
Hence we have the teaching about avoiding the "first
movements of sensuality", "occasions" of sin and so on. Arousal,
as we saw in the text from St. Teresa, leaves reasonableness
behind. There is at least a parallel, between highest and lowest,
as we call them, and, as we read even in The Imitation of Christ,
"the highest cannot stand without the lowest." We can recall St.
Ignatius of Antioch, "my eros is crucified." Love and death, indeed,
are constantly related, e.g. in what is called the Gospel "passion",
of which Wagnerian Schopenhauerism is a confused echo.217
So if it is true that lack of rational control, vulnerability,
causes sexual shame, yet this shame (like the passion of
verecundia) is not essentially a sinner's shame, but rather a
creature's hushedness before the absolute and at least potentially
holy, even if we happen to be sinners. Avoidance of this
dimension, in the well-meant rush to convince men of their guilt,
was perhaps the first onset of the general forgetfulness of the
transcendent which we call secularism. The authors of Genesis
wished to deny the divinity of the stars, yet Job saw the divine
216
Cf. the discussions of this in C.S. Lewis, Surprised by
Joy or The Problem of Pain (final chapter).
217
On this topic, cf. Denis de Rougement, Passion and Society.
inscrutability in the glory of a creature, a sea-monster, and it was
not only Satan who promised Eve that we could be as God but
also the Psalmist who declared that we are anyhow his true
image. "I have said ye are gods."
***********************************
What has been said so far in this chapter can be taken as woven
round those two most cherished ideals, love and freedom. Their
only competitor might seem to be justice, though this perhaps is
valued not so much for ourselves as for the sake of others, or at
least equally for their sake. We are indeed afraid that we will not
receive justice if we do not give it to others, and this applies also
to mercifulness or kindness, which returns us to love. The Socratic
insight, anyhow, that the unjust man is to be pitied does not
appeal so immediately to us as our desire for love and freedom.
These are in many respects valued both together and above all
else. To be just may be an indispensable condition for human
happiness, but love and freedom are seen as of its essence, while
happiness or beatitude itself, we find Aquinas saying, is, like God,
more noble and "honest" than even virtue. Even though, as Kant
saw, justice cannot be made a means to happiness, yet it is still a
condition for happiness and this is what gives justice its value. In
that sense it is a means, but not in the sense that it should only
be sought for the sake of happiness. One ought rather to believe
that renouncing one's own non-essential good in favour of what is
due to others is uniquely the way to one's own essential good.
Acting justly is in fact a first participation in happiness, this, as we
said, being the condition for its own positive and desirable
character, what makes it a value. This situation depends upon the
fact that we are so made that our happiness will consist in certain
personal relations, so that justice is required for the enjoyment of
love and freedom.218
We should hope that these relationships which justice
presupposes, with God and men, in at least some cases blossom
into love219, understood as a mutual well-wishing and delight in
one another, whether with our relatives, friends, spouses or
lovers. And really none of this is possible without an initial love for
218
This means, of course, that there could never be a total collision
between justice and inclination, i.e. it cannot meaningfully be proposed. One
can indeed "hunger and thirst" after it.
219
We have made clear above that justice not informed
and thus originating in love is in itself deformed and hence
ultimately unjust.
the ground of our own being, which leads some to delight in the
very sand upon which they walk, ground indeed, and which in the
end is love of God.
There are indeed those who aspire to love with an
impatience which excludes justice, obsessed with a desire for
union excluding respect for the otherness of the beloved, as if he
or she (and not God) had somehow become the ground of their
being. This is an illusion with much good in it, but only potentially.
If literally followed through it is already a murder of the other, and
we might ask how this passion, with its insensate jealousies, could
ever have been considered an exalted and even the most exalted
form of love. An answer might be that as creatures brought out of
nothing we each have a natural need for a union with that ground
outside ourselves which will give us all that we lack but which
needs nothing from us. Feeling this, we also feel that nature,
doing nothing in vain, will provide us with such a love, and so, in
the simplicity of youth, we confuse the most worthy images of
that beauty and love, our fellow men or women, with that beauty
and love itself. Hence one may guess that it is those with high
metaphysical sensibility, or so-called religious genius, who are
most exposed to this tragic mistake.
However, such an experience, the falling in love,
prudently handled, can become a way to deeper love of reality, of
God we might say, as traced out par excellence by the poet
Dante. At the other extreme we have Wagner's Tristan. Both
transcend a love-starved world, one in life, the other in death,
although it is in Dante himself that we read that death is the
gateway to life (mors est janua vitae).
One could say much more than we have done about this
eroticism which is but a misplaced and hence treacherous eros,
about the ready sympathy of our organism with such an absolutist
illusion.220 To combat it we need not only the moderation of
passion by reason but also the discernment of spirits.
We can compare our need for and interest in love with our
need for and interest in freedom. There is a sense in which
freedom is merely a means, a condition, for doing anything; it is,
as Hobbes defines it, the state of not being hindered or
constrained. It is apparent, though, that freedom is valued for
itself, as if it had a spiritual quality. It is often those who have
more of it than they seem to need who most urgently want more
220
This can be conceded while still maintaining the more
positive view of concupiscence and the ground of sexual
modesty (verecundia, which Aquinas declares lacking to
great saints as well as great sinners) outlined above.
of it, not only freedom from impediment but freedom to decide, or
to do nothing and remain alone. An absorbing interest in health is
often explicable in function of a desire for that kind of freedom, a
spiritual and not just a bodily good even where the body be its
subject.
Yet there is an apparent conflict between freedom and
love, surprising in view of what we may take to be the oneness of
the human good, if these two are indeed cherished above all else.
Hence the typical notion of freedom in current discussion and con-
versation is one of not being bound, as one is bound if one has a
household pet, or if one is committed to someone in what is called
an "old" relationship, such that it inhibits one from forming new
"relationships". Of course the proponents of this kind of freedom
avoid saying that it is love which inhibits freedom. Still there lurks
here an unconscious cynicism suggesting a genuine inability to
understand which is comparable to an incipient psychopathic
tendency.
For where what is valued is principally newness of
relationship this amounts to rejection of relationship as such and
consequent elimination of responsibility. What remains are just
surface encounters of the flesh, a halfway stopping-place on a
journey of retreat into a sterile solitude, ultimately inimical to
erotic or any other fulfilment. If this were freedom it would be
freedom to go nowhere, best compared with dropping a man or
woman in the middle of Siberia or on the moon, where he or she is
imprisoned without need of confinement.
Even the specific, very real charm of starting new
relationships will not long survive this negative orientation to their
continuance, once both parties understand that there is no
prospect of or capacity for this. The reason is that if one does not
intend to continue with the relationship then one is not starting a
new relationship, a truth mirrored in the requirement of an
intention of fidelity (till death) for the very validity of a marriage.
Without this all encounters will become casual and impersonal, a
devitalization reaching well down into the sexual dimension. It
may however take a few years for the persons making these
rejections to understand them as such.
So we need to understand how freedom is to be achieved
in a life of relationships, of love, given that the freedom to go
nowhere is ipso facto no freedom at all. For freedom of choice
cannot exist without the readiness to make a choice, after which
the choice is made. Does freedom end here? Or does freedom
from unemployment and loneliness now begin?
But one need not postulate a previous unemployment and
loneliness. The biblical pattern of leaving father and mother to
cleave to the spouse recommends a life of uninterrupted
relationship with others (with no bed-sitter interregnum), in any
case always with the world of spirits, so that one behaves with
modesty and decorum even when humanly alone, like the
craftsmen of our cathedrals who did not forsake beauty of form
even when working on those parts where no one was likely to
look. Before the commitment of vocation, in this perspective,
there were always the tasks of the home, the father's workshop
for example. Yet the moment of new choice should not be missed
if one is not to fall out of this pattern of relationship, in self-exile
to a spiritual Siberia.
What then is this freedom of choice once made, twin
blossom, with love, of our dreams of happiness? Not all choices
bring freedom after all, many are commitments to slavery. What
could it be about love itself that liberates?
We may say that if love is the willing of good to another
then it is not separable from our notion of what good is. On St.
Teresa's view, for instance, to love our neighbour is to will that he
or she love God whole-heartedly, become a fulfilled human being
in her terms. On any terms loving someone is willing him or her all
that is good. This means that we do not forget him or her, do not,
in principle at least, switch off the current of love since we know
that it is in itself the greatest good we can bestow. In the end only
love counts, this was the insight of St. John of the Cross. So we
are, as we say, carrying him or her in our hearts. Spouses,
perhaps, or parents, understand this most easily.
What this liberates or frees us from is the closed prison of
self. To love is to be related to another not just externally but in
one's spirit. This setting up of relations is the natural fulfilment of
personality. If it were not then it would not be liberating. So
freedom from relationships does not fulfil personality and is not
liberating. One might as well be free from happiness, or success,
or life, any kind of life.
An exclusive love, however, might seem at first sight to
leave one imprisoned. A man who deliberately only loves his wife
or child is not free. For just as when one knows, then one knows
that one knows, so when one loves must one also love love itself,
and so to love one person must teach one to love others. The
good father does not harden his face against other children, the
good spouse becomes a loving member of society.
Someone might object that by this argument he or she
should love other women or men as he loves his wife or she loves
her husband. This does not follow. The argument shows, rather,
that a man, say, should love the women to whom he is not
married in the way that is appropriate and natural in such a case,
just as a mother does not love her child in the way she loves her
spouse, but loves both equally nonetheless. This may indeed be a
love which is best expressed at times in a certain reserve, as
being that which is most compatible with whole-hearted love for
his wife. We know these things.
From the point of view of these possibilities the desire to
possess seems a limited and deformed type of love more than it is
an exciting alternative. For the love of love and of loving is a
movement out of the possessive self and its saturnine immobility
into a literal ec-stasy. I live yet not I. It parallels the old doctrine of
knowledge where I intentionally become the other without ceasing
to be myself, the remedy for our finitude. Knowledge and love,
indeed, are the defining marks of spirit, as love and freedom are
twin pillars of happiness. "As having nothing and yet possessing
all things."
*******************************
***********************************
221
Messenger point out that Aquinas refers these sins
principally to the way in which an act is initiated rather than
to what happens within the act itself (as in drunken driving,
we might say).
222
Pope John Paul II caused a stir in the Italian media a
few years ago by warning men against looking at their wives
Aquinas here expresses himself in a way that seems to resist our
general attempt to go behind the idea of a divine commandment
(not to "reduce" it). But it can be shown that Aquinas might
express himself differently on his own principles, as we see
already in the case of temperance as such, only "commanded" in
the sense that we cannot love our true good and still be happy
without it.
We pass then to acts of lust inordinata secundum se in
what is in fact the more precise sense of having undue (here
injustice arises) matter repugnant to charity. We have found that
we can see any wrong as repugnant to charity, indeed only this
repugnance (charity being the form of all virtue) is undue, so this
is a definition here of what is inordinate223, not an addition.
Charity, as caring for the good of man, in the first place here of
children, requires all sexual commerce between men and women
to be ordered by marriage to one another. Such commerce must
however be proportionate not only to the education of children
but to their generation. Thus, Aquinas argues, outward sins are
those in general which harm man's life, firstly by taking it away
(murder), or even by taking away goods needed for it (theft) or, he
goes on, taking away what is potential to it, viz. semen. All
inordinatio about this, therefore, is against charity and as such
distinct already224 from the sin of lust giving rise to it. It appears,
furthermore, that all voluntary acts of emission of semen not in
themselves potentially generative are thus inordinate (age,
sterility or weakness frustrate this potentiality propter aliquod
particulare accidens. It remains a real potency in such cases
secundum communem speciem actus so here there is no sin.
Because of this aspect of the common good at which his language
hints Aquinas argues that use of the generative organs is matter
for the "legislator" as eating is not225. But law considers acts only
226
One can still wonder what makes intercourse with a
sheep, say, worse than masturbation or not just a form of
masturbation. Would the evil of the act be lessened if
performed with a condom, for example (we prescind from
hygiene and health here), or if the sheep were dead. Would
that still be "bestiality"? Probably not.
227
Rasputin might be urges as counter-example to this
statement.
is not vehement is not of much interest to anyone.228
If, finally, these arguments or at least their general drift
are in the main acceptable they point to a life only partially and at
times attained by most people, Christian or otherwise. "The just
man falls seven times a day." So it is not surprising that a positive
religious teaching and appeal to "law" is needed to back it up,
plus perhaps a tendency to rely too categorically upon
questionable arguments (unless we think that there are implicit
premisses to be brought out which would much strengthen these
arguments). In so far as we can see such a situation obtaining (as
we see the daily nastinesses that occur between people in
general) we should be the more open to the traditional way of
going on whereby people accuse and berate themselves over acts
which it is likely they are shortly going to commit again and try to
live with the humiliation of this and a naturally arising hope of
deliverance from this, to which religion claims to offer an answer.
CHAPTER NINE
we call men good when their wills are good, because will
determines the use to which everything is put,
230
A.C. MacIntyre, After Virtue, London 1981.
231
Nietzsche personally would of course have loathed this situation.
which Kant gives to pure reason in his sphere of necessity. For
reason here, like duty in Kant's ethics, is considered apart from
any anchorage it may have in biological reality. The source of the
constraining categories which Kant postulates may be biological,
indeed it must be, and that is the source of the kinship between
Kantianism and materialism. However, and as a sort of
consequential opposite to this, reason is considered as a purely
formal operational system, setting up relations according to its
own laws and not in any sort of natural interchange with reality
and being, just as the will, for its part, is here naturally bound by
nothing. This "pure" way of considering our human faculties had
earlier enabled Descartes to establish reason or the individual
intellect as totally separate (not merely separable) from the body,
a separate reality corresponding to a clearly distinguished idea
since, again, whatever is conceivable is possible, i.e. possible just
as it is conceived, reality parallelling every distinction the mind
may make.
As far, then, as the will is concerned what are excluded
from consideration are the biological conditions for the will's
exercise, or any notion that the will might have a natural object
which it cannot but will (for Aquinas such an object, bonum in
universali, specifies it as rational). This was denied also by Scotus
and most of the late medievals, thus preparing the soil for that
voluntarism plausibly seen as modern culture's defining
characteristic. It is interesting that the occasion of the rise of this
voluntarism was a theological reaction, mis-called Augustinian,
against an Aristotelianism with which Aquinas was all too facilely
identified (the episcopal condemnations of 1277). The idea of the
absolute power of God, as against Greek necessitarianism, was
exalted so as to exclude any natural willing by God, even of
himself, this becoming reflected in man, his image, as the liberty
of indifference, e.g. as between willing good or evil. But whether
there can be a will with no natural object is highly doubtful. The
nature of freedom as itself rooted in the rationality of a world of
stable natures has been missed here. Thus a God who could
choose not to exist is scarcely a God, neither is a God who might
reenact the laws of logic or morality, since these, if they are
anything, are his own reflection in the world.
As with Cartesian scepticism, there is no way back from
these positions, once they are taken as seriously acceptable. Kant,
for example, seems to have believed that the categorical
imperative gave people a method for arriving at the traditional
moral truths, not by means of the heteronomy of conformity but
autonomously, being both laws unto themselves and yet
conforming to the antecedent law. But, it might be objected, a
person with certain desires might well wish, as de Sade had
suggested, that it be a law that we have absolute rights over one
another's bodies, finding the risks to himself preferable to the
constraints of virtue.232 This happens all the time, since not every
evil-doer is a fool, but often a consistent autonomist. Besides his
mistake here, Kant's anti-ontological attempt to base human
dignity, needed for respect for life, upon an indifferent openness
to every kind of choice equally fails, as Sartre has well shown,
comparing Kantian freedom to a not especially dignified hole in
being, as in a cheese. One hole, of course, might flatter another to
bolster its self-esteem, as in Andersen's story of the pot and the
kettle.
So set are people upon the voluntarist course that such
counter-examples often carry as little weight for them as does the
existence of fanatics unmoved by Golden Rule considerations for
R.M. Hare, with his crass mis-observation that "fanatics will always
be few". Sartre himself was not deterred from voluntarism by his
own insight into its moral bankruptcy, preferring to jettison
morality instead.
Regarding murder, then, people too hastily assert as
sufficient argument against it that one does not wish to be thus
killed oneself. How would you like it? They forget that it is just
absence or weakness of this anxiety which typifies the murdering
fanatic, and what murderer is not a fanatic? The argument fails, as
Hare admitted, with the only people against whom it is needed.
Nobody else needs an argument. It is not merely that he cannot
persuade fanatics. He cannot establish, as we have seen with the
Kantian argument for human dignity, that their moral premisses
(the end justifies the means, humans are expendable as means
etc.) are false. But this is precisely the conviction of the fanatics
themselves, and as at least negatively sharing it (he cannot rebut
it even to himself, but hopes merely that not too many people will
care enough about anything to take such a position) the meta-
ethical liberal is in some way assimilated to them as having
somehow lost the good of reason. For it is this, and not his
enthusiasm, which makes the fanatic to be a fanatic. The error
here, also discernible in Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarian
criminals, is not to see the kinship in humanity between the
fanatic and ourselves, that he or she, as we, is bound to know and
abide by the same moral truths. It is as if such writers concede the
intellectual case to the criminals (please let them be few) and
232
This would not be an advance along the line of that creative ethics
explored in previous chapters, insofar as it is clearly impossible to view it as
at some time or place an embodiment of love or spirit.
merely add that this is so much the worse for intellect, as if it
were a totally depraved faculty on the old Lutheran model.
Fanatics apart, this ad hominem appeal to the agent's
own wants also leaves one with no argument against murder by
consent of the victim. This might not much trouble those who
claim a right to terminate their own lives, but it ought to trouble
them if they reflect how one can move from this position to
justifying murdering many people without their consent, if one
might oneself rather die than descend to the situations in which
one's victims, one's "patients", find themselves. This might have
been the reasoning of the killer specialized in bumping off
deformed women, or of the murderers of Brazilian street children.
There will be even less security for those victims who are
not only caught in an unenviable situation and are henced
deemed murderable but whom one can expect to kill without their
feeling distress, pain or any other frustration of wishes, either for
themselves or their relatives and friends. Sheer existence, after
all, is not a quality of which one deprives an existing individual
since it is only as long as he exists that he can be deprived of
anything at all, that he can even wish to go on living, though we
are supposing this wish absent. We will return to this point.
One asks, meanwhile, whether these findings need be
matter for concern. Can we not simply attune outselves to the
anti-ontological stance, as we prepare ourselves to "liquidate" the
unfit, the aged, unwanted or handicapped infants, born or unborn,
excess female children, lingering AIDS victims? Would this not be
a natural field for that creative ethics of which we have been
speaking?
Evidence that such an attunement can be fairly smoothly
managed is suggested by the development of corresponding
fashions in humour, or by the ease with which society adapts to
the removal of severe penalties for at least some murderous
activities. These penalties clear fulfilled a teaching, and not just a
deterrent role in communicating horror of the behaviour judged to
deserve them. Yet we can see how easily sizeable minorities of
populations in concerned areas seem to learn how to commit or
accept with equanimity actions reckoned monstrous in more
peaceful periods. Murder is all too common, as is, therefore, the
requisite attunement to it. Croats, Jews, the unborn, the hostage,
the Ulsterman, the terminally ill, all come to seem "fair game" as,
for the utilitarian "humanist", do all those no longer deemed a
paying proposition. Media men and women parrot the term "ethnic
cleansing" without batting an eyelid.
We do not perhaps believe literally in a progress by
negations as envisaged by Hegel or Marx. But our culture remains
dominated by voluntarism, by a freedom of opinion seen more as
a right of will, that is to say, than as an intrinsic property of
intellect. In such a climate any natural determinism, of human
nature or of things generally, is almost hysterically resisted, e.g. in
sexual matters. Where will is thus divorced from intellect,
furthermore, one can expect that every thesis once accepted will
be negated after some time. Consciousness of this parameter
must then lead to nihilism (misnamed relativism), as consequence
of the anti-ontological stance.
A society thus open to any ethical point of view would
gain, for a while at least, a unique versatility, given up to an
almost comical veneration of pure change. Ethical constraints
upon technical progress would be progressively removed, the
ethical dimension of progress itself getting lost to view. But in so
far as this is a mistake, the separation of the ethical from the
physical as knowable by intellect, nature will tend to revenge
itself, with dustbowls or psychotic children and ruined family
happiness, for example, or financial disasters consequent upon
unrestrained currency speculations stifling all sense of a need for
productive work.
Such a voluntarist society would not long be bound by the
traditional prohibition upon all forms of murder. This was enforced
during these twenty centuries by the Christian movement upon
societies long inured to murders of convenience. So we do not yet
have today a society totally blinded to that permanent, so to say
legislative order which is reality; we never could have it so long as
men remain men. Nevertheless the process of denaturing, of
rejection, depending upon the anti-ontological stance of freedom
from essence, a principle, with esse, of any being whatever, is
already far advanced. As doctors in Sweden (1997) and elsewhere
clamour to experiment upon fetuses even before they are aborted
we are not warning merely against something which might
happen.
We are not, that is, drawing a Brave New World233 or The
Abolition of Man234 scenario, while we are well past 1984.235 We
might consider instead some products of the mid-century British
cinema, such as Kind Hearts and Coronets or Chaplin's Monsieur
Verdoux. In the former we are invited, indeed caused to laugh as
233
A novel by Aldous Huxley (1932).
234
A set of three lectures delivered at Durham University by C.S. Lewis
(1943).
235
1984, a novel by George Orwell (1949).
Alec Guiness, in a variety of characters, is repeatedly murdered
without, however, having much idea of what is happening to him.
This facilitates the mirth and equanimity in the face of evil deeds
thus not felt to be evil, but at most "naughty", as is behaviour
transgressing a traditional standard which is no longer respected.
It is cathartic, one might think, of our more lethal repressions. All
the same, it is different from such representations in Hollywood
cartoons or in fairy stories involving purely evil figures, or, of
course, from tragedies where we sympathize with the victims or
applaud the evil-doer's just punishment. There seems in fact no
parallel to this brand of humour, as it were an imaginative
condoning of murder, in Shakespeare or Chaucer, though we can
find in them some rather hard-hearted mockery of tiresome
husbands, we might think. Where the cuckolding extends to
murder the actor loses our and the author's sympathy. In our time,
however, we are offered tales such as Doktor Glass236, where the
young doctor benevolently poisons the over-demanding husband
of one of his young patients, thereby showing himself to be a
liberated existentialist philosopher. We have, if nothing else,
grown more heartless. I do not urge that such works be banned,
merely that they portray, but also betray, a weakened sensibility,
as would a return to entertainments of the type of the old Roman
circus.237
Thus in Monsieur Verdoux the old rogue238 is on trial for
the murder of several hapless and defrauded wives, whom,
however, he treats with kindness to the last, so that they die
without rancour or sorrow. He excites only our sympathy, plus a
few belly-laughs, as, in the accents of a gentleman, he makes his
last speech from the dock, morally berating those preparing to
condemn him, for all the world like Jesus addressing the pharisees.
One might call this, again, the freedom to go nowhere. As freedom
it attracts, and this is the appeal of such creations, until we see
that it is the freedom of having given up, not of having moved out
of and above a too constricting moral frame. The humour may still
of course be unreflectively enjoyed.
One might argue, for example, that these are exercises in
236
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doktor Glas, Stockholm 1905.
237
The test, going by what we said in earlier chapters,
would be that of whether the young doctor could be seen as
performing a work of love towards both the young woman
and her importunate husband. But he is more likely to say
with Meursault, in Camus' L'étranger, "it doesn't matter".
238
The story is based on the case of Henri Landru, earlier in the century.
elegant moral paradox, comparable to De Quincy's essay on
murder as a fine art or the "Heartless Rhymes for Heartless
Homes" of almost as long ago now, and there might indeed be a
continuity. We did say that the process was well advanced. G.K.
Chesterton in his day, for example, though by no means
humourless or narrow-minded as regards creative liberty among
artists, found distaste appropriate in reacting to this kind of thing,
as is recorded both of his conversation and of his reaction to
jingles such as
239
See G.K. Chesterton, "The Fat White Woman Speaks", in Works
(Wordsworth Poetical Library), Ware 1995, p.32.
240
To this argument from self-evidence (no statistics could ever be
advanced to disprove that jumping from high places produces broken limbs:
if they did not then we would assume that other, preventive causes were
operating) we can add that in any period without capital punishment,
considerations, anyhow, are distinct from the question, to which,
however, they are very material, as to whether a state has the
right, to be tempered by mercy, of protecting itself in this way.241
The urgent disgust, anyhow, the imperative, animating police and
people, to hunt down like a beast one who has thus brought
shame to the humanity which he or she shares with us, is not with
us as it once was, something not solely explicable by appeal to
that new and mysterious lack of "resources", an appeal made all
too readily in connection also with those needing a more special
health care. Babies, for example, may be left to starve to death,
though many far poorer societies would never take that course.
The anti-ontological stance is thus bound to foster
heartlessness in so far as it makes it impossible rationally to
oppose all forms of murder. It is no coincidence that the stance
goes hand in hand with a reluctance to find anyone personally
guilty of those murders which are still opposed. One who does
such things, it is claimed, must be ill, not responsible. Rather than
say that he may not, is forbidden to will what he has willed we try
to suggest that he only willed it as part of some functional
disturbance, requiring treatment or preventive detention. What is
harmful or inconvenient is thus, as a notion, separated from what
is morally bad, and this is in itself a confusion facilitated by the
divorce of the ethical from the dictates of physical reality, of value
from being. Yet there is no value, there is nothing at all, without
being. The truth that the ethical is itself, virtually by definition,
what will teleologically perfect man and society in their proper
being (so that the unethical or morally evil is ipso facto harmful)
has been quite lost from view.
In fact we cannot in the end so easily adapt to the
situation described, where we may murder when, according to
these values, we may reasonably wish to do so, as a heathen
Anglo-Saxon might murder if he paid the wergeld, i.e. the man-
money. We must then find something wrong with this stance,
these values, to which we cannot adapt. So we will have to return
to finding the wrongness of murder signalled in some physical or
natural truths about how man is in himself. That is, we must
overcome our attachment to the doctrine of the naturalistic
fallacy. The fact that I can conceive "ought" apart from "is", in an
whether the murder rate is greater than at an earlier period (it is) or not, no
one can know how many murders would have been committed in that same
period but with capital punishment as the rule. One cannot make the
controlled experiment that would be required. At the most obvious level we
can say that the non-executed murderer is able to kill again, as the
executed one is not, surely a statistic.
241
See our remarks on this at the end of ch. 1.
ontological vacuum indeed proper to thought, to ideas as such, by
no means entails that our real duties must exist in such a vacuum.
Since the laws of human behaviour parallel the teleological laws
of all other things, as a tree needs water and sunlight and to avoid
herbicides, so our duties cannot be divorced from our needs. So
what has to be shown is that for the common good it is needed
that we stop treating one another as units disposable under
certain conditions, evaluable by ad hominem, intra-subjective
criteria.
The argument against the adequacy of such ad hominem
ethics is well set out by Robert Spaemann:
242
Robert Spaemann, "Über den Begriff der Menschenwürde",
Scheidewege 15, 1985-6, p.25ff. (my translation).
argumentation, through some kind of correlation (through being
sacred to) with some non-perishable or eternal being of at least a
much higher value than things temporal, such as we generally call
God. Hence it is that Horkheimer and Adorno claim in their
writings that there is only a religious argument against murder,
the concept of such a dignity being essentially sacral.
So we certainly need to put man back into the forefront of
today's ecological considerations. If forests or endangered species
have intrinsic value and demand ontological respect, unaffected
by what they can will, viz. nothing,then the being of the rational
creature, as such a being, and not just in virtue of individual
subjective desires, demands a respect such that we cannot make
him or her a means to ends of our own, as we do when we kill him
or refuse to help him in his extremity. Nor is this to deny that God
can take back his life. God, after all, cannot be thought of as
respecting some value outside of himself.
So if it is only men who put value upon other men, or
upon themselves, then there is no independent ground upon
which to establish man's value and dignity. A claim for
unconditional respect can no longer be made. It then lies in the
logic of things that one claim to autonomy will clash with another,
one man making another a means to his ends, as aged relatives
needing costly medical attention or simply much personal
patience are pushed aside (or under a pillow), infants or the
unborn are drowned in a bucket (the favoured method in poorer
countries) or aborted, and so on. The pains of pity are also too
hastily, if understandably, quenched, without the brake of a
worshipful respect for one another, as in the easy euthanasia
portrayed in films such as Betty Blue or One Flew over the
Cuckoo's Nest, while the life-affirming reasons forbidding a right
to suicide are no longer understood.243
Men and women, this is to say, take it upon themselves to
decide who is and who is not a person, as a grim praxis
submerges all theoria. But effectively, under such circumstances,
no one is a person, there is no respect for persons, and each is to
count for one and none for more than one, as Bentham put it. The
unconditional respect for personality, as biologically founded and
upon which alone the prohibition of murder can be founded,
243
If these cases be compared with our criterion of love,
then we have to ask whose well-being we are considering
when we solve our more agonizing problems in these drastic
ways. It is a peculiarity of the wish for extinction, after all,
that one can never satisfy it, the recipient being no longer
there to be satisfied.
however, demands that each is to count for all and none for less
than all. This is what is meant by the common good, as distinct
from, prior to and superior to the aggregate good.244
There can, in other words, be no question of our deciding
who is a person and who not. Personality, indeed, is something of
which each of us is conscious, but as known and not as a mere
concomitant to consciousness itself. We know that we have it
while we sleep, for however long, as the mother knows it of her
sleeping child. Rip van Winkle or the Sleeping Beauty are correctly
portrayed as sleeping persons. We cannot, again, be just coopted
(by the others) to the human community, allowed to remain in it
merely by the will of other human beings. Such a conception is the
polar and essential opposite of the very idea of human rights. But
this is a true idea.
Pascal was wrong, for once, in saying that "We never love
the person, but only his qualities." What we love (if and when we
do) is the existing human being, the failure of whose "qualities"
can thus grieve us, and it is this act of being or of subsistentia
which makes a person to be such. Hence there are no merely
possible persons, a concept quite different from that of an existing
person's potentialities. Every individual possessed of our common
rational nature has ipso facto the inherent potentiality to be free,
to take charge of his own existence. He has this purely and simply
as a member of the human species genetically defined, a spiritual
being in the old, often misunderstood terminology, i.e. one
capable by nature of a scientific grasp of the whole of reality and
thus free, not determined within a fixed cognitional and sensory
environment. Head, hand and sense cooperate in devising ways to
overcome the finitude of these natural endowments themselves, a
variant perhaps of being capax Dei.245
In effect, if it is laid in the hands of a majority to decide
who becomes, or when, a member of the human community, then
human rights have already been abolished. The idea of such rights
presupposes that one, everyone, has already a right to
membership of that community, and that can only be through
biologically belonging to the species. There is no real question as
to who is a person, who not. Even in Christology, if Christ be not a
created human person it is only because he is a divine person.
The dignity of personality thus outstrips that of merely being
244
Cf., again, Sullivan & Atkinson, "Benevolence and Absolute
Prohibitions", International Philosophical Quarterly, September 1985.
245
There is no Pelagian implication here. It is because man is naturally
open to the transcendent that the transcendent can itself reach down to
him.
human, in Christian thought at least, something countering the
charge of "speciesism".
Talk of animal rights, however, obscures the issue. For if
we are of more value than many sparrows this is not a matter of
respecting our species simply because it is ours. The anti-
ontological stance consistently pursued, on the other hand,
respects no species at all and the furor over animal rights is best
seen as a back-handed confirmation of that. Yet the friends of the
furry, like those of the earth, might be saying that if people do
respect our species then this has to be part of a wider ontological
stance in which all things are good, i.e. have a value.
It is true, indeed, that a consistent "ontological stance"246
is one respecting all reality. Even a domestic pet or a glass of beer
resemble God as having a value in themselves and not just for us
(contrary to what we found the voluntarists holding even about
human beings). The idea of anything having value just for us is in
the end incoherent. Even the beer, just because it is so good for
us, attains an authentically high worth in itself, so that we
reprobate its wastage.247 Anything good for human beings is to
that extent already good in itself, since we exist. This does not
imply that that same entity would not be good did we not exist.
The whole ethos of our attachment to or delight in animals
depends upon an appreciation of the value and beauty which
these creatures have in themselves, more apparently in some
than in others. Even the arachnophobe cannot deny the beauty
and grace of the tarantula's to us ghastly movements, its web-
spinning activities and so on. So even at this low level the
ideologists, in so far as they make things pure means in a social
struggle, fall short of philosophy and of religious or ecological
reverence, while experience teaches, against the animal rights
lobby, that one can love what one eventually eats, a possible
argument, it might seem, for cannibalism which, however, for
reasons sufficiently stated above, could never carry the weight
required.
The point about beer, cats and this whole material world
is not that they have no ontological worth but that they have a
limited or finite worth, so that they may on occasion be destroyed
to preserve or enhance a being of greater value.248 Beer found in
246
The expression is constructed on the analogy of an anti-ontological
stance. But it is not a literal stance but simply the natural attitude.
247
This view as to beer is contested by many, but on the ground that
they do not consider beer good for us and can see no further use for it. So
there is no counter-argument here.
248
This would not apply to matter as such if, with Aquinas, we consider
the hands of an alcoholic may be poured down the sink, animals
may be killed for human food or clothing, parts of the human body
removed and so on. We thus condemn wastefulness as destroying
goods without need, cruelty to sentient beings as injuring them
wantonly, i.e. without sufficient reason,249 such behaviour being
insulting to our own rationality and consequent diginity.
So when we come to human beings the fault of the anti-
ontological, exploitative stance just becomes more glaring. People
are prepared to treat others as they wouldn't treat a dog, i.e. as
merely disposable. It is this that horrifies the average Westerner
when he comes upon the indifference shown by many (not all)
other peoples to the condition of their animals, when they are not
worshipping them. Closer contact with such people can even show
that they practise such things as human infanticide, as a group,
without losing any sleep over it.
What is to be concluded from these negative phenomena
in other cultures, or our own, is not that ethical standards are
relative or subject to cancellation in changed conditions, which
means that they are never mandatory. To adopt such an attitude
to them is to refuse to acknowledge real value in anything. Where
there is an indifference to the theoretical, a reckless cult of one's
own individual or collective satisfaction beyond all justice, one has
simply to register and deprecate this. It is genuinely philosophical
to condemn indifference to being, truth and beauty; thereby one
avoids nihilistic relativism. "You have not dealt thus with other
nations; you have not taught them your decrees," we read in the
Psalms of David, and this might encourage one to an impossible
theological positivism in the voluntarist mode. The thought
expressed might rather be, however, that the "people of the Book"
have uniquely activated potentialities common as natural to all
human beings in all cultures. Thus, for example, when the miss-
ionaries came to China or, for that matter, to Scandinavia the
resentment of those peoples against the missionaries'
condemnation of their truly murderous inhumanity to children and
the helpless found no argument to keep it alive, though these
things tend to resurface as and when the tide of Christianity, with
its moral pressure, its affirmation of and care for human well-
being, recedes.
It seems, in fact, that the anti-ontological, voluntarist
stance reduces to a purely practical stance. Murderers can be the
it a "necessary" being or one that, once created, must, like the human soul,
always be.
249
Harming and hurting equally deprive an animal of a good, be it
bodily integrity or the feeling of well-being.
most practical people; nothing must hinder a goal once proposed.
We become, anyhow, locked into that system of merely
apportioning value to one another, while it falls to those ready to
sacrifice their own lives "for the revolution", Marxist, religious,
ecological or what, to expose this pretence in its empty circularity.
One can opt out of this system of apportionment, and then it
becomes logical to see the class-enemy as "insects", to speak
only of liquidating undesirable "elements" (which we do not value
or will to exist), not of killing persons. Our life thus depends on the
desire of others, who may or may not co-opt us into that closed
system which they have preferred to life and being, with a power
that is no longer "the morality of those who stand out from the
rest", but which "grows out of the barrel of a gun," also a way, if
all else fails, of distinguishing oneself, notoriety compensating for
an unachieved fame or glory.
What is destroyed here is precisely the common good.
Men can no longer put an absolute value upon one another, or
promise each other loyalty, support, kindness, respect, protection,
"for richer or poorer", "in sickness and in health", "till death us do
part", they themselves being too ready to play the role of death,
no longer a dread messenger from outside, for one another. The
very meaning of love becomes unintelligible here.
Ultimate Happiness
**************************************
251
As a concept (or in communi) the ultimate end or goal is distinct from
happiness, but the getting of this final end (i.e. of the res aimed at) is what
we mean by happiness (Summa theol. Ia-IIae, 1, 8 ad objecta: beatitudo
nominat adeptionem ultimi finis).
that one wants and finding it worthwhile when one gets it."252
Discussions of this topic, however, are often couched in
terms of plans of life, of inclusive versus dominant goals, chunks
of time and so on. Theories of "transcendent happiness", as it
(what?) is called, tend to be dismissed as not relevant to
"contemporary theorizing",253 a perhaps surprising judgment as
being itself when uttered contemporary with that best-selling
praise of inwardness, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance.
The professionals go their own way, however, and more often than
not a programme of moderation is set forth as a way of getting
the most out of what the world has to offer.254 Mention of the
world, though, can set off those scriptural resonances with which
we are all more or less familiar:
What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul?
252
T. Benditt, "Happiness", Philosophical Studies XXV (1974), pp. 1-20.
253
Cf. Douglas den Uyl & Tibor R. Machan, "Recent Work on the Concept
of Happiness", American Philosophical Quarterly (April1983).
254
E.g. by John Kekes, "Happiness", Mind XCI (1982).
however, we must, to be happy, be free of that poverty which
might sour the relationship. We further require, such philosophers
go on to specify, a relative freedom from fear of loss of these
things through disease, war, infidelity or inflation.
From these requirements, their type, it would seem to
follow, so that one must not be thought merely sarcastic for
saying so, that it would also help if we could be placed, with our
life-companion of course, on an island where the sound of the
misery of others would not reach us, unless that sound might
perchance add to our sense of good fortune, given the
fundamental individualism assumed in such enquiries.
A weakness in this calculation is that it ignores the
potential for contradiction and conflict should, for example,
passion enter the picture. If someone's work, studies or creative
zeal take hold of him to the extent that family (if he has chosen a
fertile life-companion) and finances suffer, where then is such
happiness, where the sober balance promising a greater return of
the goods of life than through surrender to any one particular? Or
to fall in love, what havoc that would work with this "plan of life"!
The will to happiness along these lines, indeed, seems
allied with a will to mediocrity, since great creativeness or great
love are excluded. Love necessarily costs, as the "suitable life
companion" is not seen as doing. We note with reverence the
sufferings of the great, how they were rejected, misunderstood
and so on, but do we not also often envy them, wish that we too
had an extraordinary gift, whatever its potential for tragedy? They
seem often, indeed, to show us up as not being happy, since most
would rather be Hamlet than Rosencrantz, or even G.E. Moore
than his pig. Tolstoy even goes so far as, on the first page of Anna
Karenin, to say that happiness is of little interest since it has no
history. Yet everyone wants to be happy and so one can think of
Wittgenstein's exclamation at the end of his intense, ostensibly
tortured life that it had been "wonderful", an adjective scarcely
applicable to the successful completion of the life-plan outlined
above. It is as if this dying thinker possessed all his "wonder" up
to the end.
But if that "philosophical" mode of happiness, as they
invite us to call it, does not carry credibility, if it is just too
heartless for such a name, then either happiness is not, after all, a
matter of such quantitative satisfaction but something else or it is
impossible.
Our natural tendency, after some experience of pain, is
indeed to draw up a plan for happiness identified or confused with
a plan to exclude all pain. Yet the two projects are not identical,
but indeed two. Thus even if we take into account the great pain
of being without happiness yet the quieting of that pain can con-
ceivably be achieved without the cessation of all pain whatever. It
is possible, then, that eagerness to exclude all pain has prevented
us from allowing non-chimerical approaches to happiness which
might include a measure of pain. Resentment can cloud vision, as
if we had never heard, for example, about the massive popular
cult of glorified and hence happy martyrs (witnesses) to divine
truth displaying the instruments of their sufferings. What they
witness too, however, is of course extremely "transcendent", since
they have to die first. Yet this, after all, is an example of how
happiness can be achieved under conditions of temporality,
granted that we do not start out from but travel255 towards
happiness, and the prime image and symbol of this would be the
stresses and strains of adolescence, which have to be sustained
by hope and not seen as diseases snatching one from an infantile
joy which left nothing to be desired. Even those, like Wordsworth
or Vaughan, who stress the negative aspects of this development,
the accumulating "shades of the prison house", see the childhood
which they perhaps idealize as a type of something eternal, to be
returned to, perhaps, but at a higher remove. There is, in other
words, a process of growth involving at least some openness to
pain, which is why courage, defined as a readiness to face death,
along with hope, is a virtue needed for the attainment of
happiness.
We might consider one of those states which we listed as
excluded from the rationalist plan of life model, not the unusual
plight of genius but the near universal experience, in our culture
at least, of love, falling in love, at its strongest as something felt
by the sufferer as closely connected with happiness in the
phenomenon of "first love", typically of a boy for a girl, a girl for a
boy, this consideration (of what is typical) again associating the
sexual impulse with the divine or "transcendent" beckoning of our
ultimate goal. We have already noted in an earlier chapter a
connection between a comprehensive inclination and directive to
love and the creative fulfilment of vocation upon which life's
satisfaction will depend.
Such a lover, then, may be still a child, or an adolescent,
255
The analogy of life with a journey seems unavoidable. But one must
not forget that this is no more than an image, that life cannot be a journey
since all journeys are events within life consisting in local movement or
changes of place. Time, on the other hand, is a measurement of change in
general. We cannot travel through time with H.G. Wells because we do not
even travel through our own lives. Each life is whole in each moment and it
is there alone, as actual, that happiness can be sought.
or any age at all. He or she becomes, it only seems
unaccountably,256 transfixed by another person, even by some
aspect of that person, in ways ranging from the noble to the
ridiculous.257 It seems that thenceforward this is all that matters to
him, and the this may be variously interpreted as merely the
liberty to think about that person all day long, write poems, or
perhaps just be with him or her. It is like a light that has arisen in
the mind making all else darkness, of no life or interest. It is here
alone, in the eyes of the beloved, that the immortal is reflected,
as Dante saw it long ago and as Plato explained it before him.258
This is the point, that the young lover, typically young at least,
now feels, to revert to our cited text, that the whole world is truly
not worth gaining, that in this pain (which may also be ecstasy) he
has discovered his own soul, the unique key to his particular lock,
or lock for his key perhaps. At a stroke he is delivered from
ambition, envy and all the rest of it.259 He feels nausea, distaste,
for his previous carefree life, at most a sham happiness, before he
knew love, and pities the crowd who cannot feel as he feels as he
looks in at the casement of beauty, beauty itself as far as he is
concerned. Once again this is only explicable as being the natural
way by reliance upon the ontology (of the indivisibilityof being)
sketched earlier. Otherwise it has to be explained away or
dismissed as morbid sickness, though such a dismissal is, we
know, difficult to carry through and, much of our literature would
attest, wrong-headed.260
The state, of being in love in this way is not, in its
entirety, likely to last. No human being, we want to say, can be
more than the temporary bearer of such a vision. Such worshipful
eros, anyhow, seems a different matter from the project of sharing
a life together, and so such lovers are generally regarded as
doomed. Society hopes for at least a compromise, such as even
256
One must account for it in the way sketched earlier, according to
which each thing, each being, is just that, being, which cannot be parcelled
out or divided.
257
This was the theme of Resnais's film, Le genou de Claire. The idea of
fetichism would not exhaust all that was mooted in this scenario.
258
Cf. Josef Pieper, op. cit.
259
Jealousy, indeed, may enter in, but only through a negative
development of the process.
260
It would take us too far afield, even if one were competent, to
attempt to specify how the experience might differ, if at all, for men and
women respectively. I am, however, considering the experience as vision, in
separation from the urge to find a mate.
the course of nature itself seems to urge should the sharing of a
bed become internal to the experience, love producing the love-
child, with his or her distinct rights and needs. In romantic and
latter-day Christian tradition an attempt has been made to portray
and also live out the state of marriage as natural fulfilment, and
so not a compromise, of such an experience. In that case the
sense of doom which witnessed to the opposition between the
everyday or "bourgeois" and the serious search for human
fulfilment is at least softened, while at best a corresponding
splendour might be attributed to at least these kinds of marriages
qua marriages.
The lover, anyhow, knows that he has found that261 which
his soul seeks. All else is dust and ashes, and love is to be fed by
withdrawing in ever greater contempt from this dust and ashes.
Such is the mentality, apparently irrational, of passion. Awareness
of analogy, however, can lessen conviction as to its irrationality,
since, as we have said, if each being is unique before being cast
as member of a class (just one more human being) then just one
person might conceivably be the key to life's riddle, as in the myth
of the severed androgyns. This passion, anyhow, is so absorbed by
what it hopes for that it typically forgets to be urgent in attaining
it. Happiness has thus in a way already begun, whatever misery is
to follow, and in the years ahead the memory of it may seem like
time spent in another world:
*******************************************
261
He or she has found her or him, says the Song of Songs, in itself a
suggestive title.
If one began with such a picture then the plan of life
paradigm would not begin to engage at all with one's view of
things. One would dismiss it with as much disgust as Socrates in
the Phaedrus dismisses Lysias's praise of the non-lover. For the
lover is quite certain that happiness is not achieved through a
plan of life facilitating the heaping up of the greatest amount and
variety of goods. It is closer, rather, to the attainment of some
kind of union, such as vision, knowledge or a compenetration of
touch, with a beloved, commonly personal substance, in whose
company one may as it were swing the whole world as a cheap
trinket at one's wrist, a liberty which the prophet Isaiah would
reserve for Yahweh.
Something at least of this intense experience can last,
and thus one might press the claims of amicitia more forcefully
than has lately been done as needed for happiness, after the
example of Aristotle (and Cicero). This indeed, as calling for
fidelity, the for richer or poorer, better or worse, in sickness or
health till death us do part of the old English marriage vows,
makes short work of the inclusive plan of life idea.262 To press our
point, however, we need to justify such a view of the world
independently of any particular lover's experience, it might seem:
the view of the world, that is, as a collection of goods from which
we do not choose procedures in a state of "ontological
subjectivity"263, but in which we find or are found by something
bearing no proportion to the rest, the "pearl of great price" or
even the personal vocation of which we have been speaking. The
state of mind is exemplified in the account of Edith Stein as
reading the autobiography of St. Teresa and thereupon exclaiming,
"This is the truth", i.e. not merely this is what I want (omitting the
question of why one might want it), or what will suit me. The
lover, to be such, believes in the sovereign truth and beauty of the
beloved, and this is the indispensable basis for the vows essential
to love (one is not merely referring to the marriage vows). A
wrong choice, an unworthy love, is clearly conceivable, as one can
back the wrong horse; our point would stand, though, that the
inherent logic of the notion, necessary to us, of happiness imposes
a behaviour of search rather than of calculation, if only because
before we are happy we have not found what we are looking for.
262
One may note an analogy between what is negatively viewed as
being "stuck" with a partner and the more inward view of happiness as
consequent upon having taken possession of one's own being, having
"become the path". In both cases a certain fragility, a certain anxiety, is left
behind.
263
Kekes, op. cit.
One who calculates, by contrast, has all his options present to
him.
The "plan of life" man, universally moderate, will want to
object that the world, in fact, is all that we have. Many Platonic
texts would rebut this, but the worldly philosopher will isolate
them as "a Platonic way of speaking".264 Certainly Plato speaks in
his own way and Aristotle was at one with him on this. For he too
speaks of the lover of wisdom as practising a kind of death
(athanatizein), siding with the immortal part of himself against the
more ordinary human concerns, looking past, as we have said,
much of what is to be had in the world. We even find word of a
lover, after all, in the very name philosophy. A lover or friend of
wisdom, typically falling down wells with Thales, designated as
one who wonders, is the last type of person to seek happiness in
that plan of life which nonetheless he perhaps, more in error than
wisely, enjoys outlining.
Wanting just one thing excites disapproval. People regret
that Aristotle seems to have understood the dialectic of ends thus,
and try to soften the scandal by a distinguishing between
"inclusive" and "dominant" ends. In today's spiritual climate one is
not willing to think that it could be reasonable to stake all on the
unum necessarium. Anyone who does so must be confused, and
wanting just one thing is even assumed to be a vice in itself rather
than because of the insufficiency of most objects thus idolized.
This, however, contradicts the whole Jewish and Christian
tradition, from the first commandment of the Decalogue, viz. to
love God with one's whole soul, to St. Paul's saying "I count all
things dung that I may win Christ." What is missing is an argument
to the effect that there is no such summum bonum.
One might question also the lack of symmetry between a
plurality of goods and the unity of consciousness, or between
unitary second-order and multiple first-order satisfactions, as
Kekes, again, has it, following the idea of the search for happiness
as the one aim of getting the many things that one wants. But
there is something distasteful, all the same, about this cold
heaping up of delights, exciting that age-old animus against "the
many". May it not be that a man who would win through to
happiness, if any can, would be one who disdained such a
calculation, beholding a single object of which he judges, "This
alone is desirable for itself"?265 This would have to be argued as,
historically, it has been.
But first we would need to distinguish happiness from
264
R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford 1963), p.147.
265
Augustine of Hippo, speaking of contemplation.
bewitchment. For a man may feel happy without being happy.
That, after all, is the principle a sure possession of which alone
allows our societies conviction in the fight against drugs. But the
distinction which it makes, in which it consists, depends upon a
theory of the object as cause of happiness, in the absence of
which happiness is only a semblance of itself. One can hardly be
more objectual than that. If there were no such object then there
could be no distinction between happiness, as human fulfilment,
and a drugged ecstasy able to last up to life's final moment. Such
a cause cannot be merely the inward consistency of achievement
with plan of life. The latter is itself subject to the criterion of the
object, since perpetual self-narcosis is one plan of life amongst
others, is itself an object. What, though, will explain the necessary
connection of happiness with this one object unless we can invoke
some kind of identity of the two? We speak indeed both of being
happy and of possessing happiness, just as we explain happiness
as a state of getting what we want yet also say, quite naturally,
that happiness itself is what we want most of all, without any
consciousness of switching to a supposed second-order discourse.
But this is to anticipate the argument, to which we now turn.266
*****************************
266
See, however, Theron, The Recovery of Purpose, Frankfurt 1993, ch.
7, on teleological explanation as applied to human life.
267
Not even felicitas is just this.
268
Aquinas, Comm. in Sent. P. Lombardi, bk. 4, d.33, q.1, art. 1c.
has somehow been discredited. Aristotle, whom the Thomistic
argument is too easily assumed merely to repeat, is accused of a
"clearly fallacious transition", called the quantifier shift fallacy269,
when he argues as follows:
If then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for
its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake
of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake
of something else (for at that rate the process would go
on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and
vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.270
to
One might well agree with Anthony Kenny that pointing to the
fallacy of such a transition is an Aunt Sally and even an ignoratio
elenchi as not being directed at Aristotle's argument in the quoted
passage, since he presupposes "some end of the things we do".
That is, he does not make this transition. Kenny, however, goes on
to say that the fallacy of which he finds Aristotle guiltless
269
Cf. P.T. Geach, "History of a Fallacy", Logic Matters, Oxford 1972.
270
Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics 1094a 18 (tr. Ross).
271
G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus,
London (HUL) 1971, p.16.
272
A. Kenny, The Anatomy of the Soul, Oxford 1973, p.52.
Second Part of the Summa Theologica273, which is also the first
quaestio of the short treatise (five questions) on the last end,
prefacing the much longer part (two hundred and ninety eight
questions) on "those things which are ordained to the end". St.
Thomas does not, that is, speak baldly of means to the end here.
Article Four is entitled Utrum sit aliquis ultimus finis
humanae vitae, whether there is some last end to human life274,
which misleadingly suggests that the main point is going to be
settled here. Article Five, however, asks whether there can be
several ultimate ends for one man, which would be a superfluous
question if it had already been settled that there was one ultimate
end of human life in general, while Article Seven asks whether
there is one last end for all men, which seems scarcely to differ
from asking whether there is some last end to human life, as at
Article Four. Yet what Article Four really addresses itself to, as is
clear from the body of the article, is the question whether there
can be an infinite means-end series. It is the negative answer to
this that leads on to Five, whether one man can have several last
ends. Since he or she can only have one, it is concluded, Article
Six next asks whether a man wills all that he wills on account of
that one last end. Finally it is asked, at Article Seven, as we noted,
whether all men have the same ultimate end, i.e. whether there is
one ultimate end of all action. We should note that in Aquinas's
text this whole nest of arguments is kept separate from the
explicit treatment of beatitudo, being concerned rather with a
final end as such. It is not therefore possible to neutralize the
force of the arguments by applying them to a "second order" end
consisting in satisfaction at gaining a plurality of first order ends.
These will not ultimately be ends at all if it can be proved that
only one thing can be ultimately aimed at, which by the same
token could not then be reduced to satisfaction at getting the
other things.
So the chain of argumentation goes like this: a) an infinite
means-end series is impossible; b) any one person can only have
one ultimate purpose; c) he wills all that he wills for the sake of
that; d) this ultimate purpose is common to all human beings.
If these points were established they would dispose of the
idea either of an ethical freedom from the ends of human nature
(the soil of the plan of life project) or of calculation over a plurality
273
This Second Part of the Summa Theologica treats of man as using his
freedom of choice, according as he has God for his last end and through free
actions can come to that end or fall back from it.... (cf. Prologue to Ia-IIae).
274
Construing the last two words as a dative of advantage seems
preferable to the possessive genitive.
of desired goods as being the rational or viable path to happiness.
They thus seem to commit one to a certain inwardness in one's
approach to life, inasmuch as the one ultimate good of beatitudo
does not depend on an acquisition of other goods and yet is not
identifiable with any visible or material thing. Even our example of
being totally in love with a concrete human being was only meant
analogically, to show how native to us is the psychic structure
involved, of a search for one priceless pearl. It is true that Aquinas
defers at some points to the Aristotelian concept of active
happiness (felicitas), but this is clearly not man's last or ultimate
end275, which he is here arguing is sought not only as a quasi-
temporal (in the sense of post-temporal) crown to life's activities
but also from moment to moment, i.e. in any action whatsoever as
being its ultimate motive power. It is thus truly our life's passion or
what we most deeply want. Hence the urgency of knowing what it
is, as he goes on to ask in a following question. Hence also his
disagreement with Aristotle in stating that it is necessary for man,
for his or her living well, to know what the ultimate end of life is.276
We should try then, as he does, to discover this, since it seems
this is ultimately an effort at self-discovery. But at the stage of
argumentation we are now examining what this beatitudo consists
in has not been disclosed and ceteris paribus it might seem that a
person could accept these arguments and go on to conclude, as a
genuine absurdity, that man is necessarily driven by an end
natural to him but which cannot be attained since its existence is
impossible. Aquinas's own discussion appears to assume the
success of the arguments for the existence of a perfect and
infinite good, God, at the beginning of his magnum opus. At this
stage, however (Ia-IIae Q1), one might still identify the necessary
ultimate end of action with pleasure or riches, say, or several
different individual ends if one rejected the argument of Article
Seven that there is a common last end for all men. Question Two,
however, if accepted, would show negatively that the ultimate end
cannot consist in these things and even that men are not in fact
275
One must distinguish carefully in this treatise between imperfect or
"active" happiness, as conceived by Aristotle, and the imperfect
participation in beatitudo or happiness properly speaking which is all that
can be had in this life (Ia-IIae 5, 3 ad 1um) and which is treated as such at
Question 69: De Beatitudinibus, cf. art. 1: Dicitur enim aliquis jam finem
habere propter spem finis obtinendi: someone is said to possess the end
through hope of getting it, this hope arising through approaching the end by
action of the type specified in the Dominical beatitudes of Scripture
("Sermon on the Mount"). This is theological confirmation of our
philosophical thesis that hope is internal to virtue.
276
Aquinas, Sententiae Libri Ethicorum, Rome 1969, Bk. 1, lesson 2, p. 8
ll.52-71.
driven by these ends which they falsely propose to themselves, a
conclusion which would then lead to an acceptance of Question
Three, Article Eight, that happiness as here conceived could only
consist in the vision of the divine essence, even on the part of one
rejecting the existence of such a thing. This is to say that the
soundness of Aquinas's arguments here do not depend upon the
theological project which he himself employs them to work out.
They demonstrate, if valid, the tragedy of unbelief, since they
demonstrate that motivation by an at least ideal infinite and yet
unitary good is naturally necessary to man.
Article Four in itself is not very controversial. It concludes
that
when we now speak of the Final Good we do not mean the end of
good whereby good is finished so that it does not exist,
but the end whereby it is brought to final perfection and
fulfilment.280
280
City of God, XIX,1.
281
For a vivid example of how hope can include real participation in the
final delight one need only consider the life-giving act of sexual intercourse,
intoxicatingly pleasurable from the first moment but still unambiguously
directed to climax, in default of which disappointment is experienced. For
the joy is precisely a joy that it, the finis, is coming, as we say.
We do not have the security of possession which present
happiness would require. At the same time a happier life even
now is promised, as it were incidentally, to those who place their
happiness elsewhere, and in that way, also on the Christian view,
life can become like a dance, based now on the surer foundation
of confidence and hope. Hope, anyhow, is ineradicable even on
the most earthbound views of happiness, since man is always tied
to a future, be it long or short.
In regard to the three arguments of Article Five, the first
argument begs no question in saying that my purpose is not my
final purpose if it is not my whole purpose. Russell, however,
would object that it satisfies us not to be satisfied:
If this were so, however, it would itself come under the list of
things wanted, as
and not
282
B. Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
however, would almost seem to give the game away, since it is
certainly better to arrive. Plausibility, anyhow, is commonly
associated with deception, and if these satisfactions are looked
forward to then they must be hoped for. But to hope for something
entails wanting it to be had. If I say I will be less happy having got
it than when I aspire to it then I deny that I am hoping for it. We
cannot desire a diminution of happiness, this being the fulfilment
of desire.
It will be rejoined that what is required for happiness is
that as wants are satisfied other wants should arise. How, though,
do we distinguish this from the treadmill of unhappiness with
which we are familiar. One is reminded of the old Punch cartoon of
one man scowling at everything the other man finds funny. We
might then just say that dissatisfaction following on the heels of
satisfaction is the common pattern of life, discouraging to the
pessimist but evoking perpetual hope in the breast of the optimist.
Since the pessimist concedes the objection to the
Russellian view the optimist needs to show that this hope can be
maintained as a constituent of happiness even if it is not seen to
have a term. Is not a hope that is known to be unfulfillable a cause
of certain unhappiness, in so far as we steadily contemplate that
knowledge, as we should? For to ignore what one knows is a prime
cause of neurotic silliness.
The optimist replies that this is not his case. He is talking
of a series of distinct hopes, each of which is fulfilled as it arises.
The question is, is this enough? It partly depends upon how much
a hope is specified as a hope by its object. This seems not to be
the case283 but what we have, rather, is a situation in which men
suffer a generalized state of being in hope, less or more confident,
which not only is to be resolved by a general attainment but which
is saved from becoming despair, its contrary, by the belief that
such an attainment is possible.
We seem to be saying that the things which we desire are
significant to us, evoke hope, not because they are whatever they
are but because we desire them, even if what is desired is
necessarily the res and not possibly the mere having of the res in
separation from what kind of thing it might be. I desire a thing
because of what it is, but what it is would not signify for me if I did
not desire it. Is there not a contradiction here?284 What resolves
283
It is rather the case that hopes are all specified as hope by being
hope of the good, which is thus, again, the last end, as Aquinas says (e.g. in
his third argument here) about acts of the will generically considered.
284
For more detailed treatment of this question, cf. our The Recovery of
Purpose, Frankfurt 1993, Chapter Seven.
the contradiction is the concept, or rather the reality, of the good,
bonum, which, although an ens rationis insofar as the term
signifies a being (ens), is still, as related to the will and by the
same token, a being. Hence Aquinas says that
*******************************************
288
Cf. Dewan, p.581: "willing is an intrinsically infinite
action, because it has the good as its object" (referring to Ia
54, 2 and associated texts in the Summa).
It is not necessary for having an ultimate end, Aquinas
explains, that one always think of (cogitare) it. What has been
shown, rather, is that it is the power or virtue of the first intention,
i.e. of the ultimate end, which is decisively present (manet) in any
desire (for anything) which is able to maintain itself in act. One
does not stop walking on the road when one ceases to think of
each step, a pertinent analogy since this part of the Summa has
as subject homo viator. Here also there is no sign of the quantifier
shift fallacy.
Article Seven, we note, concedes that not all agree on
what the last end is, so that not all desire it expressly. The real last
end is that desired by those with well (bene) disposed affections,
as good follows being. Such affections will be in accordance with
reality as disclosed by the foregoing analysis. Satisfaction will not
be achieved elsewhere.
It is the formal nature of the Thomist concept of
happiness as that which initiates and gives point to willing as such
which enables us to dispose of problems posed by certain
altruistic theories. A unified account of ethical values is presented
within the context of human living. Yet it is only because Aquinas
identifies happiness with God, at once real and ideal, that he is
able to explain happiness as being both a formal notion as first
principle of action and yet full of particular content. But this is just
the bipolar nature of the term in daily life too.
**********************************
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The crisis of ethics in our time calls for a synoptic view capable of
kindling confident teleological motivation, in persons and
societies. It is futile to search for the "clear and distinct idea" in a
field of such universal importance as ethics, for which the ordinary
discourse of humanity is well suited. Rather, our notions must be
open, open to the analogies in things and situations, and open too
to the real human situation in all its depth and breadth, such
things as the desires of the human heart, the burdens of finitude,
misfortune and death, the polarization of the sexes, the insights
and traditions of religion, the exigences of politics, the compelling
witness of the arts and of literature.
The reason for this universal importance, such that a field
of discourse considered especially intractable or even (by J.L.
Mackie) "queer" cannot be isolated as if somehow less scientific
and hence inherently problematical or "emotive", was clearly
stated by Aristotle when founding this science, this theoria of
praxis. It is that ethics is concerned with the nature and end of
man, with man, that is, in view of his characteristic action or
praxis. That is to say, in view of what we said earlier, it is the
science of human happiness, of how to be happy. But this is the
object of all human endeavour without exception. Hence, if a
content to happiness were ever to be identified, e.g. as the
knowledge, vision or attainment of God as, it might be, of some
analogue of friendship with this infinite being, then it would follow
that this content is the ultimate aim of all our civil and social
arrangements, a conclusion that St. Thomas unhesitatingly
draws293 but which can at once arouse our fears regarding civil
and religious toleration. But there is no reason why what has been
achieved in this field cannot be integrated with a programme of
following the Thomistic insights, a work already outlined in More's
Utopia and one in fact deriving from Aquinas's own principles,
even though he lived under more restrictive regimes himself.294
Such an identification, however, of our desire, before it
would explain the hidden motor of society externally considered,
would more proximately explain ourselves to ourselves. And so
the young person reading for the first time the treatise on
beatitudo in the Summa theologica is led within himself to that
state of mind so habitual to, say, St. Augustine, when he wrote
You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it
finds its rest in thee.
There are any number of phrases from the Psalms of David (or the
poems of Wordsworth or Emily Bronte, or the writings of those
rather misleadingly called mystics) which suggest the same thing.
For what is here logically and metaphysically grounded by St.
Thomas is actually the most natural of our inclinations, whereby
we are not merely open to the transcendent but crying out for it,
so that the eye looks on at the passing show of this world forever
unsatisfied. The most natural of our inclinations is to the
supernatural, from the side of which we long for an initiative, if
only we might hope for such a thing. There is no ultimate human
beatitude short of that, and hence it is that when we read the
touching pages of Aquinas, somewhat constrained by a literalist
theological tradition we might think, about the fate of infants who
have died unbaptized, i.e. in "original sin" and without
supernatural grace or "baptism of desire" on the dominant
traditional view, we find that the purely natural felicity which he
there attributes to them (they do not share the divine life) is
293
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles , III 37.
294
See Maritain's True Humanism for suggestions and
insights in this regard. It would indeed be unfair not to
mention that such ideas are frequently embodied not only in
documents of the modern Roman Catholic Church and other
specifically Christian bodies, but even in less specific
documents including, in a measure, the constitutions of
some states, whether, Islamic, secular or of some third
variety, as well as some other international documents.
ultimately a species of hell, i.e. of deprivation of the fundamental
human hope, though these one-time infants are unaware of this.
But to speak of the most natural of our inclinations is to
concede that we have a plurality of inclinations, among which,
however, there has to be a certain order, both because order itself
is something to which we are clearly inclined and because that
inclination to universal good (bonum in commune) which we have
already picked out, identifying such a good or end both with that
end which in fact specifies the human will in its being as a will and
with the vision of God, is already sufficient to order the rest.
We might ask how it is that we can have this plurality of
inclinations if inclinations are to perceived goods and "good" has
the meaning of "end", if there be just one ultimate end not only of
all human life but even, we have found in our previous chapter, of
each and every human action. Here already, I believe, is the place
to introduce the essential notion of participation. Human beings
are so situated that there are a variety of ways of participating, of
taking part in, the universal goodness of beings, whether in the
order of learning or in the order of desire, use and enjoyment. The
basic realities of birth and education to maturity are sufficient
evidence of this. Before one even asks the question why do I live,
how shall I be happy, not to speak of answering it, one has lived
some years with one's energies bent upon nourishment, play, the
search for love, or whatever it may be. This is why we quoted the
scripture, saying that there is "a time to love and a time to die... a
time to embrace and a time to shun the embrace." Again, after
those first, typically adolescent days of spiritual enlightenment in
which, it may be, one discovers one's eternal destiny and the
dignity of one's own soul as a necessary being, after those intense
days of conversion the exhausted spirit will be forced to
remember its continuing need for, and hence inclination, at least
at some level of its nature, towards those finite goods which in its
ardour it had forgotten, a recurring pattern to which we must not
forget to add the need for healing and forgiveness of our own
wounded being.
In all these ways we can participate in the ultimate good
which draws us to itself like a force of gravity, pondus meus, and
so it is only good for us to use these other goods when they do, in
the particular circumstances as evaluated by the virtue of
prudence, constitute such a participation. Hence we are advised
never to seek fulfilment in them on their own, and even that such
a desire defiles the soul. It is possible, however, to abstract such
goods in the mind for separate consideration as to what is or is
not to be done with respect to each, assuming the circumstances
are otherwise right, and hence we arrive at those formalities of
justice which are enunciated as laws.
It is indeed characteristic of the legal mode that it be
analytic, considering each element on its own. Nor is there
anything wrong with such a mode. Hence if it be said that there is
a law such that adultery is forbidden, then, as law, this will hold
without respect to circumstances of place or person. The example
is Aristotle's295, and we may say that the whole thrust of the
Kantian ethic, for example, arises from Kant's insistence upon
viewing matters of behaviour exclusively in the legal mode, this of
course being in pronounced tension with his wish to deny any real
role to an external legislator, so as to secure "autonomy".
The tension is pronounced because it is this external
reference that specifies the legal mode itself, and which is the
reason why, as we said, laws, whether moral or societal, do not in
themselves reflect consideration of the total situation or intrinsic
aims of those subject to these laws, this being the very ground, in
fact, upon which Kant praised the dignity of duty.
It cannot be denied that this is the mode under which
morality is often presented to us in scripture, at least to begin
with, precisely in consideration of the infinite dignity of the law-
giver. Even if we see the wisdom of a given commandment and
how it will help us to attain our ultimate end, yet that is not the
reason why we are to obey it in so far as we are religious. Justice
though the heavens fall, we are inclined to say (the deeper truth
being, however, that justice is itself necessary for attainment of
the end).
In this perspective the doctrine of natural law faces in
both directions at once, preserving that complete reality which is
deformed in one way or its opposite by the positivist theologian
and philosopher of duty or by the consequentialist humanist
respectively. We have stressed the doctrine's analogical character
as a legal theory. Yet the claim stands that our inclinations really
promulgate to us laws (of nature), as arising from the reflected
divine light in our immortal souls, whether or not it be through the
weakness of our minds and not because of some positive open-
ended quality, of at least the more specific or "material" laws
themselves, that we for the most part do not, prior to
metaphysical analysis, perceive them as laws. "What is in fact law
is only inferentially grasped by us as law"296. We simply grasp,
295
Aristotle, EN 1107a16.
296
Cf. L. Dewan, "St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the
Moral Order", Angelicum , LXVII (1990), p. 304. It would be a
straight off, the goodness of being, a seed in the mind which the
mind, after some labour according to its own laws, will come to
see as the law of loving God more than oneself, something which
we in fact do without realising it in that initial grasping of the
goodness of being. And so with the other laws in their proper
order. An angel, says Dewan, would know from the first that these
are laws, and we can add to that the Aristotelean (and Thomistic)
caveats regarding the variability of the matter with which such
laws are concerned, this indeed tying in with the teaching on love
as a higher justice (even higher than equity), "covering" all things.
No doubt these angels know that too.
The strength of natural law doctrine, however, lies
precisely in this internal derivation of law from inclination, since,
as we have explained, law is superficially the opposite of
inclination, as what comes from outside is opposed to what comes
from inside. The claim is that in coming to know our own
inclinations, and there is no human inclination that is not a known
and indeed willed inclination, we are having the creator's law
promulgated to us. We are not just using our inclinations as a way
of working out what ought to be done.
In fact what Kant and St. Thomas have in common, as
philosophers in the Christian tradition, is just this insight both that
law must be preserved in all its dignity ("not one jot or one tittle
shall pass away") and that it must and can be internalized ("I will
plant my law within their hearts"). Now Kant's solution internalizes
law by the simple expedient of transferring the alienation
experienced by the subject of positive law into the depths of the
human soul itself. So it seems, at any rate, to most interpreters,
this being the effect of proposing a nobler end than human
happiness to the point of an absolute altruism divorced from all
inclination.
It is clear though that no other consistent outcome can be
expected once one has accepted the Suarezian definition of law as
something proceeding essentially from will, as a compulsion from
outside (which can then only be quasi -internalized in all its
externality, so that reason itself becomes the heteronomous
enemy of any natural appetite). If, however, law be understood as
a principle of rational order, intrinsic to reason in the first place,
reason as in its own intellectual nature being the cause of the very
faculty of will, then it becomes possible to understand the
Dominican and Augustinian view according to which the New Law
of the Gospel is not written down but poured into the depths of
Ex hoc enim quod aliquis vult finem, ratio imperat de his quae
sunt ad finem ,
297
Summa theologica Ia-IIae, 99, 1.
298
Ibid . 90, 1 ad 3um. I.e. where an end is sought it is
reason that lays down the means for attaining it... Otherwise
a prince's will would be more iniquity than law.
as set above him but as grounded in his very nature as end of all
things, is not even a possible being.
This, indeed, is the only possible solution. Kant would
seem to have enthroned law to the exclusion of God and hence of
that happiness which is ultimately founded in the divine being. He
could see no other way to preserve its majesty, due to the
voluntarist conception of law just referred to. But then law loses
the very majesty which he is emphasising, being now immanent in
a human reason which stands alone, no longer reflecting the
divine, and which seeks to exalt itself as an absolute end in virtue
of a purely negative freedom from even the first determinations of
a thing's nature. Aquinas, by contrast, had stressed that just
because intellect is open to all being, able to have the form of the
other as other, it needs, since it is a nature, and a very exalted
nature, to have, like God himself, its own natural inclination, from
which proceeds the faculty of will as such and, indeed, all the
inclinations of our nature.299
Before we go on to examine more closely the nature and
role of the inclinations, however, it is desirable to remove a few
remaining doubts and ambiguities. It was perhaps the fear of Kant
and his predecessors that the law, in Aristotelian and Thomist
perspective, had been made the servant of the inclinations and of
happiness in utilitarian and consequentialist fashion. There is a
certain imputation of guilt by association here but in fact, and
whatever the tendencies of Aristotle in this regard, St. Thomas,
guided, we may suppose, by the light of revelation, is perfectly
free of them, as may be seen, for example, in the different
emphases in the doctrine of epieicheia as presented by the two
thinkers, or in the way that St. Thomas stresses, in contrast to
Aristotle, that to live well it is necessary to know what it is in
which man's ultimate end consists.300
299
Cf. St. Thomas, QD de veritate 22, 10 ad 4um; Summa
theologica Ia-IIae 9, 1 ad 2um; 49, 4 ad 2um.
300
Cf. St. Thomas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, Rome 1969,
Book I, lesson 2, p. 8, ll. 52-71. See also L. Elders, "St.
Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Nichomachaean Ethics
", Autour de saint Thomas d'Aquin , Tome I, Editions Tabor,
Paris 1987, esp. pp. 78-79. See also Theron, "St. Thomas
Aquinas and Epieicheia", Lex et Libertas (ed. Elders &
Hedwig), Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Rome 1987, pp.171-182.
definitions of right reason and right appetite in terms of each
other merely.301 These inclinations, consequently, are presented
as a real, majestic and all-demanding law, to which, however, man
is inclined in the depths of his own nature in its noblest aspect,
viz. its aspect as a reflection and image of the eternal law, under
which aspect, specifically, man is called upon to be a providence
for himself in the freedom of individual personality.302
On this view of law as proceeding from the divine
goodness happiness, in the sense of living well, flourishing,
personal fulfilment, is in fact the highest development of life
according to law, of morality, and the fulfilment of all the virtues.
Hence St. Thomas will describe charity as the end of all precepts
and moral life. It is a question not of being for or against the
relevance of happiness in a moral context but of what view one
holds of happiness, that is to say, of motivation, without which
there can be no meaningful consideration of law in the first place,
if law is given to agents and if indeed it is a physical truth that
every agent acts for an end. Practical reason as practical is
inseparable from the question of motivation. For practical reason
as reason takes part in decision-making, as law itself belongs to
reason. Hence in this field, again, specification is not wholly
separable from exercise.
Now Aquinas, inspired by the Gospels, holds the very
highest view of happiness. To accuse him of an instrumentalist
eudemonism is to miss all that he has to say about that
participatio which we mentioned earlier. He is quite
uncompromising in saying that beatitudo is not to be had in its
perfection in this life, not even in the practice of virtue. One of the
virtues, in sign of this, and indeed it is a theological virtue of the
highest dignity, is hope, hope indeed of a praemium , a reward.
This reward, however, is intrinsic to virtue in so far as virtue, as
we know it on earth, is already an initial participation in this
reward which it thus genuinely merits, as a light growing ever
stronger, or rather as a sick body recovering vigour in such a way
that each new access of strength is itself used to develop more of
the same, the compound interest principle so to say.
Such is St. Thomas's perspective on the beatitudes of the
Sermon on the Mount, to which we referred in our previous
chapter and which, with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, hold a central
301
St. Thomas, ibid. Book VI, lesson 2, p. 337, ll. 109-
127.
302
Cf. St. Thomas, Summa theologica, Pars secunda,
Prol.
place in the Pars prima secundae , the first part of the book of
man as on the way to that same beatitude. For St. Thomas, in fact,
takes his conceptions of happiness from this most Christian
source, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Once we have
realised this then the strictures upon his teaching as unworthily
eudemonistic appear misplaced and even uninformed.
For what we are presented with is an exact replica of the
Gospel teaching upon human blessedness303, that same Gospel
which Kant (like J.S. Mill or R.M. Hare) had claimed to translate into
philosophical terms, but with lamentable effect. St. Thomas
claims, in sober truth, that they are happy who are poor, meek,
merciful, pure in heart, who mourn over their sins and hunger and
thirst for justice, who seek to make peace and who are persecuted
and reviled by the generality of men. This last characteristic, in
fact, shows that it is an aristocratic account of happiness,
correlate with the view that pauci sunt salvandi , at least in the
sense that each person must detach himself from the crowd and
enter by the narrow gate, this move being in itself, however,
natural to the dignity of personality and not peculiar to the
Christian dispensation in any particularist sense, a sense, anyway,
under which Christianity, of which Catholicism, viewed by de
Lubac as "religion itself"304, claims to be the normal form, should
perhaps never be viewed.
If it seems paradoxical that these categories, in various
ways categories of suffering or at least of painful effort, are the
categories of happiness here on earth, then this is so in proportion
as it is stressed that beatitude, in which they participate, lies
outside the world, simply because it lies in God, whom no man
may see and live, in the kingdom of heaven, to be peopled by
those who shall inherit the earth, who shall be comforted, who
shall obtain mercy, who shall be filled with justice, who shall see
God and be called his children and who now rejoice in being
persecuted like the prophets before them as a sign, they may
hope, of their predestination. In St. Thomas's conception this
Christian vision follows as it were naturally upon consideration of
the greatness of God in comparison to the creature, of eternity in
comparison to time, considerations which of course this teaching
in turn fortifies and confirms.
The idea that the purity of virtue is somehow
compromised by its association with these hopes springs from
303
Ibid. Q 69, esp. art. 2.
304
Henri de Lubac, Catholicism , Universe Books, London
1950, p.157.
that same failure to see that they are internal to virtuous living,
as good and the end are internal to law. Hence indifference to
hope, like despair, is a sin, a vice, sloth perhaps. Indeed, if the
patristic doctrine common to St. Augustine, St. Gregory and St.
Anselm, that to live according to the rule of rectitudo voluntatis
propter se servata is just to live secundum Deum , a doctrine
which St. Thomas's endorsement of the eternal law shows that he
too teaches, besides his explicit affirmations of it, then indeed the
blessedness of divinity cannot be other than intrinsic to the moral
effort, to the arrow aimed at the unseen glory above the clouds
not merely at the same time but inasmuch as it is aimed at that
visible point which is purity of heart. For this aim of its nature
participates in the other, as was the doctrine of Cassian and St.
Benedict and indeed of St. John the Apostle when he said that a
man who loves God cannot be other than a man who loves his
brother, whom he has seen, as well. Since he cites love of the
brethren as proof of love of God305 he cannot mean, as is
sometimes supposed, that the former, love of the brethren, could
be the foundation. That desire for God is intrinsic to moral
rectitude means that the latter must be understood as religious,
as participating in the transcendent, or else become a form of
spiritual vice. This vice indeed is present where one seeks to
misrepresent these texts as primitive foreshadowings of secularist
altruism in the manner of Feuerbach.
Thus St. Gregory the Great explicitly denies that there
can be a rule of right which abstracts from the law, cult and love
of the true God306 while, conversely, St. Augustine states, in tune
with St. Thomas's endorsement of the beatitudes, that those are
happy who have wished, not merely to be happy, as do all men,
but to live recte, hoc est secundum Deum, quod mali nolunt.307
This is why Aquinas says, as we noted, in correction of
Aristotle, that to live well it is necessary to know in what our
ultimate end consists. And this, incidentally, explains those Gospel
paradoxes about losing one's life as a condition for finding it; not,
be it noted, as a means to finding it since that would be the
seeking to find or save it which we are told will fail, but as a
participation in the new life by losing the old, something only to
305
I John, 3:14 et passim.
306
Gregory, Moralia 5, 37.
307
Rightly, i.e. according to God, as bad persons do not
wish to do. St. Augustine, De libero arbitrio I, 14, Civitas Dei
XIV, 9. Cf. St. Anselm, Ep. 156, p. 20, 86-86: quae in Deo
fiunt, secundum Deum, id est, recte fiunt.
be explained by what God is, the total good to which one can only
give oneself totally, as being the secret of one's own being
("closer to me than I am to myself"), and what we are, viz. images,
reflections, of that supreme good, who find our fulfilment in the
return to our common exemplar.
The Gospel, that is, never fails to promise a reward to
those who live in this way and it is indeed this reward, like Christ's
own resurrection, which is the essential justification of virtue, the
proof that the wicked were mistaken in despising it. This reward,
however, is itself, in the divine wisdom, the intrinsic flowering of
the virtues, a doctrine which in some form the virtuous man is
required to believe, at least through some commitment to the
beauty of virtue, beauty of life being unintelligible except as some
form of participation in blessedness, in that which pleases. But
any such concession to fides implicita should in no way be
confused with making of the religious or transcendent dimension
of ethics an optional superstructure. Our position, rather, is that
the Patristic era was in historical and cultural continuity with the
insights of Plato and Aristotle and others in the classical tradition.
This depends on our view that the idea or even the reality of
grace, of revelation, as something to be looked for from a
transcendent being, can be treated philosophically, since what is
taught as coming from outside is always open to rational
consideration upon its own merits. It was the error of rationalism
that it did not acknowledge this. Much of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, furthermore, rests tacitly upon the Patristic
advances and is unthinkable without them, as, consequently, is
the contemporary philosophy
of human rights or certain aspects of the "scientific" mentality in general.308
CHAPTER TWELVE
308
Cf. Theron, Africa, Philosophy and the Western
Tradition, Frankfurt 1995.
Charity, we have stressed, is the form, the originator, motive
power and orderer of virtue. Forma dat esse, says Aquinas. Love
fulfils the law to the point that law and behaviour are deformed
without it. We affirm, again, that what are called the precepts of
natural law correspond, to the point of identity as regards their
order at least, to the settled inclinations of our nature. Now as
regards these inclinations, the first or controlling inclination, we
saw, is that to the last or ultimate end, for the sake of the
attainment of which anything whatever that is done is done. We
have found Aquinas calling this end variously happiness, the good
generally considered (bonum in communi) or God. This first
inclination, then, is clearly one with the inclination of love, and as
man seeks the good which Aquinas identifies with God as his
ultimate end and first mover of his or her actions, so this ultimate
inclination is one with that first controlling precept of the natural
law which is the love of God, as we find Aquinas interpreting this
Old Testament command, viz. it is a and even the precept of
natural law, which can be so to say secularized to mean the
pursuing of the good in general, bonum in communi. Good is to be
pursued and evil avoided. This precept, at least on a religious or
even correctly metaphysical view of reality, is one with the
command to love God. Thus it was given in the Old Testament
without any connection with the later developments of the offer to
share in the divine life, although we have interpreted this
transcendence as fulfilling the ultimate aspirations of our nature,
which extend as it were naturally beyond what can be hoped for
as owed by right while, conversely, this "supernatural" fulfilment
is foreshadowed in Jewish (and other) tradition from the
beginning.309
So it is these inclinations which dictate the direction, the
energy, the passion and the virtue of love, itself the prime
inclination, for the passion of amor becomes the virtue of caritas
to the extent that it is rightly (recte) ordered, i.e. to the extent
that it follows the order of the natural inclinations, the total love of
God being, again, a natural norm.310
309
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae 100, 3 ad 1: the two
commands of love and neighbour "are the first, general
precepts of natural law" (sunt prima et communia praecepta
legis naturae, quae sunt per se nota rationi humanae vel per
naturam). He adds vel per fidem, supporting our general
contention. Cf. also Ia-IIae 44, 1.
310
Theological disputes have obscured this, but we
cannot turn aside here to contribute further to such
If these are indeed the premisses of Aquinas's argument,
his vision, if, moreover, they are demonstrably true, then we
should be able to show, and to find in his text, that our human
inclinations are indeed structured in this way, that this is our
nature. This will follow in turn, as it were physically (phusikos),
from the intellectuality of that nature, from the truth, with which
Aquinas was identified to the point of scandal but which was
accepted after his death by the official Christian community
(Council of Vienne, 1317), that this intellectual soul, and it alone,
is the form of the human body (forma corporis). Aquinas finds that
the Aristotelian principles, which he considers sound, permit no
other conclusion, whatever difficulties they may cause for
theology.
It has been claimed311 that St. Thomas's treatise on the
Last End is not well integrated with his treatise on law; in
particular it is felt to be not well integrated with what he has to
say about the natural inclinations as having an order which gives
the order of the precepts of natural law. So it is important to show
how this integrated unity reaches right down to the metaphysical
core of his conception.
We find, accordingly, that in the Summa theologica, at Ia-
IIae 94, 2, a table of inclinations is set forth which many interpret
as proceeding from a basic tendency to individual self-
preservation, through the inclinations to sexual intercourse and
founding a family, to what is most specific to man, viz. the
intellectual tendencies to such things as knowing the truth about
God and living in society. This, however, does not seem to fit in
very neatly with the questions on the Last End of man, where it is
argued that the vision of God, universal goodness, alone fulfils
human nature.312 It even seems to positively contradict what we
have found Aquinas saying about the order of charity. If by nature
we love, and should love, God more than ourselves,313 then how
can our first and foundational inclination be to individual self-
preservation? Again, there are arguments in the Prima Pars to
show that we, as rational beings, naturally love more what is
common in us than what is individual.314
disputes.
311
By G. Grisez, writing in the New Catholic
Encyclopaedia (McGraw Hill) on our last end.
312
Ia-IIae 3, 8.
313
IIa-IIae 26, 3.
The quasi-Hobbesian interpretation of Ia-IIae 94, 2,315
supported without question by the formidable authority of Joseph
Gredt, has not gone unchallenged.316
It may even be that there are graduated levels of meaning in the
text, not all of which need to be brought into play for all purposes.
Gredt, for instance, cites a passage from the earlier Commentary
on the Sentences which suggests a tendency to keep the idea of
natural law at the level of "that which nature teaches all animals",
which certainly would give prominence to individual self-
preservation.317 There, however, where St. Thomas is discussing
polygamy318, he certainly goes on to introduce rational
considerations pertaining to man specifically, such as the need for
education, avoiding quarrel in the household and so on.
In any case it is quite clear in the treatment of natural law
in the Summa theologica that we are dealing with the first
precepts of the law as recognized by practical reason as true,
nota per se. That they are thus true, and hence constitute a law,
is guaranteed by the explicit consideration that such an
apprehension of the first notions, corresponding to seminal
realities319, is made possible by the divine reason's reflecting itself
in our own nature. So here there is no possibility of somehow
restricting natural law to the lower reaches of ethical theory. It
orders our nature as a whole, in its practical aspect, which, qua
nature, tends to what is good, i.e. to its end.
A pointer to what may not be more than the insufficiency
of what I have been calling the Hobbesian interpretation of the
first of the three sets of inclinations in 94.2, besides the clash with
parallel treatments of charity and of the last end which I have
mentioned, is that it makes it impossible to see the argumentation
of this long article as forming a coherent whole. Hence J. Finnis320
refers to the table of inclinations as an irrelevant speculative
314
Ia 60, 5.
315
Cf. Th. Hobbes, Leviathan I, xiv.
316
Cf. Lawrence Dewan, "St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights,
and the Moral Order", Angelicum LXVII (1990), pp. 285-308.
317
J. Gredt, Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-
Thomisticae, 3rd edn., Freiburg 1929, 939.2, 940.
318
IV Sent., dist. 33, q., art. 1 et seq.
319
Cf. Ia-IIae 51,1; Ia 115, 2.
320
Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford 1980.
appendage, which would certainly be unusual in St. Thomas's
works, concerned as he was for order. And, in fact, up to the point
where the schematization of inclinations is introduced we seem to
have a most ordered presentation and a progression of a type with
which the notion of individual self-preservation as the basic
inclination clearly clashes.
Thus, in the article, Aquinas declares the precepts of
natural law to be the principles of practical reason as per se nota,
and by this alone we can see that these precepts of natural law
are themselves, together with the first principles of reason as such
(i.e. of both the knowable and the knowable as do-able),
I.e., practical reason moves the will from the start by conceiving
the good, sicut praesentans ei objectum suum, i.e. precisely as
presenting to it its object, which means that it presents the good
as a being , since nothing is otherwise intelligible (than as a
being).
It is quite wrong to make natural law consist in those
precepts which human reason devises, taking the inclinations as
mere "starting-points". We can see here that the precepts of
natural law, clearly meant to be taken as a whole, are identified
with those first principles which are naturally known to all, and
this is precisely why St. Thomas states in the next article that not
all virtuous acts belong to the natural law:
For many things are done according to virtue to which nature does
not at first incline us; but through rational investigation men
discover them as useful for living well.322
321
Ia-IIae 63, 1: [Q]uaedam seminaria intellectualium
virtutum et moralium, in quantum in voluntate inest quidam
naturalis appetitus boni, quod est secundum rationem.
322
Ia-IIae 94, 3: Multa enim secundum virtutem fiunt ad
quae natura non primo inclinat; sed per rationis
inquisitionem ea homines adinvenerunt quasi utilia ad bene
vivendum.
virtue is natural to man according to a certain incomplete
beginning: according indeed to the nature of the species,
inasmuch as there are naturally in man's reason certain
naturally known principles of both knowable and do-able
things.323
in any age, and with whatever human nations, there was always
some offering of sacrifices. But what is found everywhere
seems to be natural. Therefore even the offering of sacrifices
belongs to the natural law.325
323
Ia-IIae 63, 1: virtus est homini naturalis secundum
quamdam inchoationem: secundum quidem naturam
speciei, in quantum in ratione hominis insunt naturaliter
quaedam principia naturaliter cognita tam scibilium quam
agendorum. Cf. 51, 1.
324
IV Sent., dist. 33, 1, 1.
325
IIa-IIae 85, 1, sed contra; cf. Contra gentes III 38.
The same distinction is applied in the treatment of the peccata
contra naturam, as their name would indicate, and there is little
doubt that this sense, whether or not we find it personally
appropriate, is intended by the Popes in their repeated
condemnation of contraception as unnatural. They are not just
saying that it is unreasonable; they are giving a reason for saying
this. Natural law, in general then, is in the reason rather than
being a construction of reason. It is our own conception of the
ends and first movements (inclinations) of our nature, and this is
its justice, being ius before it is lex.
The whole discussion of Ia-IIae 94, 2 should thus be seen
as controlled by this statement at its beginning concerning the
nota per se or foundational character of the precepts of natural
law, i.e. all of them, as distinct from conclusions drawn from
them.327 This statement, in turn, should be related to the
statement at Ia-IIae 10, 1 that there are three types of thing from
which, as naturally willed, voluntary movement arises:
As we know, the first two of these will be found to be idem re, the
same in reality.328 The third is due to the fact that the other
faculties of man, who is volens, the one willing, besides the will
itself, which has bonum in communi as its own natural object,
have their own natural objects which are thus equally the objects
of the man as a whole.
For we do not only desire through the will what is proper to the
faculty of will itself, but also what is proper to the other
powers and to the whole man.
326
Op. cit. p.299.
327
Thus article 4 of the same question cites acting
according to reason as one of the common principles equally
known to all, and acting according to reason is taken from
the third level of the principles of practical reason in 94.2.
For such a commitment of course exists prior to any
deliberate following of what reason may decide.
328
St. Thomas speaks of "universal good, which is not
found in anything created, but only in God." Ia-IIae 2, 8.
Hence it is that man, in and through these other powers, inclines
to these objects as well as to bonum in communi and the finis
ultimus, and this is the situation reflected in the table of
inclinations at 94.2, but provided for with perfect consistency here
in question 10, article 1, where the natural movement of the will,
as distinct from the natural inclinations of man as such, is
discussed:
Whence man naturally wills not only the object of the will qua will,
but also the other things which belong to the other powers;
such as knowledge of truth, which belongs to intellect; and to
be and to live, and other things of this kind which look to
natural perdurance; all of which things may be
comprehended under the object of the will, as certain
particular goods.
from which it follows that "good and being are the same in reality"
(bonum et ens sunt idem secundum rem).
So good is explained in terms of being and in terms of
act, or being in act, under the aspect of a thing's perfection as
giving the ratio of appetition. For appetition is for what completes
one's being. Therefore it is with this aspect of being, and not with
some irreducible logical difference of the practical such that good
is its absolutely first concept, that we are dealing when we say
that it is upon bonum that the first foundational precept, upon
which all the others are founded, is built. Fundare is used twice in
the text.
We are perceiving being as appetible, which we convert
into the ens rationis of bonum, whereby the intellect (and not
merely the blind will) becomes practical. Everything then is first
founded not upon a precept but upon a term used in the precept
but first grasped, in the human case, by abstractio. A term such as
ens (and, mutatis mutandis, bonum), however, is grasped as a
seed of all the sciences, pondered and penetrated by the
intellectual virtue of sapientia, which is more noble (nobilius),
because more fundamental, than is intellectus, i.e. the virtue of
the understanding of principles, because sapientia judges of the
terms of these.330
This is why St. Thomas speaks of the habitus or habit of
intellectual understanding, synderesis in regard to practical
principles, as only partly inborn, inborn as an inchoate habit.331
We have to get to know ens and hence, in the light of the above,
bonum, as
If this were not so, says St. Thomas, in the body of the same
article, then natural love would be perverse, and hence not
perfectible by charity, which would rather destroy it.
This last, strong statement suggests that it might not
even have occurred to St. Thomas that someone might take him
as positing conservation of individual corporeal existence as the
first precept of law, which, on the contrary, is always focussed
upon universal good, to the point that the life of man is by law to
be preserved in common, as pointing to the whole destiny of the
rational creation:
338
Ia 60, 5 ad 3um. See also what we found him saying
about prudence as, in perfecting individual nature, having
always to be also "political" or looking to the common good.
339
Ia-IIae 90, 2 ad 3um.
(immediate ordinem ad universale essendi principium).
This indeed has been stressed in this very article (94, 2)
as establishing the first foundational precept as we have
investigated it here. But it is not the intention of the table of
inclinations to leave that out, since that is what is primo, i.e.
foundational. The first inclination is the inclination of the will as
such , before we come to the inclinations of the other faculties
achieved by its means, where St. Thomas is for once prepared to
place intellect after the generic inclinations, simply because he is
following an ontological order from the universal to the particular.
Thus it is clear that under intellect he intends to treat of
something very specific. He speaks of knowing the truth about
God, living in society, and so on, rather than of the achievement
of the finis ultimus. That is included rather under "the inclination
to good according to his nature in which he communicates with all
substances" (i.e. at the first level of the table of the inclinations
given in 94, 2), since under "the conservation of his being
according to his own nature" (conservationem sui esse secundum
suam naturam) is included that perfectibility connoted by bonum
and, we saw, sought by all, although in the rational nature it
requires possession of bonum in communi as constitutive object of
the will.
Certainly conservation of one's own being would be
included in this perspective, bearing in mind that man according
to his nature is primarily a spiritual being, and this indeed accords
with St. Thomas's teaching that although man by nature loves God
more than himself yet he loves himself more than other men,
since they are not above him in the order of substance. Thus in
the order of spiritual good he might be led to sacrifice his own
body, but never his own spiritual good, for others. The latter, and
hence his spiritual being, is indeed enhanced by the former type
of action.
Again, it is quite in order for St. Thomas to indicate here the lower
reaches of this universality. The highest does not stand without
the lowest and the inclination to bonum in communi as ultimate
end can be thought of without violence as including preservation
of that being for which one is most immediately responsible, out
of a rational consideration presupposed to any inclination
qualifiable as human.
The idea of inclination, after all, presupposes the idea of
truth, the bonum apprehensum in mente, then sought in reality.
And again, we have to do here with
natural appetite, or love, an inclination which nevertheless (i.e.
despite being natural) is found differently in different
natures... in intellectual natures it is found according to the
will.340
340
Ia 60, 1.
341
L. Dewan, "Jacques Maritain and the Philosophy of
Cooperation", L'alterité, vivre ensemble différents (ed.
Gourgues & Mailhiot), Montreal & Paris 1986, p.116.
level as interpreted here. We go from man as being to man as
animal to man as rational animal.
Similarly the four types of law, forming a set which is
surely in itself analogous, begin with that most universal of all
laws, the lex aeterna or eternal law, embracing all creation from
highest to lowest. We then pass to that law proper to man in all
his aspects, the natural law, before passing to the particular
aspect of law in societies (human law), spoken of in places as an
addition to natural law, before rounding off the list (in some sense
a circular one therefore) with what is at least equal in nobility to
the first but which is in a way the most particular law of all342, the
lex divina or divine law proceeding from Israel, ultimately uniquely
personified in Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. We can thus
recognize that a hierarchy having a kind of dual or even spiral
direction, such as we seem to be finding in the table of the
inclinations, was congenial to the mind of St. Thomas.
What is a consciously universal communion and self-
transcendence in the rational creature is in inanimate beings also
a participation in the divine, at which all things aim, but solely in
essendo, this being the reason that things don't immediately fall
apart. Bonum, like esse, is at once the highest and most perfect in
all things and yet, by the same consideration almost, that which
each and everything must have at the basic level of existence.
Even bread must be good.
Yet here this aspect of universality is clearly implied by
what has gone before. For if the order of the precepts is according
to the order of the inclinations and the first precept is "good is to
be pursued" then the first inclination is to the good, as explained
above. The inclinations in question are never "brute urges", and in
so far as man is subject to these he falls away from the integrity
of (his) nature.
For it has been contended here that ethics in
contemporary life, so attuned to analysis, will only be conserved if
this whole perspective of man's nature and destiny be taken into
342
It is particular in not being the law of nations, but the
law of one nation. One could, however, urge a distinction
between the form and content of the divine law as it has in
fact been given (as very particular by divine choice) and the
category of divine law, of revelation, in itself, as in fact lex
divina is generally treated in the earlier Summa contra
gentes of St. Thomas. But even granted this distinction it
would seem that a law of revelation would be essentially
more particular than the other three types (cp. Theron,
Africa, Philosophy and the Western Tradition, final chapter).
account, a perspective which saves us from viewing the final
paragraph of Ia-IIae 94, 2, in the Summa theologica, as an
irrelevant "speculative appendage" and hence saves the particular
precepts of natural law from being presented as a disordered set
of restrictions upon human spontaneity imposed by a "reason"
which is rationalistically alienated from man's most natural and
hence most noble aspirations. But rationality characterizes man
as such, the whole man.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Substantial form, last end, charity, this book has served to depict
the analogy between these three in philosophical anthropology,
action theory and ethics respectively. It is the ultimate or specific
difference which perfects or accounts for all that is in man, such
as his animal or sensitive nature or anything else. It is the
ultimate end of action which accounts for and sets in motion any
action at all. It is the new and ultimate law of love, the "good
wine", which perfects and frees from deformity or falsity any
previous ideal of justice or any other virtue. Our purpose,
however, was the application of these metaphysical goods, as I
may call them, to the existing tradition of natural law and our
thinking about it. I believe this has been done. It may help,
however, if we here single out three of the topics already treated
for further consideration on their own. There follows, accordingly,
a critique of certain theories of autonomous value and, in
particular, of attempts to harmonize them with Thomism, a
discussion, secondly, of the relation of human reason to human
nature as a whole while, thirdly, some further reflection upon the
role and nature of the end or telos seems appropriate. These three
topics are internally related to a high degree and upon their
combined resolution the possibility of any properly ethical
knowledge seems to depend.
****************************
355
Aquinas, Expositio Dionysii de divinis nominibus, cap.
x, lect. 1.
356
Ibid. 1094a 22.
357
St. Thomas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, Rome 1969
(Leonine edn.), I, 2, 8, 52-71.
358
Ibid. I, 3, 12, 144; II, 2, 80, 25.
in the acts of the intellect (in second intention), but it directs
man's free acts, i.e. it orders them to his end. This, however, is a
scientific knowledge, like any other, about a certain order, and
St. Thomas, in agreement with St. Augustine, claims that man can
and even must discover that he is made for the enjoyment of God,
the transcendent and infinite, even if he cannot know much about
this final goal.360 Hence he repeatedly characterizes the happiness
outlined by Aristotle as imperfect, and hence not proper happiness
according to the received definition of it by Boethius as a perfect
possession.
Whereas ethics as, in the above sense, a practical science
belongs to reason alone prudence as a virtue involves the will as
making use of a knowledge of ethics. St. Thomas points out that
Aristotle's remarks about the results of ethics being subject to
change apply more truly to individual actions as left to one's own
prudence.361 Again, the apparent circularity of Aristotle's view that
while the practical intellect is true when it agrees with right desire
yet the latter is only right when it follows right reason362 is
overcome by St. Thomas's pointing out that what is desired is
determined by nature, just the point so contested by modern
voluntarism. It is not open to reason, as determining means to the
end, to determine what the end shall be, the empty pretence of
Sartrian or Nietzschean existentialism. Such choices, where
perverse, satisfy rather the natural, and hence pre-determined,
inclination to indulge one's own will, albeit beyond due measure.
Hence they will not attain the end.
The desire of the last end, for Aquinas, must be natural
and hence involuntary, and here he claims to be true to Aristotle.
359
Henry Veatch, "Concerning the Distinction between
Descriptive and Normative Science", Journal of Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, Vol. VI, No. 2, December
1945. Cf. pp. 293-294.
360
Ibid. I, 9, 31, 50; 16,60, 222.
361
Ibid. I, 2, 81, 71-78.
362
Aristotle, NE 1130a 23ff.
Even if all men can know that happiness is the ultimate purpose of
living, this being what drives even the professed altruist as the
very name of motivation (he prefers not to betray his ideal), yet
not all know in what it consists. They make mistakes about it.
So whereas Aristotle might, with Vasquez, have spoken of
natural law as lex indicans, yet for St. Thomas it is lex praecipiens,
and here he thinks of the constant intention of the divine
legislator (lex naturalis being defined as the reflection of the lex
aeterna in the rational creature363) in a way brought out in his
treatment, contrasting with Aristotle's, of epieicheia or equity.
Whereas Aristotle considers human actions as variable materia
preventing there being a uniform law for all times, places and
persons St. Thomas will only grant this as applying to positive
laws not including the legislator's intention, which is truly
universal, and so he prefers to understand material variability not
of actions but of incidental deformities of intellect or nature, due
to matter in the literal sense.364 But all this is related to his
emphasis on the just thing (iustum) in reality as that of which the
law (lex) in the reason, as intentional, is truly and only a sign
(signum formale), this just thing as universal in rebus being
mentally apprehended by repeated acts of epagoge in (sense-)
experience:
lex non est ipsum jus, proprie loquendo, sed aliqualis ratio juris.365
Social and educational factors, for their part, are no more than
instances of this empirical information. Hence the quasi-
innateness of synderesis is offset by the claim that it can be no
more than an inchoate habit (secundum inchoationem).366
*************************************
363
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia-IIae, 91, 2.
364
Aquinas, In III Sent. 37, 4 ad 1um, ad 2um; cf. Theron,
"St. Thomas Aquinas and epieicheia", Lex et Libertas (ed. L.J.
Elders & K. Hedwig), Vatican City 1987. On either view the
individuality and creativity discussed earlier will remain the
crown of ethical endeavour.
365
Aquinas, Ibid. IIa-IIae, 57, 1 ad 2um. The law is not
that which is right in itself, properly speaking, but a certain
rational statement of it.
366
Ibid. Ia-IIae, 51, 1: Utrum aliquis habitus sit a natura.
Lex naturalis, in the context of Thomistic thought, is the lex
humanae naturae. This nature carries authority precisely because
it is a reflected divine light, i.e. because human nature images
divine nature. How man is sets the standard because he (she)
reflects how God is, which in relation to his governing the world is
the lex aeterna, ordering all things to their end.367 If anyone
should ask why how God is should be the ultimate standard
(expressed in scripture as the precept of total love of God, later to
be explicated in terms of imitating Him) then the only possible
reply is that God, as First Cause, is the end, exemplar and
controlling reality of all things, intimate key to our own otherwise
opaque personalities.368
It is significant that the definition quoted above says that
natural law reflects eternal law in the rational creature. It does not
say that it is reflected in reason alone, as on the rationalist and
implicitly dualist interpretation. All the same, law qua law is
primarily in the reason, but this is because the intellect is itself
the form of our human nature, i.e. it is the substantial form of the
substance man, through which unformed matter is shaped into
the human body with all of a man's bodily powers. This body does
not exist as a separate entity (with its own forma corporis) upon
which a purely rationalist system can then impose truly violent
demands, and this, conversely, is why natural law is also present
in man's generic and animal nature, creating the possibility of the
peccata contra naturam, but also, more positively, giving that
nature its iconic dignity.
It is not therefore a question of an imposition of a rational
order from without. Reason indeed sets up an order,
sicut ordo rationis rectae est ab homine, ita ordo naturae est ab
ipso Deo,369
regula proxima est ratio humana; regula autem suprema est lex
aeterna (the proximate rule is human reason, but the
supreme canon is the eternal law).
373
Ibid. Ia 85, 2.
374
Cf. Summa Theologica Ia 85, 5; QD de veritate 4, 2c;
de potentia 9, 5.
directly violating the more immediately God-given order (by the
lex aeterna) of our generic nature.375 What specifically violates
reason as a natural faculty, by contrast, is the sin of lying. To lie is
not just to act against reason, as with theft, say. It is to violate
reason, a faculty or power of the soul.
Related to this is the Thomist empiricism whereby we do
not start off with a knowledge, presumably innate, of principles or
laws but have first to understand the terms (termini) of these
enunciations in apprehensio, the first of the three acts of the
understanding enumerated by Aristotle in his Peri Hermeneias.
Hence
375
If this is so then, by our principles as elaborated in
earlier chapters, it would be up to love to find this out.
Otherwise Thomism appears, in today's climate particularly,
as a kind of sterile rationalism maintained against all vital
liberty and spontaneity, since it is indeed easy to feel that
the argument here from teleology is fallacious (cf. P.T. The
Virtues, p.138), or at least not the last word. Yet in the
Summa texts on these matters Aquinas considers our
generic nature in the light of a sacred trust from God, i.e. he
considers it theologically, himself exercising and inviting in
us an impulse of response to the love of God qua our
creator. Whether this same love might prompt to
superficially deviant behaviour on occasion (e.g. propter
defectum materiae) is a separate question. All the same, in
so far as the texts are interpretative of love, including
therefore any "human" love (of self or neighbour) in a total
vision, they cannot without distortion be seen as essentially
opposing or limiting it (see chapter 8 above).
376
Aristotle, Post. An. II, 19, and quoted with approval
and supporting argumentation at Summa Theol. Ia-IIae 51,
1.
acting against how man is, in a way which is most directly seen at
the biological or generic level, where such acts are deformed or
perverse in a double sense (specialis ratio deformitatis...
dupliciter). They are not only repugnant to right reason but to the
natural order itself377, thus injuring God himself as its creator
(iniuria ipsi Deo ordinatori naturae). If this is so, then it is all the
more incumbent upon society to create conditions where love
between men and women can flourish without bitterness, leading
to family and pre-family atmospheres less likely to encourage
obsessive or settled behaviour here termed unnatural. Insofar,
however, as homosexuality, for example, might be found to have
a genetic basis the problem would lie deeper, though the
consideration that also male infidelity finds genetic support might
tend to neutralize the objection. Genes don't set the standard, as
genetic inheritance of what are unambiguously diseases makes
plain. Genes, that is, are not nature in the sense discussed here,
even if they might seem to many to be its ultimate building
blocks. Nature, that is, is a form in the philosophical sense, more
determining than determined by genes.
The idea of making a lie out of nature, it is interesting to
recall, was just that used by St. Paul in defining idolatry as making
a lie of the divine nature378, this wilful religious ignorance then
causing one to pervert one's own nature. For our purposes what is
noteworthy about these perspectives being found in St. Thomas
(apart from its witness to the coherence of the tradition) is that
they are a direct consequence of his freedom from dualism, his
view of intellect as a form of being (intentionally being the other
while remaining oneself) and living not separable from human
living in general.
************************************
377
repugnat ipsi ordini naturali venerei actus, Summa
Theol. IIa-IIae 154, 11.
378
Romans 1.
necessitate finis, quando scilicet aliquis non potest consequi
finem virtutis, nisi hoc faciat (It is otherwise with the
necessity arising from an obligation of precept, or from the
necessity of the end, when namely someone cannot obtain
the end of virtue unless he does this).379
380
Comm. in Sent. IV, 33, 1, 1.
381
Ibid. IIa-IIae 44, 1.
382
Ibid. Ia-IIae 1, 3 ad 3um; IIa-IIae 64, 7.
controlling precept of the natural law, bonum est persequendum.
Even this precept has its end, bonum, towards which and
for the sake of which est persequendum states that there is an
obligation, viz. of pursuit. Hence, again, it cannot be this pursuit
itself to which we are primarily obliged, but the good which we
pursue. St. Thomas implies that calling the ultimus finis an action
(usus vel adeptio) cannot be literally true, whatever we say of
beatitudo:
Again, if all action is for the sake of an end, then the last end
cannot be an action or, if it were, then that action too is for the
sake of an end.384 What is to be enjoyed cannot be that enjoyment
over again.
A further reason for this is that in any real final causality
the end as cause has to be an unambiguously real thing and not
some ens rationis. An intentional object desired in the mind is
caused by some perception of a real object, thus functioning also
as causa efficiens. In this sense it is claimed there is a First Cause
of all desire and consequent action, which is also the final aim, i.e.
thing sought by that action, knowingly or unknowingly, as is seen
in the case of non-rational creatures,
Ex hoc enim quod aliquis vult finem, ratio imperat de his quae
sunt ad finem (Willing the end entails reason's commanding
whatever is needed to that end).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
387
Ibid. Ia-IIae 90, 1, especially ad 3um.
388
Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, Rome 1993.
here, though I hope this admission will not lessen the interest of
my contribution. The explanation might be that the present author
and the Pope share an admiration for the pure doctrine of Thomas
Aquinas, by no means universally grasped, still less approved, by
a majority of those claiming to follow Aquinas. One would prefer to
think, however, that what is shared is rather a care for the true
good of man and an ability, in greater or smaller measure, to
penetrate to it, while it just so happens that the least flawed
account historically of this matter is to be found in the pages of
just Aquinas.
Here, therefore, I want to point to the sureness of touch
with which the one-time Professor Wojtyla sets out these matters,
albeit in a style suited to a wider perusal than the academic. He
says most of what he has to say on the inclinations and on natural
law in general in paragraphs 47 to 51 of his monograph where, for
example, he endorses the statement of his predecessor Leo XIII,
also once an academic, that "the natural law is itself the eternal
law."389 In theology, after all, one may assume what we have been
labouring so hard to demonstrate philosophically, that man is
made to the divine image, something compatible with at least an
orthogenetic account of evolution.
The identification, the identity, of natural and eternal law
is the cause of the rational judgments of conscience being also
"magisterial dictates".390 Where that much is agreed ethical then
theory must next focus upon the relation of reason to nature or,
the Pope's preferred stress (in line with our own), of freedom to
nature.
He sets out his exposition of this in a context of the
objections against the reality of natural law which allege that it
masks an unacceptable physicalism or naturalism (or "biologism"),
presenting merely biological laws as moral laws.391 Behind this
allegation lies an implicit acceptance of the positivist position that
law is predicated in both physical and moral, i.e. descriptive and
prescriptive contexts only equivocally.392 The Pope notes that
many writers believe that the official Church teaching (of the
"magisterium") is itself involved in this invalid "biologistic"
389
Leo XIII, Praestantissimum, Rome 1889, 219.
390
See J.H. Newman, A Grammar of Assent, V, 1.
391
Veritatis Splendor 47. Cf. S. Theron, "Natural Law and Physical
Reality in the Thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas", Proceedings of the IXth
Congress of Medieval Philosophy, Ottawa 1992.
392
Cf. Henry Veatch, Op. cit.
reasoning, as they conceive of it. They claim, he says, that the
natural inclinations "cannot determine the moral assessment."
Against this he objects to the view of the human body
(and its inclinations) as "a raw datum", mere material upon which
an absolute freedom goes to work. Here the finalities of the
natural inclinations are seen as merely "physical", i.e. non-moral
goods, "pre-moral" in the current jargon.393 In this way, as he
summarizes it,
This will mean that what we spontaneously want can never derive
moral value from this spontaneity, a position we found de Muralt
reprobating and which we ourselves have repeatedly attacked.
Such a view, the Pope categorically states,
does not correspond to the truth about man and his freedom. It
contradicts the Church's teaching on the unity of the
human person, whose rational soul is per se et
essentialiter the form of his body.
person himself in the unity of soul and body, in the unity of his
spiritual and biological inclinations and of all the other
specific characteristics necessary for the pursuit of his
end,394
393
Veritatis splendor, paragraph 48.
394
John Paul II, op. cit. 50.
the Pope cautions that
i.e. not just as an individual.395 The Pope says here that the
foundation for this duty of self-preservation is
397
In the sense in which we have noted previously that it is the ends of
the precepts which are of primary obligation, this being the only explanation
of the existence of a virtue such as epieicheia or equity, for example.
398
Here one can see that it is not merely a debasement which we
might ethically deprecate but a straight confusion to equate the personal
with the private. One's personal circumstances are rather the totality of
circumstances from which one may judge what will serve one's total (not
one's "private") good here and now.
399
For further confirmation of this interpretation, implicit anyhow in
Wojtyla's own account, cf. Lawrence Dewan O.P., "St. Thomas, Our Natural
Lights and the Moral Order", Angelicum LXVII (1990), pp. 285-308. See also
chapter 12, above.
or rational inclination. Thus the specifically human inclination is
not the indiscriminate, generic inclination to venereal pleasure,
but the more specific programme of permanent mating and the
raising of a family, which of course includes and is in a sense
founded upon this pleasure. And it is this same inclination (and
not some "heteronomous" law) which can hold one back from
destructive indulgence in this field400, this being the law "written
on the heart" of which St. Paul wrote. That is, it is a law of the
person and nature, of how he is and hence of how he operates,
what he inclines to, and thus far it is entirely descriptive, like any
other "scientific" law. What indeed would be the sense of
"prescribing" for any being behaviour which did not accord with
the nature of that being, with what will fulfil or perfect it? The
inclination itself constitutes a law with which one's own being is in
deep autonomous harmony, for the obvious reason that it is a law
of one's own being.401
So it is important to grasp the essence of natural law as
being not other than a "natural teleology", what is natural to man
never being purely biological in the animal or vegetable sense.
The rational animal is rational through and through, saturated as
we might say. Those who feel constrained at the thought of having
a natural teleology simply fail to understand the nature of
freedom. Freedom does not begin where nature leaves off, but is
rather its crowning aspect as being of the essence of rationality
itself, will flowing from intellect as intellect itself flows from the
substance of the soul.402 Thus freedom to sin, to act contrary to
nature, is not what defines freedom, since it can in no way lead to
our overall fulfilment, this being a fulfilment of nature and hence
of the person.
There is a certain coincidence here, as we noted also
above, with some ideas of D.H. Lawrence as urging us, in that
400
It can also, as Jacques Maritain suggests, lead one to
exercise a political rather than a despotic control upon these
more generic impulses, this being less likely to backfire in
the progress of one's personal history. I.e. it is the more
natural, less violent way (it being an old principle of physics
that nothing can continue indefinitely in a violent state),
secundum inclinationem naturalem.
401
That it is also, we have seen, a "magisterial dictate", is precisely the
pledge of the dignity of that being, as made in the divine image.
402
A rational being is free in virtue of its rational nature, i.e. by a natural
necessity. This finding needs to be taken more into account when adopting
the concept of artificial intelligence into serious scientific discourse.
striving for happiness which is of the essence of morality, to
identify our deepest and truest desires (concerning which,
however, Lawrence's own views were not as differentiated as one
might wish).403 It is in this sense that rationalist moralism can be
seen as a subtle enemy of the religious, as of the poetic, spirit,
creative of "a division within man himself", in the Pope's words.
One can only admire how he avoids the post-Kantian fashion of
speaking of reason as an extrinsic, heteronomous404 arbiter
opposing man's spontaneous and natural wishes which arise from
within the heart of his own being. Instead, for Wojtyla, reason, or
intellect, more properly speaking, is soul, our deepest self,
seeking the overall good of the person, of what we are. For dualist
rationalism and the accompanying alienation arise precisely
where it is denied that it is the intellectual soul itself which is the
form of the body.
On the view defended, on the other hand, one sees how
the activity of reason, and hence of freedom, is essentially
supplementary, extending the natural law, i.e. the law of what is
ontologically determinate or given.405 Conversely the sins of
unnatural vice, though not against the intellectual part, are yet
against an essentially intellectual or rational nature, with
corresponding inclinations to the common good (an essential
mark of law), even at that generic level. Such inclinations are not
those irrational egotistic urges which, as the Pope intimates, are
irrelevant to the project in hand.
The wrong view envisages a rationalist or rationalizing
corrective to the inclinations, which are regarded as morally
neutral or "ambiguous". The right view sees these inclinations and
their natural order as themselves legislative, because of the
dignity of that human nature which they themselves define, and
hence of the human person. They need no corrective, since an
order is already present among them as existing in the
harmonious arrangement of all that it needs to be human, just as
when a man eats he eats knowingly.
So human inclinations, as human, are always to known
goods. They are not, again, those "blind urges" which we may
encounter in the lower reaches of our nature, but not only in
faculties uncontrolled by reason. An indiscriminate curiosity or
"nosiness" is equally a failure of nature (of the inclination,
403
Cf. the work of H. McCabe O.P., referred to above.
404
Kant only calls it autonomous.
405
Cf. Summa Theol. Ia-IIae 94, 3; IIa-IIae 66, 2 ad 1um; 85, 1; Summa
Contra Gentes III, 38.
perhaps, to live in harmony with our neighbours). These
inclinations refer, in fact, to what man as man, the person,
naturally wills. Hence John Paul's protest against treating free will
and nature as fundamentally opposed. The will is a crowning part
of nature, has itself a nature according to which its freedom is
exercised:
For we do not desire through the will only those things which
pertain to the power of will, but also those things which
pertain to each of the respective powers and to the whole
man.407
Wherefore man naturally wills not only the will's proper object as
such, but also other things which belong to the other
powers; such as knowledge of truth, which belongs to the
intellect; and to be and to live, and other things of this
406
Aquinas, IV Sent. 33, 1, 1 (author,s translation).
407
Aquinas, Summa Theol. Ia-IIae 10, 1 (author's translation).
kind, which are required for the integrity of our nature; all
of which things will be comprehended together under the
object of the will, just as are certain particular goods.408
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
408
Ibid., eodem loco.
409
Cf. F. Inciarte, op. cit.
example, that of man, is that the rational intellective soul itself
marks and forms human sensitive, i.e. generic animal nature. It is
therefore that this nature is, as Aquinas says, more "noble" than
that of the brutes,410 i.e. just because for us it is not the ultimate
and hence determinative form. Thus our music surpasses the cries
of bats, even though their auditive range may be more extensive,
our discriminative world of colour transcends all animal sight, as
do our sexual refinements all animal coupling, i.e. in their proper
sensuality (hence the fifty-seven varieties Geach humorously
mentions411, their "exquisiteness", must be distinguished from the
mere lustfulness they may on occasion serve).
The formative power of this ultimate difference, itself
even steered by an ultimate individuality of personality, reaches
down into the autonomic vegetative system, inclusive of patterns
of brain activity, and bears upon the sheer matter of our being,
the sheen of our skin, the dignity of our hands, so much more than
prehensile claws in their infinitely docile adaptability, a
potentiality we have learned to venerate just as potentiality in the
more than animal, quasi-divine helplessness of a baby, that new
human beginning of which Geach speaks. The human genetic
code with its far-reaching determinative powers is accordingly
itself to be viewed as determined in this way, whatever form it
possesses on its own being subsumed into the higher. This, after
all, is no more than we mean by speaking of our human freedom.
So, again, it is the ultimate perfection of love which
straightens out and perfects earlier ethical postures and
constrictions. As it was said, "In thy light shall we see light." Here,
in this book, we have allied love to creativity, referring, as we
should, to the superior wisdom of an ultimately supernatural
prudence and to the "higher justice", as being a justitia quaedam
existens, potior and melior than "legal justice", which is epieicheia
or equity.412 Such justice is informed by love, being in its perfection
410
The choice of this term is significant. It originally had
the sense of "knowable", as in the older form gnobilis.
411
Geach, The Virtues, p.148. Yet Geach himself says, "It
is not a matter of lower animal appetites, shared with
ancestral apes, that overcome a weak will; the radical
perversion or misdirection of the will is what deforms animal
appetite." Our point, however, is that in human nature
animal appetite, quite apart from original sin, is manifested
with more "nobility" (which will then also of course give an
opening for greater perversion) than among apes, say.
412
Epieicheia directs legal or general justice. Cf. IIa-IIae
impossible without it. Similarly, by this principle of the sovereignty
of the ultimate and "directing" difference, this highest or best
justice cannot be an occasional justice. It is the "superior rule" of
all human actions.
Now in the same way creativity cannot be an occasional
or side-effect of love. Love is predicated per prius of creativity,
since this is its superior rule, its "wonderful effect".413 It is, so to
say, quintessential love, as epieicheia is quintessential justice, the
proper justice which has regard to the intention of the legislator.
Two cases of fidelity may look the same, but they differ depending
on whether or not they are informed by epieicheia and ultimately
by love, in a way that will sooner or later show, as the
unprofitableness of the man who buried his talent, or the human
and moral deficiencies of the spiritless idler Osmond in Henry
James's Portrait of a Lady, ultimately showed. This was the
meaning of the proposition agreed on by C.S. Lewis and his group
of friends that creative artists, especially when creating worlds of
fantasy414, more closely show forth the image of God as creator of
the world, an idea wrongly dismissed by John Wain in his
autobiography Sprightly Running as silly.
But it is not only the fantasy writers who are creative. Any
attempting of great or original things, even or especially in a small
but continuous way, any imaginative entering into the worlds and
needs of others, any joyful shouldering of the daily task, any
readiness to think, to be kind, to make the best of things, to bring
good out of evil, to redeem failure, to forgive, in short, as we
stressed in an earlier chapter, all this belongs to the creativeness
which is, so to say, the sign and flower of love. Of this, too,
Aristotle might have said that a little of it is worth all the rest, as
St. Paul said it was the greatest and sole enduring virtue, as St.
Peter said it covers a multitude of sins. It goes beyond not doing
what we would not like others to do to actually doing whatever we
would like them to do to or for us, and it is just such originative
action which requires imagination, the envisaging of an end in
fantasy which we wish to realise.
120, 2 ad 2um.
413
Cf. the chapter in The Imitation of Christ (the fifteenth
century classic by Thomas à Kempis) entitled "On the
wonderful effects of Divine Love" ("Love walks, runs and
leaps for joy... attempts great things etc.").
414
Of course only God creates being. Fantasy worlds are
"beings of reason", as are of course the "possible worlds" of
"sistology".
Indeed the coincidence with Aristotelian contemplation is
not fortuitous. Thus Aquinas speaks, with tradition, of the active
and contemplative lives. Strikingly, it is only to the former that
moral life properly belongs, since the vita contemplativa is really
proper to the life to come, where the need for effort is no more.
Mary is not troubled, like Martha. This is the final reach of the law
of our nature, höchste Entfaltung der Sittlichkeit (M. Grabmann)
indeed, but ipso facto no longer itself Sittlichkeit. Again, honi soit
qui mal y pense; it is like that. Is thine eye evil because I am good,
asks the landowner in the parable. Again we remember
Screwtape: "he's a hedonist at heart." The laughing buddha says
as much. But we here might remember Rembrandt's blind but
laughing Homer, beside sighted but solemn Aristotle, not to slight
the latter but to see him fulfilled beyond himself in creativity, in
the self-fulfilling prophecy of unshakeable joy. There is indeed no
argument against joy. Joy has no time, indeed, for thought, yet it
cannot be thoughtless, as can the false hilarity of a mere
enchantment which, as a violence done to nature, will not endure.
Such thoughts, paradoxically, are sobering for a philosopher. Yet,
as Aristotle, again, insists, no man is a philosopher, i.e. the quality
is not proper to any human being qua human. So we all have to
"come off it" sometimes, one day for ever, perhaps (though by the
same token we will then be more truly "on it".
Creativeness is indeed the analogue and sign of the
contemplative life under conditions of change and development,
here below as we say. This is the true significance of the
development in ascetic theology, in thought about the spiritual
life, noted by the modern Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing in
his book Thérèse of Lisieux, when he says that patristic and
medieval spirituality,
419
See our The End of the Law, Louvain 1999.
420
See our Philosophy or Dialectic? p.202.
cause this greater heavenly joy, incomprehensible except on this
premiss of a venture, after the pearl of great price, as we said. For
the line of thought helps also to explain the power of erotic
fantasy, as we need to do. People dream in this area, alone or
together, while procuring for themselves a more than imagined
satisfaction, though the setting of fantasy is often needed for this
end. They thus feel they are in the imagined world with their real
minds and bodies, as the young swimmer experiences the joy of
entering another element, again at best in an enchanted or
bewitching setting, such as a deep pool in the mountains, or as
does anyone who weeps or laughs in response to something
imagined. In so far as sexual acts are commonly performed in a
state of high and concentrated fantasy, a situation corroborated
by the structure of dream-life, commonly accompanied by sexual
excitement, the paradoxical naturalness of what is likely to be
called perversion, fetichism and so on seems obvious. It can seem
unnatural or even brutish to repress fantasy where one's life
engages one to sexual activity, and it might well lead one to fail in
one's plain duty.
It follows that the sadistic or criminal variants of this
operatic or dream aspect to life are actually due to a weakness or,
which is the same, one-sidedness of fantasy, a failure to see it as
bearer of life, hope and all that is good. Ugly fantasy is fantasy
that lacks something, like the poor draughtsmanship of many
comic-books. What happens here, rather, is that the aspect of play
belonging to the art-work or show but only superficially, in so far
as we become a merely passive audience, is then, as a negative
or limiting characteristic carried over into real life as cruel
irresponsibility. Thus the movement against audience passivity is
so far justified. All play is earnest, as children know and as ritual
proves, or at least expresses. But when ritual becomes ritualism,
as morality can become moralism, then this is a morally negative
phenomenon accounting, among other things, for the insufficiency
or even evil of mere voyeurism when it is a replacement for sexual
involvement. This is not a point against fantasy though it may
seem to call, at least for the most part, for a sharing of it. But
even if one remain convinced of the total evil of sexual fantasy it
still would illustrate our thesis of the structure of human action as
such, which in turn explains the pull of erotic fantasy, materially
so close to this central area of love and, even more clearly,
creativity. One can hardly abstract from this when one considers
the statement of Aquinas that the beauty of the bodies of the
redeemed will render superfluous any resurrection of animals and
plants. This, as Lewis pointed out, is trans-sexual, even super-
sexual we might say, not a-sexual. Instead of particular organs,
whole bodies and hence persons pass into one another, as in
Milton's vision, or, more centrally and simply, "I in them and they
in me". It is an unimaginative timidity which two-dimensionally
restricts this (or any other saying of the speaker) to a purely moral
interpretation, as in a unity of will and purpose. "I am the vine,
you are the branches... my meat is meat indeed... taste and see."
It is just here that the ideal of virginity takes its rise, as crown of a
creative ethics seeking the enthronement of a vision, known as
realised only in the groping imagination, which none of the
necessary restrictions and caveats of negative, apophatic
theology can suppress, functioning as a guide and target of
action.
To be moved, again, by great music, for example, is
precisely to feel that it has taken up into it (as indeed it takes us)
something of one's life and its direction (or that of another being
with whom we feel a sympathy). Being moved just is the
interaction of art and life at this point, the passing beyond play. No
doubt this can even interfere with the just appreciation of art on
its own terms. Yet it is music itself, when most intensely itself, as
coming to birth out of an initial silence, or when the strings cry out
in child-like wonder and joy at the simultaneously solemn
expression of peace in the brass (close of Bruckner's Fourth
Symphony), which most directly achieves this.
In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis presented a picture of the
final end-dream of human life as a kind of park where the blessed
wander naked and "drink deep of Christ", possessing a solidity and
agility denied to outsiders. A certain what we might call erotic
intensity, in comparison with the mystics or with Aquinas as we
cited him, is missed in so far as animal life and scenery, giving a
note of calm and even relaxation, are not otiose here. Lewis's
contrast, rather, is between the lizard of lust perched chattering
on the young man's shoulders and delivering to him intense but
restricted dreams which keep him from the heaven around him,
and the glorious horse on which he himself rather mounts, so as
to gallop to the mountains after consenting to the killing of the
lizard, so central to his old self. Submit to death as gateway to
salvation is Lewis's classically Christian message, and a believer
may find that our philosophical equivalent really participates in it.
What we have tried to show though is that such a submission is
way beyond a purely obediential submission to a set of inert moral
rules. It is rather an openness and an opening to creative winds,
to all reality (in the end the All of St. John of the Cross or St.
Francis), the reality of others included. It is a viewing of what we
experience under the aspect of the whole, without restriction, sub
specie aeternitatis indeed. It is a willingness not to see one's path,
to be led by what is revered above self. In a word it is love, not
merely the love which is loyalty, but identification, outgoing to the
other to the point of death, this indeed giving rise to all virtue (as
we hope we can see without having personally achieved it), not by
showing itself in agreement with virtues already in place, but by
creating new virtue which, all the same, fulfils what was best in
the old. Ecce omnia nova facio, again and again, in ceaseless
revolution (Mao), or as passing through one chamber to another
until, if we could, we reach the palace's centre (Teresa of Avila).
Enlightened by this love we will indeed be enabled to
describe, to descry, to exercise all the virtues making up the
image of human goodness in its fullest beauty.
Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one
(Novalis).