Abstract
Thomas Aquinas never articulated a systematic account of a purely philosophical ethics. When writing in his own name, as opposed to commenting on Aristotle, Aquinas’s interest in ethical matters is always explicitly framed by his understanding of moral science as part of the larger project of theology as sacra doctrina. 1 In the course of articulating a moral theology, Aquinas makes systematic use of some basic Aristotelian philosophical categories and doctrines from the Nichomachean Ethics. Indeed, the explicitly moral section of the Summa theologiae, the Second Part, begins with a consideration of beatitude and is structured according to a treatment of the virtues. This heavy reliance on Aristotle, along with what appears to be a relative reticence to incorporate specifically Christian doctrines into the discussion, has led some to conclude that Thomistic moral theology is really just a lightly baptized version of Aristotelian ethics. Yet as Servais Pinckaers has shown, Aquinas’s moral thought is fundamentally evangelical when properly and holistically understood.2 At the heart of Aquinas’s vision is not Aristotelian eudaimonia, but rather the Beatitudes of the Gospels; the primary resource for moral action is not acquired Aristotelian virtue, but the grace of the Holy Spirit poured out into the hearts of believers through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; the primary law is not some version of Stoic natural law, but rather the new law of the gospel.
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References
See the account of sacra doctrina in Chapter Two.
Servais Pinckaers, O.P., trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), see especially 168–190. Pinckaers is the pre-eminent contemporary interpreter of Aquinas’s moral thought.
The attempt to focus on natural law as the primary category for Thomistic ethics appears to be at odds with Aquinas’s preference for a virtue-centered ethic. The relationship between natural law and virtue has been a point of dispute among Thomists, but in this context we must leave that debate aside. Pinckaers’s account of how natural law and virtue functions within Aquinas’s moral theology is surely correct.
“La béatitude dans l’éthique de Saint Thomas” in The Ethics of Thomas Aquinas, ed. L.J. Elders and K. Hedwig, Studii Tomistici 25 (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1984), 80–94. See also the earlier reference to Sources of Christian Ethics.
“La béatitude dans l’éthique de Saint Thomas,” 89. The translation is mine.
STI-II,3,8.
ST I, 12.
The best study of the question is Jorge Laporta, La destinée de la nature humaine selon Thomas d’Aquin, Études de philosophie médiévale, 55 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965). A fuller discussion of the relationship between human nature and the beatific vision is central to the next chapter on Human Nature and Destiny.
ST I-II, 62, 1. The reference is to the same doctrine in the earlier 5, 5.
ST I-II, 3, 5. This would make Aquinas a “dominant end” interpreter of Aristotle.
IV Sent. d.49, g.1, a. l, sol 4.
Volume III in his Opera omnia, ed. Victorino Rodriguez, O.P. (Madrid: Consejo Suerior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1972).
Revised edition (Paris: J. Aubier, 1942).
Ibid., II.
See Chapter Two, pp. 37–38.
Originally published in 1963, it has recently been reprinted in a revised third edition (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998).
See his Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, revised edition (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997) and Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992).
Ibid. Mclnerny’s remarks on the continuity between Aristotle and Aquinas are a reaction against the views of René Antoine Gauthier, who argued that Aquinas’s theological perspective led him to alter Aristotle’s ethics in significant ways. See Mclnerny’s discussion in Aquinas on Human Action, 169–185. I think Gauthier is right.
The Question of Christian Ethics, 38.
See the discussion of this in Chapter Two, pp. 37–43.
The Question of Christian Ethics, 59.
“The Role of God in the Philosophical Ethics of Thomas Aquinas,” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia V. 26: Was ist Philosophie im Mittelalter?, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 1024–1033.
Ibid., 1025.
Ibid., 1027.
ST II-II, 85, 1.
ST I, 60, 5 and I-II, 109, 3.
G. Stevens, “The Disinterested Love of God according to St. Thomas and some of his Modern Interpreters,” The Thomist (1953): 307–333; 497–541.
SCG I, 4.
ST I-II, 109, 3.
I argue this at greater length in “Aquinas on Pagan Virtue,” The Thomist 63 (1999): 553–557.
Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).
Ibid., 164. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., viii.
“Sur l’organization du savior morale,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 23 (1934): 258–280, and “Questions disputées de science morale,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 28 (1937): 278–306.
“Sur l’organisation du savior morale,” Bulletin Thomiste (1935): 424–432 and “De Philosophia Morali Christiana,” Divus Thomas (Fribourg) 14 (1936): 87–122; 181–204.
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
Ibid., xi.
This would be an example of Christian philosophy insofar as reason establishes on its own grounds a truth which it only came to recognize on the basis of faith. See the discussion of Christian philosophy in Chapter Two, pp. 40–43.
In this context, see especially Pegis’s response to Henri DeLubac in “Nature and Spirit: Some Reflections on the Problem of the End of Man,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 23 (1949): 62–79. A fuller discussions of Thomistic anthropology can be found in Chapter Seven.
ST I, 12, 5.
(Paris: J Aubier, 1946).
See Chapter Seven.
Bk I, c. 1.
The complex functioning of law within Aquinas’s moral theology cannot be discussed here. It is worth stressing again, however, that the entire discussion of law is explicitly theological because it culminates in the new law of grace: “[Aquinas] distinguishes five kinds of law: the eternal law, divine source of all legislation; the natural law, that is its direct participation in the human heart; and then the human law that is derived from the natural law. Revelation adds to this the Old Law, concentrated in the
Decalogue, which rejoins the natural law; and the evangelical Law of the New Testament. These different laws are connected by a true dynamism that originates in the eternal law, descends through the natural law to civil law, and then returns towards God its summit in the evangelical law, which is the most perfect participation here below in the eternal law, and the closest approach to the ultimate end proposed to us.” Pinckaers, Sources of Christian Ethics, 181. I have modified the translation.
ST I-II, 90, 4.
See ST I-II, 91, 1 and 93, 1.
47STI-II,91,2.
ST I-II, 100, 3.
ST I-II, 100, 3.
ST I-II, 100, 5.
ST I-II, 100, 3 ad 1.
ST I-II, 100, 11.
ST I-II, 99, 2 ad 2.
ST I-II, 95, 4.
ST I, 1 2
DT1,3ad4.
Grisez’s major focus has been on systematic moral theology in The Way of the Lord Jesus, 3 vol. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983, 1993, 1997).
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 48–9.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 89–90.
See the “Preface,” vi-vii.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Ibid., viii.
Ibid.. 85–86.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Ibid., 116–138.
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).
“What is the End of the Human Person? The Vision of God and Integral Human Fulfillment,” in Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, ed. Luke Gormally (London: Four Courts Press, 1994), 68–96. .
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 188.
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneology, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 135.
Ibid., 141.
Ibid., 137.
Ibid.
Ibid., 140.
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 181.
Three Rival Versions, 140.
Ibid.
See the reviews of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Thomas Nagel, “Maclntyre Versus the Enlightenment,” in Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969–1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 203–209 and by Martha Nussbaum, “Recoiling from Reason,” New York Review of Books 36, n. 19 (December 7, 1989), 36–41.
For example, I argue that Maclntyre is too pessimistic about human nature and the possibility of virtue in my “Pagan Virtue.” Robert George has argued that Maclntyre’s account of natural law is too relativistic in “Moral Particularism, Thomism, and Traditions,” Review of Metaphysics 42 (1989): 593–605.
Three Rival Versions, 146.
Ibid., 147.
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Shanley, B.J. (2002). Religion and Morality. In: The Thomist Tradition. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9916-0_6
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