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  • The Perfection of Desire: Habit, Reason, and Virtue in Aquinas' Summa Theologiae by Jean Porter
  • Patrick M. Clark
The Perfection of Desire: Habit, Reason, and Virtue in Aquinas' Summa Theologiae BY JEAN PORTER Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2018. 158 pp. $15.00

In this 50th Père Marquette Lecture, Jean Porter considers the integral role of the passions in the development and exercise of the virtues. This latest monograph from one of the world's most distinguished moral theologians represents a significant contribution to a wealth of recent scholarship on this topic. While not as expansive as Nicholas Lombardo's Logic of Desire or Diana Fritz Cates's Aquinas on the Emotions, it nevertheless offers an illuminating portrait of Aquinas's moral psychology and develops many fresh lines of inquiry for Christian ethics.

Porter's argument rests upon the claim that for Aquinas, interior movements of desire and aversion not only precede cognitive processes of practical deliberation, but autonomously shape those processes in distinctive ways. The passions therefore partially determine human perfection, as they retain a certain degree of autonomy even within virtuous activity. Without moving beyond Aquinas, Porter masterfully demonstrates how this key insight aligns with contemporary perspectives in both moral philosophy and developmental psychology.

The book comprises an introduction and four chapters, with the last serving as an anticipation of theological elaboration. Porter first sets out Aquinas's understanding of habits, viewed as distinctively human principles of action. Like other animals, humans spontaneously perceive and assimilate sensory data, but unlike other animals they experience that data in and through their capacity for rational reflection. Hence on Aquinas's view, "the passions operate … in such a way as to prompt a certain kind of interpretation of the creature's ongoing perceptions" (28). To the extent that embodied reason continually relies upon the particularities of sensory perception and imagination, the passions influence moral development in ways that cannot be entirely reduced to or superseded by cognitive processes.

Key to Porter's explanation of this influence is the role specific paradigmatic acts play in an agent's reflective determination of moral norms. "Ultimately," she writes, "we formulate concepts of the virtues in terms of the kind of goodness towards which they are oriented, but even at the highest levels of abstraction, these formal concepts are always understood through reflections on the particular paradigms of behavior with which moral reflection begins" (67). Since the passions actively influence the establishment of these paradigms, they shape the processes of practical reflection "all the way down." [End Page 197]

Porter goes on to trace the passions' influence even upon virtues of the will, particularly justice. While affirming the objective basis of justice as an "other-regarding virtue," Porter roots the acquisition of justice in the same psychological processes at work in the development of every other virtue. "The natural structures of human interactions provide the necessary starting points for processes of desire, reflection, and choice in human relations, through which a grasp of the ideals of justice and a disposition towards justice can develop in tandem" (107). In this way, Porter provides a Thomistic account of the role of personal experience and particular relationships in the practice of justice. To the extent that the development of justice requires the adoption of paradigmatic images of just action, any particular just act will "always bear the stamp of someone's history, and the desires and interactions that shape that history" (120).

The concluding chapter applies the preceding analysis to the distinction between acquired and infused virtues. Porter maintains that while both kinds of virtue remain fundamentally distinct in their manner of development, they nevertheless rely equally upon paradigmatic images derived from experience for their determination as subjects of practical reflection. Those interested in theological virtue will find much to build on in these concluding remarks, just as those interested in virtue theory generally will find the entire book immensely stimulating. [End Page 198]

Patrick M. Clark
University of Scranton
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