Aquinas's Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations, Moral Theory, and Theological Context

seven. The Virtues

seven The Virtues W e have set out in this book to integrate Aquinas’s metaphysics of human nature, his action theory, and his ethics. His metaphysics of persons tells us what sort of beings we are; his action theory tells us what beings of this sort are able to do; and his ethics tells us how human beings can live a good, flourishing life. At one level, we have seen that Aquinas’s story about these three areas can be told in the language of Aristotelian philosophy: We are rational animals, composed of form and matter; our nature includes a set of potentialities and capacities, most notably intellect and appetite, which fit us for action. When we fully develop those natural capacities, we reach actualization or perfection as flourishing members of the species. As our study of Aquinas’s metaphysics and action theory has already made clear, however, there is more to the story than that. In this third part of the book, our study of Aquinas’s ethics will put us in a position to see how his theological commitments transform and transcend his Aristotelian views of a flourishing human life, even as they incorporate and build on them. Aquinas’s ethics is framed by his discussion of human nature and human action, since the goal of the ethical life—human flourishing— consists in knowing and loving God. These activities express the perfection of intellect and will, and thereby also the perfection of our rational nature.1 After laying out his view of human nature and describing the rational capacities of intellect and will, then, Aquinas goes “behind the 129 scenes” to examine three specific influences on the intellect and will: virtue, law, and grace. All three guide and shape our actions in ways that enable us to realize our ultimate end. Aquinas calls virtue an interior source of influence because virtues perfect the sources of human agency, intellect and will.2 He counts law and grace as exterior influences because God, an agent distinct from the human intellect and will, is their source.3 As we will see, things soon become more complicated. For now, we simply note that all three are treated in the ethics because they each involve human participation or action in some way; that is, they are still human ways of achieving our end because they involve, at some level, the contributions of intellect and will.4 Understanding Aquinas’s ethics well requires that we pay attention to the overall structure and context of his discussion. A cursory glance at Aquinas’s ethics reveals a lengthy and detailed discussion of the virtues— first in general, and then in particular.5 The Summa theologiae includes forty questions on virtue and vice in general and one hundred seventy questions on individual virtues and vices, compared to only nineteen on law and six on grace.6 Lengthy discussion (or an increased number of objections and replies in a given question) often indicates an area of controversy ; at other times it indicates importance, or an area in which Aquinas’s synthesis of traditions calls for extra explanation. When we notice that the vast majority of his ethical instruction on human flourishing is devoted to virtues and virtuous living, and that in the secunda secundae (the second half of part II of the Summa theologiae, or ST IIaIIae) Aquinas organizes discussions of law and gifts of the Holy Spirit under the superstructure of the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues, we may wonder why the three principles of human action in the prima secundae (the first half of Part II, or ST IaIIae)—virtue, law, and grace—are apparently so unevenly distributed in the discussions in ST IIaIIae. This extensive attention to the virtues may puzzle readers of Aquinas’s ethics for other reasons. Many scholars and textbooks frame Aquinas as a natural law theorist, and their accounts of his ethics say little or nothing about the virtues. Given the text before us, however, the sheer amount of energy Aquinas spends on virtue begs for an explanation : how do virtue and law fit together in his ethics?7 Moreover, given the theological commitments operating in Aquinas’s ethical work, how can 130 Aquinas’s Ethics we explain the paucity of attention he gives to the more obviously theological concepts of law and grace, while the virtues—a Greek philosophical inheritance...