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

eight. Law and Grace

eight Law and Grace In chapter 7 we examined the virtues in Aquinas’s ethics and argued that the theological virtue of charity is central in his account of the virtues. Virtues, or good habits, are the “interior” directors and perfecters of human action. In the present chapter we introduce Aquinas’s account of the “exterior” principles of human action, sources external to us that perfect our nature and direct us to our ultimate end. In treating the exterior principles of law and grace, our emphasis will be on how Aquinas integrates these with the virtues and how, again, his theological commitments inform this move. Law Aquinas’s discussion of law begins with God, who orders the universe and all its motion back to himself as its ultimate end and good.1 Wisdom (in all its forms) and goodness, the perfections of the intellect and will, respectively, involve right order.2 The duty of the wise person is to understand the order of reality, and moral perfection requires living in accordance with that order. The fundamental function of a lawmaker is to order things toward the good, and God’s providential ordering of the universe, a rule marked by wisdom and goodness, explicitly frames Aquinas’s discussion of the law.3 Human beings, as creatures who have 152 “power” [potestam] over their own actions, reflect in their intellects and wills their participation in God’s rule.4 By participation, Aquinas means both the way our natural inclinations reflect God’s law and the way we can actively share in God’s activity of governing ourselves and other created things. Law in general names the ordering of action to the common good. Lawgiving requires reason, since it involves ordering and commanding the things under the lawgiver’s care to the proper end of the whole— whether that whole is the universe, a human community, or even an individual , who is the common subject of various capacities.5 Law therefore presupposes a person in charge of the common good; it presupposes that there is a community or whole made of parts that has a good and that is capable of being ordered; and it presupposes that those subject to it can take orders, since—to count as law—those orders must be “promulgated ” or made known.6 Under this general description we can see how Aquinas’s view of law is modeled on God’s nature and action: God, a person capable of both directing and commanding others by virtue of his rationality, is in charge of the world that he created and orders all things to himself as their end and the perfect good.7 Law is also closely identi fied in Aquinas’s ethics with divine agency, since by means of law, God is the extrinsic principle of human action.8 Aquinas treats four main kinds of law: eternal law, natural law, divine law, and human law.9 He further divides the divine law into the Old and New Law, with the New Law providing a fitting segue to the discussion of grace. Despite these distinctions, the different types of law overlap substantially in content. Aquinas begins his discussion of the types of law with the eternal law as the archetypal law from which all other laws derive their status as law. Eternal law is another name for God’s providential direction—his master planning—of the universe as a whole. God’s rule of law is evident in the workings of the natural world as well as in human inclination and history; it guides and orders everything to its proper telos.10 All other kinds of law, in order to count as law, must reflect and accord with the eternal law.11 Natural law, the second type, names the extent to which human nature , especially the human intellect, participates in God’s law and imitates Law and Grace 153 God’s lawgiving.12 Directing our own actions according to an end and a good that we grasp as such is a law-like ability. Our nature, with its internal principles, capacities, and telos, is designed to conform to eternal law, as are all other natures; however, we uniquely imitate God in our ability to apprehend a common good and direct ourselves and others to it. Law’s work of directing and commanding not only locates it within the scope of the work of the...