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Chapter 11 ST. THOMAS AND THE FIRST CAUSE OF MORAL EVIL Seeking the first cause of moral evil, St. Thomas Aquinas was not content to speak only of the deficiency in the will’s choice, nor again to speak only of the freedom of the will itself, taken as a good thing created by God. Rather, between these two, namely, the privative deficiency and the good nature, he insisted on the necessity to posit in the free operation of the will a pure negation, a non-considering of the rule, that is in no way culpable, nor indeed in any sense an evil, but that is absolutely indispensable for an adequate conception of the first cause of moral evil. Jacques Maritain called this ‘‘a metaphysical discovery of the first magnitude, absolutely fundamental, and without which no philosophy of evil is possible .’’1 In view of such a judgment on the part of so eminent an interpreter of St. Thomas, I have undertaken the investigation here presented. Are we speaking of a discovery that Thomas himself made? It would seem so. The remote background for the discussion is in St. Augustine, but Peter Lombard’s inclusion of the question of the first cause of sin in his Book of Sentences meant that thirteenth-century theologians regularly discussed it. In these discussions as presented by Albert the Great and Bonaventure, and even by Thomas himself in his own Commentary on the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard, no mention is made of any such voluntary nonculpable deficiency prior to the act of sin.2 It is in the Summa contra gentiles (SCG) 3.10 that we find the requirement for the first time.3 Then, a second detailed presentation is made in the Quaestiones disputatae de malo 1.3.4 There are more rapid discussions or references to the doctrine in the Summa theologiae (ST), but for the sake of brevity I will here discuss primarily SCG and De malo.  St. Thomas and the First Cause of Moral Evil  The precise point toward which SCG 3.10 is arguing at the outset is that evil can be caused only by the good. Only later, in SCG 3.13, will it be argued that evil must have a cause. Hence, the argument with which SCG 3.10 begins is to the point that if evil has a cause, that cause cannot be the bad; it must be the good. Having after several arguments so concluded, SCG 3.10 (no. 1939) argues that the good can be the cause of the bad only as a ‘‘per accidens’’ cause, that is, a cause ‘‘through attachment.’’ Also, although up to this point the notion of cause embraced somewhat all four types of cause—final, efficient, formal and material—here in paragraph 1939 we now have a narrowing to efficient causality. The rest of SCG 3.10 is aimed at the investigation of the good as per accidens efficient cause of the bad. First, we consider how the efficient causing of the bad occurs in nature (and art), and then how it occurs in moral matters. In the treatment of nature, St. Thomas says that the accidens, the attachment , by which the per accidens causality can come about, can be found either on the side of the agent itself or on the side of the effect. When the attachment is on the side of the agent, it is a deficiency in its active power. Such a deficiency is precisely something outside the nature of the agent as an agent—hence an accidens—since the agent is an agent precisely in virtue of its active power. It is noted that the deficiency can be either in the agent itself or in its instrument. But it is argued that evil is caused per accidens, from the side of the agent (as distinguished from its effect) on the basis of a defect pertaining to the agent. (The example St. Thomas gives of deficiency in the agent is weakness in the digestive power, so that it does a bad job of digesting the food; thus, the resulting nutrient is bad. His example where the agent has a deficient instrument for its agency is that of the human body’s motive power producing a limping motion—a bad motion—because of curvature in the tibia.) The presentation on the side of the effect looks at two sources of evil, the...

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