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6 Light and Morality Aquinas uses language of light and dark throughout his discussion of morality and sin, so much so that someone not acquainted with his thought might label him a dualist in the Manichean tradition. A world divided into light and dark would seem to lack an appreciation for the difficulty in making sharp judgments about the morality of our actions; surely, one might argue, this is just an old divisive mode of ethics that lacks subtlety and has too much confidence in its own moral reasoning. In fact, the whole metaphysical basis of Aquinas’s ethics is decidedly nondualistic. He is always aware of the Manichean heresy that manifested itself in the lives of the Cathars. As we approach Aquinas’s ethics, we will begin with those metaphysical assumptions about privation that maintain the unity of creation, goodness, and light and dark, then turn to Aquinas’s account of the darkness of sin and its consequences, investigate his understanding of human nature, look at the role of conversion in his ethics, and finally turn to how Aquinas’s use of illumination language can help us make sense of the role played by reason, law, and the virtues in his moral theology. Metaphysical Assumptions As we discussed in chapter 2 and the last chapter, darkness is a privation—it is no “thing” in itself, with “no form or nature of its own,”1 but strictly a privation or absence of light. Darkness has no substance or being, while light exists as a quality of an illuminating object. Aquinas maintains this stance when he talks about light and darkness with respect to good and evil in moral acts. Again, the goal here is to avoid any account of evil that makes God responsible for creating evil, while maintaining that God created everything. At the same time, we must 1. ST I 48.1. 173 in no way deny our experience of evil, for without the evil of sin there is no need for Christ to heal us of the darkness of sin. Aquinas thinks there are two kinds of privation, a privation where a substance has been fully deprived of its reality in some aspect, and a privation where a substance is in the process of being deprived. It is the difference between being bald and balding, where both are privations of hair, but one is complete and one is in process. Aquinas uses a different example: of death, which is a complete privation of life, versus being sick, in which one still has some health, but is deprived of perfect health. He claims that this latter kind of privation is the kind of privation that we understand as evil.2 There is a problem here, however, with regard to the discussion of light and dark. As we have seen in previous chapters, Aquinas sees darkness as occurring instantaneously, and resulting in a complete privation, but here he sees evil as a process. Perhaps, however, the experience of evil he is talking about here is more like the setting sun, which slowly deprives the air of the light it needs, so that eventually the total dark takes over. Part of what is going on here is based on Aquinas’s idea of the convertibility of being and good, where to exist is a good and to have goodness is (at least) to exist.3 No rational being, including the devil, can be completely evil, for complete evil would be a complete privation of existence. Aquinas takes up the same issue from a different angle in his discussion of whether all sins are equal. In making the case that all sins are not equal and some are worse than others, Aquinas makes the same distinction between privations of being, which in this article he calls a “simple or pure privation,”4 and privations of becoming. The former, he says, do not admit of more or less, so that a pure privation is not capable of being any more deprived. Aquinas gives the example that if a house is already dark, covering a window will not make it any more dark. Privations of becoming are explained here as a matter of corruption; they thus admit a scale of being. Here Aquinas draws in a discussion of the vices and sin. Sins are privations of the “due commensuration of reason, 2. ST I-II 18.8 ad 1: “The other privation consists in becoming deprived, thus sickness is privation of health; not...

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