The Primacy of Love: An Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas

166 Pages·2016·2.55 MB·English

by  Paul J. Wadell

THE PRIMACY OF LOVE
An Introduction to the Ethics
of
Thomas Aquinas
by
PAUL J. WADELL, C.P.
WIPF & STOCK· Eugene, Oregon
Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W 8th Ave, Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
The Primacy of Love
An Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas
By Wadell, Paul J.
Copyright©1992 by Wadell, Paul J.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60608-369-7
Publication date 12/16/2008
Previously published by Paulist Press, 1992
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Meeting a Man with Designs on Us .............•.... 7
2. Why We Do Anything At All:
A Look At Human Behavior ....................... 29
3. Happiness: The One Thing Everybody Wants ...... 44
4. Charity: The Virtue of Friendship with God. . . . . . .. 63
5. The Passions and Affections in the Moral Life:
Exploring the Primacy of Love .................... 79
6. The Passions and Affections in the Moral Life:
Finding the Strength to Go On . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 94
7. The Virtues: Actions That Guide Us to Fullness
of Life ........................................... 106
8. The Virtues: Finding Our Perfection in a Gift..... 125
9. What to Make of a God of Love?
Some Conclusions about Aquinas's Vision
of the Moral Life................................. 142
Notes................................................ 150
Index................................................ 154
iii
To
My Sisters and Brothers:
Mary, Anne, Amy, Robert, Christine,
Barbara, Thomas, John
Introduction
The purpose of this book is to reintroduce the moral theology of a man
who has been picked apart more than any other Catholic theologian.
No theologian has been quoted, commented on, and written about
more than Thomas Aquinas, but somewhere in the abundance of
those pages the spirit of Aquinas may have been lost. Here is a man
who was glaringly overweight, had a terrible fear of lightning, and
loved God with a passion that cannot fail to inspire.
For a long time I have been convinced that the moral theology of
Thomas Aquinas is the hidden treasure of the Catholic moral tradi
tion. It is hidden because it has not been sufficiently appreciated. Too
often Aquinas's ethics are presented as being overly rationalistic, ex
cessively formal, and too scholastic to be of use to us today. But that is
a disservice to Aquinas and a loss to us all. The core of Thomistic
ethics is not the natural law, but the virtues, and the virtues are best
understood not as acts of reason, but as strategies of love whereby
those devoted to God are transformed in God's goodness. There is
nothing heady about this; it is the earthiest and most practical of
moralities because it is centered in love, the passion that gives energy
and shape to all our behavior.
Too, Aquinas saw no division between the moral and the spiritual
life. For him they were one, and to attempt to separate them was to
forget that the overall purpose of the moral life was to make us the
kind of people whose lives are songs of praise to a God whose love is
unending. Thomas knew that the moral life is the Christian life, that
to grow in goodness is to be transfigured in holiness, and that charity
is no idle love, but is the virtue that makes our whole life an offering to
God. The strategy of Thomistic ethics is not primarily to assist us in
making good decisions or to help us in resolving problems of con
science; no, its goal is the total transformation of ourselves into people
who can call God's Kingdom their home. There is nothing piecemeal
or partial about Aquinas's moral theology. Because of the glory it
promises, it is the most wholistic and radical ethic imaginable.
1
2 The Primacy of Love
One does not so much read Thomas's ethics as become part of
them. To enter his vision of the moral life is to take up an adventure
that will involve us to the center of our being. We cannot study
Aquinas and remain untouched. His schema of the moral life will grab
us, it will make demands on us, and the longer we travel with him the
more we will notice we are not who we were when we began. 8urprising
changes will take place; we shall be implicated in a conversion. That is
why it is important to know the man whose moral theology is not to be
read, but lived. Chapter 1 is a brief overview of Aquinas's life. Before
we begin our journey, we must know something about who will be
leading us. Thomas will guide us into a way of life from which we shall
never fully recover. It is fitting that we meet him and learn as much
about him as we can. We shall glimpse his struggles, sufferings and
frustrations. We will be touched by how generously Thomas put his
talents at the service of so many: his Dominican community, the
church, and the world. More than anything, we will be moved by the
humanity of this man: his humility, his doubts, his dedication, his
moments of darkness, but especially his deep, passionate love.
In chapter 2 we enter Aquinas's moral theology. We begin as he
did, shaping our account of the moral life by looking first at how
human beings behave. Through that observation we learn a simple but
important truth: men and women are purposeful. Everything we do
bespeaks something we are trying to achieve. We spend time prepar
ing a meal because we want to bring joy to those we love. We work
hard on a project because we want to contribute to something bigger
than ourselves. We gather in worship because we want to give thanks
to a God on whom we absolutely depend. But there is one purpose
which embraces them all, one purpose which articulates the desire
behind everything we do. This ever-present purpose is our intention
for wholeness, completion, happiness and peace. We search for some
thing good that will restore us, we hunger for a love in which we desire
no more. For Thomas, morality pivots on desire. It is born from our
hunger for something good and perfecting, and it ends when our
hearts find peace.
In chapter 3 our investigation continues as we consider how
Aquinas understands happiness. He is convinced that happiness is the
one thing everybody wants; for him, it is the focus of the moral life.
But if this desire for well-being empowers everything we do, it is im
portant that we understand rightly what happiness is. A realist,
Aquinas begins his investigation by considering where most people
think happiness is to be found. He looks at money, prestige, power and
pleasure. And he takes them quite seriously because he knows we
Introduction 3
cannot have a good life without them. Still, Thomas wants not just
something good for us, he wants the best for us, and so he presses on to
discover a happiness that does not fail. In possessing what good shall
we know the deepest possible joy? It is this question that guides
Aquinas's search for where true happiness is to be found.
Not surprisingly, Thomas concludes that our most perfect and
enduring joy is found in God. The reason is simple: in God is a good
ness money, prestige, power and pleasure lack. As good and as neces
sary as these things are, they cannot do for us what God can, and God
can do infinitely more than we could ever do for ourselves. Thomas
sees our happiness in a particular way. For us to be happy is to be
related to God in friendship. He calls this friendship charity, and it is
the most comprehensive and constitutive activity of our lives. In
chapter 4 we shall examine what Thomas means by this. What do we
mean when we say our happiness is charity-friendship with God? How
can we speak of ourselves as God's friends? We shall look at the marks
of friendship, we shall explore what they mean when the friend is God,
and we shall discover why, for Thomas, it is through this special rela
tionship that we receive the happiness God has always desired for us.
Aquinas has a love-centered ethic. Our actions are empowered by
love because they are born from our desire for something good. Desire
is love at work. Through our moral acts we direct our lives to whatever
we think will be best for us. Thomas sees it this way. Morality begins
in love, works through desire, and is completed in joy. Obviously, then,
the passions and affections are integral to Thomas's account of the
moral life. In chapter 5 we will look at what Thomas means by the
passions, particularly love, and how he sees them empowering moral
growth and transformation. As we shall see, far from excising the
emotions, Thomas argues that becoming good is a matter of learning
to love the right things in the right way.
But that is not always easy. Thomas envisions the moral life as an
odyssey through love to the good-but every odyssey is imperiled by
adversity, threatened by bad luck. The plot of the moral life is to move
through love to the good, and in the good to find joy. This may be easy
when life cooperates and everything goes our way, but that is not
always the case. Sometimes life does not cooperate and we are
upended by misfortune. Sometimes we simply tire of pursuing the
good, we grow disenchanted, our original zeal dims. Thomas sees two
sets of emotions in the moral life. The first charts the direction of the
moral life and captures our position toward the good. In this sense we
speak of the moral life beginning in love, continuing through desire,
and culminating in joy. But we need another set of passions and emo-
4 The Primacy of Love
tions to enable us to remain steadfast in our quest for the good and not
grow dispirited. Here emotions such as courage, hope and anger be
come crucial in our odyssey to the good for they help us persevere
when the good is difficult to attain or some evil is hard to avoid. In
chapter 6 we shall look at the two classes of emotions and consider
how they function in the moral life.
But ultimately passion is at the service of virtue. In chapter 7 we
shall consider Aquinas's understanding of the virtues. His is not an
ethic of duty or law, but an ethic of virtue. Thomas has a virtue ethic
because his primary concern is not just good decisions, but good per
sons. Virtues are moral skills that make both actions and persons
good. In Christian language, they are transforming activities that
sculpt us into people capable of finding bliss in God. Virtues formed
from charity transfigure us in holiness; with them we radiate the
goodness of God. In this chapter we will consider what the virtues are
and why we need them. We will study how they are gained but also
how they can be lost. Our look at Thomas's account of the virtues will
convince us that human beings are creatures who can go to extremes.
Poised between epic possibilities, we are capable of extraordinary
goodness, but also of terrible evil.
But can we ever be good enough? Thomas says not quite, espe
cially when the goodness we seek is God's. In a sense, Thomas sets us
up. He tells us we will never find joy unless we have union with God.
But we can only enjoy such intimacy with God when we have enough
likeness to the goodness of God to make such a relationship possible.
Try as we might, we can never render that goodness ourselves. There
is a sense of futility smuggled into Aquinas's treatise on the virtues.
The virtues are perfecting, but not perfecting enough. They make us
good, but not good enough. They change us, but not enough to give us
union with God. We sense the possibility of virtue, but also its limita
tions. This is why Aquinas's account of the moral life does not end
with the virtues, but with the Gifts of the Spirit. At the limit of every
virtue the Gifts emerge, for it is in them that the virtues find their
completion. What the Gifts ofthe Spirit remind us is that for Aquinas
the moral life begins in gift and ends in gift. It begins with the out
pouring of God's gracious love in our hearts, and ends with the out
reach of God's love to complete our virtue with a goodness we could
never offer, but only receive. Seeing the link between charity's virtues
and the Gifts of the Spirit will give an unexpected twist to Aquinas's
ethics and bring our investigation to a surprising conclusion. We shall
reflect on all this in chapter 8 by looking first at the special relation
every virtue has to charity, then by examining the cardinal virtues,
Introduction 5
four virtues Thomas sees as especially prominent in the moral life,
and finally by thinking about the Gifts of the Spirit, those special
manifestations of God's redemptive love that perfect us and guide
us home.
A word about the style of this book. Studies of Aquinas's ethics
have often been forbidding. The language is strange to us, the style is
foreign. I have tried to make this book as accessible as possible, writ
ing in a way that is hopefully clear and understandable but, at the
same time, does justice to the spirit of Thomas's thought. References
to secondary sources are few. I have avoided them not only because
commentaries on Aquinas often obscure more than they illumine, but
also because the best way to appreciate Aquinas's thought is to work
with the texts themselves. I have focused almost exclusively on his
moral treatise in the Summa Theologiae. Thomas wrote on morality
elsewhere, but the Summa presents the most developed and complete
account of his ethics. Where necessary I have included passages from
the Summa to illustrate that my treatment is faithful to Aquinas's
thought; however, wherever passages are cited, I have tried to explain
and interpret them as clearly as possible.
Every book is a debt to those who teach us what we did not know.
I am especially grateful to Sebastian MacDonald, C.P., who intro
duced me to the writings of Aquinas when I was a student at Catholic
Theological Union in Chicago. It was MacDonald's high respect for
Aquinas that prompted me to investigate a theologian I otherwise
might too quickly dismiss. I am also indebted to Stanley Hauerwas,
now of Duke University, who was my mentor at the University of
Notre Dame. It was Hauerwas's conviction that Aquinas's ethic of
virtue was the richest lore of the Catholic moral tradition that encour
aged me to study him more patiently.
I must also thank the students of Catholic Theological Union in
Chicago. I have taught a class in the ethics of Aquinas for several
years. The classroom is a fine place to test one's ideas. It was through
the persistent and perceptive questions and challenges of the students
that I came to a better sense of a theology I thought I understood.
Special thanks is also due Kenneth O'Malley, C.P., of Catholic
Theological Union for his painstaking assistance in preparing the text
for publication.
Finally, I want to thank Lawrence Boadt, C.S.P., of Paulist Press.
He convinced me a more accessible contemporary study of Thomistic
ethics might not be a bad idea. It was his interest, encouragement, and
enthusiasm that gave me confidence to write this book.