Editor’s Note: This essay is part of our special series marking the 800th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Aquinas.
References to the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas are replete in moral theology and philosophy from the 13th century onward. While his influence diminished for a time in post-reformation Protestant and secular circles, Catholic thinking has been more consistently informed by Aquinas’s ethics than any other thinker — or so it seems.
How is it then that, following Vatican II, the influential Belgian professor Servais Pinckaers, O.P., could advocate for a return to Thomistic moral theology? For Pinckaers, in the ubiquitous citations of the angelic doctor, something crucial was missing. In his Morality: The Catholic View (2001), he illustrated this deficit by counting pages. Alphonsus Liguori’s Theologia Moralis, a massive treatise written between 1748 and 1785, runs 2,807 pages; it served as the backbone for what was known as the “manualist” tradition that dominated Roman Catholic moral thinking from the late 16th to the mid-20th century. But of these thousands of pages, Liguori spends just 73 explicitly discussing virtue. By contrast, his discussion of law and moral precepts runs 1,004 pages. Pinckaers credits the help Liguori provided to priests utilizing the manuals in the confessional and elsewhere to instruct the faithful in “licit” or “illicit” acts. For this, certain sections of Aquinas’s writing — on the commandments, or the precepts of the natural law — provided helpful guidance. Other sections, however, such as those on the virtues, proved less helpful, and merited only about 2 percent of Liguori’s ink.
The manualists’ relative silence about the virtues was accompanied by a neglect of the structure of Aquinas’s magisterial Summa Theologiae, particularly the long secunda pars (hereafter ST II) that treats human beings as creatures made in God’s image. Aquinas’s teacher Albert the Great (d. 1280) trained him in Aristotle’s ethics, which assumes a teleological anthropology; for Aristotle, human life requires some end or purpose. So Thomas begins ST II with a discussion of our “final end,” which is happiness. What sort of human life is the best life? And how can we be formed to live it well? Following Aristotle again, Aquinas thinks happiness is an activity; living the best kind of life means learning to act rightly. Acts, he thinks, spring from the passions, but the passions need training, and this comes only with habit. In their simplest definition, virtues are good habits; we need them to live well. Thus Aquinas gives the rest of ST II over to the virtues. Of the ST II’s 262 articles, 161 are about the virtues. This is the weight of virtue that slipped through Liguori’s grasp. Fr. Pinckaers and others have worked to recover it.
The virtues were similarly eclipsed in post-Reformation Protestant and secular writing about ethics, but that is a story too complicated to tell here. We can, however, mention some key results. For example, there was a shift from goodness to rightness — that is, away from an interest in good character to right (moral or immoral) action. Furthermore, when considering right action, many moral theologians in the 17th and 18th centuries became interested in how we identify a right action. This interest yielded an “epistemological turn” in moral thinking, giving rise eventually to talk of “metaethics,” that is, theorizing about the “foundation” of moral judgments. This theorizing produced various foundational principles, for example, the utilitarian principle of Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill that claimed maximizing pleasure for the greatest number defined moral behavior. Another example is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative that, in one form, instructs us never to treat human beings only as means.
We can observe a certain confluence of this secular moral thinking (which arguably arose as an extension of Protestantism) with the Catholic pattern. Both attend to action to the exclusion of character. Moreover, they assume that morality is a territory we only occasionally traverse, typically when we consider some difficult moral choice or dilemma — what the American philosopher Edmund Pincoffs called “quandary ethics.” Gone are the deeper and more fundamentally human questions regarding what we should live for — perhaps even who or what we should worship. By contrast, for Thomas, the moral life is the human life. And as human beings, our journey is to become conformed to God’s image, or as Thomas puts it, to participate in a “certain kind of friendship with God,” that is charity, the highest of the theological virtues (ST II-II, 23).
Although an emphasis on virtue has by no means recaptured the mainstream, recent decades have witnessed something of a return to the subject. Initially this retrieval included a robust critique of the lingering 18th-century trends in ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), perhaps the most influential text in this movement of return, notes how a distinctly modern notion of “obligation” hangs loose, supported by no plausible anthropology and dependent on a facile acceptance of David Hume’s “naturalistic fallacy,” which invariably leads to an emotivism that can make no truth claims.
At the central turn in his seminal work, MacIntyre asks whether it will be Aristotle or Nietzsche. Both qualify as virtue thinkers, but offer different accounts of virtue and, as well, of the polity they encourage. While MacIntyre’s either/or may be overly stark, it reminds us that returning to virtue hardly eliminates contention; in fact, this return may accentuate it since disagreement about the best sort of human life, who human beings should become, always has been widespread.
In the contemporary discussion, Christian scholars who write about virtue almost always return to both Aristotle and Aquinas, and typically find they have more in common with non-Christian or non-religious Aristotelians (e.g., the naturalism of English philosopher Phillipa Foot) than other accounts of virtue that begin with Nietzsche and his postmodern progeny. We can think here of prominent Christian scholars such as Josef Pieper, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Meilaender, and Jean Porter. The tie that binds, and that opens room for fertile discussion of the virtues across traditions, is teleology: virtue ethics almost always implies the Aristotelian view that there is some true end toward which human beings live. Moreover, these particular Christian scholars all hold that the best way to return to Aristotle and his ethics is through Aquinas, whose discussion of the virtues attends to and synthesizes so much.
In comparison with Aristotle’s treatment of the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics, which is brilliant but somewhat haphazard, the Summa’s arrangement of the virtues — divided as seven, four cardinal and three theological — is systematic, elegant, gives room for a subtle discussion of vice as it relates to the various virtues, establishes complicated lines of relation between the virtues, and incorporates moral insights from Scripture, the church fathers, Aristotle, and many other thinkers outside the Christian tradition, such as Maimonides and Averroes.
In the 13th century, Aquinas already was modeling how different accounts of the virtues, and therefore of the good human life, can agree and disagree. This feature by itself has opened fertile space for contemporary thinkers to fill. For instance, almost any account of the good human life and its attendant virtues will include the virtue of courage (or fortitude). But how is courage best defined and shown? For Aristotle, it is on the battlefield, where one risks or gives one’s life for one’s civitas. But for Aquinas, who acknowledges the courage of the soldier, the highest form of courage is shown by the martyr, who does not daringly attack but rather patiently endures (ST II-II, 123-4). The Christian martyr, of course, follows the example of Christ in this endurance.
In this change from Aristotle, Aquinas demonstrates how Christian claims about what is truest and highest, claims dependent on fundamentally theological convictions, inform the Christian moral life. And yet Aquinas remains in dialogue with other virtue accounts that do not share these convictions. Discussions of such matters, which can be contentious but also fruitful, must never leave Aquinas behind.
