Let us consider the foundations of morals or ethics. Those of us who live by faith in Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, find in him the best possible source of direction for our action.¹ However, more so in modern times than ever before, people are exposed to nihilist ideology that presents each individual as a designer of what it is to live a human life. This kind of thinking is supported by materialist ideologies linked to scientific method, ideologies that dissociate moral values from objective reality. All of this is a source of confusion...

One problem for the foundation of ethics is the question of the reality of nature. Is there any such thing as nature?² Much prevailing scientific orthodoxy suggests that the coherence and order of reality is ultimately accidental.³ Another problem focuses on the move from being to goodness-for-me (from “is” to a decisive “ought”). Even given that things have natures, and that natures are interesting and beautiful, what relevance has the appeal that they make to one’s appetites? The sapiential response to both of these problems is to presentthe appetite as pertaining to the nature of the thing.The human...

The Christian does not depend on philosophy for his conception of human dignity. That is too serious an issue to be left to mere philosophy. As the common doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, teaches in the very first article of hisSumma theologiae (ST), there is need for a doctrine over and above philosophy, a doctrine revealed to us by God. The primary reason for this need is the very goal that God has in view for the human being, a goal that surpasses the human mind’s capacity to conceive.² The magnitude of human dignity is properly grasped...

In proposing “The Importance of Truth” as the theme for this year’s convention, I had it in mind to provide a topic that would lend itself to contributions both theoretical and practical. However, as far as my own contribution was concerned, I was thinking about issues that straddle the borderline between the ethical and the metaphysical. I was thinking of my own education and the extent to which it took place in a milieu that brought home to students the primacy of contemplation. And I was asking myself to what extent the institutions in which I have since taught have...

The present paper is ethical. That is to say, its aim is to affect the actions of people. I will be discussing the goal of human life and the appropriate course of conduct required if we are to arrive at such a goal. It will be, so far as possible, an appeal to reason, not directly to the passions. It supposes that we are somewhat free to shape our own behavior and can be persuaded by reasons to do so. One of the fruits of the invention of computers is poll taking and great masses of statistics. Such information, when...

InThe Future of Belief, by way of general introduction to the problem of religion in our time, Leslie Dewart refers to Freud’s view of religion, and particularly of belief in a god, as a case of an infantile illusion that has outlasted infancy.¹ He then goes on to maintain that Freud himself was still under the spell of the older, primitive worldview and showed himself to be so by sadly concluding that man cannot attain to happiness.² Professor Dewart suggests the possibility of rejecting both the obsolete illusion and the Freudian substitute:

If reality is experienced as reality, if...

In a recent issue ofNew Scholasticism, Vincent Punzo presented his conception of a “reflective or person-centered ethics,” that is, an ethics having its “normative basis” in “the constitutive role of the reflective intellect in the lives of . . . persons.”¹ Otherwise said, he proposed a view of ethics that makes “freedom” the “foundational rational norm.” He says: “The decisive consideration involved in the sorting out process [“what ought or ought not to be done”] is whether a proposed line of conduct confirms and nurtures, or weakens and stunts the character of human beings as free agents.”² The unity...

Speaking of the will, its nature and raison d’être, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, uses the expression “arduum arcanum,” a challenging mystery.¹ And anyone who has read Cajetan’s commentaries on the primary texts concerning the will in theSumma theologiae (ST) of St. Thomas Aquinas will be inclined to agree. The study of intellect and will belongs in part to that topmost flight of natural philosophy that considers the human soul,² but mostly it belongs to metaphysics.³ What this means in terms of the content of our conceptions is that to intellect and will, properly speaking, motion belongsmerely metaphorically.⁴...

James Keenan’s bookGoodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae¹ offers us an occasion to reflect on the conception of the will and its relation to intellect. This book favors a distinction involving the use of the words “goodness” and “rightness.” Whereas classical Christian moral theology has spoken of bothpersonsand theiractionsas “good” and “bad,” Keenan (following others) proposes that one reserve the vocabulary of “goodness” for persons (persons aregoodif they strive to do the right thing), while speaking of actions as “right” and “wrong.”² This is thought to be a more adequate description...

The stimulus to compose this chapter came from my reading of David Gallagher’s “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas.”¹ Gallagher presents Thomas on free choice at considerable length, following the doctrine throughQuaestiones disputatae de veritateandSumma contra gentiles (SCG) toQuaestiones disputatae de maloand theprima secundaeof theSumma theologiae (ST). Choice is seen as something that follows upon knowledge, but in order for choice to be truly free, the will itself must control that knowledge, that is, must somehow determine what aspect of things the intellect as source of specification of the choice...

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 positin the free operation of the will a pure negation, a non-considering of the rule, that is in no way culpable, norindeed in any sense an evil, but that is absolutely indispensable for an adequate conception of...

The study of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas draws one into considerations of the distinction and coexistence of reason and revelation, as well as of the divisions, pedagogical sequence and coexistence of the sciences. St. Thomas, in theSumma theologiae (ST), insists from the start on the unity of his theological undertaking, while affirming the inclusion of all the philosophical or scientific endeavors, theoretical and practical, within this unity.¹ John Finnis, in his bookNatural Law and Natural Rights, calls attention to such issues by the very nature of his project.² Finnis wishes to present a genuinely ethical discourse,...

I will take as basis for my observations chapter 4, “The Rights of Man,” of Jacques Maritain’sMan and the State.¹ Maritain notes that with the Universal Declaration of Rights published by the United Nations in 1948, men “mutually opposed in their theoretical conceptions” have been able to come to a merely practical agreement regarding a list of human rights. This “last refuge of intellectual agreement among men” invites the philosopher to propose its true justification.² The justification Maritain proposes is the doctrine of natural law: “The philosophical foundation of the Rights of man is Natural Law.”³ Eager to rid...

My project herein might be called a “fiftieth anniversary” observance. Labeled “May-June, 1945, at Rome,” Maritain’s essay “La dialectique immanente du premier acte de liberté (notes de philosophie morale)” was originally published inNova et veterain the autumn of that year. Subsequently it appeared in the bookRaison et raisons(1948) and in English translation as “The Immanent Dialectic of the First Act of Freedom,” in The Range of Reason¹

Maritain himself indicates that this essay is closely tied to two very important texts of St. Thomas, one on the question, Can the human being, by its natural power,...

Jean Porter’s bookNatural and Divine Law¹ aims at making theologians aware of medieval Scholastic theological discussions of natural law. The sources she consults include both theologians and canonists, extending over a period including the twelfth and much of the thirteenth century. She sees such discussions as a possible fruitful source for contemporary Christian ethics.

As a former student of Etienne Gilson’s, I rejoice to see this interest in medieval thought and in its theological dimension. As a disciple of St. Thomas, I am sure that acquaintance with the background against which he formulated his views of natural law can...

My theme is the relation of the person to the common good. When one hears these words, the expectation is that the discussion will be of things political, even if at a philosophical level. And certainly my original interest in preparing the present essay was quite political, namely, the duty one has to put one’s own life at risk for the good of the political society in which one lives. My aim has been to place this duty properly within the context of the sapiential vision proposed to us by St. Thomas Aquinas. In so doing, I must confess to...

In our observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the role of the philosopher is to provide, as Jacques Maritain said, the true philosophy of those rights.¹ The present study is focused on the nature of political society, with the view that this is the best thing there is, at least in the line of practical life, in human affairs.² Not to be allowed to live the full life of political society is to be gravely deprived, and philosophical teachings that tend to diminish our awareness of the nobility of political or civic...

In 1970 Germain Grisez published a paper criticizing St. Thomas’s view of the legitimacy of capital punishment.¹ That Grisez found Thomas’s doctrine in this matter unacceptable is not surprising, since, as he made clear there, Grisez rejected Thomas’s fundamental conception of political society and indeed, the absolute primacy of the common good.² Grisez taught that no one, not even the political authority, could ever licitly intend the death of a human being.

Gerard Bradley, in a paper for a Grisez Festschrift,³ argues that Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical letterEvangelium vitae (EV), tends to agree with Grisez. In...

The contemporary phenomenon that has stimulated the following reflections is suicide as a tactic of war waged in the interest of a religious cause. Certain Muslims have recently been using such tactics, driving trucks of explosives into emplacements, the truck driver having no possibility of escape (and making a videotape prior to the event to proclaim his religious and suicidal intention)—all this in the name of a “holy war.”¹ In a world where suicide for private reasons seems to be gaining in acceptance, and where suicide as an escape for captured spies is often presented as a sort of...

For a colloquium in 1985 celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Faculty of Philosophy of Laval University, I wrote a paper entitled “Death in the Setting of Divine Wisdom.”¹ I had been asked to prepare something in the domain of “ultimate questions,” and I was then much interested in such events as the suicide bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983. At the request of the Lebanese government, the United States had established a peacekeeping force between Muslims and Christians in Beirut. The Muslim forces, however, viewed the soldiers as their enemies and frequently attacked them with artillery and mortar. On...

My aim here is to carry further than Jacques Maritain ever had occasion to do certain fundamental proposals of his. I treat philosophy of religion as the highest part of moral philosophy. Maritain championed the development of as autonomous a moral philosophy as is possible in the universe, the true dynamics of whose sphere of action is revealed to us in the Gospel. He argued both that moral philosophy does not yet exist and that the principles for fully developed moral philosophy are to be found in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Accordingly, I make some suggestions concerning possible...

What do I mean by “spirituality”?¹ I am going to take this word as synonymous with “holiness,” “sanctity,” as these words, in turn, are a way of speaking, from a particular angle, of what Thomas Aquinas called “the virtue of religion,” or just plain “religion.”¹ It refers to the quality of life of a religious person. The activities of the religious person are such deliberate things as acts ofdevotion,prayer(the interior acts), and adoration, the offering of sacrifices, the taking of vows, public praise (external acts). Insofar as these practices imbue and transform the whole of life, one...

Twice in his twenty-year academic career, toward the beginning and toward the end, St. Thomas Aquinas undertook to present systematically the act of prayer.

The first of these studies is found in the fourth book of hisCommentary on the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard, written about 1256.¹ There² the general topic is the sacraments, and in the midst of the discussion of the sacrament of penance, St. Thomas reviews the means by which one makes satisfaction for an offense against God. These means are fasting, almsgiving, and prayer.³ In this way, an occasion is presented for a discussion...

Is it good to tell a harmless lie to save a life? Immanuel Kant held that it is very bad, for even though the lie does no immediate harm to the individuals involved, the liar is doing all he can to undermine the basis of law and contracts.¹ Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine’s lead, had a much less severe judgment in the matter. Although he held that all lying is bad, what he called a “sin [peccatum],”² he nevertheless believed that a harmless lie to save a life is only a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Still, some interpreters...

Recently I heard of a bishop who, seeking advice on the abortion issue, consulted some academics in a Catholic institute of higher education in his diocese. He consulted the members of the Department of Theology. He did not, as far as I know, consult those in the Department of Philosophy. As it happens, the people best informed in the Theology Department regarding the details of opinion and debate surrounding abortion had, as it seems to me, little to recommend them as metaphysicians. Abortion, on the other hand, is an issue that stirs such emotions as tend to bring into question...

The importance for theology, at least from the mid-thirteenth century onward, of the Latin word “obiectum, -i”—a substantive meaning the object of a power—is easily shown. The case of St. Thomas Aquinas is entirely symptomatic. The word figures prominently in his explanation of the beatitude promised to man as the goal of life. And it is accordingly used to explain the nature of Christian charity: charity is the love of God, that is, the love one has for God, considering God not merely as the author of natural reality but as theobiectumof supernatural beatitude.¹ The word...

Aristotle tells us that Socrates was the first to consider moral taxonomy. We read: “Socrates, however, was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole butseeking the universalin these ethical matters, andfixed thought for the first time on definitions.”¹ We might ask ourselves why it was in the realm of morals that interest in definition first arose. Perhaps the answer has to do with Plato’s point, in theRepublic,² that interest inousia, that is, in questions about the being of things, arises from situations in which something appears both as...