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Aquinas’s Ethics: the Infused Virtues and the Indwelling Holy Spirit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2024

Eleonore Stump*
Affiliation:
Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri, United States

Abstract

This paper explores Aquinas’s ethics. For Aquinas, the moral life begins with a surrender to God on the part of a person who comes to faith. That surrender includes a change in the person’s will from the state of resisting God’s love and grace to quiescence, the cessation of resistance. Once a person’s will is in this quiescent state, God infuses grace into his will. On Aquinas’s views, in an instant this grace moves the person’s will to the will of faith. In that same instant, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell in him and also brings into him also all the infused virtues, as well as all the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. The paper explores Aquinas’s claims about the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, and it argues that for Aquinas the moral life is first and foremost a matter of having a right second-personal relationship to God.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.

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References

1 Jean Porter, ‘Right Reason and the Love of God: The parameters of Aquinas’ Moral Theology’, The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 167-191. See also her essay ‘Virtues and Vices’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2 Andrew Pinsent, The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

3 ST I-II q.65 a.3.

4 To say that the spiritual life is perfected by the virtues is to say only that the infusing of the virtues contributes to the process of being perfected in righteousness, not that the process ends with the infusion of the virtues. All the virtues are infused in the first instant of faith, but they can exist in a person with contrary dispositions as well, as the remainder of this chapter will make clear.

5 ST I-II q.65 a.2 s.c.

6 Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (QDV) q. 28 a.9 reply. (The translation is mine.)

7 In the Summa contra Gentiles (SCG), Aquinas makes clear that, in his view, God himself, the whole Trinity, indwells a person of faith when that person has the indwelling Holy Spirit: ‘Since the love by which we love God is in us by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit himself must also be in us…Therefore, since we are made lovers of God by the Holy Spirit, and every beloved is in the lover…by the Holy Spirit necessarily the Father and the Son dwell in us also’ (SCG IV c.21).Here and elsewhere I like and therefore have used the translation of Anton Charles Pegis (reprinted 1991), though I have felt free to modify it where I thought I could do better.

8 ST I q.38 a.1 s.c.

9 ST I q.38 a.1 corpus.

10 Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, tr. F.R. Larcher and M.L. Lamb, ed. John Mortensen and E. Alarcon, (Lander, Wyo.: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012) C.3, l. 5. I like and therefore have used throughout the translations of this series from the Aquinas Institute, but I have felt free to modify it if I thought I could do better.

11 Commentary on the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, trans. F. R. Larcher, ed. J. Mortensen and F. Alarcon (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012) C. 5, l. 1.

12 Commentary on the Gospel of St.John, , trans. F. R. Larcher, ed. The Aquinas Institute, (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), C. 14, l. 4, p. 249.

13 Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians, tr. F.R. Larcher and M.L. Lamb, ed. John Mortensen and E. Alarcon, (Lander, Wyo.: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), C. 1, l. 5.

14 For a detailed defense of these claims, see my ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’s Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions’, Faith and Philosophy 28.1 (2011): 29-43.

15 ST I-II q.68 a.1.

16 ST I-II q.68 a.2.

17 As Aquinas explains the first five fruits of the Holy Spirit, they are in fact all consequences of shared love between a human person and God. The remaining seven have to do, one way or another, with the love of one’s neighbor understood as beloved of God or with suitable love of oneself and one’s body. See, for example, ST I-II q.70 a.3.

18 ST I-II q.70 a.3 corpus.

19 For an excellent discussion of this subject in connection with Aquinas’s ethics, see Andrew Pinsent, The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), especially ch. 4, in which Pinsent likens the fruition of second-person relatedness, an ‘abiding in’ the other, to a state of resonance.

20 For more discussion of the nature of the second-personal, see my Wandering in Darkness, ch. 6.

21 ST I q.43 a.3.

22 See, for example, Commentary on the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, trans. F. R. Larcher, ed. J. Mortensen and F. Alarcon (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012) C.5, l.1.

23 It is perhaps worth highlighting here that the biblical text implies a mutual indwelling between God and a person in grace, and Aquinas understands the biblical text in this way.

24 Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians, tr. F.R. Larcher and M.L. Lamb, ed. John Mortensen and E. Alarcon, (Lander, Wyo.: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), C 5, l.6.

25 At the risk of overdoing it, I want to highlight here as well Aquinas’s supposition that there is mutual indwelling between God and person in grace.

26 SCG IV c.23.

27 See, in this connection, ST I-II q.27 a.3 and q.28 a.1.

28 For more discussion of this notion, see my ‘Faith, Wisdom, and the Transmission of Knowledge through Testimony’, in Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue, edited by Timothy O’Connor and Laura Frances Goins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 204-230.

29 Just as the will can be divided against itself as regards desires, so it can also be divided against itself as regards dispositions. The infused disposition for temperance in general can co-exist in the will with a long-established habit of gluttony, for example.

30 ST I-II q.65 a.3 ad 2.

31 Clearly, there are many more problems that arise in connection with Aquinas’s account, perhaps most obviously the question whether a position which implies that only Christians are moral people is itself morally intolerable. What helps in this connection is the recognition that for Aquinas, as for Karl Rahner, there are people who are rightly related to God in this second-personal way even if they have never heard of Christianity or even if they have heard of it and reject it entirely. It is the right relationship to God, implicit or tacit, that makes a person moral, not membership in a religious club. (In this connection, see also footnote 36 above.) For further discussion of this and related issues, see my Aquinas, chs. 12 and 13, and Wandering in Darkness, ch. 8. I will also return to this issue in the section on exclusivism in Chapter 8.

32 ST I. q.82 a.1.

33 SCG III.88.

34 ST I-II q.113 a.3.

35 SCG III.148.

36 QDV 22.8.

37 What Aquinas has in mind with this description of the first way in which God changes the will is the subject of some discussion, which I cannot canvass in passing here. But my own view is that the best clue to his meaning is given by the lines in remainder of the paragraph, namely, that in giving the will a nature God puts a particular will (the will to happiness, as Aquinas holds in other texts) into the will. Whatever is at issue in this first way, however, is not the way in which Aquinas thinks God changes the will when God infuses grace into the will, and so I will leave consideration of this part of Aquinas’s account to one side in what follows.

38 By ‘wayfarers’ Aquinas means people in grace in this life.

39 QDV 22.8 reply.

40 QDV 28.7 ad 5.

41 See, for example, In Rom 5.1.

42 Commentary on the Letter of St.Paul to the Philippians,tr. F. R. Larcher, ed. J. Mortensen and F. Alarcon (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012) C.4, l.1

43 Stephen Darwall, The Second-person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).