Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Thomistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at ThomisticInstitute.org.
Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here with you and to be invited to speak to such august company and at this great university, the reputation of which is well known also in the United States. And thank you, Emma, for your introduction.
What makes a person good? What makes a person happy? Are those different things?
These questions are big and important questions, questions that I hope every person will ask during the course of a lifetime, questions that I hope each of you has already asked, or at least tonight will be asking yourself. Certainly as a group, we can ask them together, but they're also existential questions for each of us individually, questions that are perhaps among the most important that one can ask. At the same time, these questions are very important. are so big that they might seem intractable, hard to get a grasp on, hard to get to the bottom of them. And if you just ask Google this question, I imagine you'll find a whole lot of recommendations about how to be better.
In fact, there's a kind of industry on the internet, it seems to me, about how to be better at doing doing X or doing Y, and if you're doing something for the first time, I don't know, maybe making a souffle, you're going to watch a YouTube video about how to do that well. If you want to be a good cook, you will find resources to help you, or a good board game player, or something like that, if you want to be good at Monopoly, or Risk, or Settlers of Catan, or whatever the fashionable game is today. But the question that I'm proposing that we ask together this evening is not about how to be good at an individual aspect of life. Not only how to be good at individual tasks, but how to be good as a whole. How to be a good person.
So, it implicates some of the biggest questions. What is my life all about? How do my studies, or my future career, or this particular job I might take, fit into my life as a whole?
Will it help me be a good person? Will it help my life turn out well? Now, Thomas Aquinas actually has a great deal to say on this question, and in this talk my goal is to give you a kind of overview of the wisdom of the Thomistic tradition of Thomas Aquinas and, of course, Aquinas'own. Aquinas is drawing on a lot of other philosophical predecessors.
Aristotle is one of the big ones in the background for him. Also Cicero and Boethius and lots of other great pagan philosophers. But Aquinas has a kind of synthesis about how to approach this question, and my goal is to give you a kind of introductory overview of the whole picture.
And it's a very big picture, so there's lots of ways to go in... in much greater detail on any of the individual themes that we'll talk about, and we won't have time to get to the bottom of all of them. But what I'm hoping you'll come away with is some understanding of the whole and the main principles.
and also perhaps a renewed interest in examining some of the individual parts. And as a side benefit, I hope that even if you're not completely clear on what will make you a good person, you will have at least one step towards being a good reader of Thomas Aquinas, because at the end, we'll go through the text on your handout and try and read that text together. And I hope to give you an example of the fact that...
fact that Thomas Aquinas is a little bit like an acquired taste or, you know, a foreign language. The first time you encounter it, it seems difficult, but as you work in it a little bit, it quickly comes into focus, and it turns out it's not so hard to read. So I hope to encourage you to actually also read the text of Aquinas for yourself, and then you'll be able to be your own teacher.
Well, in a way, you'll be able to just be a good student of this great teacher, Thomas Aquinas, and if you come away with this with nothing other than that, I will. regardless as being a success. Okay, just for those Thomists in the room, to give you a quick sense of where we're at, this talk is a kind of quasi-overview of the whole second part of the Summa, the whole secunda pars of the Summa, which actually has two parts, as you may know, the first part of the second part and the second part of the second part.
Thomas Aquinas was not extremely creative in coming up with labels, but he is very insightful. Okay, what makes a person good? Let's start with the question of what is good? What is goodness?
What does this mean to ask that question? What makes a person good? This has been the locus of a lot of confusion and a lot of debate, philosophical debate even, since at least the 14th century.
But of course it's a classic question. One common way to answer this question is to say, well listen, whatever I choose for myself is what I regard as good, and so that's good for me. So really, this is a completely specific question. subjective question. I will determine what is good for me.
Okay, that's one way to answer the question, and certainly you're probably familiar with people in our contemporary age who would make that kind of case. Another common way to answer this question, at least historically speaking, especially in the theological traditions, is to say something like this. Well, whatever conforms to God's will. is good. So if I do God's will, or if I follow God's commands, or I obey God somehow, then I will be good.
So there the essence of goodness is really just rule following, or above all following God's will or God's command. And so the definition then of goodness might just be conformity to the divine will. or conformity to God's commands. Under the influence of philosophical voluntarism and nominalism in the 14th century, there's actually a complex history here.
This idea came to be very influential in, say, the 16th and 17th centuries, in the Enlightenment, also in the Reformation, and from there down to our time. Now, Thomas Aquinas doesn't entirely reject these two views that I've just laid out for you. The first one being, well, whatever I desire, and the other being, well, obedience to the divine command or divine will.
He doesn't totally reject them, but I think he would say that both of them are partial, and in a certain way, secondary ways of approaching the question of what is good. And neither of them are able to do full justice. to the subject because they don't get to the heart of the matter. So what is goodness according to Thomas Aquinas? Well, it's interesting.
He doesn't ever provide an actual definition of good because he regards it as a kind of primary notion. ocean, and he doesn't think you can give definitions of primary things like that. But he does repeatedly describe it, and always with two characteristics, which he thinks really do track what it is.
The first characteristic is that it's desirable. The good is what we desire, or what causes or arouses our desire, or our love, or our appetite. It's what we desire in all of our willing. Now, this is interesting.
As a first matter, I'm just going to note this as a kind of footnote, and then we'll move on. If we want to talk about human freedom, desire for Aquinas is actually very important as part of the picture. Because every act of our freedom arises from some preceding desire. for the good, for some good. If we didn't desire the good, or at least some good, we would never choose or will anything.
So, desire for good is at the root of human freedom, according to Aquinas. Okay, that's a very interesting, rich idea. We won't really have time to flesh it out, but maybe there will be questions about that, or we can discuss it afterwards.
But on this view, freedom has to do with how we, as intellectual creatures, rational creatures, seek the good. We seek it not only the way, say, a dog seeks tasty food. We seek it with a higher kind of spontaneity and creativity because we understand our goals and we can order and choose among a vast variety of things. array of possible things that we might do to pursue what we think is good.
So human freedom fits into a picture about how we seek goodness in the world. We seek goodness freely. and with a higher order of activity than any animal is able to do. Do you follow that? So, this question of goodness is tied up with the question of human freedom, too.
But there's a second important way that Aquinas describes the good, and it in a way is related in a very important sense to the first. The good is what perfects a thing. It's what perfects a being. Goodness has a note of perfection to it, completion. So, when you have achieved a true good, you've achieved a kind of perfection.
And when you possess a very full good, the more good it is, the less there is remaining for you to get in that domain. Now, perfections... are variable. Depending on the kind of thing we're talking about, there will be different kinds of perfections. The perfection of a plant is one thing.
The perfection of an animal is a different thing. The perfection of a human person is something different again, or actually of a higher order. Because Aquinas thinks there is a kind of hierarchy of being, where you go from, say, inanimate things, think of a rock, to growing things like plants, to growing and sensing and desiring things.
Those are animals. And we are animals too. We're just rational animals.
We're animals. with intellects and wills, and so able to understand abstractly, and to understand what is good, and therefore to order our activity in a higher kind of way than animals can. Okay, so these perfections... are going to be different depending on the kind of thing we're talking about.
And we don't even have to be talking about those grades of B, and we can just use some very warm, everyday examples. You can say, today was a good day. And you might ask, well, what exactly do you mean by that when you say it was a good day? Like, that was a great summer day. When I say great summer day, you probably have in your mind some things about the day that were as they should be for a summer day.
It was a kind of perfect summer day, if it was a good summer day. There's a perfection involved. Or you could say the same thing about a chocolate bar. That was a good bar of chocolate.
Or a dinner party. Or a conversation with a friend. a relationship in general. Now, is the goodness of a summer day the same or different than the goodness of a chocolate bar? Well, obviously, these are very different things, and what is good about them is different.
But there's something analogically the same, which is why we can use the same word to describe the goodness or the perfection of the summer day and the goodness or the perfection of the chocolate bar. They have all the things that a thing like that ought to have. And so there is a note of perfection about them.
And because they are perfect, they are also desirable to us. Well, in fact, they're desirable to us, especially insofar as they are perfected of us. So when we desire something as good for myself, according to Aquinas, we're desiring some perfection for myself.
Well, this leads us to a more difficult question. What makes a good person or a perfect person? What are our perfections?
It's easier. to talk about this with lower things. So we might just start with an example of a friend of mine is from a family of apple growers.
And so they have apple orchards. And actually, he rebelled against this. and said, I never want to be involved in this apple orchard.
He had to work in the orchard all through his childhood. So I tell this anecdote partly thinking of him, because at the end of his adolescence, when he was getting ready to go out to university, he burned the tools that his parents had made him use so that he would be done with it forever. He was going to university.
He was going to not be an apple farmer. But if you are an apple farmer, and you want to come up with a good apple tree, well, how do you judge that? Well, an apotree that does what it's supposed to do. is a good apple tree. It does it well.
It produces good apples. Ultimately, that's what the apple farmer is interested in. And you might have to think about how to help an apple tree to flourish and produce good apples. There might be a certain amount of fertilizer, or a certain way you're supposed to prune it, or a certain care that you're supposed to take, how much water it should give, or how much sun it should get, etc.
And you might refine over time a kind of practical wisdom. about how the apple tree will produce the best apples, how it will be the best apple tree, a truly good tree. So it depends on the nature of the thing, how to come up with a way to make it good.
And then we can ask a more difficult question, okay? We may have a good sense of how to make good apples, how to grow good apples. How do you make a good human life?
What is good for a human life? What is the perfection of a human being? That's a much harder question and a more contentious one than asking what makes a good apple tree.
But we could at least say this. A good person will be a person with whatever qualities or traits that are needed to do well. even perfectly, whatever it is that human beings are characteristically supposed to do. Right? Do you follow that?
That's the kind of argument that Aquinas makes. Whatever it is that human beings most characteristically do, that characterizes their nature, then whatever qualities or traits they need to do that well will be what makes them good. So then we might ask, well, what exactly is it that human beings characteristically do? Maybe this is a familiar question to you. Those of you who have studied Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics know that this is right there in Aristotle's Ethics and Aquinas' Aquinas takes it just from him.
He says, yes, the human being is a rational animal. So there are some perfections that pertain to us as animals that we share with dogs and cats and lions and bears. But there are some perfections that pertain to us uniquely as rational creatures. And he thinks those are the things that are most important for us to work on and to perfect.
Because that is what is most characteristically human. So, you might ask yourself, in all of the activity that you see people around you in our ambient culture pursuing or trying to be good at, are you really good at it? Are they things that pertain to our animality or to our rationality?
And Aquinas would say, well, actually, that's a very good measure to pay attention to. We have in common with stones that we want to stay in being, and the way we stay in being as human beings is we have food and water and shelter, things like that. Now, we have... common with animals that we generate and raise offspring, and that's a whole important domain of animal life, and also it turns out human life. A lot of human psychology is tied up with that drive, but that's something we have in common with all animals.
Athletic activity can be noble and certainly there it may be guided by reason. Certainly when you get into the higher domains of athletic activity. I mean I'm a fan of American football. What could be more rational than that, right?
That's a joke. Then there are things that are really proper to us as rational. Aquinas thinks that these are things like to have friends. Friendship is something characteristic of rational beings.
We want to have communion with other persons. We can share deeply with them. We can pursue common projects, projects that might even touch the whole of life.
Think of... a marriage. For Aquinas, this is, yes, about reproduction, about the generation of offspring and their raising, but it's also about having a friendship for the whole of life, which is what he thinks marriage is. It's a special kind of friendship for the whole of life, that it has the specificity that it's also concerned with the raising of offspring. But included in our rationality, of course, is the ability to know the truth.
Above all, the truth about God. The ability to love. To love God and to love our neighbor. To do what is just.
Justice is not a category in the animal kingdom. Lions do not deliberate about whether it is just to eat the gazelle, or to eat the gazelle that my other lion friend has just killed. In the animal kingdom, this doesn't exist as a category, but it does exist, very importantly, among human beings, in human society. These are perfections that are proper to us as human, as rational beings.
So, in a way, we could define the human person as a being that is meant to be perfect not only on the animal level, not only to have a perfect physique, not only on the physical or biological level, but on the spiritual level. A person who seeks love and friendship, who seeks justice, who seeks truth. Now, when you frame it this way, all of a sudden, your time in the university takes on a new focus.
Because what is a life in the university supposed to be concerned with? It is not concerned with animal goods, although, like, we're going to feed and clothe you and house you. But it's above all concerned with the spiritual good of knowing the truth and growing in friendship, behaving justly with each other. When we frame our lives in this way, we begin to see that we need some virtues, some qualities or traits.
that are going to help us direct ourselves towards these high spiritual goods. As I was saying before, the distinctive thing about the human being is that the human being is able to to know the good with the mind, and then direct our actions, sometimes by a very complex and long-term plan, towards the good we see. But of course, this also comes with a danger. It's a danger we don't see as clearly in animals, that we will have the wrong idea of what is good for us.
And this problem of being confused about what is really good for us becomes much greater because of sin. So this is also a very important part of the picture, according to Thomas Aquinas, and of course... Christian tradition.
That's because as we sin, our intellects become clouded, our appetites become distorted, and in fact, it becomes much harder for us to control our appetites, our appetites for lower things, especially for the goods of touch, which would mainly be pleasures of food and drink and of sex. These things become very hard to control. And even when our mind knows what we should do, we often find that we're not doing what we know we ought to do. So we'll have more to say about this in just a minute, because I'm going to talk in a little more detail about the fall.
Okay, so let me go back to the common errors that I mentioned at the beginning. One common error about seeking the good, what is the good, as I said, was whatever I desire is good for me. So that's a kind of a relativistic position.
Well, where's the truth in that? For Aquinas, it's... It's certainly true that the good is desirable.
So we don't want to just construct an image of the human good that has nothing to do with what human beings desire. But it is also true that we are easily deceived. by our desires, and our desires sometimes lead us in the wrong direction. There can be errors in what we desire.
So it also seems, and most of us have experienced that, so it also seems that we need to do some education or purification of our desires. It can't just be anything that I desire, but something that is perfected of me. truly perfected. That's what will be really good for me.
The second common error was about God's law and whether just obeying God's will is enough to say that you are a good person. Now, Aquinas thinks that God's law is given to us to help us get pointed in the right direction, get pointed ultimately back to God. But also, it teaches us how to avoid going off the rails.
So, for example, thou shalt not kill is a very good instruction for how to structure human relationships. If you're violating the fifth commandment, then You're going to be doing fundamental injustices to the people around you that will destroy any sense of shared human society. The reason that killing is wrong is not just because God has forbidden it to us.
Rather, God has done that because it is a terrible deviation from the right order that he has created in us. the universe. So Aquinas says something very interesting, and this is really maybe a subject for another talk, and so I'm not going to go too far down this detour, but Aquinas even says something very interesting, that God's decrees are not just an arbitrary rule, they really point us to our true flourishing. That's because there's an order of divine wisdom, which he says is like a law for God's willing.
In a sense, there's a law, God has a law to himself, which is the order of his wisdom. So all of his willing flows forth from the ordering of his wisdom, the wise ordering of all things. So that human beings would have right order relationships in human society requires that we not kill.
And God's law is in a way a manifestation of a truth about that order. Okay, if there are more questions about that, I'll... I look forward to entertaining them in the Q&A, but we still have a lot more to say about what makes a person good. And so I want to keep moving forward.
The complicating factor that I mentioned a moment ago is sin. And here especially, we have the problem of the fall. So according to Aquinas, the human race was initially created in grace.
That's a very important starting point. He thinks that our first parents... began with an original grace. So at every moment of their existence, before the fall, they had a grace from above that allowed them to know God perfectly and to know clearly what they were to do and to carry it out.
But through their own fault, they turned away from God and sinned. The result of that is that the human race lost that original grace and now was plagued by a wound. A wound that is not being in right relationship with God. And because of turning away from God, we then experience rebellion in ourselves.
This is how Aquinas describes the effects of the fall on us. Our minds should be obedient to God, but because in our first parents'day, turned away, all of the powers below our mind, even within ourselves, like our bodily appetites, they have also become rebellious. And they don't listen to our reason anymore. And that's why we have... the problem of concupiscence, which is a wrong desiring of pleasure or seeking goods not according to reason.
So we do tend to have some kind of thirst for happiness, but it often goes wrong because of the wounds of sin in us. How do we fix this problem? How do we begin to acquire what will lead us to our true perfection? We might even ask, you know, perhaps we've not even gotten completely clear on what is our true perfection. Well, let me sort of...
Spoiler alert if you're reading Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas thinks that our true perfection is to attain what is fitting for our intellectual nature, but above all that is found in God alone. God who is the perfect good, God who is the source of all that is good. So he thinks that ultimately our true happiness will consist in attaining to God. The difficulty, of course, is that's not easily possible for us.
In fact, it's completely impossible based on our own natural powers. So for this, we need God's help, which, happily, he does offer to us through his grace. grace.
So, in a certain sense, the answer to the question, what makes the human person good, comes the answer, well, in the end, it's primarily the grace of God. Because of ourselves, we often are not good. At the same time, Aquinas does not paint the picture that this is a kind of alien divine good that is just zapped into our souls, that has nothing to do with our natural human lives. He really thinks that there is a way that we can progressively grow towards being a better and better person. This is the activity of acquiring virtue.
That is aided by grace, actually in a very important way, but it's also possible to our nature to acquire some real virtue, and the virtues are the paths to happiness and to goodness. So what is a virtue, according to Aquinas? A virtue is a disposition of soul, or a habit, that makes us good and that no one can use badly. Now, if we wanted to spend a little time unpacking that definition, I'd welcome some questions. It's a disposition of soul.
He calls it a habitus in Latin. A habitus is something stable. Think of the way that you perhaps have learned a foreign language.
There are probably... Are there people here who have studied foreign languages? Most of you? Some of you? A few of you at least?
Yeah, a good number. How about musical instruments? Has anybody studied a musical instrument?
So if you've studied, say, the piano, you have gone through sometimes a rather rigorous process of learning how to play this instrument. And when you begin, it's not always that easy. I don't know about you, but when I took piano lessons, I did not sit down at the piano and have my piano teacher say, okay, play.
That's not the way it works. If you've ever taken any kind of music lessons, I mean, typically what happens is you sit down at the piano bench and the piano teacher says, no, you're not sitting right. Okay, sit up straight, right? Oh, the bench is too...
far away. Move it closer to the keyboard. Okay, now, hold your hands over the keys.
No, not that way. Curl your fingers just like this, and you're like, this does not feel natural. This is not normal. And then she's telling you to do the scales, and you're thinking, I wanted to play Beethoven. You know, why am I playing scales?
But of course, these are all stages of acquiring a habit of being able to play the piano. Now, playing the piano is not a virtue. A virtue adds another dimension to that kind of stable disposition. But if you have practiced a musical instrument for a while, what happens to you?
You acquire a new ability. a kind of ready disposition to play that instrument. And the longer you study, the more you work at it, the more you're able to play that instrument well, beautifully, artistically, creatively even. you're able to begin transcending some of the rules in the service of creating beautiful music.
So a great virtuoso piano player does not need to think about how to sit on the piano bench and how to hold his or her fingers over the keyboard. These rules have just been incorporated into the person and now just becomes almost a second nature. Well, that's exactly the way Aquinas describes a virtue. A virtue is like a second nature. It's a stable disposition of soul that gives you a capacity to exercise your powers in a certain domain with ease, with creativity, with excellence, with flourishing.
Okay, now, playing a musical instrument or learning a foreign language or anything like this, these are what Aquinas would call arts. They can be misused. You could play the piano in order to, I don't know, what's some sinful goal?
You could play the piano in order to have a kind of prideful adulation from your audience. That wouldn't be a moral perfection. You could learn French because you want to go to France and seduce some attractive French person.
Okay? That certainly would not be virtuous. Right?
That's not making you good. You could use French in the service of an... international bank robbery or something like that.
I mean, we have all kinds of movies about this kind of thing. The kind of clever thieves who seem good, but in fact what they're good at is doing something that is corrupted and unjust. So a virtue is different from these kinds of things because a virtue can never be used for something bad. Think about the classical virtues. Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance.
If you have the virtue of justice, you have a stable disposition with respect to your will. of giving to the other what is due. You want, or you habitually are ready to, give to others what is owed them. You cannot make a bad use of that virtue.
If you really have a stable disposition that renders you ready to give what is due to another, then it will always be right to give what is due to another. So that kind of virtue is simply perfective. Aquinas thinks that it makes you good. And if you were to read in Aristotle, or if you were to read in Cicero, or above all, if you were to read in Thomas Aquinas, in the second part of the Summa, he goes through a very long discussion of these virtues. And these are the four cardinal moral virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
He thinks that they are the natural virtues that make a human being good. Because Because they perfect in us what is highest. Now he also thinks that there are intellectual virtues.
Those are virtues especially important for you as a student. These don't perfect your willing, but they do perfect your knowing. It's, say, the virtue of...
of studiousness. That is a good virtue that will help you flourish as an aspiring intellectual. It's perfecting your power of knowing. We could talk much more about all the other virtues that fall under these kind of capital virtues, these cardinal virtues.
For example, if we were to look at the virtues underneath justice, Aquinas says, well, there's piety, that's being obedient, honoring your parents and your country. You can never give fully back to your parents what you owe them because they're the source of your being, Aquinas says. So you owe a kind of piety to your parents.
Okay, so footnote. don't call your parents, you know, while you're at university. Call them.
Tell them that you actually care about them, you know, that you love them so much. That's an act of piety. Observance. You give what is due to those who are in a position of dignity.
Gratitude. That's being thankful towards benefactors. Truthfulness. This is manifesting the truth to another. Remember, you know, what you think is what you say.
Affability or friendliness. This is something, actually, that's very important for dorm life. I don't know if you all live in dorms here in Edinburgh. You probably have roommates.
Affability is a very important thing to have in a roommate. Because it means not being grumpy. Even when you kind of feel grumpy.
Right? You behave in a friendly way towards other people. You try to be pleasant.
To be around. You're polite. You're civil. You're good-mannered. Those are virtues that make it easier to live with you, because you're probably a little bit difficult to live with.
We all should admit that, right? Liberality or generosity, that would be another virtue under justice. One more, very important one that I'll mention, the virtue of religion. This is to render to God what is due to him. And like our parents, only even more so, we can never give to God...
what we owe him, because he is the very source of our existence. So, acts of worship are part of the virtue of religion. It's an act of justice for us, or a quasi-act of justice, for us to render worship and thanks and adoration to God.
Okay, we can talk about much more, but now I'd like to speak for a moment about grace, because this is where we'll get to the text of Aquinas that you have in front of you, and also... where we find, I think, the most powerful response of Aquinas about what makes a person good. And I think maybe the best thing for us to do is to, there's plenty of additional things to say about grace, but maybe we should just jump in to this text and read it together so that we can learn a little bit together about how to read Aquinas.
And you'll see a lot of the things that I've been saying. are included in this condensed little article from Aquinas'Summa. So this is from the Prima Secundae, question 109, article 2. And as you may know, in the Summa, Aquinas always asks questions.
Every little article, the smallest part of the Summa, is a question. So there are hundreds and hundreds of questions. The question we have before us is whether man, and by the way, the word there in Latin, I just took this from a standard translation available on the internet, the Latin there is homo, which doesn't have a gendered connotation, so it's just referring to to kind of this universal singular of human being. We could have translated whether a human being.
But going with this translation, just because it will be hard to correct it on the fly, whether man can wish or do any good without grace. Aquinas always begins with the objections. I'm going to skip the first objection. Actually, there are three.
I didn't put them all on the page here. But you should always feel free when you're reading Aquinas to skip the objections and come back to them later. That's the standard quick way that I always read an article in the Summa.
The objections are important, and the replies to the objections are even more important. But the core answer of Aquinas is the most important. So that's the place to go first.
And that's where you'll find Aquinas answering the question. that he's given you. But he does pose good arguments against his view, and those are the objections. So let's just jump to Aquinas'answer.
So the question, whether man can wish or do any good with that grace, and he answers, man's nature may be looked at in two ways. First, in its integrity, as it was in our first parent before sin. There he's talking about our first parents, think Adam and Eve.
Secondly, as it is corrupted in us after the sin of our first parent. Okay, so Aquinas is here drawing a very big, divided line in history. There is before the fall, and there is after the fall. And human nature works differently after the fall in important ways because it has been wounded by sin. And so if we're going to answer the question, what makes a person good, then Aquinas thinks we have to first get clear on...
the kind of trouble we're in because of the fall. And that's what he's going to now distinguish. He's going to draw that out.
Now, in both states, human nature needs the help of God as first mover to do or wish any good whatsoever. This is not the subject of our talk, but Aquinas does think that for absolutely every... that you make, God must be the first mover, giving the actuality, giving the beginnings of motion to your action.
So Aquinas absolutely does not think that there's any problem with saying that God is the first mover. moves you to a free human act, he would say every free human act has to have some kind of impetus coming from God at the beginning of it. Okay, but that's a huge subject and not our subject for today. The state of integrity, returning to the text, as regards the sufficiency of the operative power, okay, in other words, as regards the natural powers that you have in you because you're a human being.
He says, man, by his natural endowments, could wish and do the good proportionate to his nature. In the state of integrity, that means before the fall. So our first parents, he says, could wish and do the good proportionate to our nature.
Such as the good of acquired virtue. What are the acquired virtues? Well, think of the ones that I just named. Above all, prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, all the virtues under justice that I mentioned. Aquinas thinks all of those things, Adam and Eve, prior to the fall, would have been able to do from the power that their human nature had in them.
They have the capacity to do those things. Even so, Aquinas goes on, but not surpassing good as the good of infused virtue. Okay, we haven't really talked about that. The infused virtues, above all, would be the virtues that order us directly to God. Like faith.
Like charity. Like hope. These are theological virtues. That put us in direct contact with God.
That, Aquinas thinks, is supernatural. That is a supernatural perfection of the person. That has to be given from above, even for Adam and Eve. Okay, let's get to the more interesting part, though.
This is where he talks about corrupt nature. That's the nature that we all have. Nature after the fall. He says, but in the state of corrupt nature, man falls short of what he could do by his nature, so that he is unable to fulfill it by his own natural powers.
What does he mean? Even the natural goods, like being just, or being prudent, or being temperate, being an affable, friendly person, these things we now find to be difficult to do. That's the effect of sin in us. Even so, let's go back to Aquinas'text.
Yet, because human nature is not altogether corrupted by sin, so as to be shorn of every natural good, even in the state of corrupted nature, it can, by virtue of its natural endowments, work some for taking. Okay, so in other words, we're not totally lost. We're not completely corrupted.
There are some good things that we can do. What are they? He says, well, to build dwellings, plant vineyards, and the like. In fact, in a longer version of this text, Aquinas has a longer version.
This is the Summa. Summa just means summary. It's very highly summarized here.
In a longer version, Aquinas lists a whole long list of things that you can do. It's all the things like living in civil society, founding a dot-com startup. I mean, these are things that pertain to our natural capacity. And they're good. They're good to do.
What is he saying, though? He says, What is he saying then? Our wounded nature is weakened because of sin.
We can still do some good things. But we can't do every good, even every good that's... befitting our nature, let alone the higher goods, which would be with respect to God, like loving God above all things. That's just not possible to us.
So he concludes, and this is the last paragraph, in the state of perfect nature, man needs gratuitous strength in order to do and wish supernatural good, but in the state of corrupt nature, there are two reasons why we need grace. He says, namely, in order to be healed, and to carry out works of supernatural virtue which are meritorious. Okay, so the bottom line. If you want to be good, we have certain goods that pertain to our nature as human beings. We can do many of those things from our own natural powers.
But grace heals and strengthens us in doing them so that when we're in a state of grace, when we're in right relationship with God, God helps us even to do the natural things that we're otherwise not able to do. ordered to do just as human beings. But on top of this, God offers us something surpassing what our nature is capable of, and that is a share in his own divine life.
That divine life is something that we cannot generate from ourselves, and that must be given to us by grace. Okay, so I'll just now give you my conclusion. Aquinas thinks that you can genuinely do some good without grace.
You can be a good person in a certain respect. You can be affable. You can be just. You can be prudent and temperate.
But you probably won't succeed at doing that all the time. And there will be certain respects where you find it difficult or where you even fail. What is more, he thinks, you will not have ordered your life perfectly to God.
And that is the most important thing you can do. Because in the end, that will be the only thing that really matters when your life comes to its conclusion. So to be good in the fullest sense, you need the help of God. This is what we call grace, which heals the wounds of sin and raises us up not only to pursue the good, goods that fit our nature, but also to live a kind of divine life by his grace, a life of supernatural faith, hope, and love, which are, for Aquinas, the substance of the spiritual life.
A very short measure of your spiritual health is to look at the acts of faith, hope, and love that you are doing day in and day out. How often are you worshiping God? How often are you praying to Him?
How often are you believing Him and loving Him and your neighbor? This is a good measure of your spiritual health. Final point.
And this is an overarching truth that sets kind of frame around everything that we've been talking about. We love things that are good, that are perfective of us. That's what we desire, things that perfect us. Does God's love work in the same way? Aquinas says, no, God is a very different kind of being than us.
We desire what perfects us. We desire what we don't have. But God is completely perfect, lacking in nothing. So it cannot be the case that God reaches out for a good that he doesn't have. There is no good that God doesn't have.
In fact, there is nothing that God is not the source of. So everything that exists, exists only because it comes from God. This means we have to think about love and goodness in God very differently from love and goodness in creatures. He is good as the perfection of goodness, as the fullness of all being, as the source of every good.
And we are made good as he gives us a share in his being, in his life, in his love, in his grace. That means that God does not love you. Because you're good. You're often not good.
He still loves you. He doesn't get anything from you, really. What does he want? He wants to share himself with you.
He wants to share his goodness with you. His goodness, His love, is the cause of our goodness. And that's a wonderful saving truth. And that's why we need God's grace in order to be truly good.
From ourselves, we don't have anything truly good. But God's love is the reason why he has mercy on us and draws us into his life. He is perfectly good, and he is the one who makes us good. Thank you.
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