The Political Implications of Acquired Moral Virtue—Even Amid the Life of Grace
Introductory remark. The following paper is a reworked version of a text given at the American Maritain Association in Spring 2024. Due to the busyness of my schedule, I chose against seeking to have it published in our yearly volume. For the sake of giving priority to other labors (which are not immediately related to the topic at hand), I do not plan to put this text into form for a journal article. However, the topic is very important in view of contemporary discussions regarding the question of the infused moral virtues and acquired moral virtues. The approach below is not primarily exegetical but, rather, considers the philosophical (and, I would argue, the theological) implications of denying the continued operation of the acquired moral virtues in those who are in a state of grace. The argument is inchoate, but I believe—on the foundation of the older scholastic tradition among various schools, as well as on the well-founded and well-articulated observations of thinkers like Maritain—that it is potentially deleterious for a proper understanding of the nature of human moral and political culture, as well as the elevation of the supernatural order itself, if one denies the continued co-existence of the acquired moral virtues alongside (or, to put it better, vitally subordinated to) the infused moral virtues.
If in what follows it seems that I am not interacting with the extensive literature on this topic. This is due to the nature of the originally oral nature of the text, as well as my general aim to outline the topic in view of certain things from the later Thomist tradition, not always operative in all authors considering this problem. The current debate is often more Thomasian than Thomist and is inflected toward a kind of “positive philosophy” or “positive theology” of Thomas’s own text. Obviously, I am not claiming that such authors are exclusively concerned with a textual-interpretive kind of intellectual historicizing. Clearly each of the main figures (mentioned below) propose their interpretation of Thomas as being, ultimately, the most compelling account of the question at hand. Nonetheless, in this talk, I was more so concerned with laying out the stakes of the problem and how to analyze it in a philosophical- and theological-scientific manner.
If the footnote references sometimes seem sparse or cursory, this is due to the pressures of time, though with an awareness of the genre of the present website where it is posted. The reader can, however, relatively easily attain the texts mentioned, even if not fully cited.
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“Now, based on what we have said, it is clear that only the infused virtues are perfect and to be called virtues in an unqualified manner, for they set man in right order toward that end which is unqualifiedly ultimate. However, the other virtues, namely the acquired virtues, are not virtues without qualification but, rather, in a qualified sense, for they set man in right order with respect to an end that is ultimate in a given genus, though not with respect to that end which is unqualifiedly ultimate.”1 At first sight, the words of St. Thomas in this passage from the Prima Secundae seem relatively clear in their implications: human agency involves acquired and infused virtues; the former are true virtues;2 however, they are limited as virtues, insofar as their ultimate measure is something non-final and non-beatifying.3 According to the standard (and long-received) account, therefore, everything seems relatively straight-forward, therefore: the human person has two ends, one natural and one supernatural; the virtues that fit us for the former are qualifiedly virtues; but both sorts of virtue are necessary for human life. Human excellence involves both human and divine virtue, both operative and integrated, yet in some way distinct from each other: such was the general consensus of Thomists for centuries, and it was also commonly held by members of the Society of Jesus who were more or less Suarezian in their thought.4
Yet, the person who is familiar with the Thomistic literature of the past two decades will be aware of claims that echo the following remark of Notre Dame’s Jean Porter: “Given what Aquinas says about the necessity for the infused moral virtues, taken together with the wider context set by his analysis of grace as a form of the soul, it is impossible on his view that the infused and acquired virtues can co-exist in the same individual.”5 In the Christian moral life, grace would perfect nature by replacing or instrumentalizing6 it and performing its own labors, all in the service of supernatural ends. With various nuances, the position is held by such authors as Jean Porter, William Mattison, Eleanore Stump, and in a somewhat softened form by Angela Knobel. Contemporary voices such as David Decosimo, Thomas Osborne, Brandon Dahm (in a perhaps less emphatic way, perhaps), and others have maintained, however, the older Scholastic position, generally upon purely textual bases in Aquinas himself.
The purpose of the present paper is not to adjudicate, yet again, a full textual sampling of various remarks across Thomas’s corpus attesting to one side of this debate or to the other, nor to gather together a full study from earlier scholastics. Instead, I wish to provide a kind of overview of principles that are operative in the matter and in light of those principles themselves to note how the denial of the coexistence of the acquired and infused moral virtues leads to a profoundly strong kind integralism, denying the unique and irreplicable human task of intra-historical political and cultural development and thereby returning Catholic thought, nolens volens, to a powerfully “sacral” conception of political agency,7 implying the de iure necessity for a pan-instrumentalization of natural finalities in formal and objective subordination to the supernatural order. My argument will be that if one wishes to deny the coexistence of the acquired and infused moral virtues, this will be at least one of the implicit consequences of such a denial.
Three Principles: Nature-Grace; Division of Supernaturality; Objective Specification
A first and essential presupposition for any position related to this topic is that which concerns the distinction and relationship between the orders of nature and grace. The literature relative to this contested topic is massive, especially in the wake of the de Lubac’s controversial study Surnaturel, along with the positive and negative assessments of his reading of Aquinas.8 In this paper, I wish to address both a relatively broad listenership as well as a strictly Thomistic public. Therefore, given the significant differences among contemporary Catholics regarding the correct parsing of the natural-supernatural distinction, I will here (as in my remarks regarding the next two “principles”) provide both a “minimal” interpretation and a “maximally” Thomistic one.
First, the “minimal” interpretation of the nature-grace distinction: the human person has a single ultimate end. All are called to supernatural beatitude, and other finalities in human life are subordinated to that ultimate end. Human nature can be said to be the naturally apt receptive subject for grace, and all that is good and true in man’s non-supernatural finalities will, in some way, find its fulfillment in the supernatural life that is our ultimate end. The natural finalities of the human person have sufficient ontological and moral “density” to ensure that when a person is not in a state of habitual grace he or she, nonetheless, does not succumb to absolute depravity. Human intelligence and volitionality, though finding its ultimate fulfillment in the knowledge and love of God, nonetheless does not elicit solely sinful actions in such a state. This represents a kind of minimalist Tridentine claim,9 and in light of this minimum, one must say that there is some kind of natural ontological principle that proximately specifies such at-least-incipiently-virtuous actions, at least in some of those who are not in a state of grace.10
The “maximalist” Thomistic position (underlying my own position and remarks) is as follows. All things have been created in view of a single ultimate divine decree: the glorification of God through the redemption in Christ.11 However, this single order involves three interrelated orders communicated by God, the former being presupposed by the others:12 nature, grace (objectively uncreated supernaturality), and the hypostatic order (subjectively uncreated supernaturality). Certain natures, namely humans and angels, have spiritual faculties of intellection and of volition connaturally fit to their respective human or angelic natural intellectual light. The human, properly as rational, is fit for knowledge of sensible quiddities, and the angelic, properly as a created intelligence, is properly fit for self-knowledge.13 However, both of these, precisely as intellectual, are extensively and adequately open to the possibility of knowledge and love of God in His mystery.14 As natural, such openness is formally-objectively specified by the limits of the given created intellect in question. For that reason, the openness of created nature for such knowledge and love of the uncreated God is said to be a passive obediential potency for such cognition and appetition (and in the case of human intellection, it will be discursively elicited). Such potency is not a mere possibility that human and angelic nature would be “indifferent to.” In such a supernatural order, nature finds itself fulfilled in what remains, however, completely natural in its formal capacities. This obediential and elevable capacity is the “point of insertion” or natural receptive subject for the life of grace.15
This brings us immediately to a second distinction. Not all cases of supernaturality are the same, thus requiring us to disambiguate our terms. We will see here, however, that a “minimal interpretation” is slightly more difficult to draw in such matters. Nonetheless, I believe I can provide a relatively cogent minimal position after, however, first explaining what is at stake in the robust distinction of kinds of supernaturality recognized by the later Thomists.16 To do so, we must consider three very different senses of the word “supernatural”: the supernatural most broadly and improperly considered, the modally supernatural, and the formally or substantially supernatural.
The first sense of “supernatural”—an admittedly inexact and merely colloquial sense of the term—must be excluded: that which lies outside of the normal order of the physical “laws of nature.” Although this first sense is obviously not the scholastic sense of “supernatural,” it nonetheless exercises a powerful influence upon popular understandings of the term “supernatural.” Thus, to the “man on the street,” the word “supernatural” will conjure up the paranormal world of Art Bell and George Noory and the spiritual domain of angels and demons. These are not, however, “supernatural” in the strict theological sense of the term. Nonetheless, this point of ambiguity does point us in the right direction. Such alien, psychic, and spiritual phenomena point us in the direction of that which is somehow outside of the being and operation of nature—albeit, in this particular case, “nature” is constricted because of modern materialist presuppositions. The scholastic will say: if such mind-reading were possible, it would, in point of fact, be in some sense, natural. At the most, it would be “preternatural,” not meaning thereby something spooky but, rather, something that is “beyond” nature but, nonetheless, belonging to the order of created effects that are formally natural but within the scope of natural powers of some sort, at least hypothetically.
In absolute contrast to this very weak meaning of supernatural there is the wholly opposed case of strict and lofty supernaturality (the last in the threefold series above): God Himself, according to the mystery of His Triune life. To the later Thomists (and according to Thomas himself), this would be the essential order of supernaturality. By the time of the post-Tridentine period at the latest, one would call such supernaturality “substantial” or supernaturale quoad substantiam. According to the later Thomistic terminology, such supernaturality can be either uncreated or created. Uncreated supernaturality is non-participated supernaturality, either in divinis (i.e., the Trinity of Persons themselves) or in the economy of salvation (i.e., the uncreated Person of the Word in which the human nature of Christ subsists).17 Created supernaturality is the mysterious case of participated supernaturality, creaturely supernaturality.18 It pertains to those gifts that affect creatures, capacitating them for acts of knowledge and love that have the Uncreated God as their formal objects. Such created supernatural gifts, as it were, “look in two directions”: toward the creaturely substance which they subjectively elevate (after the manner of a quality) and toward the Triune God in whose Uncreated mystery they objectively terminate their activities of knowledge and love. Thus, we have sanctifying grace, the theological virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the “light of glory” subjectively capacitating the intellect for immediate vision of God, the habitus of theological science, and also the infused moral virtues. Each of these is specified in some way in relation to the Trinitarian mystery (and therefore, even below, involves a kind of beginning of the participated eternity that will fully flower in the hereafter)19: as indwelling as the vital principle of new life (habitual sanctifying grace); as the First Supernatural Truth revealing (faith); as passive readiness to supernaturally moved toward a kind of quasi-experiential encounter with God (the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom); as acting with a justice that is configured to image of Christ and the Trinity (infused justice); etc. Insofar as each of these is primarily specified and differentiated in relation to the particular capacitation that it grants to the creature (potentia dicitur ad actum), each has a particular formal object quo (or ratio formalis obiecti ut obiectum) that in each and every case is formally supernatural. When we elicit an act of infused theological faith, we do not merely believe as the demons do (natural, “acquired faith”), albeit with a kind of Christian gilding; rather, we believe in a way that is marked by the acceptance of the self-manifestation of the “First Truth,” the supernatural Trinity, the supernatural truths of the economy of salvation, and the natural truths that God has revealed to us on the authority of the supernatural attestation that marks out the formality of faith itself.
But, there is a role for the aforementioned “gilding,” a kind of supernatural “manner” of doing a deed that, in the end, is formally-objectively natural. Thus, we have the other sense of “supernatural” that is distinguished from the supernaturale quoad substantiam, namely the supernaturale quoad modum: that which is modally supernatural, or supernatural in its particular mode of being performed, of being finalized, or in its very unique character as something that cannot substantially be performed by any power of nature.20 The first (modal supernaturality according to efficient causality) involves an action that a natural power is perhaps capable of doing, but it is performed by an efficient cause that is above nature: thus, natural sight can be miraculously returned to the blind and natural health—and even natural life—can be restored by God Himself. The second kind of modal supernaturality (modal supernaturality, in relation to a further end, quoad finem) is the most interesting for our purposes: it is the supernaturality by which one action, retaining its species, is at least virtually ordered to a further, supernatural end. We will briefly return to this kind of supernaturality below, as it is the kind of modal supernaturality that belongs to truly human acts when elicited immediately by the acquired moral virtue, even though the act is ordered to a further end that is formally extrinsic to the immediate end of the natural virtue in question. (However, the sources to be consulted for a full study of this topic will be only indicated in a footnote.) Finally, there are cases of modal supernaturality involving something that no power of nature could formally cause, though the effect technically remains natural in species. Thus, according to St. Thomas (at least early in his career), the species of the luminosity of the resurrected body will be proportioned to sight and, hence, will remain in some way natural, even substantially.21
The distinction between modal and substantial supernaturality involves some problems regarding the articulation of a “minimalist” account of this particular principle. For example, certain Scotist accounts of grace held that the supernaturality of grace involved only a relationship to God as to a new and higher cause. Thus, even in the vision of God in the hereafter, the human intellect would need no subjective capacitation (“light of glory”) for unmediated knowledge and love of God. Thus, immediate vision of God would be something possible for the human intellect as such, though “access” to that vision could only be effected by God manifesting Himself to the created intellect. In the opinion of the Thomists, such claims ultimately represented a reduction of grace to the merely modally supernatural: it’s not a question of an act that is formally outside of the scope of the intellect, but rather, only effectively impossible for it.22 Some nominalist accounts of grace would go even further and make grace merely a question of legalistic extrinsic attribution, a view that helped to pave the way for the position held classically by early Protestant thought.23 Such would be a kind of limit case for modal supernaturality: a forensic justification that only God could effect.
Thus, a “minimal” account of this second principle would need to rule out the Scotist and nominalist positions as possible contenders for membership in the “minimal” camp. (In any event, the Scotists and nominalists would also be excluded from this conversation in the end, due to their denial of the need for infused moral virtues.24) Thus, having excluded the Scotists and various nominalists, a minimal position could run as follows: there is 1˚ supernaturality consisting in the Trinitarian life of Christians, and there are 2˚ some formally natural things that only God can supernaturally bring about, at least in certain circumstances. Such a minimal articulation sufficiently accepts, in implicit form, what is more fully explicated in a more developed position, such as the Thomist one that I outlined above.
To this point, I have presupposed one final, third metaphysical principle, imbuing all being and agency in both the natural and the supernatural orders, namely the fact that every power, habit, or act is specified by its particular formal object.25 According to a kind of minimally committed interpretive framework, this principle could be understood as follows: if there is some differentiation among the capacities and actions of various created beings, that differentiation will imply that such capacities and actions ultimately have a different “objective orientation.” Thus: intellectual knowledge is concerned with intellectually cognizable being; volition is concerned with being as potentially sought after and rested in; cogitation has to do with those particular things we can fantasize about freely; temperance has to do with human actions under the aspect of desirability to be rationally measured; and so forth.
According to a more robust Thomistic interpretation, one should more clearly distinguish between the formal object quod and formal object quo (or ratio formalis obiecti ut res and ratio formalis obiecti ut obiectum) of a given power, habit, or act. Thus, sanctifying grace, faith, hope, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, acquired supernatural theology, and even the infused moral virtues all have the Trinity as their formal object quod; however, this same Triunity is ultimately objectified by those various habitus in different manners: as First Supernatural Truth (faith), as light of discursive theologizing (theological “science”26), as radiating in supernaturalized human relations within the mystical body of Christ (some species of infused justice), etc.
Thus, we have our 3 ruling principles in this matter: the appropriate understanding of the relationship between nature and grace; the two different ways that supernaturality irradiates creation (i.e., formally or modally); the specification of all actions by their formal objects. We will now apply these basic principles to the question concerning the infused moral virtues, with an eye toward noting a particular political implication.
The Infused Moral Virtues do Not Suffice for Explaining the Temporal Task of Christians
According to St. Thomas, the infused moral virtues are capacities required 1˚ for living the full vitality of a new supernatural life and 2˚for adapting our human acts to the new ends that are bestowed by the theological virtues, so that our moral acts might be proportioned to our supernaturalized agency. Our Christian moral agency will not be merely passively carried out in the wake of the theological virtues. Rather, our moral use of human freedom must itself be exercised as by a true agent, habitually perfected by a perfective state of soul, enabling us to elicit divinized moral actions as from a true and free source.
Therefore, as later Thomists would come to state more explicitly,27 the infused moral virtues are not merely modally supernatural but, rather, are formally or substantially supernatural in their objects. This is a striking claim, of course. What it means is that the prudence, justice, courage, and temperance (as well as all their connected virtues) exercised by a Christian will be marked by the supernaturality of the Triune God. The Christian life will not be a mere moral imitatio Christi but, rather, a true continuation of Christ’s own Uncreated vitality, participated in by the members of the Church. Specifically Christian morality, down to the lowliest of acts of infused temperance, will be marked by a kind of participatively eternal splendor, even here-below in our state as wayfarers.
This membership will be first and foremost reflected within the infused virtues associated with justice.28 As Thomas and the later Thomists and other scholastics will state: the infused moral virtues fit us not for the earthly city, but for the celestial one.29 To put it another way: they fit us for a living together as members of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. The various species of infused justice supernaturally capacitate our wills so that they may be ready to render to others what is supernaturally owed to them as potential or actual members of Christ. Merely thumbing through the Gospels, the Pauline corpus, Patristic authors, ascetical and monastic writers, or later spiritual authors, we could readily discover a host of examples concerning how grace not only transforms the temporal bonds existing between people as citizen-members of the moral community that is the political community but, most importantly and immediately, renders our actions fit to the profound union of those of whom St. Paul would write, “We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members, one of another” (Romans 12:5).
This structure of supernatural relationships will bear fruit not only in a supernaturally Christ-configured30 attitude of self-sacrifice and mercy in interpersonal relations. It will also play out in the grace of marriage, where parents play their particular role as heads of the “domestic Church.” Likewise, too, it should give rise to a readiness to recognize the grandeurs of the Saints (above all the Mother of God) and the gift of the hierarchy in the life of Christians. It will imbue Christian worship with a supernatural spirit that should create an entire cultus of external actions rendering homage to God. And so forth…
Similar examples could be drawn in the domains of prudence, courage, and temperance. There is a reason why ascetical literature so hyperbolically discusses Christian fasting, why the martyrs strike us as we consider the immense élan of courage that animates their deeds, why Christians in all ages have had a kind of utter certainty in their discernment of conscience when they listen with docility to the voice of the Church’s living magisterium: virtuous Christian self-abnegation should be something supernatural in itself, in its formal object. Especially when such deeds are drawn along in the wake of the exercise of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we have the signal cases of the Christian life in act.
However, as humans, we perform many acts that have natural goods as their formal objects. Endlessly clear cases could be drawn from the arts. A healthy Christian culture does not solely appreciate and create “Christian art.” One can think, for example, of a work such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a text born of his deep Christianity but written as a tale that had its own internal mythological coherence.31 Admittedly, however, this example is a kind of limit case, for it exists on the borders of Christianity and human culture. There are, however, many great works of literature, painting, music, sculpture, etc., that present us with goods that are not purely reducible to Christian finalities yet most surely can be appreciated in themselves for the beauty that they communicate. The same could be said, also, regarding all of the “useful and ludic arts” and other skills. The technical perfection of carpentry, plumbing, and glassblowing, the athleticism of hockey teams, skiers, and basketball players: all of this is formally natural, and yet also all of it is beautiful and good. As David Decosimo has well observed, it is a very bleak worldview indeed that would not see and appreciate goods that are formally natural precisely as natural in their formal objects:
An undergraduate teacher I knew—a well-known atheist—could not grasp why his Christian students could be interested in literature apart from questions of salvation. He rightly perceived that redemption and God’s kingdom are a Christian’s most urgent and central concerns. So, he wondered why these students would read Dickens and Balzac at all, let alone tune themselves to the internal goods of their work and not only their immediate significance for the Gospel. His ignorance offers vivid picture of what it would look like, in one realm, to live exclusively in immediate view of New Law – to the exclusion of acts and virtues ordered immediately to subordinate goods. With Christians through the ages, these students loved literature not only for its immediate significance in relation to redemption and the Gospel, but for all the diverse subordinate goods it realizes. Loving these goods for their own sake is another way of loving the God who gives them. But one must have eyes to see them. Such seeing requires training. It requires that one bring these goods into view, loving them for their place not only in redemption but creation, not only in view of grace but of nature. If this is so for literary goods, how much more is it so for the political good?
Among all goods, ends, and rules subordinate to beatitude, none rivals it. The natural good is a good worth loving for its own sake and acting immediately for. It is a good God declares very good. Should we do better than God himself? If we are to love literary and aesthetic goods in se and not exclusively under the formality of New Law, are we not to love, seek, and act for the natural perfection of our natures and communities?32
The same could be said, too, for the goods of intellectual culture. No Thomist would ever claim that medicine, technology, and the sciences are to be completely swallowed up by the supernatural light of faith and theology. And the same holds true, quite obviously, for philosophical reasoning as well. Whatever position one takes on the objectively Christian nature of Christian philosophy,33 nonetheless, in its objects, principles, and methods, the various philosophical disciplines represent sublime natural goods, able to be appreciated for their own sakes. All such arts, skills, and branches are all natural in their formal objects and deserving of being pursued, even though they are not immediately ordered to the eschatological goods of grace. Time and history will pass away, and so too will medical science, skiing, cuisine, and carpentry. And yet, it takes great cynicism to say that such things are not a true conquest by the human spirit amid the mutability of earthly existence.
Likewise, too, strictly within the moral order there is the great domain of political rationality, which cannot be eliminated by the demands of the Gospel. The Church herself has variously taught in official manners—and great Thomists have insisted for centuries— that the formal perspective of political rationality is natural, this-worldly, and nonetheless deserving of recognition as its own kind of excellence, even though such natural-political ends in no way directly and formally pave the way for the in breaking of the end of times.34 In short: political rationality is finalized and objectively specified by a formality that is natural, by the various bonds of justice that bind together citizens in their various roles. In the language of Maritain and Journet, such goods are infravalent goods.35 They are not mere instruments of the supernatural order (in which case they would be formally-objectively supernatural and openly eschatological). They are true goods that have their own formality, distinct from, but subordinate to, the supernatural ends of the life of grace.
This “infravalence” is what is most important for understanding whatever theory one has concerning the indirect authority of the Church over the state.36 The Second Vatican Council clearly requires the faithful to maintain that there is a real subordination of society (including political society) to the Church.37 Although she allows great latitude for various theological and philosophical accounts concerning this relationship, one thing that is necessary for remaining within acceptable doctrinal bounds is to acknowledge that in the operative order (i.e., in actions truly elicited in the world) that natural justice not be merely the instrument of eschatological-supernatural justice. Failing this, one will implicitly deny the specification of a natural order of life and justice that is distinct from the eschatological life of those who are united by bonds of grace in the Mystical body of Christ.
And for this reason, contemporary trends in Thomistic theology holding that the acquired and infused moral virtues cannot coexist seem to conceptually lead, nolens volens, to a kind of stark “integralism” of a sort dreamt of perhaps only by the most extreme “political Augustinians” (if even by them).38 To claim that the infused moral virtues are the only specifying principles of moral39 activity is to claim that all so-called “political” rationality is, in the end, merely an exercise in the supernatural life of Christians. For those who believe that Christian agents should influence the political order—something presumably all Catholics wish to do in view of the many decrees of Catholic Social Teaching—the logic is inflexible: the only just civic order open to Christians will be the absorption of the “city” into the Church herself: because formal objects matter; if the formality of infused justice is all that remains, then all politics will become formally ecclesial. The only other option would be—contrary, however, to the spirit of Catholic social teaching—a complete removal of Christians from the public sphere. Upon entering the state of grace, the Christian would have no agentive principles (i.e. virtues) formally specified by intra-temporal (i.e., acquired) justice. Such a solution might be acceptable to a Protestant follower of Hauerwas. It is not, however, acceptable for Catholics. Therefore, one can only surmise that the inherent logic—obviously not willed but nonetheless operative—in contemporary claims against the co-existence of the acquired and infused moral virtues runs in the direction of the stark “integralism” mentioned above.
Obviously, explaining the operative coordination of the natural order in relationship to the supernatural order is a complex affair. Such complexities are doubtlessly what in part motivate the denial of “virtue-coexistence.” In this paper, I cannot provide a theory of the various ways that the acquired moral virtues can be ordered to the supernatural end without being supernaturalized. However, the notion of modal supernaturality mentioned earlier provides the app instrument for understanding how an extrinsic end can influence a formally natural action without thereby supernaturalizing it intrinsically and formally. Such ordering will surely impart a modally Catholic character to the exercise of the acquired moral virtues. In fact, given that there can be no fully rectified moral virtue without a reference to charity,40 this must be reflected in the natural activity of a vitally Catholic politics. Even if Maritain perhaps somewhat failed to emphasize the strongest implications of the papal magisterium in line with Immortale Dei,41 nonetheless, he was very well aware of the fact that natural political agency must at once subsist as natural and yet must be referred modally (and hence, in a very real yet infravalent manner) to our ultimate supernatural ends:
The acquired moral virtues per se proportion our actions to temporal ends, and their proper domain is that of civil or political life, or, as we would say today, that of culture or civilization. . . . And when a soul in a state of grace practices the acquired moral virtues in this domain, they are elevated by charity and the corresponding infused moral virtues, but they are elevated in a non-instrumental way. For in this case the acquired virtue initiates the movement in view of its own ends, which are civil or temporal, although it needs the infused virtue to be borne beyond its purely natural point of specification (ultra suum specificum), as befits a rightly ordered civil or temporal life, i.e., one that is indirectly oriented towards the ultimate supernatural end. For civil life per se belongs to the natural order, but this natural order of civil life is elevated by way of participation by referring (whether explicit or merely ‘experienced’) to the supra-temporal ends of human persons. Without this reference, the civil or temporal order has no proper rectitude. Thus, the father of a family, motivated to build up his wealth by his natural love for his children, will pursue this temporal end with the acquired virtues of prudence and temperance—though these will, in turn, be elevated by the corresponding infused virtues; at the same time, he will recall, for example, the parable of the lily of the field. In this way, the social tie par excellence, namely friendship between fellow citizens, will be elevated by charity in souls in a state of grace. Or, again, the politician—if he is in a state of grace—seeing the immediate dangers threatening his country because of a refusal to play false, will be strengthened in his acquired justice and prudence by the corresponding infused virtues, which will make him supernaturally rely on the providence of divine government.42
In short, infused and acquired moral virtues must be distinct precisely because the formal virtue-principle immediately eliciting acts that are natural and temporal are not in their objective specification eschatological and supratemporal. Failing to draw this distinction within the person who is in the state of grace, we will find that we cannot distinguish between the two great domains of the strictly spiritual Christian activities and those which belong to the temporal activity of Christians, so well described by Journet:
Spiritual Christian activities are immediately governed by the needs of the kingdom that is not of this world: I do them insofar as I am a Christian. Temporal Christian activities are immediately governed by the needs of things of this world and mediately by those of the kingdom of God. In the latter, I thus act as a doctor, technician, manual worker, merchant, politician, poet, or philosopher, but I always do so as a Christian. [In the words of Maritain:]
If I turn towards men to speak to them and act among them, then, on the first level of activity, which is the spiritual level, I stand before them insofar as I am a Christian, and to that extent I represent Christ’s Church. And on the second level of activity, which is the temporal level, I do not act insofar as I am a Christian, yet I must act as a Christian. I only represent myself and not the Church, though I represent my whole self, and not an amputated or disanimated self. I thus implicate myself as a Christian who lives and works in the world without being of the world, a Christian who—however small—is called, by virtue of my faith, baptism, and confirmation, to infuse the world in which I exist with a Christian sap….43
It is on behalf of all of these goods of culture44 that I called into question the tendency that seems, to my eyes, logically implied in the claim that the acquired and infused moral virtues do not coexist. Doubtlessly, there are passages in all of the authors cited above that witness to the fact that they do not wish to vacate nature, leaving it behind as nothing more than an empty vacuole45 filled with the order of grace. Nonetheless, I believe that there are rich resources in the Thomist tradition that can enable a supple deployment of the notion of modal supernaturality quoad finem for articulating the coexistence and interactions between the acquired and infused moral virtues, in a way that would augment the important contemporary voices who insist on the coexistence of these two orders of virtue.46 And I believe that such an account is necessary if we are to maintain, at once, the ontological density and importance of nature and history themselves, as well as the affirmation that the eschatological light of glory is powerful enough not merely to instrumentalize, subsume, or replace the natural but, rather, to transfigure and transpierce nature itself with the radiance of supernatural glory:
But the world of nature and of culture is animated by a dynamism all its own, and temporal history has a meaning. Aided by the city of God and perverted by the city of evil, and with its victories and catastrophes, it advances towards the parousia, where it will enter into eternity. Then, the Church, absorbed into the glory of Christ, will draw to herself all that is pure in the cosmos, and all the genuinely human elements that have been secured in the struggles of history, so that she might suffuse them with her transfiguring rays.47
ST I-II, q. 65, a. 2.↩︎
Though, of course, one will need to take up further considerations to explain the conditions for them to be fully virtuous, even in their own order. See Maritain in Science and Wisdom and Garrigou-Lagrange in Philosophizing in Faith.↩︎
This relationship to natural ends is clear throughout many texts in Thomas, where he develops the notion that the moral virtues are “political” in nature. See the final footnote to this article, in which I provide texts for consideration.
However, even with the order of nature the “political” is ordered to the contemplative. This observation is structurally present in Aristotle, and doubtless this is in part what led Thomas to take up the “Macrobian” division of virtues. On this latter point, see Marie-Rosaire Gagnetbet, “L'amour naturel de Dieu chez saint Thomas et ses contemporains,” Revue Thomiste 49 (1949): 31–102 (here 58–59).↩︎
I take this up in a forthcoming chapter from a conference at Mundelein in Fall 2023, where I treat some elements of Suarez’s reception of scholastic debates regarding the infused moral virtues. From what I have in my notes from the time of composing that paper, I have listed just as examples in a long tradition in merely these two traditions (and many others could be listed, no doubt), Capreolus, Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Salmanticenses, Billuart, Gonet, Merkelbach, Suarez, Lugo, Billot, Mazella, et al.↩︎
See Jean Porter, “Moral Virtues, Charity, and Grace: Why the Infused and Acquired Virtues Cannot Co-Exist,” Journal of Moral Theology 8, no. 2 (2019): 40–66.↩︎
In which case the natural virtues would remain in a somewhat dispositional state but not as formally operative virtues, functioning as real specifying causes—secondary but infravalent (that is, not merely instrumental).↩︎
In background throughout my remarks in this paper are: Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, Integral Humanism, and The Philosophy of History; Journet’s Les exigences chrétienne en matière politique and chapter six of the first volume of His the Church of the Word Incarnate (other texts, however, could also be drawn from his extensive bibliography).↩︎
One thinks of Boyer, Gagnebet, Feingold, Mulcahey, and other more recent monographs and articles. In many ways, from an exegetical perspective at least (and also from a clear and principled perspective) Gagnetbet’s extensive articles remain quite decisive. It is our plan to post translations of these texts on To Be a Thomist in the coming months, Deo volente.↩︎
See Trent, Decree on Justification, canon. 7.↩︎
By saying “at-least-incipient,” I leave unexamined the question concerning the status of “pagan virtues.” For an introduction to that literature, see Shanley. The position that seems best to my eyes is that found in Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange (mentioned in note 2 above).↩︎
See Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2 (forthcoming in 2025); Garrigou-Lagrange, Christ the Savior and On Divine Revelation (cf. index, vol. 2); and the two volumes by Fr. Dylan Schraeder, especially A Thomistic Christocentrism: Recovering the Carmelites of Salamanca on the Logic of the Incarnation.↩︎
See the Garrigou-Lagrange texts directly above (cf. Cajetan, Salmanticenses, and Gonet); Also, J.-H. Nicolas, Catholic Dogmatic Theology, vols. 2 and 4.↩︎
And in both cases, this knowledge will condition everything else that is known naturally: for man, all will be known in the mirror of sensibly known quiddities; for the angels, in the radiance of their first, primordial, and continuous act of self-knowledge.↩︎
Regarding the distinction between proper, extensive, and adequate objects, see relevant notes that I have included in various Garrigou-Lagrange works.↩︎
On obediential potency, one might see the more recent treatment by Steven A. Long. Also, see the first volume of Garrigou-Lagrange, On Divine Revelation. For a lengthy treatment of the topic in Thomas, Thomism, and Augustine, see the first volume of Ambroise Gardeil, La Structure de l’âme et l’éxperience mystique, an opening chapter of which is available as “Human Life and Divine Life” on Homiletic and Pastoral Review.↩︎
The distinction between supernaturality quoad substantiam and quoad modum is also found, in all of its essentials at least, in Suarez. For a clear treatment, see the division of supernaturality in Garrigou-Lagrange, On Divine Revelation, vol. 1 or in his treatment of faith and miracles in The Sense of Mystery.↩︎
This division of uncreated supernaturality can be found in Garrigou-Lagrange’s Grace commentary.↩︎
There are many differences between the Scholastic terminology of created grace and the Palamite conception of participated uncreated grace. This is not the place to parse the conceptual similarities and differences.↩︎
Regarding the notion of “participated eternity” applied to the vision of God in patria, see Carl J. Peter, Participated Eternity in the Vision of God: A Study of the Opinion of Thomas Aquinas and his Commentators on the Duration of the Acts of Glory (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964).↩︎
See the division of supernaturality in Garrigou-Lagrange, On Divine Revelation, vol. 1.↩︎
This is not, however, the place to consider the question concerning the potential role of instrumentality in one’s account of the participated “accidental” beatitude derived from the essential supernaturality of beatitude. In the history of theological speculation, this question has been connected to the implications concerning the luminosity of Christ’s body during the transfiguration. I merely note this as an interesting point for further consideration. For some indications for further reflection, see Bryan Kromholt, “The Consummation of the World: St. Thomas Aquinas on the Risen Saints’ Beatitude and the Corporeal Universe,” Nova et Vetera 19, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 1271–1287. I also recall some developments about “accidental beatitude” in Janvier’s treatment of beatitude in his multi-decade preaching (with technical notes) in Exposition de la Morale Catholique.↩︎
Standard such account with citations can be found in Garrigou-Lagrange, The Sense of Mystery and On Divine Revelation; Vacant, Études comparées sur la philosophie de S. Thomas d’Aquin et cur celle de
Duns Scot. These are, however, dated in their use of the Wadding edition.↩︎
Some, such as Heiko Oberman, challenge elements of the classical narrative that sees in nominalism a proximate influence upon Lutheran theology. The objective connections seem, however, quite clear.↩︎
For a good introduction to the classical accounts of the Scotist school’s position regarding the infused moral virtues, the reader should begin with the compendius text of Hieronymus of Montefortino, Summa theologica Venerabilis Ioannis Duns Scoti, doctoris subtilis ordinis fratrum minorum, Summa theologica ex universis operibus eius concinnata, iuxta ordinem et dispositionem summae Angelici Doctoris S. Thomae Aquinatis (Rome: Sallustiana, 1902), 364–367. Similarly, see Francesco Pitigiani, Summae theologiae speculatiuae, et moralis, et Commentariorum in tertium librum Sententiarum doct. subt. Ioannis Duns Scoti theologorum facilè principis. Pars secunda (Venice: Apud Ioannem Guerilium, 1615), d. 36, quaestio unica, a. 12 (p. 473–477). And, in particular, an interested researcher should consider the arguments taken up in the commentary by John Punch and Francisco Lychetus in the Wadding edition of Scotus’s works, in which commentary the post-Tridentine context is obvious. See Ioannis Duns Scoti, Opera omnia, vol. 15 (Quaestiones in Tertium Librum Sententiarum a distinctione vigesima tertia ad quadragesimam) (Paris: Vivès, 1894), 700–725.↩︎
See Garrigou-Lagrange’s treatment of this in his Grace commentary. It should be noted, however, that this position cannot be taken for granted. The Scotist view concerning the distinction between the natural and the supernatural order mentioned above presupposes that nature and grace can be distinguished solely through a distinct relation of causality to God-as-gracing. And such a position would have echoes in the Baroque period within the line of Molinism, such that a number of Jesuit thinkers, not only into the early 20th century, but even after the promulgation of the 24 Thomistic Theses, would hold that natural and supernatural acts have a shared formal object. See the remarks by Wlodimir Ledóchowski cited in Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Order of Things (294n10) in relation to this issue.↩︎
The quotes are placed around “science” for the reasons noted in my article “Wisdom be Attentive” in the English edition of Nova et Vetera.↩︎
This is present by the time of John of St. Thomas. It is perhaps earlier. It is taken for granted by someone like Ambroise Gardeil, which indicates significant sedimentation of a settled position within the school.↩︎
Above all, this will be reflected in the infused moral virtue of religion. On the relationship between the theological virtues and infused religion, see Ambroise Gardeil’s treatment in the third section of The True Christian Life.↩︎
Some of the passages from Journet at the end of this essay emphasize this distinction. Many others can be found in him and Maritain.↩︎
One can also say “Trinity configured,” but I follow Journet in emphasizing also the “Christic” modalities of grace due to the fact that our grace derives from Christ’s capital grace. See his discussion of this in Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2. A number of related points can be also found in Jean-Hervé Nicolas’ Les profondeurs de la grâce.↩︎
I choose it as what seems to me to be a very signal case of an operative formally-extrinsic Christian ordination of the natural order with a relation to supernatural ends, without thereby re-specifying the formality of the work in question.↩︎
David Decosimo, “More to Love: Ends, Ordering, and the Compatibility of Acquired and Infused Virtue,” available on Academia.edu at https://www.academia.edu/25395706/More_to_Love_Ends_Ordering_and_the_Compatibility_of_Acquired_and_Infused_Virtue. Though differing in approach, Decosimo’s positions and concerns are akin to my own.↩︎
This paper presupposes a kind of conciliatory reading of Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange together. For the former, see Science and Wisdom and the Essay on Christian Philosophy, along with chapter 7 of Degrees of Knowledge. For Garrigou-Lagrange, see the related essay in Philosophizing in Faith. Also, see my essay in the 2022 proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.↩︎
Such a claim of immediate mediation of eschatological ends by temporal-political ends is, in fact, an error laying at the root of various forms of liberation theology. This is one example of the great political error of attempting to “immanentize the eschaton.” See the section “World History is Not Identical with Salvation History” in Nicolas, Catholic Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, trans. Matthew Kenneth Minerd (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023), 448–451. But also see ibid., 451–465. Also see the texts cited below.↩︎
See the final note of this essay for a host of citations, primarily from Journet, though similar texts can be found in Maritain.↩︎
The second Vatican council clearly requires the faithful to maintain some of subordination of the state vis-à-vis the Church.↩︎
See Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis humanae, no. 1: “Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”↩︎
For some discussion of this, see the relevant index entries to vols. 1 and 3 of Journet’s The Church of the Word Incarnate, as well as Gilson’s Dante and Philosophy (noting, however, Journet’s critiques of certain interpretations of Augustine offered by Gilson).↩︎
I am distinguishing here the infused moral virtues from the theological virtues, which directly and intimately relate us to God in His triune mystery. According to the later Thomists, the infused moral virtues have a supernatural formality, but it is a kind of objective refraction of the Triune God in the delimited domain of the virtue in question.↩︎
See the texts of Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange mentioned in note 2 above.↩︎
Although, with the passing of time, I have softened a little bit on this point, as I believe that Journet is the one who provided the answer—from a perspective obviously amenable to Maritain—to these objections.↩︎
See Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1944), 214ff. The translation above is by Dominic Spiekermann, edited by me, for the forthcoming translation of the third volume of The Church of the Word Incarnate. Below, where I cite from volume 2, the translation is mine. Pagination is from the French because the new pagination is not yet available. See Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, p. 1535 (fr. pagination).↩︎
Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, p. 1633 (fr. pagination). Maritain taken from Humanisme intégral (Paris: Aubier, 1936), 312.↩︎
The logic of the contemporary tendency is perhaps also akin to a kind of implicitly monophysite Christology that would hold that, given that all of Christ’s acts must flow from His substantial holiness as the Word of God, therefore, in the end, all of His acts, even those which emanate from the created grace and infused virtues in His soul (let alone any natural moral capacities He might have), must so completely be under the sway of His hypostatic holiness that all of his acts would be strictly theandric. Thus, Christ would fulfill human nature precisely by rendering what is human ontologically plastic to the point of becoming nothingness, under the all-dominating sway of the divine agency of the Word of God. Nature, qua nature, and even created grace, would not be transfigured; it would be annihilated. Although none of the contemporary authors involved in the present debate regarding the infused moral virtues would dream of openly drawing this conclusion, nonetheless, their evacuation of the operative formality of nature from graced human agency at least bears a kind of potential theological implication in Christology.↩︎
I owe this expression to Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), ch. 2.↩︎
E.g., Osborne, Colosimo, Cessario, et al.↩︎
Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, (p. 1637).
As mentioned above, below can be found texts that are variously relevant.
Texts from Thomas
From Gagnebet, texts related to the “civil” character of the acquired moral virtues. In III Sent., dist. 33, q. 1, a. 2, sol. IV: “Unde et in alia vita hominem perficiunt, acquisitae in vita civili.” Ibid ad 2: “per virtutem acquisitam collimantur circumstantiae secundum proportionem ad bonum civile”. Ibid., a. 4: “Acquisitae dirigunt in vita civili, unde habent bonum civile pro fine.” Likewise, see In II Sent. dist. 40, qu. 1, a. 5: "Virtus civilis dirigit in omnibus quae sunt corporis vel propter corpus quaeruntur.”
In need of some context is, nonetheless, ST I-II, qu. 63, a. 4: “secundum quod homo bene se habet ad res humanas.” Gagnebet notes that the disputed questions De virtibus is a little more complex, due to the relationship between natural contemplation and the active life. He notes that q. 1, a. 9 distinguishes between the virtue of man “as a man,” and the virtue of man “as a citizen,” following Aristotle: “Non enim est idem bonum hominis in quantum est homo, et in quantum est civis: nam bonum hominis in quantum est homo, est ut ratio sit perfecta in cognitione veritatis, et inferiores appetitus regulentur secundum regulam rationis, nam homo habet quod sit homo per hoc quod sit rationalis; bonum hominis in quantum est civis, est ut ordinetur secundum civitatem quantum ad omnes: et propter hoc Philosophus dicit Pol. (see bk. 3, ch. 2, 1276b 16-1277b 33; Saint Thomas, lect. 3) quod non est eadem virtus hominis in quantum est homo et hominis in quantum est bonus civis.” However, he notes that both are acquired and natural: “Virtutes autem quae sunt hominis in eo quod est homo, vel in eo quod est terrenae civitatis particeps, non excedunt facultatem humanae naturae; unde eas per sua naturalia homo potest acquirere ex actibus propriis” (qu. 1, a. 9). Finally, Gagnebet notes De virtutibus, q. 5, a. 4: “Bonum civile non est finis ultimus virtutum cardinalium infusarum de quibus loquimur, sed virtutum acquisitarum de quibus philosophi sunt locuti.”
Regarding both the supereminence of contemplation but also the order of politics in the active life, see In III Sent. dist. 35, q. 1, a. 3, sol. 1: “Activa vita consistit in omnibus agibilibus, sive sint ad seipsum, sive sint ad alium; sed principaliter consistit in his quae ad alium sunt, quia ‘bonum multorum, secundum Philosophum in principio Eth. (1094a, 9-10; S. Th., lect. 2, nos. 30-31) est divinius quam bonum unius.’ Unde et iustitia quae ad alterum est, a Philosopho in V Eth. (1129b 17, S. Th., lect. 2) dicitur esse pulcherrima virtutum. Sicut vita contemplativa consistit principaliter in optimo contemplabili, ita vita activa in optimo agibili.” Gagnebet cites other texts, along with Hyacinthus-M. Hering, O. P., De iustitia legali (Fribourg, CH: St. Paul, 1944); idem., “De genuina notione iustitiae generalis seu legalis iuxta sanctum Thomam,” Angelicum, 14 (1937): 464–487.
Texts from Journet
Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, p. 70 (fr. pagination)—a very important passage:
Cajetan speaks of “the modification of all the precepts by charity” (In I-II, q. 100, a. 10, no. 2). However, charity does not replace the other virtues. Honoring one’s father for [the love of] God still continues to be an act of filial piety, and this is why Cajetan qualifies as “extrinsic” the modality that charity confers upon the acts of the various virtues (see ST II-II, q. 44, a. 4). According to moralists, one and the same act can have, in fact, a twofold goodness or a twofold malice, one coming to them from their object (playing the role of intermediate end) and the other coming to them from their (ultimate) end: when I give alms in order to expiate for my sins, this act is, at once, a work of the virtue of mercy and a work of the virtue of penance. If this were not so, charity, which is concerned with the supreme end of the moral order, would no longer be, as is commonly said, the soul and form of the other virtues; rather, it would devour all of them, incorporating them into itself and supplanting them. Cf. Billuart, Summa sancti thomae, De actibus humanis, diss. 4, a. 4, §1 (ed. Bruner, vol. 2, p. 299).
Therefore, if the objects of the various infused virtues must be considered to be so many intermediate ends retaining their own specific character under the impulses of charity, the same will be true, a fortiori, for the objects of the various acquired virtues, concerned with, for example, the political and temporal order. Charity will likewise communicate to these latter virtues and their acts a perfection, a modality, which we could call extrinsic in order to signify, with Cajetan, that it is added to the acquired virtue without destroying it, though we can also call it intrinsic in order to thereby signify that such intermediate ends can be referred to the ultimate end by their nature and not in an accidental manner. For even that which is given immediately to Caesar must be able to be given to God mediately, and this is why Saint Thomas, without in any way touching on the irreducible distinction between the things of Caesar and the things of God, will write that "all that man is, all that he can do, and all that he has, must be referred to God” (ST I-II, q. 21, a. 4, ad 3).
[Words that should be etched in gold concerning the topic of the present article:] And here we touch upon a crucial insight. To refer all things to God, to establish everywhere the reign of Christ, will not at all involve striving to reabsorb the order of politics into the superior order of the kingdom of God; it will not at all involve working to abolish or lessen the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual; and nor will it necessarily be to understand this distinction in a way that is more “sacral” and less “profane.” To Christianize a hierarchy in no way involves the vaporizing of that very hierarchy.
A related point from Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, p. 1731 (fr. pagination): “Charity is the form of the other virtues by way of efficient causality, insofar as it orders them to the end. (See ST II-II, q. 23, a. 8.)” I would only emphasize also that this ordering is a kind of extrinsic ordering involving the final causality that is, nonetheless, in line with the obediential potency of the natural order (that is, not opposed to it, even if it does not formally re-specify the natural virtue in question).
Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, p. 300 (fr. pagination):
First and foremost, the Church’s relations with political communities, with various temporal groupings, and, more generally, with the entire work of culture will be governed by a law of distinction. Without a doubt, the work of culture must be ordered to spiritual ends—if it escapes the attraction of divine ends, it will immediately and fatally decline towards diabolical ones—though, such ordering will be after the manner of an intermediate or infravalent end, one that has its own intrinsic value, and not after the manner of a mere means whose value solely is derived from its ordering to the end in question. It will only be if cultural realities are taken over by spiritual ones to the point of becoming nothing more than a means to an end, playing a purely instrumental role, that they will be assumed on the spiritual plane and become part of the very fabric of the Kingdom of God, in the way that plainsong, liturgical languages and arts, and ecclesiastical goods themselves, and all things primitively and materially cultural, thereafter become formally spiritual. It can be said that, in the latter case, the spiritual can be compared to the temporal as theology, which, according to a remark by Cajetan, in addition to its own goods, appropriates foreign goods into itself, theologia non solum gaudet propriis sed etiam facit de extraneis propria (In ST I, q. 1, a. 8, no. 4).
However, apart from this case, the greater part of cultural work continues to stand on its own, and the temporal realm, even when illuminated from on high by the light of the Gospel, continues to remain, of itself, external to the kingdom of God. Therefore, a law of distinction, not of unity, is what governs the Church’s relationship with time. And it is not here-below, amid the flowing course of history, but rather, only in the here-after, in eternity, that the whole of creation—the order of authentic natural and cultural values—will enter fully into the Church, merging with her and becoming one with her, as an integral part of her being. Here-below, no doubt, the Church exists to absorb the rest of the universe into herself, and that is why her very existence always will, to a greater or lesser extent, irritate human settlements, “Since the proximity of eternity is dangerous for that which is perishable, and the universal for the particular.” But, by divine right, this absorption must take place elsewhere, not here-below. And, for now, the order of cultural realities continues to unfold on a plane inferior to that of the kingdom of God, running parallel to it, sometimes allowing itself to be enlightened and enlivened by it, though waiting for the end of historical time for the two to flow together, with such culture pouring into her—no doubt in a very decanted and purified form—the best of what it will have produced, the most beautiful flowers that will have blossomed forth from her, those that will be found worthy, at last, of being saved for eternity.
To restore all things in Christ, to make Christ king, must not and can never be some attempt, whether conscious or otherwise, to do away with the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, between Christianity and Christian culture, between the Church and civilization. To ignore this distinction, willed by God and proclaimed by Christ, would represent a return to ancient errors, which found a social expression in the medieval West, and which, abusing a metaphor that is both classic and also open to accurate interpretation, would merge the spiritual and temporal into a single community, with the Church as its soul and the holy empire as its body, bestowing upon the sovereign pontiff a supreme jurisdiction over the temporal as such, by virtue of his power as Christ’s vicar.
Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, p. 310n157 (fr. pagination):
The infused moral virtues, writes Jacques Maritain, “Proportion us to the morals and common life that are appropriate to the kingdom of God, which is already here, teaching, militant, and suffering on earth: the Church, a pilgrim and crucified kingdom. If, on the other hand, we consider the acquired moral virtues, these lead direct our activity in civil life, which is why their end is the good of civilization, unde habent bonum civile pro fine (St. Thomas, In III Sent., dist. 33, q. 1, a. 3). Here, our activity refers directly to goods that are proportionate to human nature. This is why there is no infused political prudence for earthly social life. A supernatural virtue of political prudence is only that which concerns the government of Christ’s Church.” (We must correct what we said in La juridiction de l'Église sur la cité [Paris: Desclée 1931]), 57.
However, “there is no separation or break; rather, there is vital cohesion between the natural virtues and the supernatural virtues. We know that there is no perfect virtue without the love of charity. To reach their full state of virtue, the natural moral virtues therefore need to be united with charity and the infused moral virtues, which elevate them by connecting them to the supratemporal ends of the human person.” Even though there is no infused political prudence for earthly social life, we must nonetheless remember that “there is no natural virtue of political prudence that is not united in the soul to the organism of gifts and infused virtues; the political prudence of a Saint Louis was an acquired virtue: it was a virtue in the full and perfect sense of the word only because it was elevated by the supernatural virtues.” And thus, we can understand “why St Thomas teaches that he who cares for the common good of the multitude must be bonus vir purely and simply, a virtuous man all the way down the line.” We also can understand “why civilizations, while belonging intrinsically to the natural order, can only achieve their full status and dignity as civilizations if they are elevated, in their own order, by the influence of ‘the virtues that pertain not to what belongs to Caesar but to what belongs to God.” See Jacques Maritain, “L'Église catholique et les civilisations,” in Questions de conscience (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1938), 9–11 (Oeuvres completes, vol 6 645–646).
Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, p. 315n160 (fr. pagination): “We must carefully distinguish between the end to which the work itself leads (finis operis), which may be temporal or cultural, and the end aimed at by the agent, the motive for which he acts (finis operantis), which will ultimately be heaven or hell.”
Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, p. 1532–33 (fr. pagination):
The prudence with which a pope governs the Church in a holy way, or the holy obedience he is given by the faithful, is immediately directed to a spiritual end. In its principle, exercise, and work or fruit, it pertains to the kingdom of God, and it is supernatural in its very substance (quoad substantiam). Such prudence (or obedience) is infused. By contrast, the prudence with which a head of government rightly governs his people, along with the virtuous obedience of citizens, directly aims at a temporal end, and in its principle, exercise, and operation, it pertains to human matters: this is a political and acquired prudence (or obedience). But the politician and the citizen, in governing and paying taxes to Caesar, respectively, must indirectly tend to eternal beatitude, and in this respect they belong to the kingdom that is not of this world. Thus, the dispositions, acts, and undertakings that immediately give rise to cultural works are temporal by reason of their specification but spiritual by reason of the salutary mode in which they are carried out, and they are indirectly ordered to eternal life.
Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, p. 1635–6 (fr. pagination):
↩︎At the level of spiritual or ecclesial activities, the supreme law, though not the only one, is a supernatural law of unity: the Church, the mystical body and the kingdom of God on earth, has a divine unity. At the level of temporal and secular activities, the supernatural law of unity ceases. Christian ecclesial unity only affects the temporal level by infusing it with the secular Christian unity of tendency and inspiration, which strengthens the fundamental natural unity of our species. Without attenuating them, this secular Christian unity penetrates the diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and social groups, political or cultural preferences, and forms of art and thought, and—to the extent that people give it their ever-feeble assent—it gives rise to the beginnings of a Christian humanism….
But the world of nature and of culture is animated by a dynamism all its own, and temporal history has a meaning. Aided by the city of God and perverted by the city of evil, and with its victories and catastrophes, it advances towards the parousia, where it will enter into eternity. Then, the Church, absorbed into the glory of Christ, will draw to herself all that is pure in the cosmos, and all the genuinely human elements that have been secured in the struggles of history, so that she might suffuse them with her transfiguring rays.
The Church is not the world, and the world is not the Church: there is a distinction of orders between them, as well as a relationship of subordination by which secular and human ends, which are infravalent are subordinated to ecclesial and divine ends, which are ultimate. But can a Christian, however spiritual we might suppose him to be, be in the Church with his entire self and with {{1648}} everything that belongs to him (secundum se totum et secundum omnia sua), without contributing anything to the world? Or is the Christian necessarily and legitimately split between the Church and the world, in such a way that he must give himself entirely (totus), with all his resources as a baptized and believing person: on the one hand, through those Christian actions of his that unfold on the ecclesial-spiritual level and are directed immediately to God; and on the other hand, through those Christian actions that unfold on the secular-temporal level and are directed immediately to the human being as an infravalent end, and mediately to God as the ultimate end? In answer to this question, our Savior distinguished between what we must render to Caesar and what we must render to God…
