Aquinas on Virtue

A Causal Reading

Nicholas Austin

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781626164734, 9781626164727
• eBook ISBN: 9781626164741
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Aquinas on Virtue: A Causal Reading is an original interpretation of one of the most compelling accounts of virtue in the Western tradition, that of the great theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274). Taking as its starting point Aquinas's neglected definition of virtue in terms of its "causes," this book offers a systematic analysis of Aquinas on the nature, genesis, and role of virtue in human life.

Drawing on connections and contrasts between Aquinas and contemporary treatments of virtue, Austin argues that Aquinas’s causal virtue theory retains its normative power today. As well as providing a synoptic account of Aquinas on virtue, the book includes an extended treatment of the cardinal virtue of temperance, an argument for the superiority of Aquinas's concept of "habit" over modern psychological accounts, and a rethinking of the relation between grace and virtue. With an approach that is distinctively theological yet strongly conversant with philosophy, this study will offer specialists a bold new interpretation of Aquinas’s virtue theory while giving students a systematic introduction with suggested readings from his Summa Theologiae and On the Virtues.

PART 1

Defining Virtue

CHAPTER 1

Defining Temperance Causally

Suggested reading: Summa Theologiae I.II 61.2; II.II 141, 143, 155, 166

Let us begin with an analysis of temperance. The purpose is to construct a causal account of temperance that begins from the one found in the Summa Theologiae. The interpretation of Aquinas to be built on later is not argued in depth here but is left for later chapters, when the more controversial claims will be justified. The reader is therefore asked temporarily to take on trust what is yet to be established, especially the claim that causal virtue theory analyzes each virtue into seven elements (matter, mode, target, subject, overall end, agent, and exemplar) and relates them in certain characteristic ways. How might this causal framework, in dialogue with contemporary accounts, enable the analysis of a specific virtue?

The choice of temperance may puzzle. Many associate temperance with a moralistic puritanism. A survey of over a million people interested in character development found that of the six “core virtues” recognized by positive psychology (wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence), the least endorsed is temperance.¹ Is it plausible still to see temperance as a cardinal virtue, or even as a virtue at all?

The classical argument for temperance’s cardinality or principality rests on perennial features of human nature, such as the need to limit superficial or momentary attractions for deeper and more-enduring goods.² While this rationale retains its original force, today there are other equally compelling arguments. Psychological research indicates that good self-control is positively correlated with better interpersonal relationships, better adjustment, and even better grades.³ In a consumerist society, temperance is needed to moderate the impulse toward consumption.⁴ Understood as “moderation for the sake of eco-justice,” it has an important place in an environmental virtue ethic.⁵ High rates of addiction and compulsion in relation to drugs, food, and digital media, as well as the hectic pace of modern life, all signal the urgent need for the simplifying and balancing influence of temperance. What, then, may a causal analysis contribute to the burgeoning discussion of this perennial yet timely virtue?

MODE

A natural place to begin the analysis of a virtue is its name. This is where Aquinas begins (II.II 141.1c). He holds that the name of a virtue expresses its mode (I.II 61.4). The mode of a virtue is its characteristic manner of achieving the good at stake in some specific field of human life. It is the most formal element of any moral virtue and therefore its primary defining feature, which is precisely why it is normally expressed by the virtue’s name. Does the name “temperance,” then, indicate the virtue’s mode? Immediately we run into difficulties.

“Temperance” has a lot of baggage. As Louke van Wensveen says, the term is “riddled with negative connotations, such as small-mindedness, prudishness, preachiness, missionary zeal, and especially lack of joy.”⁶ One reason for this unhappy set of associations is the enduring legacy of the temperance movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which advocated enforced abstinence from alcohol. Temperance, therefore, tends to convey an outmoded, repressive ideal.

However, ethicists are increasingly aware of how virtue terms, detached from the ancient ethical traditions in which they were forged, today are often mere shadows of their former selves. Temperance is not unique: prudence, magnanimity, humility, and, above all, charity, have similarly “dwindled miserably,” to use Josef Pieper’s apt description.⁷ These terms once had richer meanings.

Is etymology, or the original meaning, a surer guide than current usage? Not always. Sometimes a virtue has been badly named. The original Greek word for what we call temperance is sophrosyne, which in its root meaning conveys a positive soundness of mind. The Stoics employed various Latin translations that have migrated into English as “sobriety,” “chastity,” “moderation,” “continence,” and “temperance.” What is striking is that, in contrast to the affirming Greek word, they all “imply restriction or denial.”⁸

Aquinas similarly characterizes the mode of temperance in negative terms, such as “moderation,” “retraction,” or “restraint.” Moderation sounds the least restrictive, yet Aquinas adds that the moderation of temperance is achieved precisely through restraint (II.II 141.2). As he explains, “Temperance is a certain disposition of the soul that imposes the limit on any passions or operations, lest they be carried beyond what is due” (I.II 61.4).⁹ In his accounting of temperance’s mode as restraint, has Aquinas been misled by a virtue vocabulary saddled with a Stoic suspicion of passion?

When he discusses the virtue of studiousness (studiositas) as the well-ordered desire for knowledge, Aquinas does recognize the fallibility of arguing directly from a virtue’s name to its mode (II.II 166). He insists that studiousness is related to temperance, which suggests to him that its mode is restraint. But Aquinas also notes that its name suggests a positive mode that is contrary to the mode of restraint since the “studious” person is eager to know (166.2 arg 3). Aquinas’s solution is to distinguish a twofold mode in studiousness: a strengthening of the purpose to learn (that is, a conquering of sluggishness) and restraint (curbing vain curiosity). The latter mode, he claims, is more essential to studiousness than the former (ad 3). Aquinas here concedes, then, that an argument from a virtue’s name, at least to its primary mode, does not work in all cases. He also acknowledges that a virtue associated with temperance may possess a more complex and more positive mode than restraint. Why not, therefore, apply a similar twofold mode for the specific virtue of temperance itself, of rightly ordered intensification as well as restraint?

Concern about the negativity of restraint and restriction has led today’s advocates of temperance to reinterpret what we are calling the “mode” of temperance not as restraint but as integration. Mark Carr argues that the “work of temperance” is the inclusion of emotion in the moral life.¹⁰ Van Wensveen submits that temperance involves not “militaristic mastery” of our appetites but rather “creative channeling,” or “the inventive redirection and transformation of ordinary desires.”¹¹ She advocates an ethic of “formed spontaneity” rather than one founded on restraint.¹² This strategy of redefinition is attractive in that it avoids canonizing a repressive moral ideal; however, at the same time something may be lost because the definition of the cardinal virtue of temperance then seems to shirk what has always been seen as its primary work—namely, voluntary self-limitation. Defining a virtue is a complex business. How do we adjudicate these issues?

The Mode Fits the Matter

Aquinas has a second, more-compelling method for establishing a virtue’s mode that is not so reliant on semantics. A crucial principle is that the mode of a virtue is congruent with its “matter,” or the interior and exterior acts (and, by extension, their objects) with which that virtue is especially concerned. A virtue’s mode is what, when applied to the matter, makes it virtuous and reasonable. Just as a craftsman works in a different manner when using the diverse matters of wax, wood, or clay, and just as the methods of the sciences differ according to their specific subject-matters, so the mode of each virtue differs according to its proper matter.

Aquinas employs this principle of mode-matter correlation when determining the mode of temperance, as contrasted with the mode of fortitude:

For it is necessary to place the order of reason in the matter of passions due to their resistance to reason, which is twofold. First, insofar as passion impels to something contrary to reason, and thus it is necessary that passion be restrained, and from this is named temperance. Second, insofar as passion withdraws from that which reason dictates, just as fear of dangers or of toils, and thus it is necessary that man be strengthened in that which is of reason, lest he recede [from it]; and from this is named fortitude. (I.II 61.2; see also 62.3–4; II.II 141.3)¹³

The argument employs analogies from physical motion. The primary mode of temperance is a restraint from attraction, whereas the primary mode of fortitude is an impulse against a retraction. Different passions have characteristic ways of becoming disordered and distracting from what is reasonable and good. Passions of sensible attraction, when not correctly moderated, tend to seduce one toward something against the good of reason, such as adultery or drunkenness. Passions of retraction in the face of danger or hardship have a contrasting tendency to move a person into evading what is reasonable. Whereas a mode of restraint is necessary to resist the magnetic pull of the emotionally attractive, in contrast, a mode of strengthening is needed to overcome the tendency to avoid the emotionally repulsive.

It could be objected that excess is not the only way attraction can go wrong. All moral virtues (with the possible exception of justice) lie in the mean between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. The vice of deficiency opposed to the virtue of temperance is “insensibility,” which fails to take a healthy pleasure in things (II.II 142.1). Yet the desires for food and sex are biologically based impulses that exhibit extraordinary power and tend to overrun their bounds. People tend to go wrong by intemperance rather than by insensibility, so the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sources
• Introduction
• Part I. Defining Virtue
• Part II. Causal Ethics
• Part III. The Causal Analysis of Virtue
• Appendix: Virtue Defined
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author