Aquinas's Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance

Matthew Levering

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268106355
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

In Aquinas's Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance, Matthew Levering argues that Catholic ethics make sense only in light of the biblical worldview that Jesus has inaugurated the kingdom of God by pouring out his spirit. Jesus has made it possible for us to know and obey God's law for human flourishing as individuals and communities. He has reoriented our lives toward the goal of beatific communion with him in charity, which affects the exercise of the moral virtues that pertain to human flourishing.

Without the context of the inaugurated kingdom, Catholic ethics as traditionally conceived will seem like an effort to find a middle ground between legalistic rigorism and relativistic laxism, which is especially the case with the virtue of temperance, the focus of Levering's book. After an opening chapter on the eschatological/biblical character of Catholic ethics, the ensuing chapters engage Aquinas's theology of temperance in the Summa theologiae, which identifies and examines a number of virtues associated with temperance. Levering demonstrates that the theology of temperance is profoundly biblical, and that Aquinas's theology of temperance relies for its intelligibility upon Christ's inauguration of the kingdom of God as the graced fulfillment of our created nature. The book develops new vistas for scholars and students interested in moral theology.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. See Philip G. Ziegler, The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018); Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink, eds., Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012). Against the false antitheses that plague “apocalyptic theology,” see N. T. Wright, “Apocalyptic and the Sudden Fulfillment of Divine Promise,” in Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, ed. Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 111–34; R. David Nelson, “Creation and the Problem of Evil after the Apocalyptic Turn,” in Evil and the Doctrine of Creation, ed. David Luy, Matthew Levering, and George Kalantzis (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, forthcoming).

2. Bernard Häring, Free and Faithful in Christ: Moral Theology for Clergy and Laity, vol. 1, General Moral Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 19.

3. Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, Vatican translation (Frederick, MD: The Word Among Us Press, 2016), §314.

4. Ibid., §320. For discussion of divine mercy in light of Pope Francis’s homily of March 3, 2016, in which he emphasizes the need to recognize ourselves as sinners as a condition for receiving mercy, see Reinhard Hütter, “Human Sexuality in a Fallen World: An Economy of Mercy and Grace,” Nova et Vetera 15 (2017): 447.

5. For the danger of an overrealized eschatology, see the cautionary notes sounded by Paula Fredriksen in her review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 77 (2015): 388. Regarding the goal of the Christian life, Robert Barron points out that “the Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue” (Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism [Skokie, IL: Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, 2016], 6). He compares the Church’s teachings on just war with the Church’s teachings on sexual matters, observing that in both cases polling data show that the majority of Catholics reject the Church’s teachings. In both cases, people (and nations) often fall short of the moral law. He argues, however, that “to dial down the demands because they are hard and most people have a hard time realizing them is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church” (ibid., 7). He adds that the difficulty, for fallen humans, of living up to the moral law—even with the aid of the grace of the Holy Spirit—is recognized by the Church’s penitential practice (the sacrament of reconciliation). As he says, “The Church also mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute” (ibid.). It turns out, too, that to live in accord with the Church’s moral law is to live in the way that makes us most fully human, so that we discover that what at first seems an ideal—and what often remains difficult to follow, given our fallen condition—is in fact what makes us “real,” what makes us able to live in a fully human way in our families and communities. See also Barron’s critique of proportionalist ethics in his The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2007), 264–73.

6. All quotations from the Bible are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV) Catholic Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, n.d.).

7. Aquinas is clear that “at all times there have been some persons belonging to the New Testament” through “implicit faith,” which in the case of Gentiles can arise simply “through believing in divine providence” (ST I-II, q. 106, a. 3, ad 2; ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province [Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981]; all English quotations of ST are taken from this translation) and which the Mosaic law stimulated in the Jewish people. For my position on these matters, see my “Aquinas and Supersessionism One More Time: A Response to Matthew A. Tapie’s Aquinas on Israel and the Church,” Pro Ecclesia 25 (2016): 395–412. Note that Jewish scholars generally recognize that to fulfill God’s commandments we need God’s grace: see for example Jon D. Levenson, The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 158; David Novak, “Response to Matthew Levering’s ‘Christians and Natural Law,’” in Anver M. Emon, Matthew Levering, and David Novak, Natural Law: A Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Trialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 138. For a Jewish perspective that is optimistic about fallen human capabilities to overcome sin, see Solomon Schimmel, The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20. For the variety of Second Temple Jewish understandings of grace or divine gift, see John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 189–328.

8. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 890.

9. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 27. Since injustice and death still characterize the world, the inaugurated kingdom is obviously not yet the consummated kingdom. Earlier, Hays notes that for Paul, “the church community is a sneak preview of God’s ultimate redemption of the world. This is a grandiose-sounding claim, but its potential triumphalism is tempered by the other side of Paul’s eschatological dialectic, the ‘not yet’” (ibid., 24). Scot McKnight similarly observes that it is a mistake to “think church and following Jesus are disconnected” (“The New Perspective and the Christian Life: The Ecclesial Life,” in The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life: Ethical and Missional Implications of the New Perspective, ed. Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016], 128). Indeed, McKnight contends that precisely because Paul knew “that Jesus was Messiah and Lord,” the “church was Paul’s obsession. . . . The mission of the apostle Paul is to form fellowships in separate cities that embody a new sociopolitical and economic and spiritual order” (ibid., 142–43, 145). See also the section on Pauline “ethics, eschatology and theology” in Richard A. Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 98–107. After assessing a wide range of views in Pauline studies and examining Paul’s letters, Burridge concludes this section: “Because we live in the eschatological tension ‘between the times,’ ethics is all the more necessary as we work out the consequences of being ‘in Christ’ and sharing in the Christian community. . . . Jesus’ ethics were primarily concerned with a response to his preaching of the coming of the kingdom into our present now, undertaken within the context of a community of disciples. Paul is often contrasted with Jesus, and seen as responsible for a shift from ‘the kingdom of God’ to the ‘King,’ to the person of Christ, and thus the founder of a new religious movement. In fact, this is an unfair distinction since, for Paul, the supreme act of God’s sovereignty (i.e., the ‘kingdom’) is what he has done in Christ: this is how he has brought the whole story of Israel to a climax in Jesus of Nazareth” (ibid., 106–7).

10. For brief background see Philippe Delhaye, The Christian Conscience, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (New York: Desclée, 1968). Delhaye identifies seven “moral systems” developed in the post-Tridentine period: “absolute tutiorism, mitigated tutiorism, probabiliorism, equiprobabilism, probabilism, compensationism, laxism” (ibid., 21).

11. Charles J. Chaput, “The Splendor of Truth in 2017,” First Things, no. 276 (October 2017): 23. In this essay, Archbishop Chaput defends the teachings of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

12. For a defense of casuistry, see Brian Besong, “Reappraising the Manual Tradition,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2015): 557-84. While I think that his critique of Pinckaers is too broad, I agree that casuistry is needed in moral reflection.

13. Stanley Hauerwas, “Why ‘The Way the Words Run’ Matters: Reflections on Becoming a ‘Major Biblical Scholar,’” in The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, ed. J. Ross Wagner, C. Kavin Rowe, and A. Katherine Grieb (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 3.

14. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 141, a. 2. Thus temperance has to do with the concupiscible appetite, whereas fortitude has to do with the irascible appetite, since fortitude enables a person “to endure or withstand those things on account of which he forsakes the good of reason” (ibid.).

15. See Andrew Pinsent, Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance: The Cardinal Virtues (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2017), 58. He notes, “Those who dissent from this new world order are often ridiculed and may even be criminalised. Pride in sexual immorality cannot, however, wholly disguise some of its dreary and pain-filled consequences. Some of the more obvious examples include promiscuity, marital betrayal and breakdown, the corruption of the young, cynicism, the spread of debilitating diseases, and dealing with unwanted consequences of immorality through contraception, abortion and abortifacients” (ibid.).

16. In his Hope and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Elliot comments, “The rise of virtue ethics in the past decades has led to many treatments of the cardinal and theological virtues. Justice, prudence, courage, charity, and the rest have inspired a great many books, articles, dissertations, and conferences. But one ship has not been lifted by this rising tide: the theological virtue of hope” (1). He could have added another such “ship,” the Christian virtue of temperance.

17. R. R. Reno, “Redemption and Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27.

18. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, Vatican translation (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2013), §169. Pope Francis is here describing the attitude that evangelizers must take. I am not suggesting that Pope Francis has adequately handled the problems that have arisen from entrenched intemperance (and open rejection of the virtue of temperance) within the Church.

19. David Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 76. Robert Miner, indebted to Servais Pinckaers, points out that

sensitive love and pleasure function as images of their spiritual originals. Without the experience of delectatio, it would be difficult to have any grasp of what Aquinas means by gaudium and fruitio, associated with the last end. . . . The passions constitute a first image of a beatitude that transcends the passions. This does not, however, imply that the passions are solely a means to happiness, conceived as an end existing separately from the means. At the very least, the passions are partly constitutive of the happiness available in this life. . . . Conceived as a person’s total perfection, happiness cannot be limited to the actualization of a part. It must include the whole of her basic powers and appetites. (Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 295–96)

He adds that “Aquinas explicitly rejects the view that in perfect happiness [everlasting beatitude] the passions are left behind. On the contrary, because pleasure follows upon the intellect’s operatio, the passions belong to perfect happiness ‘consequently’” (ibid., 297–98). As Miner says, “The design of the 1a2ae is meant to provide a knowledge of the passions that promotes the ascent toward beatitude” (ibid., 299; cf. 94).

20. Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism, 77, 91.

21. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §168.

22. For the history and influence of the temperance movement in America, Great Britain, and Ireland, see chapter 5 of Christopher C. H. Cook, Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

23. Chaput, “Splendor of Truth in 2017,” 23.

24. Ibid. Note that Chaput is here describing a viewpoint with which he disagrees.

25. In his A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 40, André Comte-Sponville defines temperance as “prudence applied to pleasure, the point being to enjoy as much as possible as well as is possible, by intensifying sensation or our consciousness of it and not by multiplying the objects of pleasure ad infinitum.” This Epicurean definition of temperance, however, focuses it entirely on the self and misses the crucial connection of temperance to our relationships with God and neighbor. Comte-Sponville’s reflections on love later in his book are much more promising, since he validates selflessness, but in the end he diminishes charity, describing it merely as “the joyful acceptance of the other, of any other, as he is or whatever he may be” (...