Choosing to Conceive: Should IVF be Restricted in the Same Way We Restrict Unhealthy Food?

An article in today’s NYTimes online provocatively titled “The Gift of Life and It’s Price” discusses both the economic costs and emotional toll of the fertility industry. The issue of IVF is receiving renewed attention in light of the debate about healthcare and the significant costs that IVF children, particularly IVF-conceived twins who are frequently born premature with severe health problems, contribute to overall healthcare spending:

The hospitalization and doctor’s care for Ms. Hare and her son exceeded $1 million. Most of that, about $750,000 to $800,000, was for Carter. The bill was picked up by the self-funded health plan of the Trammell Crow Company, the Dallas real estate investment company where Ms. Hare worked.

“The following quarter during the earnings release, somebody asked why there was a sharp increase in medical costs,” Ms. Hare said. No one identified her, but Ms. Hare knew that her family had contributed heavily.

In Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hired an economist to predict what would happen if single embryo transfer were used in a large number of IVF cases.

Dr. Macaluso, the C.D.C. reproductive health official, estimates the patients, businesses and insurance providers would save more than $500 million annually, even taking into consideration the cost of extra in-vitro rounds, by lowering neonatal intensive care, special education and other costs of premature babies.

In an effort to be competitive in today’s fertility industry, clinics grant the maximum autonomy possible to clients in choosing how many fertilized embryos to transfer, despite the fact that higher implantation success rates means that multiple transfers is significantly more likely to lead to multiple births. Potential parents know the risk, but since IVF procedures frequently come out of their own pocket, most are unable to afford multiple rounds, and multiple embryo transfers makes it much more likely that the first round of IVF will lead to conception. Twins are much more likely than single births to have complications at birth.

According to one federal study, about 30 percent of all twins end up in a neonatal intensive care unit, with twins eight times as likely as single babies to be born below 3 pounds, 4 ounces. These are the babies who often need the longest hospital care and face the most sever health problems. Dr. Macaluso, the doctor featured in the article, calls them “million-dollar babies.”

The story does a good job balancing between discussing the extreme financial costs of IVF and multiple births with the more emotional side of the story. The parents discussed (and many of the ones weighing in with comments at the end of the article) are couples who want ever-so-badly to have children and are willing to bear any costs to make this a reality. Moreover, they are providing their children the gift of life, a gift that outweighs any financial burden.

This article brings to the mind of the everydaythomist the morality of choice, and in particular, a distinction made by the renowned Servais Pinckaers between freedom of indifference and freedom for excellence. Pickaers argues that in the contemporary period, we are accustomed to thinking of choice as a matter of choosing between what he calls “freedom of indifference” and “freedom of excellence.” Much of Pinckaers discussion of these two freedoms is a rhetorically charged jab at a caricature of nominalism, and particularly William of Occam (I am more inclined to blame Scotus for the sins of nominalism), but in essence, freedom of indifference is a conception of human freedom that reduces the matter of choice completely to the will’s ability to choose between contraries.

Essentially, freedom of indifference for Pinckaers is the freedom to do whatever is within the realm of possibility for human beings. Human beings have the ability to implant one or two or ten embryos into a woman’s uterus, thus, a woman has the freedom to decide how many embryos will get transferred. Freedom of indifference is the freedom of choice, the choice to say “yes” or “no” to whatever is possible.

Freedom for excellence is, on the contrary, a more limited construal of freedom. This conception of freedom is not one that focuses on the will’s ability to choose “yes” or “no” to whatever possible, but rather the will and intellect’s ability to choose “yes” to whatever is good. Freedom for excellence is a freedom limited to the telos of human flourishing. Choosing what is conducive to flourishing, both for the individual and the community, is an exercise of such freedom; choosing what is not conducive to flourishing, despite the fact that it may look like an exercise of freedom, is actually a mere expression of the will and reason’s enslavement to the passions, or custom, or some other power that prevents the person from becoming the person that God intended.

Freedom for excellence is not something that is simply given, but is rather something that humans need to develop through the exercise of virtuous external activities, and particularly through the development of the virtues. When I resist gorging myself on Halloween candy because I know it will make me feel sick and sluggish afterwards, I am exercising my freedom for excellence. When my husband and I choose not to buy a TV because we know that our default evening activity will be to veg out in front of the tube rather than engaging in more productive and life-giving activities, we are developing our freedom for excellence, despite the fact that we are limiting our ability to “choose” what to do each night.

Pinckaers distinction between the two freedoms is overly-simplistic, and my summary is even more so, but I think this distinction can illuminate an element of this debate about the cost, both financial and human, about fertility treatment. We think of the ability to choose whether or not to engage in fertility treatment as a foregone conclusion. After all, the technology is available, and much that is good is resultant of the use of this technology, namely the freedom for infertile couples to have their own children. Couples previously denied a choice concerning whether or not to have children now have their freedom to choose restored. This article discusses the cost of couples choosing whether or not to utilize this technology, but does not discuss the choice itself.

I am not so convinced that IVF and other fertility treatments are an authentic and moral exercise of human freedom. Consider this comment from one reader:

I’m sure I share many readers’ thoughts and feelings. Although I acknowledge people’s primal and mindless urges to procreate, in the world we share, “want” doesn’t equal “should have”. Our country and planet are places of finite resources of every kind. To squander them on IVF and its incredibly resource-intensive consequences is simply an outrage. There is no tenable argument in favor of IVF.

Many of the comments reflect this sentiment, and criticize the article for never mentioning adoption. The logic behind these comments is that it is more moral to choose adoption than to choose IVF.

Why wasn’t adoption ever mentioned in this article? Why do these women put themselves and their families through such risky procedures when there are so many children who could need loving, supportive families?

And another.

There are always options for adoption (although it is my understanding that this process can be equally time consuming, emotionally draining, and financially burdensome.

I think there is a case to be made for limiting the freedom to choose IVF, which is a restriction of one conception of freedom, in order to expand another conception of freedom. I think we need to bring the debate about IVF back down to the morality of the choice itself. Our society is limiting the ability to “choose” in all sorts of ways in order to make people “more free” in another way. We are taking coke and snack machines out of primary schools, for example, which is limiting the freedom our children have to choose between healthy and unhealthy dining options in order to make them more free by making them less disposed to obesity and diabetes as adults. In many cities across the US, including my own, it is illegal to smoke inside public buildings in order to make people more free to enjoy a meal or a drink without exposure to second-hand smoke.

We choose to limit our ability to choose in order to make us more free to make choices that are conducive to health, flourishing, and excellence. Why do we not do the same for IVF. Yes, in one sense, it is wonderful for parents who cannot conceive naturally to be able to conceive artificially, and there are many beautiful IVF success stories that serve as a testimony to its advantages. But are fertility procedures like IVF allowing individuals and society to make choices that are really conducive to excellence and flourishing?

This article points to one way in which IVF may be detracting from individual and societal flourishing by causing a huge burden to the health care system which is already over-stretched and under-accomplished. The comments about adoption point to another way in which the ability to choose IVF is not conducive to flourishing—it makes people more likely to choose IVF and less likely to choose adoption, leaving millions of kids unwanted in under-resourced foster care system. By restricting the freedom to choose IVF, we increase the freedom to choose adoption, in the same way that restricting the freedom to choose a treat from the snack machine increases the freedom to choose a healthy snack of veggies or whole grains.

Deep down, most of us are libertarians in some way. We want to maximize our choices as a way of maximizing our freedom. But most of us also recognize that on a society-wide scale, maximizing choices is not usually conducive to either making us more free or making us more happy. If given the choice to eat unhealthy snacks or a balanced lunch, most people are going to choose the latter. And we may say that it is a good in itself that they can make this choice, but when we get a society where over 30% of the population is obese, and we can’t provide adequate healthcare to all because the healthcare industry is already over-taxed in treating preventable illnesses like heart disease and obesity, we have to step back and ask whether the inherent ability to choose an unhealthy lifestyle is so good after all.

In a similar fashion, we might think it inherently good that couples at one time debilitated by the disease of infertility can now choose to bear a child of their own to love and care for. But when we get a bloated foster care system, and another giant strain on the healthcare system from couples having IVF babies demanding millions of dollars of expensive lifesaving treatments, maybe we have to step back again and ask whether the inherent ability to choose the IVF procedure is so good after all as well.

Two Forms of Judgment: Judgment per modum cognitionis and per modum inclinationis

Aquinas distinguishes between two types of knowledge at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae that correspond to two modes of judging. The first is judgment by cognition (per modum cognitionis), the second is judgment by inclination (per modum inclinationis):

Since judgment appertains to wisdom, the twofold manner of judging produces a twofold wisdom. A man may judge in one way by inclination, as whoever has the habit of a virtue judges rightly of what concerns that virtue by his very inclination towards it. Hence it is the virtuous man, as we read, who is the measure and rule of human acts. In another way, by knowledge, just as a man learned in moral science might be able to judge rightly about virtuous acts, though he had not the virtue. The first manner of judging divine things belongs to that wisdom which is set down among the gifts of the Holy Ghost: “The spiritual man judges all things” (1 Corinthians 2:15). And Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ii): “Hierotheus is taught not by mere learning, but by experience of divine things.” The second manner of judging belongs to this doctrine which is acquired by study, though its principles are obtained by revelation (I, Q. 1, art. 6, ad. 3).

According to Aquinas, right judgment can be achieved either through the perfect use of reason or by way of inclination. Judgment per modum cognitionis is notional knowledge attained by rational study. In other places, he refers to this mode of judging as per studium et doctrinam, per modum rationis, and secundum perfectum usum rationis.

Judgement per modum inclinationis is not cognitive, and not a judgment which takes place through the cogitative power, but rather, judgment according to affection or desire, and thus a kind of affective knowledge. Elsewhere Aquinas writes,

Wisdom denotes a certain rectitude of judgment according to the Eternal Law. Now rectitude of judgment is twofold: first, on account of perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter about which one has to judge. Thus, about matters of chastity, a man after inquiring with his reason forms a right judgment, if he has learnt the science of morals, while he who has the habit of chastity judges of such matters by a kind of connaturality (II-II, Q. 45, art. 2).

Aquinas is distinguishing the two different forms of judging, or assigning value to something, using the example of virtue. A person may judge a thing like chastity should or should not be desired because he or she has been taught and understands how such a thing should be considered moral or immoral. On the other hand, a person may judge rightly as to whether something should or should not be desired not through a cognitive decision, but rather on the basis of whether or not he or she actually desires the thing in question. In the case of the former, the intellect is clearly providing the basis of judgment through the cogitative power. In the case of the former, the affective inclination of the person provides the basis for the judgment. In this way, the virtuous person is the rule and measure of human actions. The virtuous person is inclined towards the object of virtue (inquantum ad illa inclinator) or through a certain connaturality with the object of virtue (per quondam connaturalitatem ad ipsa).

We might think of an example in eating. Some individuals need to mentally check themselves to ensure that they do not overeat. How much food this person should desire on any given occasion is a cognitive decision. This individual may desire to eat a second helping of a dish, but decide that this second helping would make him or her too full, and therefore decline. Others, however, just naturally desire the right quantity of food on a given occasion. This individual does not have to decide whether a second helping of a dish is appropriate—the individual simply acts on his or her desires.

We must be careful not to go too far in pitting these two forms of judgment against each other as opposites, but see them rather as corollaries. Affective knowledge and judgment per modum inclinationis is not a judgment made without knowledge, but is rather the synthesis of love and knowledge—a synthesis of cognitive and affective activity. If we understand the two modes of judgment in this way, as a single activity of knowing and loving, we may resolve the apparent tension in Aquinas between the passions and reason. Recall that Aquinas holds that the human person is a hylomorphic unity of body and soul, and that the sensitive appetite stands between these two in a unified activity of putting the whole human person substantially in relation to the world. Knowing and loving are distinct activities, but with the same principle of operation, which is the substantial unity of the human soul.

Moral knowledge, therefore, is not either purely rational knowledge or purely affective knowledge, but is rather a synthesis of both knowledge per modum cognitionis and knowledge per modum inclinationis.

The hylomorphic unity of the human person also explains how one particular power can overcome the other. If the soul’s full energies are employed in the act of cognition, of knowing, such cogitation can impede the affective movement of the soul. Aquinas says that the concentration of the intellect can actually overcome the sensitive appetite so that it no longer experiences certain sensible functions: “In the powers of the soul there is an overflow from the higher to the lower powers: and accordingly, the pleasure of contemplation, which is in the higher part, overflows so as to mitigate even that pain which is in the senses” (I-II, Q. 38, art. 4, ad. 3). More commonly, however, the soul’s activities get concentrated on affection and its accompanying form of judgment. In this way, a person under the influence of anger may judge a thing good that he would not so judge if not under the influence of that passion:

Now it is evident that according to a passion of the sensitive appetite man is changed to a certain disposition. Wherefore according as man is affected by a passion, something seems to him fitting, which does not seem so when he is not so affected: thus that seems good to a man when angered, which does not seem good when he is calm (I-II, Q. 9, art. 2).

What is important to note, however, is that the sensitive appetite seems to present the intellect with an object already laden with value. This challenges the view among some Thomists that the role of the sensitive appetite is only to obey reason.

How do Academicians Become Holier? Renewing Hagiography for the Professional Ethicist

In New Wine, New Wineskins, Christopher Steck, SJ has an article entitled “Saintly Voyeurism: A Methodological Necessity for the Christian Ethicist?” In this essay, Steck notes the lack of attention to the personal qualities and character of the professional ethicist, and argues that contemporary Catholic moral theology should incorporate of his proposed method of “saintly voyeurism” into moral education. “Saintly voyeurism” according to Steck is a return to concrete models of Christian holiness as found in the stories of the saints in order to facilitate a neglected goal for the moral practitioner, namely, their own holiness.

Steck’s concern is that contemporary moral theologians are not sufficiently rooted in and transformed by the Christian story. On an institutional level, Steck complains that that there is insufficient support both from the church and the academy to support the development of catholic ethicists own development of Christian disciples as they practice their trade. He writes,

Achieving such a vision [of Christian discipleship for the professional ethicist] is complicated in the academic culture in which Catholic ethicists practice their trade. That culture is given shape by a constellation of values whose form does not align well with that of the field of Christian ethics, especially insofar as it is concerned with questions of what constitutes the holy life. This misalignment, I argue, is due in part to the dominance of rationalistic and acutely critical modes of contemporary research, along with a lack of concern for the personal moral character of the one engaging in research. . . More though needs to be given too how Catholic moral theologians can ‘form’ themselves into Christian ethicists and address issues of Christian discipleship and the holy life.

In essence, Steck’s concern is that not enough attention is being directed towards making ethicists more ethical, and within a Christian context, more holy. Instead, the virtues of the professional ethicists encouraged in the academy are the virtues which Steck identifies with scientific rationalism. They are

• Agorism: the virtue of argumentation and debate, or the “need to position one’s work in opposition to someone else’s and disprove others’ arguments in order to be original, [to] make a contribution and demonstrate intellectual ability” (28).

• Circumscription: the inclination against universalist or comprehensive claims

• Unmaking: a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion or “belief that truth claims conceal subtle and pernicious advancements of self-interest (whether personal, group, social, or institutional) and unconscious desires of power” (28-9).

Such critique-oriented rationalistic virtues have their advantages in the academy and particularly for scholarly research, but Steck worries that such virtues are not in themselves sufficient for the development of the scholar, and particularly the Catholic ethicist. That is, such virtues encourage intellectual competency but neglect other fundamental parts of the academician’s character. As Steck puts it, “Our ends [as scholars] are not just intellectual ones; they have to do with what brings us emotional well-being, psychological peach, and deep satisfaction about a life lived well” (30).

What we need in the academy, argues Steck, are spiritual practices that nurture a more comprehensive vision of the Christian life for the professional Catholic ethicist. That is, the Catholic academy needs institutionalized ways of encouraging Christian discipleship and Christian holiness among its professional ethicists.

What Steck recommends is a sort of “saintly voyeurism,” or as he describes it, “ethical reflection on the ordinary acts of a holy existence to better understand the demands of Christian discipleship” (36). Concretely, this takes the form of a kind of revised hagiography, a study of the lives and actions of the saints with an eye toward discerning which actions are most consonant with a saintly life. He quotes Richard McCormick who says “that the meaning of Christian discipleship is best gathered from the lives of the saints” (37):

Elizabeth of Hungary’s disobedience of her husband’s wishes in order to serve the poor, Elizabeth Ann Seton’s engagement with religious antagonism of her time, and Ignatius of Loyola’s apostolic choice to minister not only to the poor but to the powerful represent choices that raise interesting ethical issues for those wishing to better understand the saintly life.

Steck does not recommend an exact imitation of the saints, but rather a “casuistry at a distance,” that is, an observation of what sort of actions might be considered saintly in a given situation in order to train the ethicist’s own vision of holiness. This moral tutoring through hagiography can occur in five ways, according to Steck:

1. It can confirm for the ethicist the viability of the Christian vision, and strengthen the ethicist’s commitment to living as a Christian disciple even in the face of great adversity
2. Studying the lives of the saints can reemphasize the theological dimension of the Christian life by emphasizing such features as surrender, obedience, participation in the paschal mystery, and trust in the abiding power of love
3. The saints can offer new paradigms for how Christian discipleship can be lived out in changing historical situations
4. The lives of the saints can offer a context for examining how holiness can break through the trial and limitations of creaturely existence.
5. Finally, the saints challenge us always to respond to the situations we find ourselves in, rather than passively accepting the lot we are given. The saints give us options for our own lives for how to live out a life of holiness.

Steck concludes:

Christian moral theology is not simply a deductive or rationalistic science. It requires that its practitioner have a well-formed heart that is attuned to the Gospel and the values at its core. In an ideal world, Catholic moral theologians would be saints and scholars. However, Catholic ethicists now perform their trade in a context that often does not sustain the kind of Gospel vision associated with a saintly existence. The indifference of the academy toward traditional virtues and the loss of preconciliar spiritual practices within Catholicism leave Catholic moralists more susceptible than moralists of an earlier generation to an almost exclusively secular and narrowly rationalistic formation. . . . Scriptural mediation, prayer, devotional practices, and liturgical participation are just some of the practices that form the Christian into a disciple. But examining the lives of the saints, ordinary people achieving great moral character, is one practice that allows ethicists to practice their art—that is, scholarly reflection on human action—and thus represents a distinctive resource for moralists.

I think Steck is right on the money. I would recommend two developments to his argument. First, I think we need to accept the fact that much of the lives of the saints can be psychologized in today’s rationalistic environment, but that need not deter us from recognizing moments of great holiness or the fact that God has worked throughout history through very flawed individuals. My pet example is St. Catherine of Sienna who allegedly went seven years eating nothing but the Eucharist and occasionally some bitter herbs. Clearly, this part of her life seems psychologically unsound, and for good reason. However, the important point to be gleaned from a study of her life is that God inspired her to do great feats of holiness requiring great courage, like caring for victims of the plague and confronting the pope concerning matters of politics, despite the fact that she was a flawed, psychologically fragile and vulnerable individual. Clearly, a great lesson for us all.

Second, I would encourage Catholics to look beyond the boundaries of Catholicism to identify both historical and contemporary saints that were not necessarily a part of the Catholic faith. Due largely to my husband’s influence, I consider the Christian singer Rich Mullins a great saint. Mullins, inspired by the Christian message and anxious to live a life of Christian witness, gave his profits from his singing career to charity, and dedicated large portions of his life to charitable activities not associated at all with his career, like moving to a Native American reservation to teach the children there about music. When I listen to Rich Mullin’s music, I cannot help but be inspired by the vision of the Christian life he encourages both through his music and the story of his life. Clearly, Rich Mullins can be considered a contemporary saint for Catholics today.

I’m interested for all the professionals or soon-to-be professionals reading this post: (1) what role do the lives of the saints play in your own professional and personal life, and (2) what ways institutionally can you think of that you are encouraged to live a life of holiness within your profession, rather than a life of pure academic achievement?

The Pope’s Very Political Encyclical

Pope Benedict promulgated his third encyclical last week entitled “Caritas in Veritate” (Charity in Truth). It’s a lengthy encyclical but if you choose, you can read the full text here. Or you can just peruse this or this very useful summary.

The encyclical fits into the genre of “Catholic Social Teaching,” and in it, Benedict reemphasizes some prominent themes from that tradition: the protection of life, the protection of workers, the importance of the economy serving human beings and not the other way around, and the principle of subsidiarity for the organization of society.

There are lots of blog posts examining the encyclical, which I am not going to do here. My interest concerns rather a point made by Ross Douthat in the NYTimes op-ed column entitled “The Audacity of the Pope.” He writes:

Inevitably, liberal Catholics spent the past week touting its relevance to the Democratic Party’s policy positions. (A representative blast e-mail: “Pope’s Encyclical on Global Economy Supports the Principles of the Employee Free Choice Act.”) Just as inevitably, conservative Catholics hastened to explain that the encyclical “is not a political document” — to quote a statement co-authored by the House minority leader, John Boehner — and shouldn’t be read as “an endorsement of any political or economic agenda.”

Then, after acknowledging that the pope is neither a Republican or a Democrat, Douthat writes that “Benedict’s encyclical is nothing if not political. Caritas in Veritate promotes a vision of economic solidarity rooted in moral conservatism. It links the dignity of labor to the sanctity of marriage. It praises the redistribution of wealth while emphasizing the importance of decentralized governance. It connects the despoiling of the environment to the mass destruction of human embryos.”

What bothers me about the rest of the column is that Douthat tries to make the encyclical somehow “fit into” American conceptions of politics, recognizing that putting the pope’s recommendations into practice is challenging for Democrats and Republicans alike. “For liberals and conservatives alike, ‘Caritas in Veritate’ is an invitation to think anew about their alliances and litmus tests.”

Douthat is right that people want to take the encyclical as political when they agree with it, but when they don’t, the pope is just weighing in with his opinion. For the vast majority of people looking at the political implications of the encyclical, politics is a matter of debate, division, and voting. Politics is like a debate competition with winners and losers. Basically, politics is about what you do; morality is about what you believe. The pope can believe whatever he wants, but this has nothing to do with politics. Morality is a private issue; politics is public.

I think this understanding of politics stems from the idea that somehow morality is something separate from politics. I’m reminded of Al Gore’s speech at the Academy Awards where he said that climate change was “not a political issue, it’s a moral issue.” Gore’s comment makes it seem like politics is about power, or about making people do something. Morality on the other hand is about right and wrong.

Aristotle and Aquinas give us a very different understanding of politics. Politics is not about coercion and power, or even primarily about making laws and enforcing them. Politics for Aristotle and Aquinas is simply a branch of ethics. For Aristotle, “politics” is simply part two of his ethics. And Aquinas never even wrote a treatise on politics, though he did write about politics in his ethics found in the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologica. In honor of Benedict’s very political encyclical, now is a good time to review what Aristotle and Aquinas take “political” to mean.

For Aristotle and Aquinas, human beings are political creatures, naturally inclined to live in society. Political society (civitas) emerges from the needs human nature and is in itself a purely natural and desirable. This is a stark contrast with a thinker like Thomas Hobbes who thought that political society was an artificial imposition established to curb the violence of human nature. For Hobbes, if human beings were virtuous, they would not need a political society; for Aquinas, political society is necessary for the full perfection of human existence. The political society is the social setting in which human beings find their fulfillment and flourishing.

The primary task of the political society, therefore, is to create good and virtuous citizens. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas says that a political society comes into being as a necessary component of human life, but it exists for the sake of living well (Commentary on the Politics, Book 1, Lesson 1).

So we see that ethics and politics has a similar end or purpose–the formation of good people. And in both ethics and politics, this process is a gradual process of development and progress over time. While political society might be completely natural, a good political society is not. In the same way that human beings must acquire moral virtue through education and habituation, even though they are naturally inclined to moral virtue in Aquinas’ system, so too must a political society be developed and fostered.

One of the ways this happens is through the natural law. The natural law, most basically, is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law. The eternal law is the Divine Governance that is behind creation. For most of creation, the eternal law is pretty determinative. It is by God’s eternal law that the seasons change, the planets move, fire rises upward, and stones fall downward. It is by the eternal law that plants grow, and lions chase gazelles, and whales swim instead of fly. But rational creatures (i.e. humans), as Aquinas writes, are “subject to Divine Providence in the most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share of providence, by being provident both for itself, and for others” (ST I-II, Q. 91, art. 2).

Human beings are not determined to specific actions like other parts of creation. Humans do have natural inclinations that come from the eternal law, but human beings have freedom and choice regarding how those inclinations will be directed. Thus, the natural law is about directing natural human inclinations towards the ultimate human good, which is flourishing. These natural inclinations include those inclinations that we share with all created things, namely, to keep ourselves in existence. They also include the inclinations that we share with other animals, namely to reproduce and educate offspring. And those natural inclinations include those distinctively human inclinations to form societies and seek out knowledge of God.

So the formation and regulation of society is a subject of study both for ethics and for politics. Laws are the natural outgrowth of the rational creature discerning how to live in order to flourish. Laws are not primarily about coercion (although they can and do have coercive effects). Laws are the product and outgrowth of the natural law. They are the embodiment of a community’s morality.

Politics, therefore, like ethics, is about discerning right from wrong in order to best live a good and flourishing life. So the pope’s encyclical, in so far as it is about morals, is political. But that does not mean that is primarily concerned with legislation. Determining how such moral values offered in the encyclical are to be enacted in legislation will vary from community to community. Aquinas explains how the process of creating laws is like craftsman who uses the “general form of a house” to build a particular house. Laws, in the same ways, are built on moral values (derived from natural law) but their specific form will vary depending on the needs of a given community.

Thus, different societies will have different ways of enforcing the precepts of natural law like prohibitions against murder or theft or laws regulating the best way to raise a family, protect the environment, or educate citizens. And different societies are going to have different ways of enacting the moral values espoused in Caritas et Veritate. The pope’s encyclical talks about the foundations for this process–the sort of moral values that all people of good will should espouse and all societies should take seriously in working to promote the common good. This is very much a political endeavor, or as the pope writes in his encyclical, it is the fruit of the “political path of charity.” (7)

No matter what you might think of the pope’s ideas, you cannot write off the encyclical as moral, but not political. But it isn’t political because the pope is taking sides or affirming the platform of any given party, or playing a political game. It is not political because the pope is coercing individuals or nations to act in any given way. It is political because the pope is talking about ethics, about the moral values that we act on that either contribute to or detract from the good life. It is political because the pope is inquiring after what human beings need in our changing world to flourish. As we debate the merits of the encyclical, let us not debate about whether it is political or not, and let us definitely not assume that simply because the pope wrote something political, he is out of line. Rather, let us allow the political process the pope started to continue as we examine the encyclical and reflect on what our society needs for its people to live good lives.

Part 2 of the Christian Response to Abortion: We are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

There is a human tendency to worship the works of our hands, to see moral and political and social progress as a human achievement. We worship our heritage, we worship human leaders, we worship our ideals. What we forget is how frail we human beings are, how readily we fall into selfish, hurtful, and wicked ways, and how frequently the good we do and the good we intend is mixed with evil motives and evil consequences. There is a song by Rich Mullins called “We are Not as Strong as We Think We Are” which beautifully captures the tragic beauty of our human condition:

We are frail
We are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Forged in the fires of human passion
Choking on the fumes of selfish rage.
And with these our hells and our heavens,
So few inches apart,
We must be awfully small,
And not as strong as we think we are.

The United States is celebrating the election of the first black president. Truly, this is something we can rejoice in, that in this country, the color of a man’s skin does not keep him from the nation’s highest office. What was wonderful about Barack Obama’s inauguration speech was that his triumph was a qualified by the fact that this nation still has so much work to do, and so much collective guilt that we have to atone for, both for what we have done domestically and abroad. As we welcome President Obama, our own rejoicing must be limited at this realization–that we, collectively, still bear the guilt of so much inhumanity, and that this human success, as with all our human success, is one which is interwoven with so much evil. The past racism of this country, and the racism that still exists, reveal something about humanity that is very much relevant to the Christian response to abortion.

13% of American women are black, yet 35% of abortions are procured by black women. The majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are still located in neighborhoods constituted by predominantly black and Hispanic populations. Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and outspoken opponent of abortion, has argued that racism and abortion are connected.

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. We create the deceptions that the other person is less important, less worthy, less human. We are all fully human. When we face this truth, there is no justification for treating those who look different than us as lesser beings. If we simply treat other people the way we’d like to be treated, racism, abortion, and other forms of inhumanity will be things of the past.

The founder of Planned Parenthood herself was an outspoken advocate of eugenics, claiming that the sterilization of the ‘unfit’ would be the salvation of the American citizen. “The most serious charge that can be brought against modern ‘benevolence,’” Sanger argued in her work “The Function of Sterilization,” “is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.”

Margaret Sanger thought that human beings could be divided into the fit and the unfit. This is the same mentality that exists behind racist agendas. What she and so many others fail to realize is that we are all unfit, that we are all frail, that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made, capable of amazing achievements and at the same time, terrifying horrors. We purchase peace with toilsome wars, we secure luxury by enslaving others, we expiate our sins by sending scapegoats out into the desert. Our triumphs and successes and victories never go without causalities.

One often hears the objection to the effort to outlaw abortion, “what about pregnancies that result from incest or rape or spousal abuse?” The assumption it is somehow inhuman to force an innocent woman to carry a child she is not responsible for. We assume it is better to terminate the pregnancy than to bring a child conceived in sin into the world. But we are all conceived in sin indicated by the fact that we bear our morality with us. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians:

We hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being given up to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you (4:7-12)

Rich Mullins puts it simpler: our heavens and our hells are always only inches apart.

What must keep in mind when we debate abortion is that we are always feeble and vulnerable and utterly dependent creatures. The child we see in the womb is our own reflection. To say that the child in the womb is liable to death is to condemn us all to death. No amount of inconvenience should lead us to treat any part of God’s creation, especially His frail, feeble image, with murderous contempt. And likewise, no amount of human mercy can change what abortion fundamentally is–a rebellious assertion of our will over God’s will. We, who are “dust and ashes,” cannot rely on our own plans, our own good intentions, and our own solutions. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, “We are able to have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that urges us to welcome children. When that happens, it is an extraordinary testimony of faith.”

Augustine writes in his Confessions, “Aware of our own infirmity we are moved to compassion to help the indigent, assisting them in the same ways as we would wish to be helped if we were in the same distress-and not only in easy ways, like ‘the grass bearing seed’ but with the protection and aid given with a resolute determination like ‘the tree bearing fruit.’ This means such kindness as rescuing a person suffering injustice from the hand of the powerful and providing the shelter of protection by the mighty force of just judgment” (285). Our acts of mercies, in other words, are always grounded in the realization that we need mercy, and the realization that “we are awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.”

Some Notes on Free Will

Aquinas uses the Latin liberum arbitrium,  meaning “free judgment” when he talks about free will in the Prima Pars (the first part of the Summa Theologica), henceforth referenced by the Roman numeral I).  The idea of “judgment” is important for his parsing out what he means by free will.

He says in I, Q. 83, art. I that some things act without judgments, like a stone moving downward when dropped.  Other things move with judgment but without knowledge like animals who judge a something like a steak to be good, but judge according to instinct, not reason.  Humans, however, act from judgment with knowledge, meaning that humans reason that something should be sought or avoided, not on instinct, but according to reason.

One advantage of acting according to judgment with knowledge is that human beings can be inclined to various “good” things like studying for comps or blogging, but not to any particular good.  Now, that does not mean that the will is not moved of necessity.  In Q. 82, art. 2, Aquinas says that the will must of necessity tend towards the good.  This means that the will has to will anything that it wills because it sees it as a good.  The reason that free will is still possible in light of this is that the will is not bound to any particular good.  Blogging and studying for comprehensive exams are both goods, and my will can choose either one of them because it judges one to be a particular good worthy of pursuit over the other (which is why I am blogging at midnight rather than studying or sleeping, other, perhaps better goods).

The idea of free will got a little distorted in the 14th c. in what is known as the Nominalist movement.  Figures like Duns Scotus and William Occam read that the will was bound by necessity to the good (that it must will the good) and assumed that this undermined human freedom.  Occam posited instead the freedom of indifference for the will, meaning that the will was not bound by anything.  It could choose evil if it wanted to, or it could choose good.  For Occam and others during this time, this was the only conception of freedom that made sense.

For Aquinas, freedom is not the capacity to choose between contraries.  The will is created to be inclined towards the good and so it simply cannot choose evil.  To understand this, let’s think of the stone falling to the ground.  The stone has to fall towards the ground.  This is simply the way God created the universe and the natural laws according to which the universe operate says that a stone dropped on earth will fall to the ground.  In a similar way, the will has to move towards the good.  The difference is that, whereas there is only one place for the stone to go, namely down, there are many places the will can go.  There are many different goods it can choose.  But just because God created it to tend towards the good does not mean that it isn’t free:

Free-will is the cause of its own movement because by his free-will, man moves himself to act.  But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself. . .God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary.  And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature (I, Q. 83, art. 1).

What I think is so interesting about Aquinas’ treatment of free will is the extent to which he emphasizes how the exercise of the free will depends on the help of God.  In the reply to 83.1, Obj. 2, he says that free-will is not sufficient, “unless it be moved and helped by God.”  In the reply to Obj. 4 of the same article, he says “man’s way is said no be his in the execution of his choice, wherein he may be impeded, whether he will or not.  The choice itself, however, is in us, but presupposes the help of God.”  In the next article, he says that “free will is the subject of grace, by the help of which it chooses what is good.”

The reformer Martin Luther is famous for saying that there is no such thing as free will.  What he means is that  human beings are incapable of doing good unless helped by grace.  To illustrate this point in a work called The Bondage of the Will, he borrows an image from Augustine of the will being ridden (enslaved) by Satan, unless it be justified, whereby it is then ridden or “enslaved” to God.

The tendency in moral theology has been to place Aquinas and Luther on opposite sides of the spectrum, with Aquinas emphasizing the good that human beings are capable of, and Luther emphasizing the complete and utter dependence on grace.  I am not so sure this is fair to Aquinas.  In I, Q. 83, art.2, ad. 3, Aquinas says “man is said to have lost free will by falling into sin, not as to natural liberty, which is freedom from coercion, but as regards freedom from fault and unhappiness.”

It seems to me that Luther and Aquinas are closer than they are thought to be.  Luther thinks that with grace, and only with grace, can the will do what it is supposed to do.  He uses the metaphor of enslavement to God to illustrate the point.  Aquinas agrees that only with grace can the will do what it is supposed to do (not just in its fallen state but in its natural state as well).  Rather than enslavement, however, Aquinas talks about necessity to clarify the sense in which the will is free.  In Q. 82, art. 2, he says that the will can freely choose among various goods that are not necessary for happiness, “but there are some things that have a necessary connection with happiness, by means of which things man adheres to God, in Whom alone true happiness consists.  Nevertheless, until through the certitude of the Divine Vision the necessity of such connection be shown, the will does not adhere to God of necessity, nor to those things which are of God.  But the will of the man who sees God in His essence of necessity adheres to God, just as now we desire of necessity to be happy” (emphasis mine).  What Aquinas is saying here is really very similar to Luther–the will needs grace to do what it is supposed to do as a will, and to do what a will is supposed to do is the only meaning of “freedom” that makes any sense.

Thomas Aquinas’ Views Featured in TIME Magazine

I am delighted with the feature article for the most recent Time Magazine.  I love it when an article substantiating everything Thomas Aquinas said 800 years is considered “news.”  The Time Magazine article is all about happiness, which I talked about here in my article on beatitude as providing the foundation of Aquinas’ ethics.  This article, however, is not so much about ethics but rather, positive psychology, which I also talked about here.

Positive psychologists are interested  not just in what makes us depressed, but also in what makes us happy.  Or as Martin Seligman, the new president of the American Psychological Association, describes the goal of positive psychology: “It wasn’t enough for us (psychologists) to nullify disabling conditions and get to zero. We needed to ask, What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?”  Seligman and others like Edward Diener, Ray Fowler, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have been pushing scientific studies to determine what makes us happy, but for a Thomist, the conclusions are not news.

Turns out, wealth doesn’t make us happy.  As described by this accompanying Time Magazine article, scientific research indicates that people with above-average incomes are not much happier than others and that loss of wealth is usually only accompanied by a short term loss in happiness, if overal happiness is affected at all.

But Aquinas already said that happiness did not reside in the acquiring of wealth (I-II, Q. 2, art. 1) because wealth is meant to serve something else like the satisfaction of needs.  Even wealth that buys us not just what we need but all the things in the world that we may want does not satisfy our insatiable human appetites, as Aquinas explains:

in the desire for wealth and for whatsoever temporal goods . . . when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others: which is the sense of Our Lord’s words (John 4:13): “Whosoever drinketh of this water,” by which temporal goods are signified, “shall thirst again.” The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein.

Positive psychologists are also discovering that education, fame, goods of the body, and even pleasure don’t make us happy.  All of Question 2 of the Prima Secundae, however,  is dedicated to proving this exact fact.

Positive psychologists have also discovered that friends are conducive to happiness.  Aquinas derives this notion from Aristotle, making this insight even more ancient:

If we speak of the happiness of this life, the happy man needs friends, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix, 9), not, indeed, to make use of them, since he suffices himself; nor to delight in them, since he possesses perfect delight in the operation of virtue; but for the purpose of a good operation, viz. that he may do good to them; that he may delight in seeing them do good; and again that he may be helped by them in his good work. For in order that man may do well, whether in the works of the active life, or in those of the contemplative life, he needs the fellowship of friends (I-II, Q. 4, art. 8 )

Religion also seems to make us  happier, which I talked about here.

But it also turns out that even the happiest people are sad some of the time.  According to Aquinas, this is because the happiness of this life is only imperfect happiness.  True happiness consists only in contemplating the Divine Essence, which is the only sort of happiness that cannot be lost.

Like I say, I am delighted that positive psychology is confirming all of these great Thomistic insights.  As valuable as positive psychology is, however, it can only tell us about imperfect happiness, which by its very nature will always be a little dissatisfying.  Maybe those like Martin Seligman and Edward Diener who are on the quest for happiness will, in their dissatisfaction with what positive psychology concludes, lead others to the theology of Thomas Aquinas which concludes that “final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence” (I-II,  Q. 3, art. 8).

New Year’s Resolutions: It Takes More Than One Swallow to Make a Spring

Happy New Year.  Chances are, you have made some New Year’s Resolutions, probably from among these most popular picks.   You either resolved to lose weight or manage your money better or quit smoking or you chose some other noble intention for 2009.  Chances are, your noble intentions will come to naught.  This article claims only 10% of people will be successful.   With odds like that, you have to ask yourself why you bother to make a resolution in the first place.

What my Thomist eyes see when I survey the popular choices for New Year’s resolutions is that people don’t really resolve to do something specific.  They aren’t resolving not get drunk at the New Year’s party, or to send thank you cards for all the wedding gifts they received a year ago, or to send in their taxes on time.  They are resolving to make lifestyle changes.  They want to be healthier, or at least thinner.  They want to be more organized, especially with money.  They want to stop smoking or to drink less.

Lifestyle changes are all about changing our habits.  Aquinas adopts the Aristotelian insight that a habit (habitus) is “a disposition whereby that which is disposed is disposed well or ill, and this, either in regard to itself or in regard to another” (I-II, Q. 49, art. 1)  Habits are not in the body, but rather in the soul which moves the body to do certain things.  If you are prone to overeating, for example, it is not your tummy which has the bad habit, but rather your “soul” which causes you to reach for a  cookie when you are hungry  rather than a carrot stick or causes you to down an entire pizza when you are stressed.  Thomas says that habits must be in the soul because  the soul, unlike the body, is not biologically conditioned to any one activity.  It has a number of different actions to choose from, and so it needs a habit which forms it to choose well.

Habits are caused by actions, and specifically by “like acts [by which] like habits are formed” (I-II, Q. 50, art. 1).  But one act is not enough.  “The Philosopher says: “As neither does one swallow nor one day make spring: so neither does one day nor a short time make a man blessed and happy.”  This is one of my favorite passages to quote.  What it means is that we need to act over and over and over again in a way consistent with the way we always want to act.  If we want to lose weight, we need to reach for the carrot over the cookie again and again.  If we occasionally reach for the cookie, we need not despair.  One cookie does not sabotage our effort to make a lifestyle change.  The more we act in a way consistent with the way we want to act, however, the less likely one deviation is to ruin us.

The reason New Year’s resolutions fail is that people resolve to stick to a certain diet or go to the gym a certain number of times a week or stop smoking entirely, and when they slip up, they despair and stop trying.  The reason they fail is that they think that bad habits can be broken easily.  They can’t.  It takes more than good intentions and it takes more than the occasional good act.  New Year’s resolutions are going to take the entire year, and chances are, the next years as well to achieve.

The good news is that good habits are hard to break too.  The more you force yourself to eat a low-calorie snack rather than junk food, the easier it will become.  The more you force yourself to go to the gym, the less forcing you’ll have to do.  And the less you keep yourself from taking a smoke break (even when you occasionally slip up) the less tempting that smoke break will be.

So make your New Year’s resolutions, whatever they may be.  But don’t count yourself a failure if on January 2nd, you finish off the leftover Christmas cookies.  You are going for a change in habit, and no habit was ever changed by one bad–or one good–act.

Using Virtue Ethics to Read the Bible (Without Falling Into Anti-Nomianism)

There are lots off good reasons to read the Bible.  The reasons would vary depending who you polled–some “secular humanists” would say that the Bible should be read for cultural literacy or for its literary value as a great book.  Christians would say that the Bible is the Word of God and tells us how to get to heaven, or that the Bible tells us God’s will for our life.  Lots of people would say that the Bible has many good moral lessons like love of enemy, care for the poor and marginalized, and other norms dictating good behavior.

If Christians believe that the Bible is a good source of morals, they are faced with the challenge of figuring out how to move from the Scriptural witness to their own moral inquiries.  This is no easy task, and Christian history is full of different ways to answer the question of the relationship between the Bible and ethics.  My fiancé is part of the Church of Christ tradition that has a very handy little system called “Command, Example, Necessary Inference.”  What this means is if the New Testament commands something, you obey (like baptism and the Lord‘s Supper).  In the absence of a command, you follow any provided example (like taking the Lord‘s Supper every Sunday).  And if there is neither, you follow necessary inference (like the use of church buildings).  For issues specifically addressed in the New Testament, Churches of Christ have a pretty coherent way of forming their views, but for issues not found in the New Testament (like surrogate motherhood, for example), their approach can be pretty unsystematic and haphazard.

Other Christians have a “cafeteria approach” to Scripture, keeping what they like and rejecting what they don’t.  You see this in a lot of the more liberal-minded groups that like things like love of enemy, but don’t really think Paul’s condemnation of homosexual behavior is all that relevant or that the Bible’s teaching about divorce should really be taken all that seriously.  This approach has the advantage off avoiding a dogmatic and unilateral approach to Scripture, but it is often quite arbitrary in what it takes seriously from Scripture and what it dismisses.

What both of these approaches have in common is that they look to Scripture for norms or rules about how to behave.  This might be called a deontological approach to Scripture which means that Scripture provides certain duties for those that follow it, and only these duties are relevant to Christian ethics.  As a virtue theorist influenced by Thomas Aquinas, I find such an approach deficient.  Ethics is not just about rules and duties, but also about character and leading a good life.  Virtue theory provides a way of using the Bible for ethics, not just for the derivation of rules, but also for a witness as to what sort of people we are called to be.  The Bible tells us what sort of character Christians should have.

Some people like the idea of using virtue theory to bridge ethics and Scripture because it makes their “cafeteria” approach more systematic.  Such people say something like “the rules in the Bible are not all that important, only the virtues like kindness and justice.”  This approach looks a lot like anti-nomianism, or the rejection of the relevance of rules (anti=against; nomos=laws).  These people tend to want to use Scripture without dealing with the parts dealing with tricky issues like homosexuality, divorce, and women.  They want to say that the overall trajectory of Scripture shows us the sort of people that we should be (kind, tolerant, just, etc.) but the details aren’t all that important.

I don’t fall into this camp.   I think the Bible shows us what sort of character we should have and what sort of virtues form that character, but it also tells us how these virtues are developed.  Aristotle tells us (and Aquinas agrees) that virtues are formed by acting well.  The virtue of justice, for example, is developed by acting justly over a period of time, such that you start doing just acts as a second nature.  But how do we know what just acts are, before we develop the virtue of justice?  One way is by following just people, but another way is by obeying just rules.

Think of a parent raising a child.  If that parent wants the child to be fair, he puts in place certain rules to encourage fairness, like sharing toys or taking turns with fun activities.  What the parent hopes is that eventually, the child will act fairly even when there  are no rules forcing them to, or no person to enforce the rules.  But the child will get to that state only if he obeys the rules about fair activity over and over and over again and by imitating the example of fair people.

Scripture can be thought of in a similar way.  God wants us to be certain people, and he has provided us with commands and examples of people to follow in order to become the people he calls us to be.  For example, he want us to be people who are wise.  Scripture tells us that “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  What does acting out of fear of the Lord look like?  It looks like following God’s commands.  For example, in Exodus 9, God commands that all the livestock be brought under shelter to protect them from the coming hailstorm He is sending.  The officials of Pharaoh who fear the Lord obey, and their livestock is saved, but those who do not fear the Lord ignore the command and suffer the consequences.  The rule God gives us is to “obey his commands” and he provides many examples like these servants for us to imitate.

Another examples of what God calls us to be is loving people.  We only become loving people, however, by performing acts of love like taking care of the widow, the resident alien, the orphan, and even our enemies.  We become loving people by not resisting evil, but by “overcoming  evil with good” as Paul tells us in Romans.  These rules are supplemented by examples of loving people, the paradigmatic one being Jesus himself, but also figures like Mary and Paul who are paradigms of love that we can imitate.

If the commands in the Bible must still be taken seriously, one might ask what the difference between a deontological approach to Scripture and a virtue-based approach.  The answer is that a deontological approach to Scripture sees obedience to the rules as an end in itself.  God commanded us to obey, and we do so accordingly.  A virtue-based approach sees the rules as a means to becoming the people that God calls us to be.  The rules are not arbitrary commands of God, but tools that God gives us to develop the sort of character we need to follow him.  If we are successful, we no longer follow the rules out of slavish obedience, but out of love of the Good that is behind the rules.  The goal of virtue theory, unlike a deontological theory, is not just be obedient, but to be good like God is good so that we may no longer be called servants, but friends of God.

At the same time, using a virtue-based approach to Scripture means that  when we come across a contemporary moral problem like in vitro fertilization or global warming, we don’t have to look at Scripture to see what is specifically commanded or what rule can be inferred.  We can also look to Scripture to see what kind of people God is calling us to be and how the dilemma at hand compares.  This will not protect us from diversity in our ethical views (some people may say that using in vitro fertilization is consistent with becoming the sort of person God wants us to be while others will disagree) but it will allow us to take seriously the Scriptural witness for the way we think about ethics without falling into unilateral dogmatism or arbitrary picking and choosing in the process.

Beatitude

Aquinas’ ethics begins with and is founded on the end.  He introduces the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologica with a treatise on man’s last end which he describes as “last in the order of execution but first in the agent’s intention.”  What he means is that the end of an action is the last thing achieved in acting but the reason for acting is nevertheless the end.  Think of spending several hours baking and decorating cookies, which I recently did for Christmas.  The time mixing the dough, rolling it, cutting it into shapes, baking the cookies, and finally, painstakingly decorating them was all motivated by the last thing “in the order of execution of baking cookies,” which is the eating and enjoying of them.  In the same way, Aquinas says that the ultimate end of all actions, which he will define as beatitude ,is the first in the order of intention for all human action.  In other words, all human action is motivated by the desire to be happy.  The reason I baked the cookies at all is because in some way, I thought that baking cookies, and watching my family enjoy eating them, would make me happy.

Another way of stating this is that the final cause is the first in the chain of causes.  We think of what we want to achieve by acting before we act.

Aquinas says that there are two ways to think of the end.  The first is the thing itself in which the end exists (beatitude) and the second is the use or acquisition of that thing.  A glutton’s end is food, and the use of that end consists in the pleasure that comes from eating.  According to Aquinas, the ultimate end of human existence in the first sense is God “who alone by His infinite goodness can perfectly satisfy man’s will.”  In the second sense, the last end for human beings is the enjoyment of this last end which Aquinas calls “beatitude.”

The word beatitude is a difficult word to understand in English.  Sometimes it is translated as “happiness,” but beatitude is a long-lasting happiness, not something that can be easily lost.  “Happiness” does not connote the steadfastness of beatitude.  Sometimes beatitude is translated as “flourishing” which again does not fully convey the full meaning of what Aquinas means by the word (mainly because we don‘t really use the word flourishing in our everyday speech and nobody really knows what it means).  What we can do is identify what beatitude is not.  Aquinas says it is not wealth, honor, fame and glory, power, good of the body, or pleasure.  It is not something external, not something that can be easily lost, not something arbitrary like luck, and not any created good.  Beatitude, according to Aquinas, is not even a good of the soul because if it were, the object of happiness would be human beings, which would mean that human beings could be loved for their own sake, which is contrary to what Christians hold to be true.

Beatitude, is, however, uncreated.  It is not something we have, it is something we do.  Aquinas speaks of beatitudes in two senses–its cause or object and its use.  Beatitude in the first sense (the thing in which beatitude consists) can only be God, and in the second sense, beatitude can only be the enjoyment of God:

“Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence.”

How does Aquinas back this up?  First, he says that nobody can be perfectly happy as long as there is something left for him to desire.  Nothing on earth leaves us without some other desire to be fulfilled.  It is almost a truism to say that just because a person has everything doesn’t mean that person is happy.

Aquinas’ second observation about happiness is that human beings are constituted to seek out the cause of things.  If we see mold growing on a piece of fruit, we seek out the chain of causes behind this occurrence until we arrive at the ultimate cause.  Our human nature is constituted to seek out the ultimate cause of our happiness.  However, simply knowing that God is behind our happiness is not enough for our intellect; we want to know the essence of God and this is beyond what the human intellect on its own can accomplish.  We need something else, some power outside of ourselves which Aquinas calls grace to elevate our intellect to know God in this way and to open our eyes to see God in this way.

In light of all this, Aquinas thinks that we can never achieve perfect happiness in this life.  We can, however, achieve “imperfect beatitude.”  This imperfect happiness is analogous to perfect happiness.  It is stable and lasting, it doesn’t exist in external goods like money, fame, or power.  Both types of happiness are “operations” or acts, not things.  The major distinction between perfect happiness and imperfect happiness is that perfect happiness consists in contemplating the Divine Essence, which we can’t do on our own, and imperfect happiness consists in the exercise of virtue, which we can do without any external supernatural aid.

Happiness in this life is often unstable and subject to the vicissitudes of fortune.  I knew somebody who had found great happiness–this person this person (we will call him Job) had friends, career success, a comfortable and even  luxurious existence.  People commented on how happy Job seemed going into the holiday season.  About two weeks or so before Christmas, Job suffered a great disaster resulting in the loss of his home and possessions.  Even if Job was a virtuous person and had all the right values and gave thanks to God that he still had his life, Job is still less happy in his homeless, possession-less existence.  Aquinas’ treatment of happiness echoes Jesus saying to “store up treasures in heaven” because only in heaven can we ever find true happiness.  In fact, this is the definition of heaven in Aquinas’ book–total happiness.

Some people say that Aquinas has an otherworldly understanding of happiness that does not allow for any sort of happiness in this life.  I do not believe this is the case.  Aquinas thinks that we can flourish in this life in different ways but he wants to keep us from thinking that this life is it.  No matter what we do, no matter how hard we work and how good we become, there will always be something else that we desire in order to be happy.  Augustine expressed this sentiment in his Confessions when he said, “My heart is restless until it rests in you.”  We always hunger for God as the ultimate Giver of all good things, and until we get him, we stay a little bit hungry.