Ens Morale: The Scholastic Metaphysics of Morals
[The present text is from a talk given in Oxford, England in June 2026.]
My talk today represents both a development of past work and a preparatory stage for a chapter in a forthcoming monograph. Some context is therefore necessary, since our subject is best understood within that larger project.
The question I wish to pursue is deceptively simple: what is the distinctive metaphysical status of a moral act precisely as moral? When we praise a just act or condemn an unjust one, we are clearly responding to something more than the physical event before us. But, what is this “something more”? The later scholastics gathered the difficulty under the heading of ens morale, moral being, and proposed competing accounts of it. My presentation today will develop in three stages: 1˚ I will recall the better-charted territory of intentional being in speculative cognition. This will provide an example that is more familiar quoad nos, upon which we might then build our further insights about the more difficult nature of moral being. 2˚ On this basis, then, I will argue that practical reason generates an analogous—though importantly distinct—kind of being in the moral order. 3˚ I will examine the main scholastic accounts of what this moral being is, defending the mature Thomist position that it consists in a real transcendental relation of conformity to “the rule of morals,” or right practical reason. I will close with some remarks on what all of this entails when carried to the summit of metaphysics, namely, God Himself.
Intentional Being in Speculative Cognition
Most of you will be familiar with the language of “intentional being,” terminology that remains somewhat contested in its application to Thomas Aquinas himself, but which became the standard currency of later scholasticism for designating the particular kind of being that belongs to acts of cognition and to their objects. This intentional, or “objective,” being was sometimes understood as a diminished or reduced mode of existence within thought, a position associated with the early Ockham’s so-called fictum theory of the universal, and present in certain received texts of Scotus, if not in his own mature position. One rightly detects in such a view the seeds of an inchoate representationalism.1
The Thomist tradition took a markedly different line. Broadly speaking—and some looseness is unavoidable here—the followers of Aquinas held that intentional being, as a spiritualized mode of existence, is in fact nobler than the non-intentional, natural being of material things considered in themselves.2 In other words, it is important to recognize that, according to such a perspective, intentionality is not merely an impulse from the knower to the known, a kind of “tendency” that will sufficiently function to ensure a realistic bridge from mind to reality. It is, instead, a way of being, namely, being as self-manifesting. This is why the later scholastic language would come to say that the knower and the known are one—not merely because a hylomorphic form has traveled from “outside the mind” and then “into” it, but rather because the intentional being (esse) of the to-be-known and the to-know is one and the same. The mind-independent reality becomes an object, a “something set before a knowing power,” precisely by being actually known. That is, the reality in question has the intentional being of manifesting, and the knower has that very same being because he is manifested-to.3
This condition of intentionality—or “objectivity,” a term that jars the modern ear, accustomed as it is to hearing the word “objective” mean precisely mind-independent, the very opposite of what it means here—gives rise to a range of properties with which this audience will be familiar. According to the later scholastic logic, as it developed among the Thomists (and, with variations, among the Scotists and Suarezians as well), these manifested realities—that is, these objects—become subject to relations that do not obtain for them as they exist in the physical world, but that do obtain for them precisely as objects of speculative knowledge.
Chief among such relations are the so-called second intentions: those relationes rationis that the intellect cannot avoid forming in its efforts to define, judge, and argue about the realities it knows.4 A Thomist example will make this concrete. On the specifically Thomist account of genera and their foundation in reality, there is no plurality of substantial forms in extra-mental things: a given human person does not contain, formally and in act, all the layered grades of the Porphyrian tree—substance, body, living being, animal, human. Rather, one and the same extra-mental reality presents itself to human cognition, through sufficient experience, under these various objective concepts, each of which is distinct from the others by what the later Thomists called a minor virtual distinction.5
When we attempt to define animal, for instance, we arrive at sensate living being. Reflecting on this definition, we note that animal is a species of living being, and that sensate is the differentia by which it is distinguished within that genus. Reflecting further on the terms themselves—species, genus, difference—we discover properties that belong to these relations as such: genus is superior to species, with greater extension and lesser comprehension. From such reflections, multiplied across propositions with their quantities, qualities, and modalities, and across syllogisms with their figures and moods, the scientific art of logic is born.
Why have I spent this much time on what might seem relatively familiar ground? I have done so because speculative cognition offers an experientially clear datum for understanding something that will be essential to our main argument: that known realities, as known, become subject not merely to new properties but, in a certain sense, to new realities—namely, the particular relations called second intentions. By becoming objects of speculative cognition, the things of our experience find themselves subject to relations such as genus, species, subject, predicate, middle term, and the rest. The particular actuality they receive through being really known creates a kind of new “space” in which they exist: intentionally. It is not the physical or natural mode of being an agent in the mind-independent world. It is, rather, the “space”—and I trust the audience will note my use of scare quotes—of discourse: at once the discourse within the soul as it elaborates its knowledge for itself, and the discourse that unfolds in our speech with one another. It is understandable that, for a period, medieval thought described logic as a scientia sermocinalis, a science of discourse, encompassing all the arts of the trivium.
What matters most for our purposes, however, is this: the objects of our knowledge are the very things we know, things that are the measure of our knowledge by what they are in themselves, yet whose objectivity is dependent upon the fact that we know them. When we know, we mind things: we attend to what realities disclose of themselves through our engagement with them, and we also confer upon them the particular being that belongs to being-minded.6
To summarize the ground covered so far. In speculative cognition, things take on a way of being that involves not only a kind of transparency or manifestation to knowers, but something more. Things (as objects) can be said to exist in a higher world: the world of shared discourse, governed as it is by the relational structure of second intentions, which is the structure peculiar to discursive, human intelligence. In this process, the realities themselves remain the measure of our knowing: they are, loosely stated, the source of the content of our cognition; more precisely, they are its objective extrinsic formal cause. And yet the conditions of being spiritually received by a discursive intelligence—by a ratio, as our human intellect is, in contrast to the angelic intellect—arise now within these things precisely as known. In their own natural being, things are unaffected by our knowledge of them; they remain agentively what they are in the world. But as known, they enter into a new kind of agency: not the agency they exercise naturally, but the act-potency relationships reflected in the structure of the second intentions they receive within the domain of discourse.
From Speculative to Practical: From Being-Measured to Measured-Measure
These reflections on speculative cognition furnish us with a more-familiar case of the very phenomenon we must understand in the moral order: the way that a reality, by becoming intellectually “objectivized,” takes on a genuine mode of being that it does not possess in its natural state. In the speculative case, this objectivity makes known realities to be subject to second intentions; and in such speculative knowledge, the reality itself remains the objective measure of the intellect. But, now, we must ask whether practical reason involves something analogous, and, if so, how it differs. To anticipate the conclusion a bit: it does, though with an important reversal, namely the fact that, in the practical order, reason no longer merely receives its objective measure from things but itself becomes a kind of measured measure of human acts.
The relationship between things and human cognition, then, does not reach its full complexity with speculative cognition alone. In fact, most of our lives are carried out within another domain of knowing altogether: practical knowledge. Such cognition is no longer concerned primarily with knowing what reality is, with attempting, as it were, to cut being at its joints. It is rather an ordering knowledge, cognitio ordinativa. And here something significant shifts. In both art and morality, it is no longer the case that things alone are the measure. Reason itself steps forward as the measure of things.7
Some examples may help to illustrate the shift. Consider a thoroughly quotidian reality, something we encounter every day as we look out from our houses or flats: the property border. Whether we are thinking of the rambling, historically accumulated boundary lines of an unplanned community, or the careful cadastral grid of an American city, one thing is evident: nature as such has no stake in the particular being of a property line. Considered purely as a natural location, a border is nothing more than the physical natures that happen to occupy the point of contact between two parcels of land. And yet, precisely because this property line has been the subject of human choice and institution, it has taken on a series of properties that exist there solely because this line is morally constituted within a community that has determined certain property laws. In its being as a border, it is established—formally measured—by the practical choices and freely lived patterns of the human community in question.
A certain kind of natural law thinking would perhaps seek to reduce this conventional being to a natural foundation. Human law, on such a view, is ultimately a specification of the more general dictates of the natural law. The contingent factors that happen to specify the property laws of this or that community derive their moral force from the general principle that human beings must render to one another what is owed. Whatever the many layers of rationality intervening between contingent law, the law of nations, moral science, and ultimately the natural law and the basic inclinations of human flourishing, the ultimate force flows from this last and most fundamental element in the sequence. One is thus tempted to conclude that human nature is the rule of human acts, with all subsequent stages of specification amounting to nothing more than our rational nature determining its particular interactions with its environment.8
This would be, to my eyes, a rather impoverished ontology, one that explains away a unique datum right in front of us. Common-sense language, frankly, offers something here that deserves to be taken seriously, not dissolved in the effort to maintain the primacy of human nature in natural law theory. We look at the concrete, stone, or hedgerow at the edge of our property and say: that is our border. In other words, the particular physicality before us is measured by something more than physicality. It has received a form that is new: the form, we might say, of being-property.
One might object, of course, that this supposed form is nothing more than an extrinsic denomination—something that holds in words, but only in relation to human convention and choice. And from there it is a short step to saying that “in its real being”—that is, in its natural or physical entity, which would be the whole of reality—what stands before us is at most a collection of externally related and positioned bits of organic and inorganic matter. Considered in terms of the natures involved, there are substances and accidents, but no whole. It is convention alone, on this view, that establishes the unity.
But this does not tell the whole story, and the objection itself already points toward the causality we need to examine. For the “convention” that establishes the unity of a border as such necessarily involves some reference to human knowing and willing. The question is: what precisely undergirds the unity of this border-form? Speculative knowledge, insofar as it is concerned with rendering the mind adequate—whether immediately or mediately—to realities as they are in themselves, is not a serious candidate here. The unity of such an entity must therefore arise from practical reason. And practical rationality, on the Thomist account, is twofold: it is either moral or artistic.
Insofar as it is artistic, the source of unity for an artifact—and artifacts are legion in our experience—or for a practice such as skiing or the playing of music, is a creative idea in view of which we fashion the intelligibility of the thing in question. It is only by reference to an artist, or to a broad artistic culture functioning as a kind of repository distributed across many knowers capable of engaging artistically with reality, that we can denominate something a work of craft over and above whatever intrinsic principles of motion and rest belong to its constituent parts.
The Measure of Human Acts: Nature or Reason?
This brings us to a question that has been hovering in the background of everything said so far: what is the measure or rule of human acts? Is it nature, or is it reason? At first glance this may seem like splitting hairs—surely the two cannot be far apart. And yet there is a persistent tendency in Thomist natural law theorizing to treat nature as the immediate measure of human acts, in a way that fails to appreciate a crucial point: that moral acts arise immediately from reason’s declarations, by which the will, the intellectual appetite, receives its specification.9
The stakes of this question were aired, with some vigor, in an exchange that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century. The principal parties were the Dominican Father Leonard Lehu on one side, and the Benedictine Dom Odo Lottin together with the Jesuit Father Edmund Elter on the other. The dispute concerned whether, for St. Thomas—and, as all parties believed, for reality itself—the immediate measure of the human act was reason or nature.10 At its heart was the question of how practical human reason can function as the immediate measure of human acts without thereby being severed from its foundation in human nature. Father Lehu’s contention was that his interlocutors, along with the Jesuit Fathers Victor Frins and Victor Cathrein, had overvalued nature as the immediate measure, failing to appreciate that in practical matters our cognition is not only measured by reality but is itself the measure of the acts we perform:
Reason, whether in the speculative or the practical order, leads infallibly to the truth—and this because our reason is derived from the divine wisdom. It was given to us for knowing the truth, as they eye was given us for knowing colors, and just as the eye placed in normal conditions infallibly perceives colors, so too reason, if one observes the laws of reasoning, arrives infallibly at the truth, whether in the physical order (“The human soul is immortal”) or in the moral order (“Blasphemy is a sin”).
There is, however, this difference, namely that in the physical order human reason knows and does not cause, whereas, in the moral order, the eternal law communicates to our reason the noble prerogative of being the rule, a secondary and participated rule, it is true, but nonetheless truly the rule of good and of evil.11
Although Father Lehu drew his argument from textual foundations spread across Thomas’s works, the key locus for his exposition is ST I-II, qq. 18–21, the subsection of the so-called treatise on human acts dedicated specifically to good and evil in human acts. This subsection would be, on his accounting—and the general contours of his reading were shared by others, such as the Dominican Father Merkelbach12—a kind of sub-treatise on the morality of human acts, following upon an earlier section of more properly “psychological” considerations, somewhat on the model of the De anima, which examines man's natural powers and acts of speculative reflection. In fact, Father Merkelbach goes so far as to say that this portion of the Summa is dedicated to human acts not in their esse physicum but in their esse morale. What does he mean by this esse morale? It is in the answer to that question that everything of importance regarding the metaphysics of any moral entity whatsoever comes into view.
Several texts from St. Thomas are of capital importance here. The first is ST I-II, q. 18, a. 5, which asks whether a human action is good or evil in its species. In that article we find a clear parallelism established between the physical species and the moral species, such that the former is taken from a relation to nature and the latter from a relation to right practical reason:
Now in human actions, good and evil are predicated in reference to reason. Indeed, as Dionysius says (De Divinis Nominibus, ch. 4), “the good of man is to be in accordance with reason,” and evil is “to be against reason.” For that which is good for a thing is that which suits it in regard to its form; and evil, that which is against the order of its form. It is therefore evident that the difference of good and evil considered in reference to the object is an essential difference in relation to reason, that is to say, according as the object is suitable or unsuitable to reason. Now certain actions are called human or moral, inasmuch as they proceed from reason. Consequently, it is evident that good and evil diversify the species in human actions; since essential differences cause a difference of species.13
And, making matters clearer, in ibid., ad 1 and ad 3, St. Thomas distinguishes between the natural and the moral rules of acts:
(ad 1) Even in natural things, good and evil, inasmuch as something is according to nature, and something against nature, diversify the natural species (for a dead body and a living body are not of the same species). Similarly, good, inasmuch as it is in accord with reason, and evil, inasmuch as it is against reason, diversify the moral species.
(ad 3) The conjugal act and adultery, as compared to reason, differ specifically and have effects that are specifically different, for one deserves praise and reward and the other blame and punishment. However, as compared to the generative power, they do not differ in species; and thus they have one specific effect.
The physical being of an adulterous act is identical to that of the same act performed within the context of marital chastity and charity. Their physical effects can be identical as well, most evidently when a child is born of such a union. And yet the praise or blame that attaches to each pertains entirely to how the act stands in relation to right practical reason: to synderesis, as declaring the ends of virtuous action; to the particular laws that more or less concretely specify the conditions of praise and blame; and to prudence, as declaring the particularized means by which those ends are to be achieved.
A parallel example, albeit with some added complexities, can be drawn from the case of a child conceived by IVF in comparison to natural conception. The physical effect is the same: a child bearing the human goodness that belongs to the nature of a rational being. The moral character of the act, however, is different. A familiar sophism seeks to deflect this point by appealing to the dignity and humanity of the child: “Are you saying this child should not exist?” It amounts to asking, “Are you saying this child is not good?” But that is a question about physical or natural effects and natural goodness. What is at issue is something distinct: the moral goodness or moral objectivity of the generative act itself. In relation to right practical reason—synderesis, as specified by moral science and, where applicable, human law, all personally realized by prudence—such an act of conception is evil; it has a being that is evil.
A final insight can be drawn from the fourth reply to the objections in this same article. There St. Thomas is responding to the suggestion that circumstances are the primary determinant of human acts. We need not enter here into the full question of how circumstances bear upon the morality of an act—increasing or diminishing it, and sometimes even altering or introducing new species into the act performed. It suffices for our purposes to note what is most determinative in making any circumstance morally relevant at all: its relation to right practical reason:
(ad 4) A circumstance is sometimes taken as the essential difference of the object, as compared to reason. In that case, it can specify a moral act. And this must be so whenever a circumstance transforms an action from good to evil, for a circumstance would not make an action evil, except through being opposed to [right practical] reason.
Nothing in practical reason deems it more or less morally upright to play with my children while wearing a blue shirt rather than a green one. But perhaps, if one of my children has sensory processing problems, it might well be wrong—in comparison to right practical reason—to wear a bright, multicolored shirt, at least on a given day, at a given time, and so forth. What constitutes the morality of this circumstance is its relation to right practical reason.
What is Moral Being? Several Candidates
Hovering behind these examples is the question that now demands a direct answer: what precisely is this “moral being” of the free act? When we distinguish between the physical or natural object and the moral object, to what are we referring? Billuart puts the difficulty squarely: “The being of nature is the very physical entity of the act itself. What moral being is, however, is not so easy to explain.”14
A Mere Extrinsic Denomination? Or Perhaps a relatio rationis?
The first and most obvious candidate is extrinsic denomination. This would seem quite tempting, particularly in light of the border example. Our visible actions, on this view, are simply the physical being in which we exercise our powers in the natural world. It is only by a kind of extrinsic relation to human use and speech that we constitute a given deed—or its effect, such as the border itself—as a moral reality. The morality present “out there” in the world would then be nothing other than the physical, natural being of things, at most externally bound up with the realities of human freedom.
As we shall see, there is a partial truth in this. However, if morality were only an extrinsic denomination of the free act—whether the visible external act or the human act itself—to the “rule of morals,” we would not have explained what it is that makes a moral act intrinsically good or evil. We would not yet have landed on anything about the act itself. At best, we could say that there is a free act which, in its morality, stands related to the “rule of morals,” envisioned as something separate from it, somewhat akin to an externalized law imposed as a measure upon the act from without. One rightly senses in this position the pull toward voluntarism: morality becomes the contingent imposition of an external law upon the human act, rather than something that belongs to the act’s own inner constitution.15
This position is traditionally associated with Suárez. In a different form, Gabriel Vásquez held that morality is a kind of relatio rationis—a relation of reason—akin to this extrinsic denomination of the free act to the rule of morals. But even if one upgraded the relation from a relatio rationis to a real relation, one would still fall short of explaining what the act itself is in its essence. For good and evil denominate the perfection or privation of the act itself, whether the act does or does not possess the fullness of being that is due to it:
Now, since this same plenitude of being is of the very essence of the good, if a thing be lacking in its due plenitude of being, it is not said to be good simply, but in a certain respect, inasmuch as it is a being, although it can be called a being simply, and a non-being in a certain respect, as we stated earlier (ST I, q. 5, a. 1, ad 1). Therefore, we must say that every action has goodness in so far as it has being. By contrast, it is lacking in goodness, insofar as it is lacking in something that is due to its fulness of being and thus it is said to be evil. For example, if it lacks the quantity determined by reason, or its due place, or something of the kind (ST I-II, q. 18, a. 1).
Freedom?
If we are speaking of the act itself, however, a second candidate presents itself: perhaps the morality of an act derives generically from the simple fact that it is a free act. On this view, freedom would be at least an intrinsic characteristic of the human act, distinguishing it from the acts of nature, which are determined to a single effect. In various forms, this position was attributed to the Scotists, as well as to Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, Domingo Soto, and others. The view has the genuine merit of locating morality within the intrinsic constitution of the human act—recognizing that what we are dealing with is a free act emerging from the human person as a practical agent, not merely a physical event externally denominated as moral. This attention to the irreducible importance of human freedom in the unique being of morality should not be dismissed, lest one overlook important data of moral experience.
And yet the position is not without its dangers. If morality as such is constituted per se by the degree of freedom present in an act, one can see how this might set the stage, however unintentionally, for a kind of autonomous or libertine account of freedom, in which the moral character of an act is determined by the authenticity or intensity of the choosing rather than by the conformity of the choice to any measure beyond itself.16 Whether this tendency is fully present in the scholastic sources associated with this view is a question that would require more careful examination than the present occasion allows. What matters here is that freedom, while necessary for moral being, is not yet sufficient to account for it.
Ens Morale: A Transcendental Relation to Right Reason
What the later Thomists observed—and one finds this with particular clarity in John of St. Thomas, Billuart, Gonet, and the Salmanticenses—is that the morality of an act, that is, its particular being as moral, involves a further condition beyond mere freedom: namely, how well or poorly the act is measured by what they variously call the “rules of morals” or the “rules of reason.” This relation, however, was not envisioned as something extrinsic to the act, nor as a mere relation to the act in the form of a relatio rationis or even a real predicamental relation. Rather, it was held to be a transcendental relation.
This expression—“transcendental relation”—though contested by some readers of Thomas and the Thomists,17 nonetheless indicates something rather straightforward in our experience. We frequently must use relative language to speak about realities that are in themselves absolute. We say that substance is related to its environment; that matter is related to form; potency to act; powers, habits, and acts to their objects; and so forth. But when we speak in this way, we are not referring to a “relation” in the sense of a respectus toward a terminus, a purely ad aliud, as the scholastics put it. Rather, we are speaking of the absolute entity or principle in question while noting a kind of dependency that belongs to it precisely in order to be what it absolutely is. Such relativity is called “transcendental” because it is found across more than one category; it transcends, for example, the categories of substance and quality alike.
To say that the moral being of a free act is nothing other than a real transcendental relation of conformity to right practical reason is to say that a given moral entity—a temperate act, for example—possesses a kind of new objectivity that is not reducible to the physical rule of nature, but that makes essential reference to a measure drawn from practical reason itself: from synderesis, which declares the ends of virtuous action; from prudence, which in the case of temperance (and courage) plays a particularly important role in specifying the so-called medium rationis; and from the practical determinations that derive from the customs, mores, and laws of a particular social and political situation.
In other words, the moral being of an act comes from the way that specific act is constituted by practical reasoning, such that the dictamen of right practical reason—synderesis, moral science, just human laws, and prudential knowledge—is the measure of human acts. It is a measure that is itself “measured” by what it is to act perfectly as a human agent. And yet one does not infer this rule directly from nature, as though moral starting points were simply read off from natural being. Synderesis—the capacity to grasp first moral principles—is, in this sense, a kind of new beginning. Presupposing our speculative engagement with the world, it nonetheless enables us to declare rightly the ends of human action. It is through this declaration that the natural law is made known to us, for like every kind of law, the natural law is, on its own part, a dictamen.18
The moral agent does not merely know how things are but how they ought to be. The truths of practical reason are ordered toward establishing the order of the moral good—not only in its most general outlines, but in all the particulars that ultimately cohere with the full range of the moral virtues. Practical human reason is the measure of the execution and the means of performing deeds. It is itself measured, ultimately, by truths it cannot fail to see: the first principles that are the truths grasped by synderesis, or, mediately, the conclusions of moral science. But what makes this or that act moral, what gives it its moral entity, is precisely and simply the fact that it does or does not stand in conformity with right practical reason, considered globally from synderesis all the way the command of prudence.
It is in relation to this act, then, that an entire moral environment is fashioned in what we loosely call the “external” world. There is, to be sure, a kind of extrinsicality involved in the way that physical beings—the stones or hedgerow on the border of my property—come to be related to the rules of practical reason. Nothing in the physical world has changed when one declares, before a magistrate, that the property line shall be here and not there. And yet a real dependency now belongs to that border, precisely in relation to the community of practical knowers, for whom it is a very real matter whether or not they observe the laws governing the recognition of property in their community. Their free acts are intrinsically moral or immoral to the degree that they are conformed to this measure.
The physical beings themselves, however, can be said to be the locus of these moral acts—an extrinsic denomination that indicates they play the role of delineating the particular situations in which moral goodness or evil takes place. But it is an extrinsic denomination that implies a real order of causality, extrinsic formal causality that is ultimately grounded in the command of practical reason, whose morality (or immorality) will depend upon how this command relates to right practical reason. Insofar as such physical beings play this role in human agency, they are, in a sense, spiritualized—somewhat as the spiritualization we examined at the outset takes place in speculative cognition. They too possess a moral being that is genuinely important, even if it is derivative in relation to the primordial referent, which is the free act itself, 19 which nonetheless can only fully exist in this visible action.20 The border is “merely physical” in its natural being. In another manner of being—moral being, being as said in relation to right practical reason—it is subject to a whole range of further, and weighty, properties.
Implications at the Metaphysical Summit and in the World
At this point, as we draw to a close, I would like to draw out certain implications that have been present throughout. If the argument has succeeded, then moral being is not a mere “way of speaking,” not an extrinsic label pinned upon an otherwise indifferent physical, “really real” act, but a genuine—if dependent and derived—mode of being, a real intrinsic perfection constituted by conformity to right reason. And a genuine perfection cannot be left at the level of created realities alone. It belongs to the very discipline of metaphysics, once it reaches its summit, to ask where such a perfection stands in the order of being as such, and whether and how it is found in the source of all being, whom we call God. Every perfection found in creatures must be found, in some eminent mode, in their cause. I would like to approach this in two ways: first as regards the being of God Himself, and then as regards what this means for “the world” that stands under His causality.
The considerations developed so far raise a question about God Himself. Does the distinction between natural being and moral being in created realities require us to register certain precisions regarding the divine being? I believe the answer is yes, though the observation moves within the lines of tensions that have been felt throughout later scholasticism.
There is a debate, admittedly rather recondite, concerning the so-called “metaphysical constitutive” of the divine nature: what is it that most makes God to be God, metaphysically speaking? Is it that He is ens a se, being from and through Himself? Or that He is self-subsistent intellection? Various figures have argued for each side, and we need not settle the matter definitively here.21 What I would note is this: from our perspective, at least, we are more readily able to understand actuality through actual operation than through the first actuality that is substance alone. To say that God is self-subsistent intellection is, in this respect, to present our minds with Pure Act not only in actu primo but in actu secundo as well. That is, to say that God is actually and always intelligent is to say that He is always fully what He is—fixedly self-manifest in a way that we finite knowers cannot perfectly represent to ourselves, given that our own self-presence and self-manifestation are partial, and won only at the considerable cost of much experience. Moreover, this solution carries certain theological benefits—not least of which is how grace makes us formal participants in the divine being22—but it also has a more immediate, one might almost say common-sense, recommendation: it presents to our minds a being in whom second act is fully actual, and second act, in our experience at least, manifests the perfection of being more fully than does the first act of substance alone.
If we can conceive of a being in whom first act and second act are simply one, we have conceived of uncreated, simple perfection. If actual knowing is the particular life of the knowing being, and if, as the axiom has it, vivere viventibus est esse—to live is the very being of living things—then actual knowing discloses to us something of the divine:
If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.23
If moral-cognitional being is, by a real intrinsic character, something new and higher—a newly specified way of being—then something of the particular actuality of this kind of being must be found eminently in God. God is perfectly conformed to His own goodness. In the perfection of His being He is also, we might say, volitionally “measured”—though by way of complete identity between measure and measured—by the rule of divine morals, which is nothing other than Himself. And in creating things ad extra, He communicates something of His goodness, such that creatures might actively reflect, each in its own mode, His fixity in being.
In animals, this reflection takes place diachronically, across the generations in which the life-form of a given species endures despite the ravages of time. In human beings, however, it takes place at a higher level: at the level of one's own free conformity to the rules of morals, to right reason. In the social, cultural, and political life that we inhabit and fashion—the life lived, as it were, “outside of ourselves”—we participate in something of God's own eminent realization of the riches of that distinctive mode of intellectual being which is ens morale.24
See Olivier Boulnois, “Être, luire et concevoir. Note sur la genèse et la structure de la conception scotiste de l'esse obiective,” Collectanea Franciscana 60 (1990): 117-135. André de Muralt, "La doctrine médiéviale de l'esse obiectivum,” in L'enjeu de la philosophie médiévale: études thomistes, scotistes, occamiennes (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), 90-167. Roland Dalbiez, “Les sources scolastiques de la théorie cartésienne de l’être objectif (à propos du ‘Descartes’ de M. Gilson),” Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie 3 (1929): 464-472. D. Demange, Jean Duns Scot: La théorie du savoir (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 201-260. De Rijk, “A Study on the Medieval Intentionality Debate Up to ca. 1350,” 85-95. For an earlier history of the notion of “object” see Lawrence Dewan, “’Obiectum’: Notes on the Intention of a Word,” in Wisdom, Law, and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 403-443. Also, see the third chapter of Tobias Hoffmann, Creatura intellecta: die Ideen und Possibilien bei Duns Scotus mit Ausblick auf Franz von Mayronis, Poncius und Mastrius, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 60 (Münster: Aschendorff 2002).
In a recent study, Martin Pickavé opines that Henry of Ghent’s own opinions about the intellectual intelligible species may have been influenced by his interpreting of Aquinas as overly ontologizing the notion of esse in intellectu, not distinguishing between being in the intellect as in a subject (ut in subiectum) and in the intellect as in a knower (ut in cognoscente). Note that the distinction ut in subiecto / ut in cognoscente parallels that of subiective / obiective. Indeed, at certain points of Scotus’s career, he will use this distinction. Thus, as will be remarked in notes below, Scotus is not the most remote source concerning doctrines of objective existence, though he is a critically important one. See Martin Pickavé, “Causality and Cognition: An Interpretation of Henry of Ghent’s Quodlibet V, q.14,” in Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy, 78-79. Hence, also, it is understandable (and quite justified) that De Rijk precedes his discussion of esse obiectivum in the 14th century with a discussion of Henry of Ghent and esse cognitum. See De Rijk, “A Study,” 80-84. Likewise, esse cognitum (as a kind of ens diminutum) is clearly deployed by Godfrey of Fontaines. See John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 15-19.
A very impressive history of much of these matters can also be found in Kobusch’s Sein und Sprache in which the author traces the theme of objective existence (and related themes / notions) from the time of Aquinas all the way through Husserl. Though the history is sweeping, Kobusch’s work is a testimony to the importance of the theme throughout the history of philosophy. See Theo Kobusch, Sein und Sprache: Historische Grundlegung einer Ontologie der Sprache (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 79-328.↩︎
This qualification is made because, at the limit, in angels spiritual being is already knowable, though as not-yet-known even the angel’s own essence can be elevated to the status of being known. And, at the transcendent limit, in God the perfection of intentional being is at one with his entitative being, such that, in a certain way, pure actual being and self-subsistent intellection designate the same perfection, such that there is only a nominal distinction between them. See Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, God: His Existence and His Nature, trans. Bede Rose, vol. 2 (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1949), 226, 229–236; Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On the Eminence of the Deity: In What Sense the Divine Perfections Are ‘Formally and Eminently’ in God,” Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 341-360 (here 349–350).↩︎
See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Cognoscens quodammodo fit vel est aliud a se (On the Nature of Knowledge as Union with the Other as Other),” Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 63–78.↩︎
On this topic, see Matthew K. Minerd, “Thomism and the Formal Object of Logic,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 93, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 414–444; also, see the sequence of entries on second intentions available on To Be a Thomist (https://www.athomist.com/articles/tag/Second+Intentions).↩︎
For a discussion of the various kinds of distinction, see my pedagogical introduction on To Be a Thomist, “From Unity to Distinction to Unity: A Recovery of the Vocabulary of Various Mental Distinctions”.↩︎
I am broadly taking this play on the expression, “Minding things,” from Msgr. Robert Sokolowski.↩︎
In the background here are the accounts of practical reason that can be found in John of St. Thomas, Maritain, Simon, Garrigou-Lagrange, Gardeil, Labourdette, et al.↩︎
In a lengthier context, one must admittedly deal with the fact that to act in accord with reason is to act in accord with nature (or, as Lehu emphasizes, it is because we act in accord with reason that we act in accord with nature). This is discussed in ch. 5 (“Nature’s Part”) in the text cited in the next note.↩︎
As will be clear from what follows, these declarations of reason are founded upon a perception of the reality of the acting human agent, with nature communicating its operative perfection through synderesis and the further truths known in light of those primordial truths. The whole root of freedom is found in reason, totius libertatis radix est in ratione constituta. The rich possibilities of moral ends, their universal scope, in fact opens wide the work of prudence to make their ratio real, here and now, in this or that place, in this or that circumstance. Here, allow the citation of a text from Maritain that I think expresses this point very well. See Jacques Maritain, “Action,” in Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 60–61:
↩︎The liberty of these philosophers of liberty is singularly fragile. In uprooting it from reason, they have themselves made an invalid of it. But we, for our part, do not fear to counsel human liberty. Cram it with advice as much as you like; we know that it is strong enough to digest advice and that it thrives on rational motivations which it bends as it pleases and which it alone can render efficacious.
In short, by suppressing generality and universal law, you suppress liberty. [One might add, for our purposes: In short, by suppressing doctrinal fixity regarding the reality of God and the reality of what He is doing within humanity for our salvation and deification, you suppress liberty.] And what you have left is nothing but that amorphous impulse surging out of the night which is but a false image of liberty. Because when you suppress generality and universal law, you suppress reason, in which liberty, whole and entire, has its root and from which emanates in man so vast a desire that no motive in the world and no objective solicitation, except Beatitude seen face to face, suffices to determine it.
I have gathered these texts together in a rough translation at https://www.athomist.com/articles/reason-as-rule-of-human-action-a-draft-presentation-concerning-the-relevance-of-a-debate-involving-fr-leonard-lehu-op.↩︎
See Leonard Lehu, “Si la ‘recta ratio’ de S. Thomas signifie la conscience,” Revue Thomiste 30 (1925): 159-166 (emphasis added here). One cannot emphasize, also, the importance of the eternal law as the foundation of all this, for as a participation in the eternal law, the natural law (and the New Law) are a participative work of the highest of Reason, a practical ordering of reality, as God so ordains it to be. He ordains that all things should be and act in accord with the operating natures that come forth from His creative and conserving power. Thus, to order moral-practical matters by the “declarations” of right reason, we are in fact participating in the rational, operative fulfillment of the human nature that God creates and Himself moves as first cause. To act in accord with right reason is to act in accord with human nature.↩︎
See Benoit-Henri Merkelbach, “Le traité des actions humaines dans la morale thomiste,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 15 (1926): 185–207.↩︎
Citations taken from the edition of the ST available online at New Advent, with updates.↩︎
The present summary is my own high-level, introductory synthesis from a number of Thomist sources. See Merkelbach, Summa theologiae moralis, 5th ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947), 107–11 (De essentia et speciebus moralitatis); Garrigou-Lagrange, De beatitudine (Turin: Marietti, 1951), 307–318; Austin Woodbury, Ethics, John N. Deely and Anthony F. Russell Collection in the Latimer Family Library, at St. Vincent College, Latrobe, PA, sec. 3, ch. 7, a. 2 (Metaphysical Essence of Morality); Josephus Gredt, Elementa philosophiae aristotelico-thomisticae, vol. 2, ed. Eucharius Zenzen (Friburg: Herder, 1961), Ethica generalis, ch. 3, §1 (372–376); Charles René Billuart, Summa sancti thomae, vol. 2 (Paris: Palmé, 1872), Tractatus de actibus humanis, diss. 4 (De actibus humanis in esse moris), a. 1 (In quo consistat moralitas in communi actuum humanorum?), 283–288; Antoine Goudin, Philosophia iuxta inconcussa tutissimaque Divi Thomae dogmae (Paris: Sarlit, 1857), q. 4 a. 1 (pp. 114–115); John of St. Thomas, disp. 8, a. 1 (617–639); also see the subsection of a. 2 (Quid sit ponitas naturae et quomodo se habeat ad moralitatem?), 640–644; Salmanticenses, Cursus theologicus, vol. 6 (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1878), De bonitate actuum humanorum, disp. 1, dub. 1–3 (3–29); Jean-Baptiste Gonet, Clypeus theologiae thomisticae contra novos eius impugnatores, vol. 4 (Paris: Vivès, 1876), disp. 1, a. 1 and 2 (3–12); Jacques-Casimir Guerinois, Clypeus philosophiae thomisticae contra veteres et novos eius impugnatores, vol. 7, Ethica (Venice, 1729), q. 5, a. 1 (312–323).↩︎
One suspects that the voluntarism in Suárez’s natural law account is downstream of this sort of extrinsicism. See Walter R. Farrell, The Natural Law According to Aquinas and Suárez (Providence: Cluny, 2019).↩︎
Perhaps somewhat unfairly, Maritain seems to indicate something of this interpretation, in his An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy. Also, see the citation from Maritain in note 9 above. Further discussion of this topic can be found in the excellent accounts of free choice in Garrigou-Lagrange’s God: His Existence and His Nature, as well as Maritain’s own summary of Garrigou-Lagrange in Bergsonnian Philosophy and Thomism and in Yves Simon’s Freedom of Choice.↩︎
I have defended the Thomist notion of transcendental relation elsewhere in Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “There Cannot Be Genuine Sensation Without a Real Sensed Thing,” Philosophizing in Faith, ed. Matthew K. Minerd, trans. Thomas DePauw and E. M. Macierowski (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 116–119. The notion was critiqued by Fr. Anton Krempel in La doctrine de la relation chez saint Thomas: Exposé historique et systématique (Paris: Vrin, 1952). For another defense, see Deely’s remarks in John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. John Deely and Ralph Austin Powell (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013), pp. 462, 473, n. 114, 477–78, n. 119, 499, and 500, n. 139. At the time of posting and presenting this paper, I do not have a paginated copy of Gallus Manser’s The Essence of Thomism at hand. However, he too defends the notion of transcendental relation in a way that is not caught up in Deely’s polemics.↩︎
See ch. 4, §5 (Natural Reason, Synderesis, Natural Law) in Lehu, cited in note 7 above.↩︎
Thus, Gredt, Elementa philosophiae aristotelico-thomisticae, no. 918:
Thus, moral goodness consists in a transcendental relation of conformity, and moral evil in a transcendental relation of difformity of the human act to the rule of morals. Therefore, the morality of the external commanded act (actus imperatus) is an extrinsic denomination from the morality of the internal act. Morality is predicated of the internal act, of the external act, of the law, of the object, etc., according to the analogy of attribution, in such a way that the primary analogate—in which morality is formally and intrinsically preserved—is the internal act; whereas the others are denominated moral from it by an extrinsic denomination.
And Billuart, Summa sancti thomae, vol. 2, Tractatus de actibus humanis, diss. 4, a. 1:
↩︎The form from which a human act is denominated moral ought to be intrinsic to some subject; just as, for example, the form from which a wall is extrinsically denominated “seen” is intrinsic to some subject, namely the eye. But this form cannot be intrinsic to any subject other than the human act itself. Therefore, [morality is intrinsic to the act]. Proof of the minor: This form, since it is formal morality itself, formally denominates as moral the subject in which it intrinsically inheres. But only a human act can be formally denominated moral, good, or evil. Therefore, [this form must inhere in the human act itself].
This is confirmed as follows: the will is called moral because it produces a moral act; the law, because it directs it; the object, because it terminates it; the end, because it moves toward it; the circumstances, because they affect it. Therefore, nothing is called moral except by relation to the moral act. Therefore, morality exists principally and formally in the moral act alone. The last consequence is evident, because things said analogically by attribution are denominated through relation to that in which the denominating form exists principally and formally. This is clear in the case of pulse, urine, and medicine, which are called healthy by relation to health, which exists formally in the animal.
For a perspective that wishes to emphasize the morality of the external act very strongly (perhaps even more strongly than the Thomist tradition), see the insightful essays in Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), esp. 1–77 and 143–90.↩︎
For a summary of this debate, see Brian Carl, “The Formal Constituent of the Divine Nature in Peter Ledesma, John of St. Thomas, and Vincent Contenson,” in The Thomist 82, no. 1 (2018): 59–88; Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, God: His Existence and His Nature, trans. Bede Rose (St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1949), pt. 2, ch. 1, no. 44 (vol. 2, p. 16ff).↩︎
Thus, I here echo observations to this end made by Gardeil in the closing sections of vol. 1 of his La structure de l’âme et l’expérience mystique.↩︎
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12.7 (trans. Ross). Ultimately, this fixity of intellection is a kind of expression of the perfection and self-fixity of substance itself, and thus (in a scholastic register), aseity has its own arguments on its side for being, at root, what is most constitutive of God in His perfection. As a question of Aristotelian interpretation, I think that this is broadly the upshot of the argument put forward by Aryeh Kosman in his The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). This is well summarized on ibid., 233–4:
Mind represents living substance’s capacity to be determined by the object of consciousness while remaining itself, for the faculty of thought is the psychic power so to be determined without relinquishing determinate identity. This is what Aristotle means when he describes mind as impassive—ἀπάτης; it is incapable of being shaken in its identity (De Anima 3.4, 429a15-16, 430a18). It is this remarkable power of mind—the power to become all things and, yet, to remain steadfastly what it is—that makes it, I have argued, emblematic of the characteristic nature of substance. It is because of this that divine substance is not only the principle both of thinking and, in general, of the animate modes of awareness, but of substance itself.↩︎
Thus, Kosman continues, in the passage cited in the previous note:
↩︎One basic truth about animal substance has been slighted in this description. There is the truth of which I spoke [earlier in my text], the fact that we, at best, approximate the divine being that is at work being itself.21 But there is another side of this fact of which Aristotle speaks elsewhere. [He then cites On the Generation of Animals 2.1, 731b24-732a1.]…
There is thus for Aristotle another mode in which we reach for divine being. It is in the activities by which we engender and raise the young, something he observes in the De Anima, for whose sake animals do all that they do by nature, “In order that they might share in the eternal and the divine in the way in which they can” (De Anima 2.4, 415a30-415b1). This is an eros like the Platonic eros that nature has for its own perfected Form, but disposed diachronically in substance’s desire to reproduce itself. The emulation of divinity thus takes place in Aristotle’s view, not only in the activity of thinking, but in the activity of reproduction as well, in the complex biological social, and in our case, political and cultural acts by which substances pass on to their progeny the bounded activity of their mortal lives.
