Renewing the City of God, II: Who's Giving Orders?

Dumping Gula, Studying Aquinas

In my early years of theological formation, I took a course in moral theology given by a cleric who, clearly, taught in contravention to St John Paul the Great's Veritatis splendor.  Though the previous professor of moral theology was dismissed on the grounds that his teachings were contrary to Church teaching, his textbook was, ironically, still being used.  When I moved to the Dominican studium generale in Berkeley, I was permitted to transfer fifteen academic credits and, ultimately, opted to toss my previous course in moral theology and have a do-over.

And, boy, am I ever glad I did.  It was taught by Prof Dr John Berkman--now at Regis College at the Toronto School of Theology--who all but tossed me (all of us students, really) into the deep end of the pool called the Secunda pars.  In contrast to the dubious principles of the "Fundamental Option" and "proportionalism" I learned earlier, Dr Berkman introduced us to the system of virtues taught by St Thomas Aquinas.

That was back in 2006.  Now, some fifteen years later, my doctoral research focuses on the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the soul of Christ; what is key is that St Thomas' way of doing "moral theology" (though it is imprecise to speak of the programme of second part of the Summa theologiae in that way) gives us a kind of "virtue-calculus" whereby we can crunch numbers, so to speak, in order to determine either the virtue or the vice of a given action.

What is often lost is that St Thomas had a pattern for explaining the virtues and vices in the "Second Part of the Second Part" (Secunda secundae for short).  The pattern, in general, often looks like this:

• Virtue (theological or cardinal) and their "variants"
• Vices and their offspring
• Gift of the Holy Spirit corresponding to the virtue
• Precept or one of the Ten Commandments fulfilled by said gift

Again, this is a very rough sketch. What matters to our discussion is how, especially when it comes to the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, each of these virtues' treatment wraps up with a Precept (Aquinas' way of saying "one of the Ten Commandments). More significantly, however, is that close to these wrap-up treatments, one or more of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit is brought in to "wind down" each virtue's treatment, and a few questions after (sometimes none at all), the Angelic Doctor corresponds one of these Seven Gifts to the Ten Commandments.

Think about that for a moment.  St Thomas is telling us, in essence, that the Ten Commandments is to be kept not by our own gumption but by the help of the Holy Spirit.  For example, he tells us that the gift of Counsel aids the cardinal virtue of prudence in S.th., 2a2ae, q. 52, and five questions later, at q. 56, he tells us that the Holy Spirit counsels us to prudentially obey the whole Decalogue.  To take another example, in q. 139, the gift of Fortitude is explained to infuse the cardinal virtue by the same name and, in the very next question, encourages us to obey the Commandments because "the Lord your God is in the midst of you, and will fight for you against your enemies" (Deut 20:3-4).

In other words, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit buttresses our souls in various ways to obey the whole range of God's law.  This is exactly why St Paul wrote in Romans 13:8-10,

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbour has fulfilled the Law.  The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet," and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, "You shall love your neighbour as yourself."  Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the Law.

St Paul by no means is talking about the emotion of love, but the virtue of love or charity, the very same thing mentioned earlier in Romans 5:5, "...God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

The Decline of Theology in the Seventeenth Century

Fr Yves Congar OP, in his book A History of Theology describes the decline which took place towards the end of the seventeenth century, when "course manuals" began to replace the writings of St Thomas Aquinas.  Amongst these changes, Fr Romanus Cessario OP, in his Virtues, or the Examined Life, notes that the "Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit" began to be detached from moral theology and was relegated to the more arcane and esoteric field of "mystical theology" around the same time.  We can see this, for example, in the otherwise excellent Synopsis theologiae moralis by Fr Adolphe Tanquerey PSS, who says nothing about the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, but instead discusses of it in his (otherwise excellent) The Spiritual Life:  A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology.  It is not really until Dominic Prümmer OP in his Handbook of Moral Theology that the Seven Gifts makes a reappearance, but only with the barest treatment.

This approach is wholly foreign to the structure of "Christian moral life" envisioned by St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae.  It seems to me that, on account of this seventeenth-century deformity in theology, two problems arose.

First, it drove a wedge between "Christian morality" and "life in the Holy Spirit" because, as St Paul said, it is the indwelling Holy Spirit who assists us in fulfilling the essence of the Ten Commandments.

Second, in lieu of "life in the Holy Spirit," there emerged a multiplication of rules to follow, with a "method" of doing moral theology known as casuistry, or a case-by-case analysis of the moral permissibility, impermissibility, or neutral acceptability of a given act.  What's glaringly omitted in the casuist approach to moral theology is the absence of factoring the Seven Gifts' operations in determining the moral excellence or baseness of a given act.

Nowhere is this shortcoming so obvious in the Church as the reception of St Paul VI's encyclical Humanae vitae proscribing artificial birth control, and that on two fronts.  On the one, the sexual responsibility demanded in Christian matrimony was said to be "too difficult" and artificial birth control was offered as a kind of fail-safe; what was missing was the Christian married couple's surrender and sensitivity to the Holy Spirit's initiative in the exercise of his Seven Gifts, the very thing which enables Christians to live lives of moral excellence.  On the other front, confessors often advised Christian couples, with respect to the magisterium of St Paul VI, to "pray and discern" about whether to obey Humanae vitae or not; the problem with this is that the Holy Spirit was made to be the very principle of a double-standard, guiding the teaching office of the pope in one way, but guiding Christian married couples in another way, despite the fact that the Holy Spirit is "the soul of the Church."  A vague Pneumatology or doctrine of the Holy Spirit among many clerics added to the moral confusion as the Church struggled to respond pastorally to the Sexual Revolution.

Being Morally Excellent Today

My mentor and hero, the late John Cardinal O'Connor, once said that a danger of liberal democracy with its "one person, one vote" is that it came to be projected onto moral issues, as if "one person, one vote" could determine for me what I can or cannot do.  As a result of this, moral issues have come to be something "voted" on, with the "majority" being the correct position.  Subsequently, many within the Church have tried to observe what moral norms are in the mainstream and to co-opt it and to "Christianize" it, so to speak.

For example, the mainstream enthusiasm for "Environmentalism" has been interpreted by many in the Church as a viable point of moral reflection and thus appropriated--I have even seen First Communion prep manuals give a disproportionate amount of attention to environmental matters at the expense of the doctrine of the Real Presence.  The same can be said of a whole range of "mainstream" issues ranging from sexuality to politics; it has not been unusual for me to encounter Catholic educators who simply take the cake of secular concerns and lather it with Jesus frosting and call it "Christian ethics."

And, of course, for "one person, one vote," the Holy Spirit doesn't have as much as a say.

This is what I mean when I describe the programme of many Christians as "building the City of God with the playbook of the City of Man."  This has, in turned, served to push back the Lordship of Jesus, precisely because it is by the Holy Spirit's indwelling of believers that Jesus exercises His Lordship.  By constructing a system of ethics apart from the Holy Spirit, we are building anything but the City of God but are, in fact, being contra-Christian.

We can begin, I would suggest, with a more robust, steak-and-baked potatoes Confirmation preparation that includes especially a teaching on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit that goes beyond mere bullet-listing to explaining what the gifts do and how to use the gifts in living supernaturally.