Desire for God: Ground of the Moral Life in Aquinas

Abstract

THE ANCIENT Christian conviction, that a desire for God lies at the root of the moral life, plays a primary role in Thomas Aquinas' moral theology as developed in the Summa theologiae. Its significance for him may be gathered from his introduction to the second volume of the ST, which is devoted to a discussion of moral theology and related questions. There he notes that in the second part of his exposition of sacred doctrine he will discuss the rational creature's advance towards God. In this way he relates his discussion of the moral life to the overall purpose of the ST, which is meant to be a discussion of God, not only as He is in Himself but also insofar as He is the beginning and end of all creatures, particularly of rational creatures (I-II, Intro.). Since Thomas holds that all creatures have a natural desire for God insofar as they tend towards Him as their last end, we are thus prepared to find that Thomas grounds the moral life in our natural desire, as rational creatures, for God. And so he does; but the way in which Thomas relates the natural desire for God both to the actual desire for God inspired by grace and to the moral life is far more subtle and interesting than the standard interpretation of Thomas would lead us to expect. According to the standard interpretation, ST portrays a two-tiered universe, a realm of natural affairs, intelligible and seemingly selfcontained, which is nonetheless supplemented and completed by participation in a supernatural economy of revelation and grace. On the basis of this interpretation, Thomas' disciples have traditionally argued that the natural world, and more particularly the moral life, naturally have some positive intimations of supernatural grace. Transcendental Thomism, with its insistence on the human person's constitutive openness to transcendence, is currently the most influential expression of this line of thought. Classical and neo-orthodox Protestants rightly object that