Sanctified Thought and Affection in Aquinas's Teaching on Nature and Grace

Sanctified Thought and Affection in Aquinas's Teaching on Nature and Grace Romanus Cessario O.P. THE WORK OF Fr. Servais-Théodore Pinckaers occupies a signal place within the Thomist commentatorial tradition.1 Consider, for instance, one well-known feature of Fr. Pinckaers's work, namely, his signature 1960 article that reminded the theological world that virtue is not a habit, at least in the modern sense of the term. This essay finds its pedigree within the Thomist commentatorial tradition.2 Vernon J. Bourke [End Page 467] (d. 1998), a North American Thomist, illustrates a proximate link in the chain of interpreters who correctly taught about Aquinas's use of habitus. Bourke's 1938 doctoral dissertation from the University of Toronto, Habitus as a Perfectant of Potency in the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, just underwent a new printing in 2017.3 One of course may cite other ligaments to the commentatorial tradition, especially from among French–speaking Thomists.4 Father Pinckaers's highly regarded disdain for moral casuistry led him to eschew the discussion and adjudication of individual moral cases. On one of the few occasions that I heard him speak about a particular moral problem, I frankly found myself taken aback. A young Dominican at the Albertinum required an exam in order to obtain his faculties for hearing confessions. Father Pinckaers and I were among the assigned examiners. The question of what moral obligation governs one's paying government taxes arose. As an American with an eye on the assiduousness of the Internal Revenue Service, I was in the process of pointing out the grave moral responsibility that obliges one to respect tax assessments. Legal justice, I insisted, requires payment down to the last penny. Father Pinckaers interrupted my instruction to the candidate with this presumably Gift-of-the-Holy-Spirit correction. "No, you don't have to pay every Franc demanded," he told the young priest; "Everyone knows governments over-charge!" I thought to myself, could this view ever qualify as a Probabiliorist opinion about tax paying? In any case, I recall this personal experience with Father Pinckaers to explain why I begin this communication with a very concrete moral case, one that has bedeviled Catholic moral theologians and priest confessors for a long time. [End Page 468] I. Sanctified Affection Catholic teaching on masturbation affords one of the few instances in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) where remnants of post-Tridentine casuistry appear explicitly. CCC 2252 includes a list of factors that may attenuate the masturbator's moral culpability. At the same time, the text upholds the harm that autoeroticism brings to a person. One eminent twentieth-century Christian theologian explains this delicate matter in the following words. For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. This harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival. Finally, among these fantasies the man is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.5 These words come from the pen of the English novelist and Christian apologist Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963). In this brief excerpt from a letter sent in 1956 to a certain Keith Masson, Lewis draws attention to the place that the sense passions of the soul hold in the Christian life. Because the topic of the passiones animae requires considerable explanation for a contemporary audience, I follow the practice of Eric D'Arcy who, in a simplified manner, translates the phrase as "emotions."6 Of course, the complexity [End Page 469] of Aquinas's psychological...

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