Grace Presupposes Nature: The Structure of the Summa and an Illustration by the Virtue of Patience in Light of Christ

The first part of this essay argues that the very structure and ordering of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae manifests a departure from the typical theological position of his time regarding natural acquired virtues. Resting on a conviction that grace presupposes nature, Aquinas uniquely holds that natural virtues perfective of human nature can be acquired prior to grace, which can be elevated and incorporated by grace into the properly Christian life. The second part of this essay offers a case study of the virtue of patience that illustrates the argument of the first part of the paper.

Motivating Hume’s natural virtues

Many commentators propose that Hume thinks that we are not or should not be motivated to perform naturally virtuous actions from moral sentiments. I take issue with this interpretation in this paper, arguing that Hume fully incorporates the moral sentiments into his understanding of how human beings act when it comes to the natural virtues and that he does not see the moral sentiments as a problematic kind of motivation that threatens or weakens the virtuous status of the action.

Natural Virtues, Natural Vices

David Hume has been invoked by those who want to found morality on human nature as well as by their critics. He is credited with showing us the fallacy of moving from premises about what is the case to conclusions about what ought to be the case; and yet, just a few pages after the famous is-ought remarks in A Treatise of Human Nature, he embarks on his equally famous derivation of the obligations of justice from facts about the cooperative schemes accepted in human communities. Is he ambivalent on the relationship between facts about human nature and human evaluations? Does he contradict himself – and, if so, which part of his whole position is most valuable?Between the famous is-ought passage and the famous account of convention and the obligations arising from established cooperative schemes once they are morally endorsed, Hume discusses the various meanings of the term “natural.” “Shou'd it be ask'd, Whether we ought to search for these principles [upon which all our notions of morals are founded] in nature or whether we must look for them in some other origin? I wou'd reply, that our answer to this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal.” (T. 473–74) The natural can be opposed to the miraculous, the unusual, or the artificial. It is the last contrast that Hume wants, for his contrast between the “artificial” culturally variant, convention-dependent obligations of justice and the more invariant “natural virtues,” and what he says about that contrast in this preparation for his account of the “artificial” virtues, makes it clear why he can later refer to justice as “natural” and to the general content of the rules of justice – that is, of basic human conventions of cooperation – as “Laws of Nature” (T. 484).

Luther's ‘Scholastic Phase’ Revisited: Grace, Works, and Merit in the Earliest Extant Sermons

By 1516 Luther charged that the Schoolmen had grotesquely inflated the significance of natural virtues. Thereafter, he increasingly was provoked by the suggestion that human effort—touched only lightly, if at all, by grace—could accomplish more healing than harm. But it is commonly supposed that opinions Luther then condemned were opinions he had condoned in his earliest works, in which he is said to have assumed God's willingness to accept the best efforts of sinful persons as virtuous preparation for grace. Certainly Luther's ambitious remarks about partial merit (mentum de congruo), which found their way into his marginal notes on Lombard'sSentences(1509–1510) and into hisDictata super Psalterium(1513–1515), contrast with his later repudiation of the “sufficiencies” of natural powers for moral achievement and of moral achievement for divine acceptance and reward. Luther himself conceded his schoolboy admiration for Ockham, who probably inspired the semipelagianism of much of the late medieval soteriology that Luther came to detest. Understandably, Luther's early apparent endorsements of semipelagian features of scholastic soteriology have attracted considerable scholarly attention. His passage from nominalism to Protestantism, choreographed variously with leaps and stumbles or as an orderly march, has been a topic for debate ever since new fragments of Luther's early theology surfaced and were pieced together in the nineteenth century. Yet two early sermons have generated comparatively little discussion. Copied together from a manuscript in Erfurt and published twice before 1900, they are clearly witnesses from Luther's early career and their contribution to the determination and evaluation of his early semipelagianism ought not to be undervalued.

Wordsworth's River Duddon Sonnets

Because none of Wordsworth's later poems has been so neglected as his sonnet cycle The River Duddon, the pleasant task remains of doing it critical justice. O. J. Campbell has used it as an illustration of Wordsworth's later symbolic art, and the geographical features of the landscape through which the Duddon flows have been adequately described. Furthermore, the English river is a happier symbol than the deer in The While Doe of Rylstone and has simpler, more natural virtues than the mystic Holy River which is the life-stream of pure religion in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Most of the Duddon poems, it is true, fall less sublimely upon the ear and have less nobility and perfection than the finest he composed before 1806. Even so, their level is consistently high, part of their attractiveness being a sometimes bleak austerity. In several ways too, as Wordsworth generously says in his “Postscript,” the sequence is related to Coleridge's project, The Brook, outlined in Biographia Literaria. More important, however, is the final development of an extended theme based upon water imagery, for after 1797 Wordsworth's profoundest insights are often associated with it. We have also Robert Arnold Aubin's comment that “the greatest river-poem of all is Wordsworth's River Duddon (1820)… . With its use of apostrophe, local pride, historical reflection, catalogue, moralizing, genre scenes, episode, early memories, prospect, ruin-piece, and Muse-driving ( On, loitering muse—the swift stream chides us—on!'), it is not wonderful that a reviewer perceived that the work belonged in the main stream of topographical poetry.”