Folia Theologica et Canonica 2. 24/16 (2013)

SACRA THEOLOGIA - Sebastian Walsh, O.Praem., “Fidelissimus Discipulus Eius”: Charles De Köninck’s Exposition of Aquinas’ Doctrine on the Common Good

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SEBASTIAN WALSH, O.PRAEM.

“The supreme science, and superior to any subordinate science, is the one which knows that for the sake of which each thing must be done. And this is the good in each case, and in general the highest good in the whole of nature (...) it is this science which must investigate the first principles and causes, and the good or final cause, is one of the causes.”25

I think this is a point on which the eminent thomist Jacques Maritain was in error. According to Maritain, the good of the speculative order, as opposed to a good of the practical order, is not a common good in the strict sense.26 Maritain seems to fall back upon a more known sense of the term good, which prevents him from appreciating the full amplitude and import of the common good: a good which is not only the foundation for every society of rational beings, men and angels, but is absolutely first in the whole order of causes.27

IV. Some Applications to the Science of Theology

It is not difficult to see the importance of this doctrine on the common good for the science of Theology. The goodness of God is the ultimate explanatory principle of all his works, both of nature and grace. Moreover, the whole of moral Theology in particular begins and ends with a consideration of God as our

25 Metaphysics, Book A, chapter 2: 982b5-10. This text comes at the end of an argument in which Aristotle reasons from a nominal definition of wisdom (the best kind of knowledge) to an essential definition of wisdom (the knowledge of the first and most universal cause or causes). And since the final cause is the cause of the causality of the other genera of causes, Aristotle ultimately concludes in this text that wisdom is most of all a knowledge of that good which is the ultimate cause of being as such.

26 Maritain argues that not only is the principle “the common good is more divine than the private good” to be understood analogously but also that its primary analogate is found in its application to human society and human goods. St. Thomas gives this dictum authenticum “its full value in strictly social matters.” (PCG, 19-20). He applies the same principle later in the same work where he states: “The common good of the intellects can be understood in two ways: in the first way, it is truth and beauty themselves, through the enjoyment of which minds receive a certain natural irradiation or participation of the Uncreated Truth and Beauty or of the separated common good. This common good of the intellects is obviously superior to the personal act by which each intellect conquers a fragment of it; but it is not a social good, a common good in the strict sense.” (PCG, 73).

27 It seems to me that the explanation for Maritain’s particular reading of St. Thomas on this point stems from an approach to metaphysics which tends to ignore the role of essences and causality in favor of being. While, according to St. Thomas, being qua being is the subject-genus of metaphysics and while the distinction between esse and essence is fundamental for St. Thomas, there is much more to a science than its subject. Neither is being the most fundamental consideration for every metaphysical problem. Indeed, for St. Thomas metaphysics is first of all wisdom, and wisdom has to do with the first causes, especially the final cause since it is the first among causes. A metaphysical approach which restricts itself to the consideration of being and the actus essendi, which pertains properly to the consideration of formal causality, is impoverished precisely because it cannot account for the whole of reality, from pure act to pure potency.