Abstract
The past several years have seen a resurgence of interest in Aquinas’ theory of the virtues, considered on its own terms and in relation to contemporary virtue ethics. Austin’s book contributes to this literature in two distinctive ways. First, and fundamentally, he analyzes Aquinas’ treatment of the virtues in terms of the Aristotelian theory of causes, in accordance with Aquinas’ claim that the perfect ratio of something can be gathered from all its causes. Second, he develops his theory in close conversation with Aquinas’ commentators, including Cajetan, the Salamancans, and John Poinsot. He does so in order to illuminate Aquinas, but this approach has the added advantage of introducing readers to theologians who are not commonly read but are interesting in their own right.
Following on Aquinas’ example, A. divides Aristotelian schema of four causes—, formal, final, material, and efficient—into seven causes, which he identifies as the mode, the matter, the target, the subject, the overall end, the agent, and the exemplar. The mode, or form, is identified as the virtue’s characteristic way of achieving the good; the matter corresponds to the sphere of activity proper to the virtue; the subject is the faculty informed by the virtue; the target and the overall end correspond to the object of the virtue, and the more comprehensive good towards which it aims; the agent is the efficient cause; and the exemplary cause is the full and originative ideal of the virtue as it exists in God. A. applies this schema in some detail to the virtue of temperance, but most of this book is taken up with general theoretical questions, rather than a close reading of Aquinas’ accounts of the specific virtues. He engages with a wide range of debates over Aquinas’ virtue ethics and more general questions of moral theory, including the rationale for the division of the cardinal virtues, the interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, and the role of passions in rational deliberation. In every instance, he argues that Aquinas’ analysis of causes can be brought to bear on a problem, in such a way as to resolve it, or at least to clarify the issues at stake.
There is a tendency among interpreters of Aquinas to deny or minimize the significance of metaphysics for his moral theory. Nonetheless, a close reading of the relevant texts makes it clear that his theory of virtue is grounded in a metaphysical account of goodness and perfection. A.’s book offers a welcome defense of the significance and coherence of the metaphysics which undergirds Aquinas’ moral theory. A.’s interpretations of Aquinas are not always persuasive, at least to this reviewer. His overall treatment would have benefitted from a wider and more systematic reading of Aquinas’ remarks on formal and final causality, especially seen in relation to one another, and in relation to the central notions of goodness and perfection. Nonetheless, A.’s interpretations are always insightful, and at their best, illuminating and persuasive. On his showing, seemingly abstruse metaphysical concepts are relevant, and sometimes indispensable to making sense of a wide range of issues in Aquinas and moral thought generally. His causal analysis of the relation of the virtues to the passions, and the role of the passions in rational deliberation, struck this reviewer as especially illuminating, but that is not at all to minimize the significance of his other contributions to moral theory. He also has much to say about questions that Aquinas did not, or could not have considered, including the very possibility of virtue and stability of character and the significance of evolutionary theory for ethics. This is a valuable book that deserves widespread attention, by moral theorists as well as students of Aquinas.