Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St. Thomas

Abstract

I MAY help anyone planning a study of these pages to have from the beginning some idea what they are about, so I propose here to indicate in the sketchy way that alone is possible in an introduction, first, something of the discussion in which they find their context; next, the general sense of the couplet, complacency and concern, which appears in their title; and, lastly, their position in relation to twentiethcentury Thomism and the study of St. Thomas. It seems a fair statement that the dominant notion of voluntary activity has taken the will as an appetitive faculty whose essential act is an inclination manifested in tendency: the will regards an end, and its activity is process towards that end. The notion can claim a solid basis in the history of thought, for it simply gives Scholastic form to the idea of eros, desire for the good, however nobly or ignobly that good is conceived; and the Lutheran Bishop, Anders Nygren, in a famous study which we must consider more at length in a later article, finds that the Greek motif, in contrast to the Christian agape, is that of eros. Thomist scholars cannot deny the importance of the eros theme in their master; one has only to show them the division of the Summa theologiae, where the whole of the second and third parts is devoted to what St. Thomas calls motus rationalis creaturae in Deum. So, whether on the level of natural ethics or on that of moral theology (and even, according to Bishop Nygren, in the mystical field), it has been usual to conceive voluntary life as a process-towards.