THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Is to Love the Whole More Than to Love Its Members? The Primacy of the Inclination to
Love the Common Good in Aquinas

A THESIS

Submitted to the Faculty of the

School of Philosophy
Of The Catholic University of America
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree
Master of Philosophy

By
Francis Emmanuel Feingold

Washington, D. C.

2012

This thesis by Francis Emmanuel Feingold fulfills the thesis requirement for the
masters degree in Philosophy approved by Dr. Tobias Hoffmann, Ph.D., as
Director, and by Dr. Kevin White, Ph.D. as Reader.

____________________________________
Dr. Tobias Hoffmann, Ph.D., Director

____________________________________
Dr. Kevin White, Ph.D., Reader

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS .........................................................................1
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Introduction ..........................................................................................................................................1
The formal difference between good of the whole and good of the part ...........................9
Bonum commune in causando: extrinsic vs. intrinsic .................................................................. 16
The political common good ............................................................................................................. 24
The common good of the universe, and God .............................................................................. 33

CHAPTER II. THE COMMON GOOD: PRIMARY BENEFICIARY OR PRIMARY

BENEFIT? A CRITIQUE OF THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS ........................................ 48
1. The Thomistic Theory of Friendship-Love................................................................................... 49
2. The specter of totalitarianism: Rejection of transcendent-love-grounding commonness
on the finis cui level .......................................................................................................................... 58
3. Is the Vision an assecutio communis? Rejection of transcendent-love-grounding
commonness on the finis quo level ................................................................................................ 63
4. The problem of exclusivity: transcendent love as grounded in diffusive commonness ......... 76
A) Common vs. proper goods, and the equating of Bonum summum with Bonum
commune ....................................................................................................................................77
B) Ut permaneat et diffundatur: Transcendent-love-grounding commonness on the
root-of-lovability level .................................................................................................................84
5. The fallacy of subordinating beneficiary-good to benefit-good in love of neighbor .............. 87
6. Key background assumptions behind De Konincks position ................................................... 96
A) The good as perfectivum ............................................................................................................96
B) God as finis cui ......................................................................................................................... 100
C) Self-love...................................................................................................................................... 105
7. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 110

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CHAPTER I. THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS

1. Introduction
It is a well-known fundamental tenet of Thomism that there is in man a natural
inclination to love the common good, and to love it with an intensity surpassing the intensity of
his love for his friends and even of his love for himself. Indeed, for St. Thomas the common
good is the only kind of good which we are at all capable of loving (let alone naturally inclined to
love) more intensely than our own.1 It is not easy to determine, however, precisely what the
term common good refers to, and specifically what it is that sets the common good apart in
kind from the good of ordinary friendship.2 Certainly Thomas Aquinas is no Thomas Hobbes:
the difference in intensity cannot be due simply to the fact that a common good will always
directly benefit us individually in a way in which a friends good does not. After all, St. Thomas
regards citizens as inclined by natural virtue to go so far as to lay down their life for their country
(in which there is certainly no personal benefit, at least in the temporal order), and, crucially, to
do so simply for love of itnot, like for Hobbes, merely because they think a universal
commitment to such service is a necessary means to secure a better chance of their own
individual flourishing, i.e., because that commitment is a risk calculatively worth taking.3

For the priority of self-love over friendship-love in terms of intensity, see ST I-II.27.3, Editio Leonina 6:194;
ST II-II.44.8 ad 2, Editio Leonina 8:337; ST II-II.25.4, Editio Leonina 8:200; and ST II-II.26.4 and 68, Editio
Leonina 8:21218; for the intensive priority of common-good love over self-love, see I.60.5, Editio Leonina 5:104
5, and II-II.26.23, Editio Leonina 8:21012.
1

2 See Gregory Froelichs seminal article on the notorious multitude of analogical meanings attached to this
term: The Equivocal Status of Bonum Commune, New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 3857.
3 Hobbes, Leviathan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), II.17, p. 102: The finall Cause, End, or
Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon
themselves, (in which wee see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more

Yet even though for St. Thomas the love for the common good does not spring from
such Hobbesian utilitarian considerations, it is equally certain that, in his eyes, it does not spring
from the other, Bentham-type utilitarianism either: the belief that happiness can be in a sense
quantified, and that therefore one should love the community above self simply because there is
more happiness at stake in the community than in oneself.4 In none of St. Thomass
discussions of the common good does he ground our love for it in our (logically prior) love for
the individuals that constitute that society; instead, rather than making love for the whole
depend on love for the parts, he makes love for the parts (at least in the relevant way) depend on
love for the whole. The constantly invoked principle is that the part will naturally love the whole,
and will naturally act for the good of that whole over its ownand if the good of the whole
requires another part to be privileged over oneself, well and good; but that privileging of the
other part is merely an instantiation, so to speak, of ones love for the whole. It is not primarily for
the sake of the President as man, as a noble individual, that I should throw myself in the way of
his would-be assassin; rather, I will be inclined to do so because he is the repository, so to speak,
of the good of the whole, and in his death the principle of the social order would be lost. (If one
leaves the common good out of the picture, e.g. in the case of a personal friend or simply of

contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is
necessarily consequent (as hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep
them in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and observation of [the]
Lawes of Nature (emphasis mine).
See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Publishing Co.,
1948), I.5, p. 3: The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the
phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The
community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were
its members. The interest of the community then is, what?the sum of the interests of the several members who
compose it.
4

someone who happens to need help, then, following Aristotle,5 St. Thomas thinks that any selfsacrifice would be performed primarily for the sake of my own nobility, and so would not be
really altruistic, at least not primarily.6)
But why should one love the whole? And what, exactly, does it mean to love its good
when one is dealing with wholes of a decidedly non-standard variety, such as society, the
universe, and God? It is easy to see why substantial parts would naturally love the good of their
substantial whole more than their own; after all, the whole is the only thing there to be loved in
the first place. But it is tempting to think of society, and its good, as being simply
nominalistic convenience-terms for a large number of mutually interacting people and their own
individual goods, or at least for those of their individual goods that happen to coincide; and even
if one resists this temptation, it is certainly not easy to understand why society would be a nobler
thing than its members, who, after all, are living beings capable of knowledge and love, while
society is not.
To answer this, a Thomist must walk a difficult tightrope. On the one hand, he has to
agree that there is no such thing as society, but rather a great number of persons arranged societywise,7 for unities of order are strictly accidental beings that inhere in their bearers. Yet on the

Aristotle Ethica Nicomachea IX.8.1169s2526:

.
5

See St. Thomass commentary on the above Aristotelian passage at Sententia libri ethicorum IX.9, Editio Leonina
47/2:532b533a, and also ST II-II.26.4 ad 2, Editio Leonina 8:213b. The idea would seem to be that generosity (the
diffusion of goodness to others) is something intrinsically good even apart from the worthiness of that
generositys recipients: the giving of the gift is for its own sake on a more primary, foundational level than is the
recipient of that gift. We will examine this idea in more detail in the second chapter.
6

7 To borrow Peter van Inwagens phrase. See his book Material Beings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1990) for an insightful analysis of what constitutes a composite substance. I think his conclusions there (that the
only genuine substances are elementary particles and living beings) are too narrow, because he does not take
perfective teleology into account as a possible criterion for substantial unity; but it is nonetheless a thoughtprovoking analysis of an important subject.

other hand he has to argue that the common good is really numerically one rather than many;
for if it were simply a nominalistic shorthand for individual goods of the sort that everyone
finds beneficial, like virtue or health (as opposed to, say, something of limited interest like
graduate studies in engineering), then we would be back to the Bentham position that to work
for the common good means simply to work for the greatest possible number of what in fact are
private goods. But the main numerically single goods of public interest are useful goods (armies,
schools, justice systems); and useful goods are of no use to us here, since these goods are loved
only for the sake of the (individual) goods that they provide. How is the Thomist to do this?
The way that St. Thomas seems to deal with the societal problem is to tackle its two
components in reverse order. Rather than proving first that society is nobler than the individual,
and then deriving from that fact the further claim that goods which benefit society are more to
be desired than goods which benefit the individual, he instead establishes first that the good
which men attain specifically as members of the social ordernamely, as I will argue, the social
order itself, with all its interlocking individual relations of mutual support and
complementarityis higher than any good that they can attain on their own; and it is only from
this that it follows that man is primarily defined by his nature as part. In other words, mans own
selfhood, his own perfection, is more bound up with his being a member of society than in
being an individual in his own right; and this is all that it means to say that society is nobler than
the individual (and that the individual is a part of society). But it is enough (so goes the
argument), because, in order to preserve the beautiful social order and harmony he loves, he
must constantly subordinate what would otherwise have been his own greater good to the
(individual) good of his fellow sharers in that order. In order for the beauty of the whole to
shine forth, all its members must be cared for. It is as though a paint-fleck were aware of the

greater beauty to which it was contributing, and had the ability to dim its own brilliance and add
luster to others if that would serve the paintings purpose: a paint-fleck that embraced its nature
as a paint-fleck would do so gladly, but for the sake of the whole, not of its fellow parts. From
here on I will use the term transcendent love to refer to this kind of non-self-interested love
for individuals (where I love X qua contributor to a common good which I love more than
myself, rather than loving X as a mere individual).
Perhaps surprisingly, St. Thomas also takes this same apparently reversed approach with
respect to the supremacy of our love for God. Rather than simply saying that it is His infinite
goodness that inclines us to love Him above everything else, St. Thomas begins with the same
starting point as before, namely the goodness of a unity of order (in this case not the order of
society but rather the order of the universe, whose beauty would likewise consist in its reflection
of God through its manifold of complementary ranks, each aiding and supporting the others),
and proceeds to argue that if one loves the handiwork, it is impossible not to love it as the
artists: it is in the artists mind that the handiworks beauty exists primarily, and, because of its
inherent integrity, one can only will that handiworks completion according to its artists will. To
put the matter another way, because God Himself is the beauty of which the universes order is
the pale reflection, and because their share in that reflection is the basis of our friendship-love
for the universes (personal) members as parts, it follows that we will have friendship-love for
God as wellbut, unlike our friendship-love for the parts, whom we love as merely contributing
to the whole and hence less than ourselves,8 we love God more than ourselves because His share
in it is total, indeed supereminent. We will our fellow paint-flecks to shine because it is through
them that the glory of the painting is made manifest; but we want God to shine because it is

Since our own contribution to the whole is closer to us, more intensely tangible, as it were, than theirs.

His light that shines through the painting itself. We are His parts, and love Him as our
whole, precisely insofar as we are parts of His plan.
There are, however, some difficulties with this approach, beautiful as it is, at least some
of which may be traced to confusions between different kinds of finality. Hence, after spending
the first chapter laying out St. Thomass vision of the common good as just described, the
second will be devoted to unpacking these difficulties. To this end I will make extensive use of a
debate that took place between Charles De Koninck9 on the one hand, and Fr. Ignatius
Eschmann, O.P.,10 and Jacques Maritain11 on the other. De Koninck is a firm proponent of the
absolute primacy of the common good as described above, and his position is, I think, the more
faithful of the two to what St. Thomas has to say directly about the subject (hence I will draw
chiefly on his interpretation for support in my first chapter).12 Fr. Eschmann and Maritain,
however, draw on other areas of St. Thomass thought (and, I think, on common sense) to argue
for a relative rather than an absolute primacy for the common good; and, though the arguments
they adduced were not always the soundest,13 I think they saw some things that De Koninck did

9 La primaut du bien commun (Quebec: ditions de lUniversit Laval; Montreal: ditions Fides, 1943); In
Defence of Saint Thomas, Laval thologique et philosophique 1 (1945): 8109.
10

In Defense of Jacques Maritain, The Modern Schoolman 22 (1945): 183208.

11

La personne et le bien commun, Revue Thomiste 46 (1946): 23778.

12 Fr. Stephen L. Brock, in his article The Primacy of the Common Good and the Foundations of Natural
Law in St. Thomas, in Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, ed. Reinhard Htter
and Matthew Levering, 23455 (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 235, gives
strong support to De Konincks interpretation of the common good. Fr. Lawrence Dewan, O.P., in St. Thomas,
John Finnis, and the Political Good, The Thomist 64 (2000): 33774, at 338, and Thomas Osborne in Love of Self and
Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 89, to name two
others, likewise give strong encomiums. Hence I think I am justified to take De Koninck as representing an
important strand of Thomist thought on this topic.
13 I am thinking especially of (1) the Maritainian division of the human being into a personal, spiritually
based, generous aspect and an individual, materially based, egotistic aspect (see especially La personne et le bien
commun, 24552); (2) a distortion of a Thomistic text (Super Sent. 3.5.3.2) that both of them lean on to make the
claim that human beings cannot be regarded as parts insofar as they are considered as persons (Maritain, La

not. The following two objections, I think, present the main substance of their insight (which,
following De Konincks nomenclature, we will refer to as personalism).
First, there is a problem with the Thomistic premise that the greatest good of man lies in
his contribution to the good of the whole. On the contrary, it seems that at least his very highest
actsthe Vision and charitable love of Godare strictly individual acts that are not themselves
enhanced or elevated in any way by being put in combination. The chief end to be attained, in
other words, is not emergent: it does not require a cooperative attainment. But if this is the case,
then mans greatest nobility will not lie in his parthood, but rather in what he is as an individual;
and if this in turn is the case, then the argument given above for mans love of the social (though
not the divine) common good above self falls flat. The confusion here would be regarding what,
exactly, the conditions are for counting a parts perfection as belonging primarily to it qua part; a
clear analysis is needed of which ends belong to which modes of attainment, and which modes
of attainment would belong to a part as such. De Koninck, however, tries to defend himself by
arguing that he did not mean that it is our end to attain God as emergently common (i.e., as
attainable only via a team effort), but rather as what I will call diffusively common (i.e., with
the desire that His ability to be received by many without diminishment should be actualized
that His goodness be diffused for His sake). First of all, this seems to negate his argument that
the intrinsic, as well as the extrinsic, common good provides a supra-individual ratio for loving
ones neighbor. Also, however, in shifting his argument I think he makes two additional

personne et le bien commun, 56; Fr. Eschmann, In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 205); (3) a general tendency to
oversimplify their opponents reading of St. Thomas; (4) a failure, like De Konincks, to distinguish explicitly
between the different kinds of finality; and (5), as a result, apparently failing to see that his argument for even a
relative primacy of the common good, i.e., in the practical order but not in the speculative, would fall for the same
reason that he attacks an absolute primacy: benefit-goods (which include all non-personal goods, including the good
of societal order) are always for the sake of their beneficiaries, never for their own sake. (Mary Keys makes this last
point well in her dissertation The Problem of the Common Good and the Contemporary Relevance of Thomas
Aquinas [PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1998], 6165.)

mistakes: 1) he formally equates supreme, universal goodness with self-diffusive commonness

on the level of what we find lovable about God (the abstract level of finality); and 2) he then
equates commonness on that level with commonness on the level of attainment. This allows him
to make the claim (which I think is false) that to love God not as common in the Vision means
to love Him in a deliberately exclusive way.
With regard to the social common good there is also a second, perhaps more important
problem: it seems that, by St. Thomass picture, the benefit-good is made primary over the
beneficiary-good. Human beings are loved, we said, insofar as they contribute to the good of
societys (and the universes) overarching, mutually supporting order, which is a thing of beauty.
But why do we love beautiful things? Surely it is for the sake of those who view themand only
individual persons are viewers. It seems, then, a mistake to say that we love our fellow man for
the sake of the common beauty, the common benefit-good (whether that common good be the
order of the universe or God Himself). Rather, it would appear, we must love the common
good, on the most fundamental level, for the sake of our fellow man.
An analogous difficulty applies to the case of love for God. Is it not problematic to
ground our love for Him in our love for the universe He has made? To be sure, the beauty of
what He has made is indeed our best epistemic route to grasping His own beauty, at least here
below; but if we take his generalship of the universe as simply being our epistemic way of
grasping something of His own hidden grandeur, it would be wrong, I think, to call this love of
Him as common good. It would not be love of Him as common because (a) the aspect under
which we love Him would be the supreme universality, not the diffusive commonness, of His
goodness, and because (b) we do not love Him as emergently attained either (which is the other
meaning of loving something as common). The only way to love Him as common would be to

do so simply inasmuch as, without the animating vision of His plan, there would be no integrity
and order here below is; but this, I think, would be to get things backwards.
I will then briefly sketch three underlying reasons that might pressure a Thomist into
arguing for the common goods absolute primacy anyway despite the above difficulties: 1) the
thesis (firmly upheld by De Koninck, rather less firmly by St. Thomas) that the proper meaning
of the good is perfective of another rather than perfect in itself, and that hence it is only
benefit-goods, not beneficiary-goods, that genuinely have the note of finality; 2) the difficulties
for divine simplicity attendant upon loving God as a beneficiary, and how one would need to
accept this kind of love in order to secure a non-De Koninckian charity-love for neighbor that
was still genuinely God-centric; and 3) the thesis that one must necessarily love oneself above
any other individual. Finally, I will conclude by explaining to what extent unity with others can
serve as the root of lovability for loving them with friendship-love, and how this still allows a
Thomist to avoid being reduced back to a Bentham-type position on the common good.

2. The formal difference between good of the whole and good of the part
Bonum gentis divinius est quam bonum unius hominis. This axiom, taken from the opening of
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics,14 is the key foundational principle that forms the backbone of St.
Thomass thought on the common good. It is ubiquitous in his writings; it appears in discussions
whose topics range from mans love for God to the fittingness of a hierarchical universe to the
distinction of the active from the contemplative life, as well, of course, as mans societal relation

Aristotle Eth. Nic. I.2.1094b810:

, .
14

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to his fellow man.15 Thus for example in De veritate 5.3, where St. Thomas is speaking of the
universality of divine providence, we are told:
Providentia Dei, qua res gubernat, ut dictum est, est similis providentiae qua
paterfamilias gubernat domum, aut rex civitatem aut regnum: in quibus
gubernationibus hoc est commune, quod bonum commune est eminentius quam bonum
singulare; sicut bonum gentis est divinius quam bonum civitatis vel familiae vel personae, ut
habetur, in principio Ethicorum; unde quilibet provisor plus attendit quid
communitati conveniat, si sapienter gubernat, quam quid conveniat uni tantum.
(Editio Leonina 22:146; emphasis mine)
Moreover, whenever the principle of the common goods primacy appears, it is almost
invariably cast in terms of the priority of the whole over the part. A classic example can be found
in ST II-II.58.5, where Aquinas is describing the virtue of general justice (an important notion
which we will discuss again below):
Manifestum est autem quod omnes qui sub communitate aliqua continentur
comparantur ad communitatem sicut partes ad totum. Pars autem id quod est
totius est: unde et quodlibet bonum partis est ordinabile in bonum totius. (Editio
Leonina 9:13)
Or again, even more strongly:
Cum enim unus homo sit pars multitudinis, quilibet homo hoc ipsum quod est et
quod habet, est multitudinis: sicut et quaelibet pars id quod est, est totius. Unde et
natura aliquod detrimentum infert parti, ut salvet totum.16
Other passages of this sort abound throughout the corpus.17

Besides the direct commentary in Sent. Eth. 1.2 n. 12 and the De veritate text I just cited, this Aristotelian
passage is also explicitly referenced in SCG II.42 n. 3 (in the context of discussing the order of the universe), III.17
n. 6 (discussing Gods finality with respect to creation in terms of the latters dependence on Hima key point we will
return to later), III.69 n. 16 (arguing for the superiority of commonness on the basis of the goods inherent selfdiffusiveness), and III.125 n. 10; ST I.108.6, II-II.31.3 ad 2, II-II.141.8, and III.1.4; Super Sent. 2.11.1.2 s.c. 1, 2.29.1.3
ad 4, 2.32.2.2, 3.35.1.3.1 c. and ad 1, 4.15.2.4.1, and 4.24.3.2.3; De perfectione 14; De regno 1.9; and Sent. lib. Politic. 1.1 n.
3, among others (I have left out the considerable number of places where St. Thomas invokes this principle in an
objection).
15

ST I-II.96.4, Editio Leonina 7:183. The principle of the part naturally exposing itself to protect the whole is a
crucial element of St. Thomass theory of love of others above self; we will discuss it further below.
16

This axiom of the priority of whole-over-part is the complement to the Aristotelian divinius passage:
whenever St. Thomas says something about the common good, if he does not directly cite Aristotles words as his
17

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As we said in the introduction, however, we must be careful about the application of this
principle to society, since society is only a unity of order, not a substance.18 Perhaps the text in
which Aquinas most clearly rejects Benthams thesis (namely, that the common good is primary
by way of the sheer quantity of its recipients) is at ST II-II.58.7 ad 2, Editio Leonina 9:15b:
Bonum commune civitatis et bonum singulare unius personae non differunt
solum secundum multum et paucum, sed secundum formalem differentiam: alia enim est
ratio boni communis et boni singularis, sicut et alia est ratio totius et partis.
Between the common good and the private good St. Thomas sees a difference not only of
degree but of kind, a formal difference that transcends the mere material comparison of things
on the part-level to each other. This is why St. Thomas can claim that general justicethe
general virtue which, for St. Thomas, is very clearly the noblest of all the moral virtues,19

authority he will almost invariably cite this axiom instead. Of the innumerable places where he does so, the
following are some of the more salient ones. In the same Treatise on Justice we have ST II-II.58.9 ad 3, Editio
Leonina 9:17b (a text about general justice and whether it includes the passions, which, as we will see, De Koninck
will lean on heavily); II-II.64.2, Editio Leonina 9:68; and II-II.65.1, Editio Leonina 9:7980. In the Treatise on Law
there are the justly famous passages in I-II.90.2, Editio Leonina 7:150 (where law is defined as serving common
good, which is equated with universal happiness) and in 96.4 (cited above), as well as 92.1 ad 3, Editio Leonina
7:159b60a. Most importantly, we find the same theme in the famous treatment of the natural love of the angels at
I.60.5, Editio Leonina 5:1045, mirrored by the parallel passages in the Treatise on Charity at II-II.26.3 (c. and ad 2,
Editio Leonina 8:211) and 26.4 ad 3 (Editio Leonina 8:213b) and in the Treatise on Grace at I-II.109.3, Editio
Leonina 7:295all of which we will return to at greater length. Outside the Summa, there is the lengthy treatment in
QD de car. 4 ad 2 (Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2, ed. P. Bazzi, Mannes Calcaterra, Tito S. Centi, E. Odetto, P. M.
Pession [Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1965], 764a), and in De perfectione 13, Editio Leonina 41B:81a84b.
18 Perhaps the best Thomistic text on the unitas ordinis (a concept which he uses frequently enough but generally
without pausing to identify its metaphysical properties, at least other than its obvious connection with final
causality) is in his commentary on the Ethics, Sent. lib. Ethic. I.1, Editio Leonina 47/1:4b: Hoc totum quod est civilis
multitudo vel domestica familia habet solam ordinis unitatem, secundum quam non est aliquid simpliciter unum; et
ideo pars huius totius potest habere operationem, quae non est operatio totius, sicut miles in exercitu habet operationem quae
non est totius exercitus; habet nihilominus et ipsum totum aliquam operationem quae non est propria alicuius partium sed
totius, puta conflictus totius exercitus; et tractus navis est operatio multitudinis trahentium navem. Est autem aliud
totum quod habet unitatem non solum ordine sed compositione aut colligatione vel etiam continuitate, secundum
quam unitatem est aliquid unum simpliciter; et ideo nulla est operatio partis quae non sit totius (emphasis mine).
This passage is especially interesting for two reasons: (1) the emphasis it places on emergent operation as a key
characteristic of unities of order (which, as we will see, is central to discussions of the common good); and (2) it
clearly states that a unity of order, as such, need not possess all the perfections of its parts, whereas a substance
does; this point will be very relevant in the second chapter, in discussing the commonness of beatitude. See also
ST I.39.3, Editio Leonina 4:400a.

Si loquamur de iustitia legali, manifestum est quod ipsa est praeclarior inter omnes virtutes morales:
inquantum bonum commune praeeminet bono singulari unius personae (ST II-II.58.12, Editio Leonina 9:19a).
19

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inasmuch as it directs all the other virtues to its own proper end and hence constitutes no less
than the natural counterpart of charity20is a virtue distinct from particular justice, which
governs our (natural) dealings with other individuals. If there were no difference between
many and the whole, as the objector had argued, then general justice would collapse simply
into an extension of particular justice, losing its supreme pride of place in the moral sphere; and
as a result the political philosophy of St. Thomas would lose its distinctively anti-utilitarian
quality. The same principle is at work, I think, behind the De regnos sharp (and entirely
Aristotelian21) division between democracy and the polity: where the latter works for the good of
the whole as whole, the former works for the private goods of the individuals that happen to
make up the majority.22 For St. Thomas there is a formal difference between many and the
whole, and it is in light of this distinction that we should take all the countless passages that
argue to the primacy of the common good from the relation of part to whole. But what is it
exactly that establishes this formal difference?
At least within the school of Thomism championed by De Koninck, this formal
difference is established by the kind of good which is being willed for the members. Common
good, for him, means chiefly and properly the bonum commune in causando or secundum rem.23 In

20

ST II-II.58.6, Editio Leonina 9:14b.

21

See Aristotle Politica III.7.1279b410; cf. Aquinass commentary in Sent. lib. Pol. III.6, Editio Leonina 48:204a

205b.

22 See De regno I.3, Editio Leonina 42:452. An objector might reply, however, that St. Thomas does not specify
here that the distinction in question is a formal one; after all, he does say that the good safeguarded by democracy
does come closer to being the good of the whole than in the case of oligarchy or tyranny, which would seem to
indicate that the whole-vs.-part distinction here is a matter of degree or percentages rather than a formal difference
in kind.
23 Charles De Koninck, In Defence of Saint Thomas, 44: I will ask the reader to recall that throughout my
own essay I most unambiguously use the expression common good for a bonum commune in causando; let us note,
moreover, that all my quotations from St. Thomas concern this good and that I maintain God is most formally a

13

other words, it is a good which is common not by mere predication or mental abstraction, as
humanity is common to all men, or happiness to all happy men, or money to everyone
with something in their bank account, but rather by way of the far-reaching causal efficacy that
pertains to a numerically singular, really existent thing, which is simultaneously a good for many
beneficiaries (e.g., a work of art, or a speech given by a wise man) Only goods of the latter sort
have their commonness in their own concrete existence; goods common merely in praedicando are
strictly individual when taken as actually existing in reality (as opposed to in the mind).
Moreover, part of what it means for a good to be common in causando is that (like the work of
art, or the speech) it benefits its recipients without first being divided up and apportioned; it is
received by each recipient whole and entire. Hence we can also use Michael Waldsteins
definition: A common good is a good in which many persons can share at the same time
without in any way lessening or splitting it.24
It is in connection to goods of this sort that we can speak of a whole formally distinct
from the many: a whole is a group considered insofar as all of its members benefit from the
same real indivisible good (bonum commune in causando). Insofar as its members benefit only from
good in this sense. In support of this claim he invokes John of St. Thomas (Cursus theologicus, ed. Vivs [Paris,
1884], 7.8.3 n. 12, p. 423, cited in In Defence of Saint Thomas, 66).
De Konincks emphasis on the distinction has left a lasting mark on the traditionally-minded Thomists who
came after him. Besides Michael Waldsteins article cited below, see, e.g., Froelich, The Equivocal Status of Bonum
Commune, 4253, esp. 43 n. 15; Benjamin L. Smith, Thomas Aquinas on Politics and the Common Good (PhD
diss., The Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, 2007), 7693; Michael Smith, Human
Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen University Press, 1995), 74
81 and 113119, and Common Advantage and Common Good, Laval thologique et philosophique 51 (1995): 11125,
at 124. (Cf. Ronald McArthur, Universal in praedicando, Universal in causando, Laval thologique et philosophique 18
(1962): 5995, for a careful treatment of this same distinction in a rather different context, namely a discussion of
universal efficient and formal causality rather than of the universal final causality that is the common good.)
Surprisingly, Mary M. Keys does not seem to reference this distinction in her dissertation The Problem of the
Common Good and the Contemporary Relevance of Thomas Aquinas, even though a whole chapter of her work
is dedicated to analyzing the De Koninck/Maritain/Eschmann controversy (chapter 2, pp. 3968); she does
mention it briefly, however, in her later book Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 193.
Michael Waldstein, The Common Good in St. Thomas and John Paul II, Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 3
(2005): 569578, at 569. Cf. Osborne, 89 for a similar definition.
24

14

the same kind of good (e.g., from a common stock of food), they are merely a many, la
Bentham.25 Or as Benjamin Smith puts it, it is precisely this numerical (as opposed to merely
generic) unity of this kind of common good that gives society its cohesiveness and animates its
activity as a whole.26 Picture, if you will, a team that, instead of aiming at victory, merely
practiced together for the sake of each individual athletes excellence (a sort of fitness club): here
indeed there would be nothing to define the pseudo-team as a whole, no way to love its other
members and desire their excellence as contributing to some overarching goal. To desire them
all to excel together is simply to desire the sum of their individual excellences, and one will do so
only insofar as one cares about them individually. If they constitute a genuine team aimed at a
specific victory, however, then one cares about each ones athletic excellence not only insofar as
it is his good, but also and above all because one loves the single thing being jointly pursued.
Before proceeding further, one should ask: is this distinction between in causando and in
praedicando commonness, and its application, genuinely Thomistic? One text that seems to lend
strong support to this view may be found in Aquinass Sentences commentary:
Dupliciter aliquid dicitur esse commune. Uno modo per praedicationem; hujusmodi
autem commune non est idem numero in diversis repertum; et hoc modo habet
bonum corporis, communitatem. Alio modo est aliquid commune secundum
participationem unius et ejusdem rei secundum numerum; et haec communitas maxime
potest in his quae ad animam pertinent, inveniri; quia per ipsam attingitur ad id
quod est commune bonum omnibus rebus, scilicet Deum; et ideo ratio non
procedit.27

25 One could consider such a group as a whole, however, insofar as they might share something else, such as an
agreement to work together to stockpile (predicationally) common food, which could count as common in causando.
26

Benjamin Smith, 81.

Super Sent. 4.49.1.1 ql.. 4ad 3, ed. Parmae 7/2:1183b. De Koninck cites this text as the chief Thomistic locus
for this distinction at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 42; Benjamin Smith does likewise at p. 77.
27

15

St. Thomas is responding here to an objection which had claimed that, since corporeality was a
more common good than spiritual being, it followed that it was the more noble of the two. His
answer is to appeal to the distinction between numerical and predicational commonness, and to
insist that it is only the former kind that is a sign of nobility; for the whole reason that
commonness indicates nobility is because it indicates a good which is diffusive of itself, raising
those who seek it up to itself and, in the process, binding them to each other as well. The same
point is made again in De ver. 7.6 ad 7, Editio Leonina 22:207b:
Dupliciter enim dicitur aliquid commune: uno modo per consecutionem vel
praedicationem; quando scilicet aliquid unum invenitur in multis secundum
rationem unam; et sic illud quod est communius non est nobilius sed imperfectius,
sicut animal homine. . . . Alio modo per modum causae, sicut causa quae una
numero manens ad plures effectus se extendit; et sic id quod est communius est
nobilius, ut conservatio civitatis quam conservatio familiae.28
Here the idea is even clearer: the more common a good is in praedicatione, i.e., the lower of a
common denominator it is, the less formal perfection it contains (the upper limit here would
be the goodness of the real individual goods of which they can be predicatedwhich also have
the considerable advantage of enjoying real existence); but the more common a good is in
causando, the nobler it is, for (besides enjoying real existence) the greater commonness indicates a
greater self-diffusiveness and a greater power to raise up many to itself. Finally, we should take
note of ST I-II.90.2 ad 2 (Editio Leonina 7:150b).29 In the main article St. Thomas maintains that
the end of law is the felicitas communis, which surely seems like a good which is common
only in praedicando (i.e., a mere common name to describe your attainment of your end and my
attainment of mine); but in his reply to the second objection (which had argued that law cannot
De Koninck does not cite this text in support of this distinction, but Benjamin Smith (p. 80), Froelich (p. 48),
and Michael Smith (Common Advantage and Common Good, 124) all do.
28

Benjamin Smith (7981) and Froelich (The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 4344) both make use of
this this text as an important Thomistic source of the in praedicando/in causando distinction.
29

16

be directed to the common good, because it deals with actions that are particular, and hence
common at best in praedicando), St. Thomas says that the actions commanded by law serve a good
which is common not communitate generis vel speciei, but rather communitate causae finalis, i.e.,
common in the way in which a concrete final cause is common.
This last passage is especially relevant, because it deals directly with the social level and
explicitly denies the utilitarian-esque claim that the common good is simply the sum of the
nobility of its members, in that it insists that the common good aimed at by law is not the
good of individual virtuous particular actions (which is common only in praedicando) but rather of
some numerically single thing to which those actions are ordered. All three of these texts,
however (and there are others as well30), seem to indicate that, for St. Thomas, the kind of
commonness that sets love for the common good apart from love for a mere crowd of
individuals is commonness of the in causando variety; only this kind is something above the
individual goods that flow from it. It is only if there is a felicitas communis that is a concrete object
or event, a society-wide equivalent to the team victory, that we can love our fellow citizens for its
sake, desiring that they should flourish so that this common happiness might be made
manifest in them. But what exactly is this common happiness?

3. Bonum commune in causando: extrinsic vs. intrinsic

Before we answer that question, let us step back and establish an important distinction
within the notion of the bonum commune in causando: the venerable distinction between the intrinsic

30 Froelich, in The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 43, n. 15, mentions three others: ST I.13.9, Editio
Leonina 4:15859; ST I.39.4 ad 3, Editio Leonina 4:402a; and In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio
(hereafter In Met.) VII.13, ed. M.-R. Cathala and Raymond M. Spiazzi (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1950), 378b n.
1571.

17

and the extrinsic common good. The former refers to a good which is rooted in the multitudes
own members, which inheres in them and informs them, so to speak; the latter is a good
which benefits the multitude as a whole without inhering in it. This distinction, and indeed much
of what the Scholastics have to say about the common good in general, can be traced back to a
famous passage of Aristotles Metaphysics:
We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains
the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or
as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is
found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not
depend on the order but it depends on him.31
Curiously, though Aristotle uses the example of an army, he does not even mention the most
obvious candidate to be the armys extrinsic good, namely its victory, but rather cuts straight to
the general.32 As St. Thomas makes clear in his commentary on this passage,33 however, the
whole reason the general is relevant is precisely because he has the more immediate external
good of victory in his charge: Finis potior est in bonitate his quae sunt ad finem: ordo autem
exercitus est propter bonum ducis adimplendum, scilicet ducis voluntatem in victoriae consecutionem; non
autem e converso. This is why the general is loved. We will return to the key role of the general
presently; for now, however, let us focus on the relationship of the army to victory.
On this level, there are two main things to notice. First, there is the assertion that not
only the armys victory but also its order itself is a good; and second, there is the claim that

Aristotle Metaphysics XII.10.1075a1015, trans. W. D. Ross. Here is the Greek:

, , .
; ,
.
31

In the context this makes sense, since Aristotle is here in the midst of his discussion of the First Mover of
the universe (the parallel to the general), and the universebeing a unity of beauty rather than an outward-directed
machineproduces no obvious parallel to victory.
32

33

In Met. XII.12, ed. Marietti 612 nn. 262731.

18

nonetheless the order is a subordinate good, one ordered to victory (and, only hence, ordered
also to the one who has charge of it), not vice versa. Beginning with the former, St. Thomas
starts by claiming that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic common good is simply a
special case of a broader distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods in general.34 As a good
Aristotelian, St. Thomas is not a functionalist: for him, there is genuine nobility and for-its-ownsakeness not only in the operation by which a thing attains its end, but also in the form which is
the principle of that operation. A form is not just an empty potency to act; it is also actuality in its
own right, what the Scholastics called first actuality.35 As St. Thomas points out in ST I.6.3,
the perfection of a thing consists not only in its attainment of the end, but also in its having the
accidents (and nature) proportionate to that attainment. And in the case of a unity of order, that
intrinsic form is its order itself.
On the other hand, however, it would seem obvious that the order (or the intrinsic form)
can never be for its own sake; for, noble as they may be, first actualities are essentially defined by
the exterior-oriented operation of which they are the principle, and for the exercise of which
they were made. Ratio eorum quae sunt ad finem, sumitur ex fine. The normal way for an
operation to attain its end is by unio secundum rem, as in the case of St. Thomass example
here of arriving at a journeys destination (and also in the attainment that constitutes knowledge);
but it might also be by way of imitation,36 or even by way of affection.37 In the specific case of a

34

Ibid., 612a n. 2627.

35 The Aristotelian locus classicus for this is De anima II.1, esp. 411 a1012, 411a2229, and 412b25413a3; see
Aquinass commentary at Sent. lib. De anima II.1, Editio Leonina 45.1:69ab lines 96129, 71b lines 289319, and
II.2, Editio Leonina 45.1:75b76a lines 105138..
36 Though attainment-by-imitation is not immediately obvious in the passage of the Metaphysics commentary
from which we are drawing, nonetheless, as St. Thomas will make clear, the whole reason the general counts as the
armys chief extrinsic good is because the armys perfection lies in imitating and obeying the generals plan.
Benjamin Smith emphasizes the role of imitation at 5153, but his source is instead ST I.103.2 ad 1 and especially

19

unity of order, however, it is important to reiterate that not only must there be an extrinsic good
in order for the order to have meaning, but it must be a numerically single good. Unless it is the
same concrete extrinsic good that all the members are striving for, there would be no order at all:
as Froelich puts it, The common goal which the Greeks had in facing the Persians at
Thermopylae was victory. Each had as his end one and the same thinga victory against this
enemy, here and nownot a general notion, which could never by itself direct the particular
actions of any army.38 If each soldier had as his goal simply personally taking down as many
enemies as possible, all military discipline, specialization, and strategy would disappear, and
instead of an army one would have a mob. In other words, not only is an extrinsic bonum commune
in causando necessary in order to love its seekers as more than mere individuals; it is necessary to
constitute its seekers into an order in the first place.
At least two problems arise when we try to investigate this idea further, however. (1)
First, how is this structure supposed to apply to a non-utilitarian order? It seems clear enough
that armies, corporations, construction crews, etc. are all unified and given team spirit (i.e.,
love for each other as contributing to a greater whole) by the extrinsic goal toward which they
are working; but what is the victory for the paint-flecks in a painting, or the members of a
dance-troupe? More directly to the point, what is the extrinsic good of a friendship? To be sure,
all friendships are about something, a shared activity which presumably would have its own

ad 2 (Editio Leonina 5:454b455b), where St. Thomas does explicitly emphasize the role of imitation in discussing
the division of intrinsic and extrinsic goods. (Indeed the whole article, whose subject is whether the primary end of
the universe is intrinsic or extrinsic to it, is an important text for this side of the question.)
See esp. ST I-II.28.1, Editio Leonina 6:187198; ST II-II.23.6 c. and ad 1, Editio Leonina 8:170; and ST IIII.27.6 c. and ad 3, Editio Leonina 8:229.
37

38

Froelich, The Equivocal Status of bonum commune, 48. Cf. Benjamin Smith, 7879.

20

external good to be attained;39 but it would seem clear that we do not love the friend because we
want the external good to be better attained thereby. Moreover, that external good is in any case
almost always common only in praedicando; thus, fellow sculptors bond not primarily because they
love working on (or contemplating) the self-same good, but rather because they love the way
beauty is expressed in their medium (which is, obviously, an abstract feature of many individual
sculptures). As we will see in the next section, this same difficulty applies, with perhaps even
greater force, to political society: there seems to be no proper extrinsic common good that could
unify it and stamp it with its unique character.
(2) On the other hand, in the cases when we actually are dealing with a utilitarian order
(e.g., the army/construction crew/etc.), why do we say that its order even counts as a genuine
unityand hence as something that can be genuinely loved at all? In other words, why would we
say that we love the armys discipline rather than the individual soldiers skill sets that make it up?
It makes at least arguable sense to speak of an objective, real emergent unity when that unity is
honestum, something genuinely noble in itself; but if the unity is strictly subjective, rooted only in
the fact that all the different parts happen to serve a need or desire that we have, it seems that to
love it as a unity would be to love it merely as an ens rationis. But it if it seems strange to say that
we can love others more qua contributors to a merely useful good than as (intrinsically noble)
individuals, it seems downright absurd if that good is not only merely utile but, in fact, a mere
figment of our imagination, a convenience-term.
One might think, then, that the army/victory analogy is fundamentally flawed: it seems
that either (a) we can transcendently love our fellow man as contributing to an extrinsic common

For one of the locus classici on this subject, see Aristotle Eth. Nic. VIII.3.1156b724. We will return briefly to
the role of a shared good in friendship at the very end.
39

21

good (victory), in which case we cannot transcendently love him as contributing to an intrinsic
common good (the bonum utile of the disciplined army), or (b) we can transcendently love him as
a contributor to an intrinsic common good (e.g., the beauty of the dance-troupe), in which case
there is simply no extrinsic common good to be loved at all. It seems impossible for man to be
ordered to be both, at least not in the same line of goodness, as St. Thomas seems to want
(and as seems to be required by the claimwhich objection #1 above, regarding apparently
self-contained unities of order like works of art, conteststhat every intrinsic common good
is given unity by an extrinsic common good40).
To reply to this, I think the basic Aristotelian/Thomistic picture needs to be tweaked
and expanded a little. It seems clear that an intrinsically noble order and a utilitarian order
have at least this much in common: they are both founded on an aggregate of individual
relations connecting the accidents of the different parts (the relation of each paint-flecks
position, color, intensity, etc. with respect to that of all the other flecks, or the relation of each
soldiers specialization and skills to that of the others). It seems clear that this aggregate is being
used for a purpose, that the individual relations it comprises are not random, and that hence
these relations seem to deserve to be called an order. Let us, then, give the name aggregateorder to this collection of relations which are ordered to the achievement of this purpose.
Now, what is this purpose that these relations are being ordered to? In the case of a
utilitarian order, clearly, it will be something like victory or some other efficiently caused
product. In the case of an intrinsically noble order, on the other hand, it is the beautiful form
itself that is the goal of the arrangement of all the individual relations, of the aggregate-order;
40 For this claim see especially De ver. 5.3 (Editio Leonina 22:146b lines 8284), where St. Thomas says that
quamcumque ergo multitudinem invenimus ordinatam ad invicem, oportet eam ordinari ad exterius principium.
More importantly, though, this claim seems to be rooted in the nature of the word order itself: order implies
order to. There has to be an end outside the ordered parts in order for it to be an ordering at all.

22

unlike in the case of the army or the assembly line, there is something genuinely emergent that
this aggregate-order grounds. Yet we also call this emergent thingthis beautiful, integral form,
this intelligible essence, or however one wishes to describe itan order, precisely because the
ground of its unity is the intrinsic arrangements that make up the aggregate-order. Let us call it,
then, a transcendent order, and define it as the intrinsically noble, numerically single relational
accident which emerges from, and is the telos of, all the individual relations that constitute the
aggregate order in a non-utilitarian multitude (one which is not aimed at an extrinsic product).
As a result of this analysis, we have something like the following picture: in a utilitarian
order, we have the metaphysical progression of {intrinsic non-emergent aggregate-order [ens
rationis of subjectively perceived intrinsic transcendent order] extrinsic unified product}; but
in an honest or intrinsically noble order the progression instead goes simply {intrinsic nonemergent aggregate-order still intrinsic,41 objectively transcendent order}. But this leaves us
with the further question of how to distinguish transcendent orders from composite substances;
after all, are not composite substances too often thought of in terms of emergence from lowerlevel arrangements? I would argue that the difference is that the composite substance (e.g. a dog)
can itself qualify as the recipient of its emergent features, for the reason that those features
(sensation, instinct, etc.) are immanent to it: its emergent perfections are not only in itself but
also for itself. By contrast, a paintings emergent perfections are visible perfections, which the
painting itself has no faculty to receive: hence those perfections, while still in itself, are for
another, namely rational viewers equipped with eyes. Finally, by contrast to both of these, a
tools seemingly emergent perfection is not only for another (its user) but also in another

41 It is, of course, intrinsic to the multitude, not to the individual constituents. The individual relations of an
aggregate-order would be both rooted in and limited to those individual constituents; but the emergent relation of a
transcendent order would not be limited to those individual constituents, though it would still be rooted in them.

23

(namely, in its product); and this in another is purely accidental except in our own eyes.
Whereas, a beautiful composition is in itself precisely because of the feature of objective
integrity that is so central to the Thomistic notion of beauty:42 there is an inherent proportion
among its accidents (unlike in an airplane) that allows it to qualify as something over and above
the manifold that makes it up. Its intelligible essence, though enshrined in that manifold in esse
spirituale,43 remains distinct therefrom. In a sense, we could say that it is externalexternal to
each of the individual parts, but not to the collective.44
We can now turn back to answer the two difficulties we raised. Beginning with #2 (the
worry concerning the unity of a utilitarian aggregate order, e.g. an army), I would say simply that
the example of the army is not intended to be a metaphysically exact roadmap, but rather a
manuductio which, for the sake of simplicity, treats an aggregate-order as a transcendent order for
the plain reason that, while his chief target is the honest transcendent order of society and the
universe and their dependence upon their directors (the ruler and God, respectively), the
aggregate-order of an army presents an easy and intuitive stepping-stone to that targets
properties. For our purposes, however, I think it is important to be clear, however, that the fact
of belonging to a construction team cannot possibly ground a transcendent love for a fellow
worker the way either the fact of belonging to a dance troupe or sharing a common external

42

See ST I.39.8, Editio Leonina 4:409a.

By this I mean that the represented essence is present in the individual accidents of the paint-flecks in
much the same way that St. Thomas understood sensible forms to reside in the medium and in the brain, i.e., in
matter which is not proper to that sensible form. See esp. Sent. lib. De anima 2.24, Editio Leonina 45/1:168a69b,
and also 2.14, Editio Leonina 47/1:127a128b, 2.20, Editio Leonina 47/1:452a53a, 2.21, Editio Leonina
47/1:156ab, and 2.26, Editio Leonina 47/1:179a 589. Cf. Super Sent. 4.44.2.1 ql. 3, ed. Parmae 7/2:1086, and
2.13.1.3, ed. Pierre Mandonnet (Paris: Lethielleux, 1929) 2:33235; De ver. 26.3 ad 11, Editio Leonina 22:758b; and
ST I.78.3, Editio Leonina 5:254a.
43

44 For more discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic goods in general, and of how the common good must
necessarily be an extrinsic good vis--vis the individual (although intrinsic vis--vis society), see Benjamin Smith, 6470
and 8789.

24

project can. Instrumentality, as such, cannot ground transcendence. As for #1 (the worry that
things like works of art and friendships are not for the sake of any extrinsic common good at
all), I think what we have said makes clear that the telos, the stand-in for the extrinsic victory in
the case of a non-utilitarian unity of order is precisely its transcendent order, and that no other is
needed.45

4. The political common good

Why is this second point important? It is important because, I think, it provides the key
to understanding how there can be a genuine political common good; for if it were necessary for
there to be a proportionate, fully extrinsic bonum commune in causando in order for society to be a
true unity that could ground transcendent love, there would, I think, be no such society.
Consider the possibilities. First of all, I think it is clear that political society cannot have God as
its proper extrinsic good. Benjamin Smith disagrees with me here, claiming that Chapter 3 [of
De regno bk. 2] states that the political common good is twofold: (1) intrinsically it is the
communal bene vivere; (2) extrinsically it is ordination to God. This is the due end of political life,
and as such, it is the governing political truth for understanding what Thomas has to say about
the practice of kingship.46 I fail, however, to see how this claim holds water, given that St.
Thomass whole purpose in this chapter is to show precisely that the kings responsibilities do
not extend to guiding the multitude to the attainment of beatitudeeven though, of course, that

To be sure, it does still need the other kind of extrinsic good, the kind that St. Thomas is after all mainly
interested in, namely a director; we will return to this at the end of this chapter.
45

46

Thomas Aquinas on Politics and the Common Good, 106.

25

attainment is indeed the most truly ultimate end of the multitude.47 Rather, the kings goal is
simply to dispose toward an end which is not properly his own; and, for St. Thomas, the goal of
the king is of course the same as the highest end of the properly political sphere.
But if political societys proper extrinsic good is not God, what would it be? As Michael
Smith notes, it is one of the weaknesses of De Konincks exposition that he makes too quick a
jump from the political common good to the order of the universe, and then to Gods final
causality. One wonders whether there is room, on this view, for a healthy autonomy of the
political order . . . in the sense of politics having its own level of competence within its own
order.48 But what are the alternative candidates for this role of that for the sake of which the
aggregate-order of society exists? First of all, a supporter of the primacy of the common good
in the socio-political sphere must rule out instrumental goodsthings like codes of law, penal
systems, education, and other public works that are conducive to the (numerically plural) virtue
and happiness of the citizens, but that do not themselves constitute the object of love (i.e., that do
not qualify as bona honesta).49 (This would also comprise at least the thinner sense of peace, i.e.,
the prevention of the disruptive forces that would keep citizens from their individual
flourishing.50) In ruling them out he will part ways from John Finnis, who defines the specifically
political common good as consisting of

Though one could, of course, claim, as Maritain and Fr. Eschmann do, that even this attainment is common
only in praedicando, not in reality.
47

48

Human Dignity and the Common Good, 121.

49 Thus, Bradley Lewis, in The Common Good in Classical Political Philosophy, Current Issues in Catholic
Higher Education 25 (2006): 2541, at 25, opens his article with the claim that the common good we are seeking must
be a bonum honestum.
50 Character-based justice and peace is, of course, Finniss proposed candidate for a political common good;
see Public Good: The Specifically Political Common Good in Aquinas, in Natural Law and Moral Inquiry: Ethics,
Metaphysics, and Politics in the Work of Germain Grisez, ed. Robert George (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University

26

(i) the good of using government and law to assist individuals and families do [sic]
well what they should be doing, together with (ii) the good(s) that sound action
by and on behalf of the political community can add to the good attainable by
individuals and families as such. . . . This specifically political common good is
limited and in a sense instrumental.51
He will also part ways from Fr. Eschmann: The common good has a relative and limited preeminence in via utilitatis, because it is essentially a bonum utile, the highest bonum utile, but nothing

Press, 1998), 174-209, at 186. (Lewis, 28, supports a very similar candidateeven despite his initial firm insistence
that the common good must be honestum rather than merely instrumental.) It is likely, however, that Finniss
understanding is actually rather thicker than this; see below, n. 61.
Also, it should be noted that while Gregory Froelich in his first article (The Equivocal Status of bonum
commune, 5253) seems to support an almost identical candidate, namely the tranquility of order, it is also the
case that (a) he seems to be meaning this in a rich sense of the term, i.e., as encompassing the whole network of
social interaction that binds society together, and that (b) he in a later article discards this candidate and adopts
political friendship instead. We will have more to say about this in a moment.
51 Finnis, Public Good, 187 (emphasis in original). Cf. Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 239 (esp. n. 89) and 247, and Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980), 155.
Though this is tangential to our main interests, in fairness to Finnis it might be worthwhile to qualify this
statement a little. First, on the same page we just cited Finnis also posits an unlimited common good; and though it
would appear to be common only in praedicatione, one could argue that it is actually in causando inasmuch as it appeals
to the stratified, mutually supporting hierarchy of society, which can certainly be construed as an emergent good.
Thus, Mary Keys condemnation of Finnis (Personal Dignity and the Common Good, 186190) might still be too
harsh, despite the redeeming value she finds in Finnis. Also, Michael Pakaluk, who in general opposes Finnis fairly
strongly, notes that Finnis sees law as at least conducive to general justice, even in its non-directly-relational aspects
(Is the Common Good of Political Society Limited and Instrumental? The Review of Metaphysics 55 [2001]: 5794, at
58), which would connect even Finniss instrumental political good to this broader, honest common good more
closely than it might at first appear.
Second, Finnis does seem to ascribe a genuine primacy to even the political common good on the practical
order. Thus, he can maintain the intermediate, instrumental nature of the political common good and still ascribe a
primacy to political science as the chief of the practical sciences, on account of its unique ability to establish the
public means for the (individual-level) good of the whole; see, for example, Aquinas, 11415 (where his argument is
based, incidentally, on Sent. lib. Ethic. I.2, Editio Leonina 47.1:9ab, the same Thomistic expounding of the divinius
principle on which the De Koninck school relies so heavily). This thesis of the common goods supremacy being
restricted to the practical order is also, famously, a key principle in Maritains La personne et le bien commun,
esp. 24445 and 25963, where he contrasts the public nature of the practical means that are the proper domain of
the active life with the private nature of the speculative attainment of the end that is the heart of the contemplative life.
I think, however, that this appeal to the primacy of the contemplative life, while not without its merits, is ultimately
misleading, in that it gives the impression that society somehow can be a genuine beneficiary-good on the level of
practical action (which, of course, was not Maritains intent).

27

more. It has no absolute pre-eminence, i.e. no primacy in ratione dignitatis.52 (It should be noted,
though, that Maritain himself will not go this far.53)
Indeed, a supporter of the political common goods primacy must part ways with them
for several reasons. First, and most obviously, because only the fact that his neighbour shares in
something higher than his own individual (noble) good can possibly ground a mans transcendent
love: to love another qua contributor to the same tool seems like a distinctively unattractive
proposition. Second, at least some of these useful goods (like social tranquillity) have the same
problem that any tool (including the utilitarian aggregate-orders we discussed above) does: their
only unity is in our minds, since their telos is unified only with respect to our own desires and
purposes, and to love people on the basis of a unity which is only an ens rationis seems at least
foolish. Third, it seems like none of these goods (with the possible exception of social
tranquillity) is all-embracing, that none of them can lay claim to being the good of society, but
rather that a conjunction of all of them is needed; and if intrinsic orders were defined by their
(numerically single) extrinsic ends, then it seems that rather than one society we would be faced
with several (one defined by the educational system, one defined by the justice system, etc.).54

52

Fr. Eschmann, ibid., 202.

La personne et le bien commun, 255: Le bien commun nest pas seulement un ensemble davantages et
dutilits, mais droiture de vie, fin bonne en soice que les anciens appelaient bonum honestum, bien honnte; car
dune part cest une chose moralement bonne en elle-mme que dassurer lexistence de la multitude; et dautre part
cest une existence juste et moralement bonne de la communaut qui doit tre ainsi assure. Rather, Maritain
merely thinks the common good is a lower kind of honest good than the highest individual goods, inasmuch as it is
practical rather than speculative (see n. 51 above). Note, however, that Maritains understanding of the honestas of
the social common good is one that is common only in praedicando: it is strictly the good of the virtue of the
multitude. We will turn to this point in a moment.
53

One could, however, contest this objection and claim that the whole system that serves human flourishing
should count as the extrinsic good of society. In saying this one would come suspiciously close to the position I will
in fact support, which is that the systemic ordering of society is itself the only defining good of that order. Insofar as
it is distinct, however (merely referring to the collectivity of all public institutions), I do not see a good way to
individuate it, since this alleged institutional machine would not have a single unified product. There is no
institution, after all, that can produce human flourishing; an institution can only produce various necessities, and
54

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Finally and most importantly, even if one ignores the preceding two problems, it remains the
case that to order oneself to a bonum utile is to order oneself, even more fundamentally, to the
bona honesta that that bonum utile serves; and at least in all the cases I can think of, these bona
honesta would be individual noble goods, or at least goods which cannot serve the whole
community. (Otherwise there would have been no reason to appeal to the institutional bonum
utile in the first place, since its main virtue seems to be its apparent commonness.) But if one
accepts this, then, of course, one has abandoned the idea of a transcendent neighbour-love
founded upon a deeper love for a common good.
An important consequence of this last point is thatcontrary, I think, to the opinion of
a number of Thomiststhe intrinsic common good cannot be virtue, human flourishing, or
bene vivere (or whatever one wishes to call it) either.55 This is a bold claim to make, because
St. Thomas himself seems to say in the De regno that the whole reason society exists is so that
individuals might flourish in a way in which they could not on their own;56 and likewise in the
Treatise on Law he seems to claim that a) the end of law is the common good (I-II.90.2), and
that b) the proper effect of good law is the virtue of the citizens, that they might become boni
simpliciter (I-II.92.1). Nonetheless, if the individual flourishing of the multitude is the intrinsic
common good, then all we have is a bonum commune in praedicando, to love which is neither more
each would be individuated by the particular kind of good it provides. A sum total of publicly producible things
that men need does not sound to me like a species-name; it sounds to me like the paradigm of a nominalistic
convenience-term.
Indeed, even Benjamin Smith, despite his firm insistence that no attribute that inheres in the agent can
possibly constitute a common good, does not hesitate to say at 97ff that, for Thomas, the political common good
consists precisely in the multitudes virtue, in its bene vivere (citing De Regno 2.3 among other Thomistic texts).
Others have argued the same; see, e.g., Michael Smith, Common Advantage and Common Good, 113 and 116,
Pakaluk, 68, and Fr. Lawrence Dewan, St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good, 35761.
55

56 De regno 1.4, Editio Leonina 42:466a: Videtur autem finis esse multitudinis congregate uiuere secundum
uirtutem: ad hoc enim homines congregantur ut simul bene uiuant, quod consequi non posset unusquisque singulariter
uiuens; bona autem uita est secundum uirtutem, uirtuosa igitur uita est congregationis humane finis. See also
Aristotle Pol. I.2.1252b30 and III.9.1280a251281a10.

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nor less than to love the sum of its members individual goods; the elusive formal difference that
we are seeking for the social whole would disappear. Benjamin Smith, aware of this difficulty,
tries instead to argue that the shared life itself is numerically one, not reducible to the virtuous
life of the individual citizens, and indeed puts bene vivere explicitly in the context of the
causando/praedicando distinction.57 But what would this mean? If it means simply that individual
virtuous flourishing depends on the existence of a societal structure, then at best we would have a
bonum utile that was common in causando; and this would leave us facing the four severe
difficulties with a bonum utile candidacy that we just mentioned.58 But what then are we to make
of the Thomistic texts just mentioned? Though they do not make the point explicitly, a De
Koninckian could argue fairly easily that law (and the ruler) strive to perfect the individual
citizens not in order to let their action rest on that level, but rather in order that thereby the
whole society might be perfected in that good which constitutes it as a whole.59 But what would
this aspect be?
It seems to me that the only remaining option, now that we have specified that our
candidate for the intrinsic political common good must be (a) properly proportionate to society,
(b) a bonum honestum, and (c) common in causando, is to identify this good not as an extrinsic good
at all, but rather as a transcendent order that, itself, requires no further extrinsic good to unify it;
and specifically, I agree with Froelich that this transcendent order is best described as political

57

Benjamin Smith, 237 n. 2; cf. 239.

58 For evidence that Benjamin Smith really does make the argument that the in causando commonness of societal
bene vivere can be justified simply by individuals dependence on unitary societal structures, see, e.g., ibid., 232.
59 The passage cited earlier from ST I-II.90.2 ad 2 might tend to support this reading, since it argues that while
yes, laws do have the governance of particular actions as their proper effect, those particular actions are in turn
referred back to the common gooda good which is common not by the commonality of genus and species, but
rather by the commonality of final causality.

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friendship,60 taken as the state of common goodwill, complementary role-filling, and common
pursuit of (non-political) goods that reigns over a healthy, peaceful society.61 Unlike God, it is of
a properly political nature; unlike laws, police forces, and gas pipelines, it is a bonum honestum; and
unlike ordinary virtue, I would argue that it is truly something emergent, a transcendent order
that is genuinely common in causando. The key reason I think this state of common goodwill is

See Froelich, Ultimate End and Common Good, The Thomist 58 (1994): 60919, esp. 611 and 613614,
where he says that Among Finnis's seven basic values or goods, Thomas would admit only one that is truly
common in the way a good is properly common, that is, as a common end or goal (communitate causae
finalis, ST I-II.90.2 ad 2). That good is friendship. Life, knowledge, and the others, since realized (or instantiated) in the
individual as such, are common only in definition (communitate generis vel speciei). Although we both may be
knowing one and the same truth, my act of knowing is not yours. . . . Friendship, on the other hand, is in its very
particularity as common to the friends as the room they may be sharing. By friendship here I do not simply mean benevolence,
for that is an interior and therefore incommunicable state of the soul; benevolence can be common only in
predication. Rather I am referring to the fulfillment of mutual benevolence in cooperative action and a common
life, which Aristotle argues is the most distinctive mark of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, 1157b624, 1171b33)
(emphasis mine).
Mary Keys endorses Froelich on this point in her dissertation The Problem of the Common Good and the
Contemporary Relevance of Thomas Aquinas, 6768. She also attributes this point to Michael Smith; but Smith
(Human Dignity and the Common Good, 128) makes it quite clear that for him, unlike for Froelich, friendship is not the
end of the political community; the end is the sharing in common of good actions, while friendship simply
provides the societal glue which he considers the sine qua non requisite of this sharing in common of good
actions (cf. p. 123). As I said, however, I simply do not see, however, how this sharing in common can possibly
have a commonness other than in praedicando; I would argue, then, that only Froelich presents a plausible
concretization of De Konincks principles on the societal level.
60

It should be noted that this is perhaps not all that different from the character-based state of justice and
peace that Finnis advocates as the properly political common good; see Finnis, Public Good, 186. It is true that,
while Froelich sees political friendship as being primarily something honestum in its own right, Finnis regards this
societal state of mutual good-will as being a common good in its own right primarily as a bonum utile, i.e., on account
of its ability to facilitate the work of Church and family in fostering further individual virtue (see ibid., 192), and in
this respect I obviously think Froelich is right.
Still, however, it may be worth making two points in Finniss defense. (1) Finniss position implies that the ratio
that defines the political common good is precisely its orientation to the (individual) bene vivere of full-fledged virtue
and union with God, which might allay at least some Thomists distrust of him. (2) While Finnis does insist that the
strict sense of peace is simply the peaceful condition needed to get the benefit(s) (utilitas) of social life and avoid
the burdens of contention (Public Good, 179, citing De regno 1.2 and 1.6), he also insists that its elements are
precisely the inter-personal virtues; and moreover, he maintains that there is an even fuller sense of peace which,
rather than stopping short at the absence-of-inequality that constitutes strict commutative justice, comprises even
the positive mutual goodwill and friendship which, in the end, must always constitute the foundation of the
thinner sense of peace. His point is not that this fuller peace is not a properly political common good, but
rather that it is not the states duty to secure it (unlike the thin peace of strict justice).
Hence I would argue that really the main fundamental difference between Finniss position and Froelichs is
that, not being concerned with the in praedicando/in causando distinction, Finnis he makes no effort to distinguish the
individual acts of uni-directional neighborly love (which are singular goods) from the overarching state of reciprocal
neighborly love (which is at least arguably a common good). Pakaluks claim that, for Finnis, peace is simply a
framework within which families can flourish ( Is The Common Good of Society Limited and Instrumental?
58ff)for which, incidentally, he does not provide a footnoteis, I think, an exaggerated accusation.
61

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importantly different from the simple collection of individual persons love for others is, as I see
it, that the proper honestas of this state lies precisely in its very reciprocity62something which, by
its very notion, cannot lie on the level of the individual inhering accident.
One might object, however: are not friendships more akin to institutions than to the
artwork type of transcendent order,63 being specified and given their character by the shared
activity on which the friendship is founded? If this were true, then political friendship itself
could not possibly be the final answer to the question of what binds political society together,
and grounds transcendent love for its members as such: we would have to seek for an answer in
a shared activity (or good) which would be the proper ground of that friendship. Now, it is
certainly true that without such a shared activity, or activities, there will be no genuine
friendship.64 Nonetheless, as we mentioned earlier, it is already clear that this activity is usually
only common in praedicando, since fellow sculptors do not sculpt the same statues and fellow

See ST II-II.23.1, Editio Leonina 8:163, for a sharp distinction of one-way benevolence from the state of
mutual friendship; cf. Aristotle Eth. Nic. VIII.2.1155b331156a5 for a similar underlining of the important difference
between a state of mutually recognized love and mere unidirectional goodwill. For commentary, see David Gallagher,
Person and Ethics in Thomas Aquinas, Acta Philosophica 4 (1995): 5171, at 66; cf. John Monagle, Friendship in
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas: Its Relation to the Common Good (PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 1973),
6365.
62

63 Indeed, if one accepts the representational theory of art (which I do), one could argue that even the artwork
type of transcendent order must also be unified by an external object, inasmuch as it owes its integrity to the unity
of the (extrinsic) real nature which it represents. Nonetheless, though cogent, I think this argument is a little weak
for two reasons. (1) It does not seem to account for the more abstract types of art such as music, architecture, or
the dance troupe we have been using as an example; even if these forms of art are in a sense representational, the
essence being represented is certainly not one to be found in any single concrete thing. (2) Even in the case of the
more directly representational arts, it seems that we can and often do have cases of fictional or mythical
representations which are unified not by any one essence existing in reality but only by the idea in the mind of the
author. Hence, while I would be the last to deny that it is the business of art to reflect and shine a light on
reality, and that it is structured thereby, I think it is fundamentally structured not by numerically single real objects but
rather by abstract features of the world that are common in praedicando.

See above all Aristotle Eth. Nic. VIII.3.1156b724. In Aquinas, see De regno 1.10, Editio Leonina 42:461b; for
actual likeness as the root of friendship, see ST I-II.27.3, Editio Leonina 8:226b27a; and for \the recurring theme
of communication as the basis of friendship, see the Treatise on Charity, ST II-II.2326, Editio Leonina 8:163223.
Froelich (Ultimate End and Common Good, 61516, and Friendship and the Common Good, Aquinas Review
12 [2005]: 3758, at 41) and Michael Smith (Human Dignity and the Common Good, 124) both make a point of noting
this.
64

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lovers of poetry need not always read the same poems (though they will probably want to); their
friendship is founded rather on a quality that each of them have, a quality of receptiveness to and
love for this particular facet of reality. Additionally, it is usually a multitude of different kinds of
things that I share with my friend, both shared qualities and shared projects; and yet the
friendship is strengthened and unified, not weakened and divided, thereby. The underlying
reason for this, I think, is that the self-diffusive, generous activity that constitutes friendship is
something worth doing for its own sake; all the shared activities are, in a sense, mere pretexts
for engaging in a friendship which very often is in itself a nobler and more precious thing than of
the things on which it was founded.65
It seems to me, then, that it is in political friendship that we find a fitting anchor for the
political order: a vast interplay of reciprocal, complementary support, with each member aiding
and supporting the others according to his role and unique character. By the Thomistic vision
of the intrinsic common good, we transcendently love our neighbor precisely qua contributor to
this overarching thing of beautya thing of beauty which (like any friendship) is enhanced and

65 Another possible objection would be that the metaphysics of a free-floating relational accident of the sort we
have been describingindeed, of any transcendent order at alltend to be obscure at best, given that we normally
say that accidents are individuated by their subjects and that hence an emergent accident would simply be a
metaphysical impossibility. We should note, however, that St. Thomas actually makes an explicit exception to this
principle for the peculiar case of unities of order:
Accidentia autem, sicut esse habent in subiecto, ita ex subiecto suscipiunt unitatem et multitudinem, et
ideo in adiectivis attenditur singularitas et pluralitas secundum supposita. In creaturis autem non invenitur
una forma in pluribus suppositis nisi unitate ordinis, ut forma multitudinis ordinatae. (ST I.39.3, Editio
Leonina 4:400a)
The only clarification I would want to add is that, of course, this should be said only of honest orders, not of
utilitarian orders (like the army), in that only the former kind has an objective rather than subjective unifying
principle. Thus, Pope John Paul II is in good company when, speaking of married love (whose distinctively
emergent character is closely analogous to that of the political friendship I am advocating), he says:
Love is not just something in the man and something in the womanfor in that case there would properly
speaking be two lovesbut is something common to them and unique. Numerically and psychologically,
there are two loves, but these two separate psychological facts combine to create a single objective
wholewe might almost say a single entity in which two persons are joined. . . . [I]t is clear to see that love
is by its very nature not unilateral but bilateral, something between two persons, something shared. Fully
realized, it is essentially an interpersonal, not an individual matter. (Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T.
Willets (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 8485)

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made more resplendent by every virtue of its members, and yet which (again like any friendship)
is a good to be tasted and savored to the full by each of its members.

5. The common good of the universe, and God

Let that much, then, suffice for the question of the political common good, and let us
now turn briefly first to the order of the universe,66 and then finally to God. St. Thomas, as De
Koninck vigorously reminds us, seems to affirm unequivocally that the best thing God has made
is precisely the order of the universe, which transcends even its best components when taken
singly:
Res autem participant divinam bonitatem per modum similitudinis, inquantum
ipsae sunt bonae. Id autem quod est maxime bonum in rebus causatis, est bonum
ordinis universi, quod est maxime perfectum, ut philosophus dicit: cui etiam
consonat Scriptura divina, Gen. 1, cum dicitur, 31 vidit Deus cuncta quae fecerat, et
erant valde bona, cum de singulis operibus dixisset simpliciter quod erant bona.
Bonum igitur ordinis rerum causatarum a Deo est id quod est praecipue volitum
et causatum a Deo. . . .
Ultimus autem finis divinae voluntatis est bonitas ipsius, cui propinquissimum in
rebus creatis est bonum ordinis totius universi: cum ad ipsum ordinetur, sicut ad
finem, omne particulare bonum huius vel illius rei, sicut minus perfectum
ordinatur ad id quod est perfectius; unde et quaelibet pars invenitur esse propter
suum totum. Id igitur quod maxime curat Deus in rebus creatis, est ordo
universi.67
Perhaps one of the best and most exhaustive texts on the high regard in which St. Thomas held the order of
the universe is Oliva Blanchettes The Perfection of the Universe According to Aquinas: A Teleological Cosmology (University
Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
66

SCG III.64, ed. Marietti 2:87ab nn. 239293 (cited in De Konincks La primaut du bien commun, 29 n. 30, and
In Defence of Saint Thomas, 25). The valde bona reference to Genesis 1:31 is one that St. Thomas will make
frequently in affirming the supremacy of the universes order as the best thing God has made. See SCG II.39, ed.
Marietti 1:156a n. 1158, and II.45, ed. Marietti 1:165b n. 1228; ST I.47.2 ad 1, Editio Leonina 4:487b; De potentia 5.1
arg. 14, in Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2 ed. P. Bazzi, Mannes Calcaterra, Tito S. Centi, E. Odetto, P. M. Pession (Turin
and Rome: Marietti, 1965), 130b, and 6.1 arg. 21, ed. Marietti 158b59a; and De spir. creat. 5, Editio Leonina
24/2:61a. There is also, however, the very interesting text of ST I.93.2 arg. 3 (where the valde bona principle is used
to argue that the universe is made just as much in Gods image as man is) and ad 3 (Editio Leonina 5:402a and
403b), where St. Thomas seems to place some important restricting qualifications on the principle; as we will see,
Fr. Eschmann leans heavily on this text, and De Koninck spends considerable energy trying to refute his
interpretation.
67

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The reason St. Thomas maintains this supremacy of the universes excellence is (as De Koninck
again heavily emphasizes68) the same as the reason for which he thinks God made a whole
universe rather than simply the highest of the angels: essentially that no finite creature, no matter
how noble, can reflect more than a pitifully small bandwidth of the divine spectrum. An
earthworm may have much less goodness than an angel, but it is nonetheless a goodness different
from the angels, reflecting God in a way in which the angel, for all his perfection, does not.69
Moreover, importantly, St. Thomas does not hold that earthworms and other lower creatures
simply add quantitatively to the higher creatures reflection of Gods goodness, for this still would
only make the universe as such a mere chaotic conglomerate, nobler than its individual
components only secundum multum et paucum (for, while this would be addition of kinds rather
than of the individuals pertaining to those kinds, it would still be fundamentally mere addition).70
Rather, he holds that all these kinds not only reflect God in different ways, but furthermore do
so in a fundamentally integrated fashion; each part of the universe, for him, is ordered to all the
other parts per se. In other words, what gives the universe its chief glory, for St. Thomas, is not
simply the existence of many different kinds of different things, but rather the interlocking web
of mutually supporting, finely tuned causality that fastens together all those different species and
68

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 2541.

69 See, for example, ST I.47.1, Editio Leonina 4:485b86a: Et quia [Deus] per unam creaturam sufficienter
repraesentari non potest, produxit multas creaturas et diversas, ut quod deest uni ad repraesentandam divinam bonitatem,
suppleatur ex alia: nam bonitas quae in Deo est simpliciter et uniformiter, in creaturis est multipliciter et divisim.
Unde perfectius participat divinam bonitatem, et repraesentat eam, totum universum, quam alia quaecumque creatura (emphasis De
Konincks, who cites this text at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 26). Other texts which De Koninck cites in
support of this particular point include In Sent. 1.44.1.2 ad 6, ed. Mandonnet 1:102021 (Quamvis angelus absolute
sit melior quam lapis, tamen utraque natura est melior quam altera tantum: et ideo melius est universum in quo sunt
angeli et aliae res, quam ubi essent angeli tantum, quia perfectio universi attenditur essentialiter secundum
diversitatem naturarum, quibus implentur diversi gradus bonitatis, et non secundum multiplicationem individuorum
in una natura; cited in In Defence of Saint Thomas, 35 n. 2), De potentia 3.16, SCG II.45, III.42, and III.97, ST
I.15.2, and Compendium theologiae 7273 and 102 (all cited in In Defence of Saint Thomas, 2534).
70

On this point, see In Defence of Saint Thomas, 35 and 39.

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constitutes the universe in its totality.71 Indeed, this seems to be a large, though lesser-known,
part of the reason that St. Thomas holds that the angels differ not only numerically but also
specifically, since an ordered relation between species will be essential, whereas it could only be
accidental between individuals of the same species, and St. Thomas thinks it is fitting that the
highest part of the universe should comprise only the deeper, essential kind of relation.72 It is
especially fascinating to note that, for him, this per se ordering between spiritual species provides
the ground for a far deeper kind of political friendship among them, bringing a whole new
dimension to their mutual love.73
In other words, St. Thomas seems to regard the proper intrinsic good of the universe as
something fundamentally emergent, as a transcendent order: the essential mutual cooperation of all
the different refractions of Gods goodness, a thing of surpassing beauty irreducible to the
beauty of any of its components taken singly, or even to any individual species relationality.

SCG II.39, ed. Marietti 1:156a n. 1157: Id quod est bonum et optimum in effectu, est finis productionis
ipsius. Sed bonum et optimum universi consistit in ordine partium eius ad invicem, qui sine distinctione esse non
potest: per hunc enim ordinem universum in sua totalitate constituitur, quae est optimum ipsius. Ipse igitur ordo partium
universi et distinctio earum est finis productionis universi. Non est igitur distinctio rerum a casu (cited in In
Defence of Saint Thomas, 26; emphasis mine). See also De ver. 5.3, Editio Leonina 22:146b147a (a text which we
have quoted previously, and which De Koninck cites at p. 28), where St. Thomas affirms that Partes autem
universi corruptibiles et incorruptibiles sunt ad invicem ordinatae non per accidens sed per se: videmus enim ex corporibus
caelestibus utilitates provenientes in corporibus corruptibilibus vel semper vel in maiori parte secundum eumdem
modum; unde oportet omnia corruptibilia et incorruptibilia esse in uno ordine providentiae principii exterioris quod
est extra universum: unde Philosophus concludit quod necesse est ponere in universo unum dominatum et non
plures (emphasis mine). It is worthwhile to observe from this that, for St. Thomas as for Aristotle, the per se order
of mutual causal support that they saw stretching throughout the universe was a key argument for monotheism. See
ST I.15.2, Editio Leonina 4:2012, and SCG II.42, ed. Marietti 1:159b60a nn. 118386, (cited by De Koninck at
pp. 26 and 27, respectively) for a similar argument for the unicity of the Creator; cf. SCG I.70, ed. Marietti 1:82b n.
595, (cited at p. 27) for the same argument being used for the closely related thesis of Gods knowledge of all
individual lower creatures (rather than merely of the highest).
71

72 De spir. creat. 8 c., Editio Leonina 24/2:81b82b (cited by De Koninck at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 26).
This is the second of the three reasons St. Thomas gives there for the specific difference of the angels.
73 De spir. creat. 8 ad 5, Editio Leonina 24/2:83b84a: Quanto cognitio est uniuersalior tanto affectio eam
sequens magis respicit commune bonum. . . . Quia igitur angeli quanto sunt altiores, tanto habent scientiam magis
uniuersalem, . . . ideo eorum dilectio maxime respicit commune bonum; magis igitur diligunt se inuicem si specie differunt,
quod magis pertinet ad perfectionem uniuersi, ut ostensum est, quam si in specie conuenirent, quod pertineret ad
bonum priuatum unius speciei (emphasis mine; cited by De Koninck at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 3031).

36

Indeed, it seems to combine into one the features of both the painting and of political
friendship, since the emergent beauty of the masterpiece is founded on the parts working
together to reflect Gods goodness in the most complete way possible not only simply a) by
their harmonious proportion and diversity,74 but also and above all b) by directly supporting each
other in their existences and proper operation75a collaboration of natural love that runs
through the whole fabric of creation, of which human benevolence is only an intermediate
analogue. This subordination of the parts to this universe-wide transcendent order is not, De
Koninck argues, to denigrate the persons that constitute a chief part of that order; rather, he
contends, their greatest perfection as persons is precisely to be a part of the divine symphony, such
that all their perfection is subsumed into the whole76 and at the same time all the perfection of
the whole is something to be enjoyed in its fullness by each of its (rational) members.77

74 Perhaps one of the most powerful texts to this effect is that of ST I.25.6 ad 3 (Editio Leonina 4:299), where
St. Thomas is claiming that God in fact could not have improved upon the order of this universe, since to increase
any part would have been to mutilate the balance and beauty of the whole: Universum, suppositis istis rebus, non
potest esse melius; propter decentissimum ordinem his rebus attributum a Deo, in quo bonum universi consistit.
Quorum si unum aliquod esset melius, corrumperetur proportio ordinis: sicut, si una chorda plus debito intenderetur,
corrumperetur citharae melodia.

See SCG II.45, ed. Marietti 1:165a n. 1222: In Deo autem est bonitas, et diffusio bonitatis in alia. Perfectius
igitur accedit res creata ad Dei similitudinem si non solum bona est sed etiam ad bonitatem aliorum agere potest, quam si
solum in se bona esset: sicut similius est soli quod lucet et illuminat quam quod lucet tantum. Non autem posset
creatura ad bonitatem alterius creaturae agere nisi esset in rebus creatis pluralitas et inaequalitas: quia agens est aliud
a patiente, et honorabilius eo. Oportuit igitur, ad hoc quod in creaturis esset perfecta Dei imitatio, quod diversi
gradus in creaturis invenirentur. The point of this text, which comes hard on the heels of another (n. 1220) arguing
for the necessity of diversity simply on the grounds of a single finite creatures incapacity to properly reflect an
infinite Creator, seems to be that while it is true that proportion and harmony does, even just of itself, constitute a
whole (and indeed in SCG II.28, ed. Marietti 1:141a n. 1060, St. Thomas goes so far as to say that a due component
of the universe would have been lacking had God created it minus the sun and moon), its chief holistic role is in
serving as the foundation for the nobler level of mutual causal support and collaboration among creatures. SCG II.46,
ed. Marietti 1:166b n. 1232, summarizes this point: Ad hoc quod perfecte divinae bonitatis repraesentatio per
creaturas fieret, oportuit, ut supra (cap. praec.) ostensum est, non solum quod res bonae fierent, sed etiam quod ad
aliorum bonitatem agerent.
75

See, e.g., In Defence of Saint Thomas, 3839. We will discuss this point again at more length in chapter 2,
at pp. 6874.
76

See, e.g., La primaut du bien commun, 1, 911, 5661, 6771, and 7677; In Defence of Saint Thomas, 14
and 41.
77

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Moreover, were this enjoyment not universal, then indeed the doctrine of the primacy of
love for the whole would make little sense; for (unlike in the case of the painting) the
transcendent order that animates the whole is one of universal mutual support, such that it unifies
the whole precisely by being the chief good (in its order, of course) for all its members. This
seems to be the import of a principle that St. Thomas stresses repeatedly in the Treatise on
Charity, that all friendship (taken as an emergent, mutual thing) is founded upon the
communication of a good78 and derives its species from the mode of that communication.79 To be
sure, St. Thomas is speaking here about Gods communication of Himself to us (which would
stand to charitys transcendent order as a paintings model stands to the paintings intelligible
beauty), whereas here we are interested in the communication of the transcendent order itself, as
a genuine common bonum honestum, to its members.80 The important point, however, is that a
whole whose animating principle is the transcendent order of friendship (rather than of, say,
intelligible beauty) is bound together precisely by the parts receiving the common good(s)81 as a
good for them. It is because each individual partakes in the bounty of the universal goodbecause

78 ST II-II.23.1, Editio Leonina 8:163b: Nec benevolentia sufficit ad rationem amicitiae, sed requiritur
quaedam mutua amatio: quia amicus est amico amicus. Talis autem mutua benevolentia fundatur super aliqua
communicatione. Cum igitur sit aliqua communicatio hominis ad Deum secundum quod nobis suam beatitudinem
communicat, super hac communicatione oportet aliquam amicitiam fundari. (emphasis mine). This principle that
all friendship is founded upon the communication of some good is reiterated, repeatedly, at 23.5, 24.2, 25.3, 25.6,
25.1012, and 26.14 (Editio Leonina 8:169, 175, 200, 202a, 206208, and 209212).

For the specific diversification of kinds of love based on different kinds of fellowship or communication, see
ST II-II.23.5, Editio Leonina 8:169 (and cf. QD de car. 4 ad 2, ed. Marietti 764a).
79

I do not mean to deny that the universe (unlike political society) might well be said to have God as its
proper extrinsic good in the sense of His being its proper model.. My point, though, is that the fellowship of the
universeunlike the fellowship of charityis founded upon the communication of the noble transcendent order
itself, not on the communication of God: for God to be communicated means that knowledge of Him must be
involved. While there can indeed be natural knowledge of God, the fellowship founded upon it is not the fellowship
of the universe but rather the fellowship of a strictly natural human societywhich, in the current economy of
salvation, does not exist.
80

By common goods I mean to refer here, of course, to both the emergent order and the (fully) external
thing that is the further principle of unity for the emergent order, in this case God.
81

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it depends thereonthat it is by nature inclined to sacrifice itself for the nobler parts of the
whole, as the hand (to use St. Thomass oft-quoted, though biologically somewhat ill-founded,82
example) sacrifices itself for the head.83 It should be clear, by now, that this dependence is a far
cry indeed from the Hobbesian, blindly egotistic reason for commitment to self-sacrifice. Rather,
it is simply that the receiving of the common good is precisely the way by which individuals are
incorporated into those wholes whose unifying principle is the friendship itself.
It is in this rich sense, then, that the order of the universe is held by St. Thomas to be the
chief object of loveoutside of God Himselffor its members: as a whole bound together and
informed by a mutual, emergent love, which transcends the nobility of even human political
friendship. On the one hand, it is nobler with respect to the mode of communication of the
common good, inasmuch as it is founded upon the essences of its members rather than on their
merely accidental relations;84 but it is also nobler with respect to what is communicated, since the

Ill-founded in that, given our knowledge of the nervous system, it is really the brain which is rather
selfishly commanding the hand to save it, not the hand nobly sacrificing itself.
82

ST I.60.5, Editio Leonina 5:104105: Unumquodque autem in rebus naturalibus, quod secundum naturam
hoc ipsum quod est, alterius est, principalius et magis inclinatur in id cuius est, quam in seipsum. Et haec inclinatio
naturalis demonstratur ex his quae naturaliter aguntur, quia unumquodque, sicut agitur naturaliter, sic aptum natum est agi,
ut dicitur in II Physic. Videmus enim quod naturaliter pars se exponit, ad conservationem totius: sicut manus
exponitur ictui, absque deliberatione, ad conservationem totius corporis. Et quia ratio imitatur naturam, huiusmodi
inclinationem invenimus in virtutibus politicis: est enim virtuosi civis, ut se exponat mortis periculo pro totius
reipublicae conservatione; et si homo esset naturalis pars huius civitatis, haec inclinatio esset ei naturalis (emphasis
mine). (Other similar texts citing the hand-head principle include ST II-II.26.3 [Editio Leonina 8:211212], In Div.
nom. 4.10 [In librum Beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio, ed. C. Pera, P. Caramello, and C. Mazzantini (Turin and
Rome: Marietti, 1950), 142], De perf. 13 [Editio Leonina 41B:81a84b], Quaest. quodl. 1.4.3 [Editio Leonina
25/2:188b], and QD de car. 4 ad 2 [ed. Marietti 764a] and QD de spe 1 ad 9 [ed. Marietti 806a]. For the related, though
not identical, principle that it is right to sacrifice the hand for the sake of the body [leaving aside the issue of the
hands natural inclination to be sacrificed], see ST II-II.64.2 [Editio Leonina 9:68] and De malo 1.5 and 3.7 ad 8 [Editio
Leonina 23:24a and 82a.) For the important connection to the notion of dependence, and the careful line St.
Thomas draws between the Hobbesian use of the word and his own, see the discussion of his response to the
second objection of I.60.5 below, pp. 4344.
83

84 See the passages cited above at notes 67 and 69, especially De spir. creat. 8 c. and ad 5 (Editio Leonina
24/2:81b82b and 83b84a). It could well be objected, however, that a necessary, essence-based love is in an
important respect not as noble as a freely chosen one based only upon the intellects apprehension of the beloveds
goodness. (This point will come up again at the end of Chapter 2.)

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universe, unlike society, has God as its proper object of imitation and hence as its (fully) extrinsic
end.85 It remains now to be seen in what sense God Himself is the chief object of love as a
common good.86
An important, though rather succinct, text for this question is ST II-II.26.3 (Editio
Leonina 8:211), which asks the all-important question of whether man loves God more than
himself:
Quaelibet enim pars habet inclinationem principalem ad actionem communem
utilitati totius. . . . Et ideo ex caritate magis debet homo diligere Deum, qui est bonum
commune omnium, quam seipsum: quia beatitudo est in Deo sicut in communi et fontali
omnium principio qui beatitudinem participare possunt.87 (emphasis mine)
The second sentence seems intended to provide us with the general mechanism for moving
from love for the whole (which is what we have been discussing so far) to love for the wholes
(fully) extrinsic good, both on the natural and the supernatural level: namely, that God is the
unifying principle and fountainhead of the whole order, the prime Communicator both of
Himself and of the fellowship founded upon Him. If the whole is loved as such (the argument
seems to go), it can only be because of (an at least implicit) love of Him, because it is only in Him

85

See In Div. nom. 13.2, ed. Marietti 364.

86 A good analysis of this doctrine of St. Thomass in its historical context is given in Osbornes Love of Self and
Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics, 69112. For further discussion, see tienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval
Philosophy, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1940), 269303;. Lawrence Dewan, O.P. Is
Thomas Aquinas a Spiritual Hedonist? in Wisdom, Law, and Virtue, ed. Lawrence Dewan, O.P. (New York, N.Y.:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 99116; Gregory Stevens, The Disinterested Love of God according to St.
Thomas and Some of His Modern Interpreters, The Thomist 16 (1953): 307333, 497541; and Louis-B. Geiger, Le
problme de lamour chez Saint Thomas dAquin (Paris: Vrin, 1952).

It is worth noting, too, that while the question is about charity and the supernatural level, the answer St.
Thomas gives very specifically encompasses (unfallen) natural love as well: A Deo duplex bonum accipere
possumus: scilicet bonum naturae, et bonum gratiae. Super communicatione autem bonorum naturalium nobis a
Deo facta fundatur amor naturalis, quo non solum homo in suae integritate naturae super omnia diligit Deum et
plus quam seipsum, sed etiam quaelibet creatura suo modo . . . quia unaquaeque pars naturaliter plus amat
commune bonum totius quam particulare bonum proprium.
87

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that the ratio of the whole is to be found originally, in a non-derived way; the reason for the
wholes emergent lovability is in Him.
There is still a key problem, however: given this basis, is it possible to avoid loving God
for the sake of the universe? Is it not the universe that is still loved here first? To see if we can
avoid this unwelcome conclusion, let us turn to a favorite text of De Konincks,88 QD de car. 4 ad
2 (ed. Marietti 764a):
Est autem quoddam bonum commune quod pertinet ad hunc vel ad illum in
quantum est pars alicuius totius . . . ; et quantum ad dilectionem respicientem hoc
bonum, principale obiectum dilectionis est illud in quo principaliter illu[d] bonum consistit,
sicut bonum exercitus in duce, et bonum civitatis in rege. . . . Et hoc modo
caritas respicit sicut principale obiectum, bonum divinum, quod pertinet ad
unumquemque, secundum quod esse potest particeps beatitudinis. (emphasis
mine)
Here St. Thomas seems to be introducing a distinction into the notion of the extrinsic common
good: the distinction between the good which is the direct object of the aggregate-order (namely
the victory) and the person who has charge of that good (the general). The idea, apparently, is that
to act for the sake of victory just is to act for the sake of the general, because the victory (and
indeed the army itself89) belongs primarily to him as his proper good, and can even be said to
exist in him.90

88

See La primaut du bien commun, 2930; In Defence of Saint Thomas, 44 n. 3 and 48.

89

For this point see the importance of the phrase Dei esse below; it is key in the argument of ST I.60.5.

This argument is also made explicitly in De spiritualibus creaturis 8 and De ver. 5.3; and while it is not explicitly
referenced in the crucial discussions of the natural love of the angels for God above self (ST I.60.5) and of the
supernatural love of charity of God above self (ST II-II.26.3), the arguments in these passages, as well as in the
parallel De perfectione 13 passage, clearly presuppose this move. It is worth noting, also, that here in the QD de car.
passage the equivalence of the bonum ducis and victory is what serves as the basis for applying to God the famous
principle of the hand naturally exposing itself to save the heada principle which is indeed pivotal in the arguments
of I.60.5, II-II.26.3, and De perfectione 13 (the argument in ST I-II.109.3 on loving God above self without grace,
cited in De Konincks In Defence of Saint Thomas, 46, also clearly works along the same lines, though it does
not explicitly reference the example). Cf. also ST I-II.90.3 (Editio Leonina 7:151), where St. Thomas describes the
common good as being proprius to the ruler (as well as to the whole people). This principle is also used to
argue downward as well as upward: in SCG III.64 (ed. Marietti 2:86a n. 2385), for example, St. Thomas argues that
90

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There are two ways one could interpret this. On the one hand, it could mean simply that
what defines the general as such is his having victory as his proper end, and that hence to strive
for victory is (at least materially) identical to striving for the generals good: whether a soldier
knows it or not, he is in fact acting for the sake of the general whenever he fights, inasmuch as
he is striving for what the general in fact essentially desires. Alternatively, it could mean that the
general is the exemplary cause of victory, such that victory consistit in illo not merely in the rather
figurative sense of being in him as his proper end or perfection, but also in the more
substantive (and Platonic) sense of being in him as the internal model for the exterior victory,
and thus not only as its final cause but also as its formal and efficient cause. The second
interpretation is strongly supported by the army/general passage from the commentary on the
Metaphysics we examined earlier (where, indeed, St. Thomass whole point is that the last final
cause defines all the things that seek it, and hence is also a formal cause in a way that, ultimately,
seems to collapse the distinction between formal and efficient causality, since to establish a thing
in its nature is just what an efficient cause does91); and it seems more powerful in that, taken this
way, the soldiers must clearly be seeking victory the generals way, and hence, if the victory has the
source of its being and its distinctive character in him, such that it can only be achieved as his, then
it no longer seems possible for the soldiers pursuit to be only materially identical to the generals.
(Hence Aquinass elaboration on Aristotles text that to seek the victory is to obey the general,
which would seem to denote a direct love for him as well as a love for his victory plan.)
all things ordered to an end are under the control of the one to whom the end primarily belongs (rather than that they
love him).
In Met. XII.12, ed. Marietti 612 nn. 263031: Magis est bonum exercitus in duce, quam in ordine: quia finis
potior est in bonitate his quae sunt ad finem: ordo autem exercitus est propter bonum ducis adimplendum, scilicet ducis
voluntatem in victoriae consecutionem. . . . Et, quia ratio eorum quae sunt ad finem, sumitur ex fine, ideo necesse est quod
non solum ordo exercitus sit propter ducem, sed etiam quod a duce sit ordo exercitus, cum ordo exercitus sit propter
ducem. Totus enim ordo universi est propter primum moventem, ut scilicet explicatur in universo ordinato id quod est in
intellectu et voluntate primi moventis. Et sic oportet, quod a primo movente sit tota ordinatio universi (emphasis mine).
91

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Either way, however, it at least seems clear that we should interpret II-II.26.3 as arguing
not that beatitude stands to God as the transcendent order stands to the good-being-imitated, but
rather that it stands to God as transcendent order stands to the artist, or as victory to the general.
This is important, because it seems that, unlike the portraits model or the shared activity of
friendship, the general and the artist can be genuinely loved with friendship-love, and that thus they
can be said to be loved more than self without committing a category mistake. (One cannot,
after all, love victory more than self; one cannot love a benefit more than its beneficiary. A great
deal more will be said about this in the next chapter.) The point is confirmed by the preceding
article, II-II.26.2, where St. Thomas unequivocally, though perhaps surprisingly, affirms that civil
friendship is primarily for the ruler inasmuch as the common good dependet upon him; the
citizens are loved only inasmuch as they have a limited share in the transcendent order is
primarily in Him and in His plan.
Indeed, only in this light can one make sense of the famous I.60.5 passage on the natural
love of the angels for God, which begins by explicitly arguing that the love in question is one of
friendship-love, not simply for a beautiful thing desired (a category which would include the
victory, or the shared activity).92 The key line of the argument, after laying out again our nowfamiliar principles regarding the natural priority of whole over part, is as follows:
Videmus enim quod naturaliter pars se exponit, ad conservationem totius. . . .
Quia igitur bonum universale est ipse Deus, et sub hoc bono continetur etiam
Angelus et homo et omnis creatura, quia omnis creatura naturaliter, secundum id

Respondeo dicendum quod quidam dixerunt quod Angelus naturali dilectione diligit Deum plus quam se,
amore concupiscentiae: quia scilicet plus appetit sibi bonum divinum quam bonum suum. Et quodammodo amore
amicitiae, inquantum scilicet Deo vult naturaliter Angelus maius bonum quam sibi: vult enim naturaliter Deum esse
Deum, se autem vult habere naturam propriam. Sed simpliciter loquendo, naturali dilectione plus diligit se quam
Deum: quia intensius et principalius naturaliter diligit se quam Deum. Sed falsitas huius opinionis manifeste
apparet (Editio Leonina 5:104a). The next chapter will explore the significance of this distinction between amor
concupiscentiae and amor amicitiae.
92

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quod est, Dei est; sequitur quod naturali dilectione etiam Angelus et homo plus et
principalius diligat Deum quam seipsum. (Editio Leonina 5:104b; emphasis mine)
The key elucidation that this adds to the II-II.26.3 text is the notion of belonging to Goda
notion which is, as it were, the other side of the coin from the notion stressed by that text,
namely that of Gods being the fountainhead of beatitude. The idea seems to be that beatitude is
communicated specifically by exemplary communication; and, as a result, both (a) beatitude and
b) rational creatures insofar as they are defined by having that beatitude as their end (i.e., insofar
as they are defined by their parthood in the transcendent order of charitable friendship which is
based on the shared activity of beatific contemplation, which in turn is based upon the
numerically single divine Essence) can only be loved as belonging to the One from whom
beatitude comes per se, just as the victory can only be loved as the generals. In other words, just as
the victory and the armys discipline, insofar as they are per se effects of the general, bear the
fingerprint of the general as general and exist only as his work, so beatitude and the charityfriendship based on it bear the fingerprint of God as Beatitude per essentiam, and can only be
desired as His handiwork. He cannot be left out of the picture; to work for His goal is to work
for Him, not only materially but also formally.93
Taken in this light, the otherwise cryptic response to the second objection now becomes
deeply illuminating:
Cum dicitur quod Deus diligitur ab Angelo inquantum est ei bonus, si ly inquantum dicat
finem, sic falsum est: non enim diligit naturaliter Deum propter bonum suum, sed
propter ipsum Deum. Si vero dicat rationem amoris ex parte amantis, sic verum est: non

This interpretation of the Dei est principle is, I think, substantially different from the one given by Gilson
in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 28588. In his explanation there of the whole-part relation of God to creatures, he
keeps the exemplar-causality aspect (Divine goodness as the Original of which creation is only a mirror), but only by
way of imitation, leaving out the aspect of friendship-love for the general (i.e., of carrying out his plan) altogether.
Gilsons understanding would thus be the direct opposite of the first interpretation of the general I gave above, and
would correspond to only half of the second.
93

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enim esset in natura alicuius quod amaret Deum, nisi ex eo quod unumquodque dependet a bono quod
est Deus.94
The meaning of the ex parte finis/ex parte amantis distinction, as I take it, is essentially that, while
the end (God) remains definitively extrinsic to the rational creature that shares in Him (as
opposed to a Hobbesian framework where the creature himself is his own only ultimate end), it
is only by virtue of his being informed by the plan of God as the Communicator of
beatitudeas the general who has charge both of the common activity of Vision and of the
common good of the emergent charity-friendship founded on the sharing of that Visionthat
the creature can sacrifice himself for His sake. If it were not true that man could only achieve his
defining perfections (emergent charity-friendship and the Vision that unifies it) by formally
following Gods will, by following it because it was the Artists wish, then indeed, for St. Thomas,
man would not be able to love God more than self. It is only by being first loved that man can
become a lover.
From what we have said thus far, then, the Thomistic claim is that God is loved above
self on account of a unique relation of dependence: a dependence that plays out not only inasmuch
as God is the unifying principle of the transcendent order of the universe by way of imitation,95 or
(in the case of the community of rational creatures) inasmuch as He is the object of the activity
that binds them together in an emergent friendship, but also, crucially, insofar as He is the director
of those emergent unitiesthe One whose proper good those unities are, and for whom they are
properly loved with friendship-love. One last key point remains, however. We just said in the
previous paragraph that God is loved as the general of two goods: of 1) the good, common in
ST I.60.5 ad 2, Editio Leonina 5:104b105a. The reply to the fourth objection is to much the same effect,
although shorter: Deus, secundum quod est universale bonum, a quo dependet omne bonum naturale, diligitur
naturali dilectione ab unoquoque.
94

95

This being the position that Gilson seems to have held; see n. 93 above.

45

causando, of the emergent friendship of charity, and of 2) the good of the shared Vision on which
that friendship is foundeda good which would appear to be common only in praedicando. But
could one not plausibly argue with them that the second one, the Vision of God, is better than
the friendship it founds because it has God as its direct object, and that hence to love God as the
director of that good a) is the deeper, more important way to love Him and b) is to love Him
in a respect that, in reality, is essentially personal rather than common? 96
To this De Koninck would say two things. First, although it is true that, in the places
where St. Thomas argues that the order of the universe is the best thing God has created, he
describes it as being ordered to God only by way of imitation, and does not mention the special
direct ordering to Him that rational creatures enjoy,97 De Koninck argues that their vision and
love of God is no different, in the relevant respect, from the imitation of God enacted by all
creatures: like the non-rational imitation, every persons love and vision of God are different,
and give Him glory in a unique and mutually complementing way.98 Just as there is an emergent
whole in the whole universes proportioned reflection of God, so there is an emergent whole in

96

Maritain and Fr. Eschmann will make precisely this argument, as we will see in the next chapter.

97 For this fundamental difference in ordering-to-God between rational and irrational creatures, see ST I.65.2,
Editio Leonina 5:150: Singulae creaturae sunt propter perfectionem totius universi. Ulterius autem, totum
universum, cum singulis suis partibus, ordinatur in Deum sicut in finem, inquantum in eis per quandam imitationem
divina bonitas repraesentatur ad gloriam Dei: quamvis creaturae rationales speciali quodam modo supra hoc habeant finem
Deum, quem attingere possunt sua operatione, cognoscendo et amando (emphasis mine; cited by De Koninck in In
Defence of Saint Thomas, 17). Another similar text is De ver. 20.4 (Editio Leonina 22:58182), which De Koninck
cites in the same work at p. 58.
98 Why did God in His goodness and wisdom produce a manifold of intellects? The only acceptable reason is
that He wished to communicate Himself abundantly, and that the communication of Himself to a single created
intellect could not meet the greatness of His design. . . . Both Peter and John know that it is better that He be
present to both together. They see the infinite greatness of God is such that, in truth, it can never be fully
manifested neither to one nor the other, nor to both, nor even to all those whom He has chosen. . . . In seeing God,
Peter sees what is greater than anything which could be his proper good for he knows that he is only Peter; he sees
that God is infinitely more communicable than He is to Peter himself, and it is this infinity of goodness Peter loves,
because he loves God in Himself and in that bounty which, of its very nature is diffusive of itself (In Defence of
Saint Thomas, 8385).

46

the reflection constituted by the contemplation of the Saints, and incorporating the full glory of
each. Hence, at least from the perspective of giving God glory, it would seem that each
individual contemplation would be valuable above all as contributing to that whole. From the
perspective of individual consciousness, however, would it not still be the case that the soul
enjoying the Vision would be focused on God Himself as summum bonum, and only tangentially
attentive to the reflection of that goodness that would arise from the orchestration of his
contemplation with others?
In reply, De Konincks second and crucial point would be to vehemently deny that the
notion of summum bonum can in fact be separated from the notion of bonum commune at all. Fr.
Eschmann had maintained this separation, insisting thatwhile God is certainly eminently
shareable in the Visionthe reason the blessed souls love Him above all else is neither because
He is actually being shared nor because He is potentially shareable, but simply because He is
Goodness Itself.99 De Konincks reply was to maintain that, while indeed the actual sharing of
others in God is irrelevant to the primacy of our love for Him, it would nevertheless be a
profound mistake to attempt to separate the aspect of summum from the aspect of the
potential communitas of Gods goodness.100 In doing so he was simply applying the principle he
had eloquently laid down at the beginning of his original work:

99 Eschmann, In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 19596: Is it not the most fundamental and absolutely
unshakeable cornerstone of Christian ethics that the term of our ordination to God is God as He is in Himself, i.e.
the Good by His essence and the essence of goodness (bonum universale in essendo)? . . . The very first and essential
element of our ordination to God is not the fact that God is the first bonum universale in causando, the fountain of all
communications, but that He is the bonum universale in essendo.

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 4648: To prescind from the superabundant and inexhaustible
communicability of divine goodness to other persons, amounts to prescinding from the infinite plenitude of divine
goodness. . . . Why does our very salvation depend upon the love of our neighbor? It can surely be only because it is
impossible to love God as He is in Himself without loving Him in His communicability to others. . . . God is the
bonum universale simpliciter. There can never be a proportion of equality between this infinite good and the intellectual
creatures capacity for beatitude. . . . We cannot love the bonum universale except as the common good, that is, the
100

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The common good . . . has the character of superabundance and it is eminently diffusive
of itself insofar as it is more communicable: it reaches the singular more than the
singular good. . . . Communicability is the very reason for its perfection. The particular attains to
the common good considered precisely as common good only insofar as it attains to it as
to something communicable to others.101
This is the fundamental premise: that the good which transcends material limitation, which is
not diminished but rather, if anything, increased the more persons rejoice in it, has its crowning
glory precisely in its superabundance. Not only is self-diffusiveness an essential sign of goodness;
it is, on this reading, the highest and most lovable aspect of that goodness. This, for De Koninck,
is the fundamental meaning of St. Thomas commentary on Aristotles divinius principle:
Manifestum est enim quod unaquaeque causa tanto potior est quanto ad plura effectus eius se
extendit. Unde et bonum, quod habet rationem causae finalis, tanto potius est quanto ad plura se
extendit.102 To deny that Gods essential commonness enters into the very ratio of the saints
contemplation is, in De Konincks eyes, tantamount to his claiming Gods essence as ones own
proper, proportionate goodwhich is the supreme blasphemy.

good which incommensurably surpasses anything which might be the proper good of a creature and which, because
of its very infinity, is communicable to others as bonum universale. If God could be the proper good (proper as
opposed to common) of any created person, He could not be the good of another person (emphasis in original).
See also ibid., 62.
From the above text we should extract two key principles that lie behind De Konincks conclusion: 1)
commonness translates directly and simply into non-exclusivity; and 2) a proper good is one that is
proportional to its receiver. By #1, the contradictory alternative to affirming Gods commonness is to claim that He
belongs solely to me, to the deliberate exclusion of everyone else; by #2, such a claim would entail the further claim
that a creaturely mind was somehow on the level of the divine essence by its very nature, capable of
encompassing it and claiming it as its own. As De Koninck does not fail to note, these two claims together surely
seem like the distilled essence of Luciferian pride (ibid., 1045). As we will see in the next chapter, however, both of
these claims face what I think are insurmountable objections.
La primaut du bien commun, 8; emphasis mine. Cf. ibid., 2627 (a text which De Koninck cites in full towards
the end of his second article, p. 86): Luniversalit mme du bien est principe de batitude pour la personne
singulire. Cest, en effet, en raison de son universalit quil peut batifier la personne singulire. Et cette
communication au bien commun fonde la communication des personnes singulires entre elles extra verbum: le bien
commun en tant que bien commun est la racine de cette communication qui ne serait pas possible si le bien divin
n'tait dj aim dans sa communicabilit aux autres: prexigitur amor boni communis toti societati, quod est
bonum divinum, prout est beatitudinis objectum.
101

Sent. lib. Ethic. I.2, n. 12 Leonina 47/1:9b (emphasis mine); cited by De Koninck in La primaut du bien
commun, 7 n. 5, as well as In Defence of Saint Thomas, 67.
102

CHAPTER II. THE COMMON GOOD: PRIMARY BENEFICIARY OR PRIMARY

BENEFIT? A CRITIQUE OF THE CLASSICAL THOMISTIC THESIS
This, then, is the Thomistic theory of the common goods primacy as I understand it,
and it is both a beautiful and a formidably profound (and powerful) thesis. Yet, as we noted in
the introduction, there are some notable difficulties with it: specifically, (a) that it does not seem
as though our highest end is in fact to contribute to an emergent good, and that hence to love
our neighbor qua part thereof is not to love him in his highest dimension; (b) even aside from
this, it would still seem backwards to say that we love our neighbor primarily so that the
common good (whether intrinsic or extrinsic) might flourish; and (c) that the derivation we just
saw of our transcendent love for God from our transcendent love for the universe is either
backwards in the same way, or else does not really depend on our loving God as a common good.
To clarify this situation, we will proceed in the following order.
First, I will examine St. Thomass own theory of love and the necessary structure of its
acts, as a framework on which to build the rest of the chapter. The rest of the chapter will
consist of a critique of the Thomist position laid out in chapter 1specifically of the Thomist
position as understood and defended by Charles De Koninck, whom I consider to have
developed St. Thomass argument to its logical conclusions. Section 2 will reject the notion of
society as an emergent beneficiary. In section 3 I will argue (per objection (a) above) that mans
emergent intrinsic common good is, in fact, lesser than his highest individual good, and that
hence it cannot serve as the ground for a transcendent neighbor-love (contrary to the argument I
laid out in section 4 of the preceding chapter). In sections 4 and 5 I will maintain that, though
the extrinsic common good does indeed surpass mans individual good, it will not serve to ground
a transcendent neighbor-love either, inasmuch as it could only do so if beneficiary-goods were
48

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subordinated to benefit-goods. (Taken together, sections 35 rule out the possibility of a

transcendent love for God as common.) Section 6 will examine some background assumptions
that, I think, underlie the Thomist/De Koninckian way of approaching the primacy of the
common good; and finally my conclusion will sketch out a possible alternative way to safeguard
Aquinass conclusions while avoiding some of the difficulties into which his proposed line of
argument seems to fall.

1. The Thomistic Theory of Friendship-Love

The classic text to look to for St. Thomass understanding of the structure of the act of
love is ST I-II.26.4 (Editio Leonina 6:190b), where St. Thomas is discussing the division of all
love103 into concupiscence-love and friendship-love:
Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut philosophus dicit in II Rhetoric., amare est velle
alicui bonum. Sic ergo motus amoris in duo tendit: scilicet in bonum quod quis vult
alicui, vel sibi vel alii; et in illud cui vult bonum. Ad illud ergo bonum quod quis
vult alteri, habetur amor concupiscentiae: ad illud autem cui aliquis vult bonum,
habetur amor amicitiae. Haec autem divisio est secundum prius et posterius. Nam id
quod amatur amore amicitiae, simpliciter et per se amatur: quod autem amatur amore
concupiscentiae, non simpliciter et secundum se amatur, sed amatur alteri. Sicut
enim ens simpliciter est quod habet esse, ens autem secundum quid quod est in
alio; ita bonum, quod convertitur cum ente, simpliciter quidem est quod ipsum habet
bonitatem; quod autem est bonum alterius, est bonum secundum quid. Et per
consequens amor quo amatur aliquid ut ei sit bonum, est amor simpliciter: amor
autem quo amatur aliquid ut sit bonum alterius, est amor secundum quid (emphasis
mine).
This is a dense passage, so let us unpack it carefully. First, it is clear that, in St. Thomass eyes,
the two terms of love are logically inseparable: to have one is to have the other as well. To desire
cake without desiring it for someone is not only impossible, it is entirely nonsensical; and the
103 Although q. 26 is part of the Treatise on the Passions, and hence might not seem applicable to the rational
appetite, St. Thomas makes clear in 26.1 that the affective movement being discussed in this question pertains to all
appetites, not just to the sensitive one.

50

same is true of claiming to love someone without actually desiring something good for them,
since to love someone just is to wish them well. Thus, while the term concupiscence is often
taken to have a negative connotation, inasmuch as it is used to describe desires arising out of
love of self, the term concupiscence-love (amor concupiscentiae) is a necessary and integral part
of any noble love either for oneself or for others; and conversely, friendship-love (amor
amicitiae), unlike friendship, need not be a positive mutual thing existing between two people,
but rather applies also to even the most degraded forms of self-love.104
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, there is a fundamental metaphysical priority
between these two parts of love: friendship-love is love simply and per se, whereas
concupiscence-love counts as love only secundum quid, by virtue of its rootedness in a friendshiplove.105 The term of concupiscence-love (which will be referred to throughout as the finis cuius
gratia, literally the end for whose sake), no matter how honestum it may be, can never be for its
own sake in the way that the term of friendship-love (finis cui, the end for whom) is: for even
the noblest of concupiscible goods (say, a sunsets beauty, or even a close friends company) is
always sought for the beloved, whereas the beloved is sought only for his own sake.106

See the response to the first objection (Editio Leonina 190b91a): Amor non dividitur per amicitiam et
concupiscentiam, sed per amorem amicitiae et concupiscentiae. Nam ille proprie dicitur amicus, cui aliquod bonum volumus:
illud autem dicimur concupiscere, quod volumus nobis. (emphasis mine)
104

Indeed this seems like a likely candidate for analogy of attribution; the relation of friendship-love to
concupiscence-love seems akin to that of the animals health compared with the health of its urine, to use the classic
example.
105

One could object, however, that even the beloved is sought for the sake of something further still: namely,
the goodness and nobility in which he participates. Indeed, as we will see, this is an important sense in which one
can claim that all natural loves are ultimately for the sake of God, the Participator of all goodness (cf. Super Sent.
1.17.1.5, ed. Mandonnet 1:4056, and ST II-II.26.3 arg. 2, Editio Leonina 8:211a), and for St. Thomas it is the chief
sense in which God can be said to love all things for His own sake (see, e.g., Super Sent. 2.1.2.3, ed. Mandonnet 2:50
51). However, though it is an important kind of final cause, it is equally important to remember that it is not the
object of what we normally primarily mean by love; we will discuss this point in some detail further on.
106

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Now, it is important to be clear that this does not imply that all concupiscible goods must
hence count as mere means. If by a means one intended to signify simply something
whose goodness is intrinsically ordered to another, then yes, every concupiscible bonum honestum
would collapse into the bonum utile category; but properly speaking, bonum utile signifies
something whose goodness is entirely derived from its ordering to another. The key distinguishing
mark of a bonum honestum is that the root of its desirability lies in itself, in its own intrinsic beauty
and nobility, whereas a true bonum utile like medicine is desirable only insofar as it allows one to
attain something else that is desirable in itself.107 Still, however, the fact remains that the
goodness of even a bonum honestuminsofar as it is concupiscence-lovedis an essentially relative
kind of goodness, a goodness that is in-itself (unlike medicine or tools, and arguably unlike
food108) but nonetheless for-another, and hence crucially distinct from, and subordinated to, the
kind of goodness that is not only in-itself but also for-itself. Indeed, St. Thomas was so
convinced of the subordination of the former to the latter that he regards the distinction as
parallel to the distinction of accident from substance, which is a very strong statement indeed.
This distinction between the bonum simpliciter (both in-itself and for-itself) of the term of
friendship-love and the bonum secundum quid (sometimes in-itself, but never for-itself) is, as I take

107 In this respect David Gallagher (whose treatment of and emphasis on the concupiscence-love/friendshiplove distinction I otherwise highly respect) makes what I think is an important mistake. He claims that every term of
concupiscence-love is necessarily desired merely as a bonum utile, and that hence the domain of bona honesta is simply
co-extensive with the terms of friendship-lovewith the result that, provided that one loves God simply because of
His inner, proper beauty, one need not wish Him well in order to friendship-love Him. See Person and Ethics in
Thomas Aquinas, 5962.

While the status of bona delectabilia with respect to objectivity vs. subjectivity is rather less clear than the
status of the bonum utile or the bonum honestum, I think it would be a mistake to say that tastiness is an actual
intrinsic, non-relational property of a food-item. Rather, it seems that the only sensory goodness intrinsic to the
food-item is the ability to positively stimulate our sense power to an activity which, at least arguably, would in and of
itself count as honestum; and hence ontologically (though not phenomenologically) it would be no different from any
other tool which is called good on account of its intrinsic ability to achieve (ultimately) a bonum honestum. An
adequate examination of this fascinating topic would, however, be a whole project unto itself.
108

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it, the backbone of the Thomistic theory of love,109 and it is emphasized by St. Thomas in many
different places.110 Before going on to draw the implications of this division of final causality,
however, let us first mention two other kinds of final cause which will be important for our
discussion. First, we must note that the bonum secundum quid can itself be divided into two: on the
one hand the desired good itself that we have been discussing, and on the other the activity
through which that good is attained by the beloved. Just as it is nonsensical to say that a
concupiscible good like food (or a paintings beauty) is desired without being desired for
someone, so it is equally nonsensical to say that it is desired for someone without it being desired
that that person should attain it in some concrete111 way. This is the distinction between finis cuius
gratia and finis quo that St. Thomas draws in ST I-II.1.8: Finis dupliciter dicitur, scilicet cuius, et

David Gallagher has repeatedly emphasized the vital importance of this distinction for St. Thomas, both as
regards the logically necessary concomitance of friendship-love and concupiscence-love, and also, and especially, as
regards the essential priority of friendship-love. See Person and Ethics in Thomas Aquinas, Acta Philosophica 4
(1995): 5171, esp. 5663 and 64, where he insists that persons are the ultimate ends of actions; Desire for
Beatitude and Love of Friendship, Mediaeval Studies 58 (1996): 147, at 23 and 1318; Thomas Aquinas on SelfLove as the Basis for Love of Others, Acta Philosophica 8 (1999): 2344, at 2629; and The Will and Its Acts (Ia
IIae, qq. 617), in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
2002), 6989, at 8485. See also Guy Mansini, Duplex Amor and the Structure of Love in Aquinas, in Thomistica,
ed. Eugne Manning, Recherches de thologie ancienne et mdivale. Supplementa 1 (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 137
96; Peter Kwasniewski, Supplement to On Love and Charity: Readings from the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter
Lombard, trans. Peter Kwasniewski, Thomas Bolin, O.S.B., and Joseph Bolin (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2008), accessed online at http://cuapress.cua.edu/res/docs/thomasaquinassuppmaterials.pdf, 86 n. 399; and Kevin White, Wanting Something for Someone: Aquinas on Complex Motions
of Appetite, The Review of Metaphysics 61 (2007): 330, at 1523.
109

See, e.g., ST I.20.1 ad 3 (Editio Leonina 4:253b), I.60.3 (Editio Leonina 5:102), II-II.23.6 (Editio Leonina
8:170, where the distinction between friendship-love and concupiscence-love is taken as parallel to the distinction
between charity and hope, and as the reason for charitys supremacy), and II-II.25.2 (Editio Leonina 8:199); SCG
I.91 (ed. Marietti 1:102b n. 763); Super Ioannem 15.4 n. 2036 (Super Evangelium S. Ioannis lectura, ed. R. Cai [6th ed.,
Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1972], 384ab); Super Philip. 1.3 n. 36 (Super Epistolas S. Pauli lectura, 2 vols., ed. R. Cai [8th
ed., Turin and Rome: 1953], 97b; QD de car. 7 and 2.8 ad 16 (ed. Marietti 771a); In Div. nom. 4.10 (ed. Marietti 142);
and De perf. 13 (Editio Leonina 41B:81a84b).
110

Of course, the lover need not have a specific kind of attainment in mind; the point is that he must want the
beloved to attain his good in some real, concrete fashion.
111

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quo, idest ipsa res in qua ratio boni invenitur, et usus sive adeptio illius rei.112 Thus for St. Thomas
one can consider the end of the rock to be either the center, or its being at the center; the end of
the miser can be validly said to be either the money itself, or his grasping of the money; and
finally, mans end can either be said to be God Himself, or the knowing and loving of God. Only
one of these two, however, can properly be named beatitudo or happiness: as St. Thomas
concludes, Beatitudo nominat adeptionem ultimi finis. This is no small statement, for to any
Aristotelian (and certainly to Thomas) happiness is precisely what is meant by final end in
the context of human action;113 the implication is that, at least so long as we are dealing with
ethics, our chief concern will very often be with the finis quothe crucial link between the finis cui
and the finis cuius gratia.114

Cf. ST I.26.3 ad 2, Editio Leonina 4:303b: Finis est duplex, scilicet cuius et quo, ut philosophus dicit,
scilicet ipsa res, et usus rei, sicut avaro est finis pecunia, et acquisitio pecuniae. Creaturae igitur rationalis est quidem
Deus finis ultimus ut res; beatitudo autem creata ut usus, vel magis fruitio, rei.
112

113 The texts that support this thesis are too numerous to attempt to enumerate either in the Thomistic or the
Aristotelian corpus; two representative samples might be the Proemium to I-II.1 (the first, foundational question in
the Treatise on Happiness, which grounds the rest of St. Thomass whole moral science) and Nic. Eth. I.7.1097a30
b22.
114 All three of the kinds of end we have examined thus far have Aristotelian roots, though they are admittedly
somewhat tangled. In this passage from ST I-II.1.8 (Editio Leonina 6:24b), where St. Thomas is distinguishing
between the finis cuius gratia and the finis quo, he refers us to two passages in Aristotle, one in Met. V and one in Phys.
II. It is my belief that the passages in question are, respectively, Met. V.2.1013a32b3 and Phys. II.3.194b32195a2, in
both of which Aristotle is making the point, in almost identical terms, that it is a mistake to consider only the last
end (such as health) and not the intermediate steps thereto (i.e., the different stages of treatment) as pertaining to
final causality. Admittedly, the connection to St. Thomass point is a little weak, since Aristotle there seems to be
making a claim about the intermediate final causality of means, and St. Thomas would be very far from wanting to
say that the finis quo of beatitude is in any direct sense a means. (David Gallagher, however, would dispute this, I
think; see Person and Ethics in Thomas Aquinas, esp. 5962, where, basing himself on In Div. nom. 4.10 and Super
Sent. 3.28.1.1, he claims that all objects of concupiscence-love are perfective accidents, and that these accidents are
desired simply as means to the perfection of the person who is loved with friendship-love. As such, they can only be
loved as utilia or delectabilia, not as honesta. I think this is a serious misunderstanding, which results partly from
misreading those Thomistic texts but also partly, as we will see, from confusing the finis cuius gratia with the fourth
kind of end, which I term root of lovability.) Still, I think they still serve St. Thomass purpose inasmuch as they
illustrate, as Thomas points out in his commentary on the Physics passage at Sent. lib. Phys. II.5 n. 6 [Editio Leonina
2:70a], that the aspect of finality or cuius gratia pertains not only to the end result but also to the steps on the way
to attaining it. (It is a little unfortunate that here St. Thomass terminology indicates that both the attainment and the
thing attained would fall under the umbrella of finis cuius gratia, where in the Summa article the whole point is to
distinguish between the finis cuius gratia and the finis quo; but I think the idea is clear enough.)

54

Secondly and finally, the notion of final cause seems to admit of one more subcategory: the goodness that lies at the root of why we love things with either concupiscence- or
friendship-love. Rather than a concrete bonum (either a person, thing, or action), we are dealing
here with the more intangible bonitas that, as it were, informs those concrete instantiations of
itselfwhat I term the root of lovability, which is not itself directly loved but which provides
the foundation for any love whatsoever. St. Thomas most clearly differentiates between this type
of finality and that of the finis cui in his discussions of how God can be said to be acting for His
own sake in His dealings with creatures, especially ST I.44.4 c. and ad 1 (Editio Leonina 4:461)
and II-II.132.1 ad 1 (Editio Leonina 10:79a).115 In I.44.1, the problem St. Thomas is addressing is
that it seems that Gods acts with regard to creatures cannot possibly be driven by friendshiplove for Himself, since (a) to act out of friendship-love means to act for the good of the beloved
and (b) it would seem impossible that any creative or providential act could benefit God or add
to His already infinite happiness in any way.116 Now, one might think that the obvious way for
St. Thomas to answer this while still maintaining his cherished position that God is His own
final cause in all that He does117 would be to deny or qualify (b). (One way he could do this, for
example, would be to appeal to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic divine glory to
argue that, just because He possesses infinite delight on the intrinsic plane, it does not follow

115 See also, however, Super Sent. 1.17.1.5 (ed. Mandonnet 1:4056), where St. Thomas distinguishes between
the ratio and the obiectum of love and compares them to how the eye sees light and color, respectively. The same idea
seems to be implicit in QD de car. 7 (ed. Marietti 770b771a), although there the term obiectum is used to describe
what in the Sentences passage is called ratio (cf. ST I-II.27.1, where bonum in the sense of the connaturalitas
that is the cause of love is likewise termed the obiectum, rather than the ratio, of loveunlike ST II-II.26.2 ad
1 (Editio Leonina 9:210b211a), where the goodness that is the cause of love is described as the ratio diligendi);
the main thrust, however, seems to be the same.
116

This is roughly the tenor of the first objection.

See, e.g., Compendium theologiae 1.34, Editio Leonina 42:92b; SCG I.7476, ed. Marietti 1:88b90b; and ST
I.19.1 ad 1 and ad 3 and 19.2, Editio Leonina 4:231b and 233.
117

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that He has no desire for goods on the extrinsic plane, even though they add nothing to His
intrinsic happiness.118) In fact, however, what he does is to accept both premises and simply
deny that God is acting out of friendship-love for Himself at all. Rather, for St. Thomas, He is
acting simply for the sake of the communication of His goodness, or as he says in ad 1, non
propter suam utilitatem, sed solum propter suam bonitatem.
The same contrast is drawn in II-II.132.1 ad 1, where, after citing St. Augustine, he states
that Deus suam gloriam non quaerit propter se, sed propter nos. Cajetan, in glossing this
passage, makes a rather striking statement: that the term of friendship-love (terminum
utilitatis,119 the beneficiary of ones action, which the term propter is used here to denote) is
in fact something entirely distinct from the final cause, which here would be the divine goodness
that God is seeking to pour out and multiply in His creation, the limited share of which that they
enjoy is what He finds lovable about them.120 To my mind this is going much too far, since this
would be to say that the kind of end that we saw St. Thomas describe as equivalent to the bonum
simpliciter is really not a final cause at all. A less radical but still substantive interpretation,
however, would be that this bonitas, this root-of-lovability, though not the only genuine type of
finality, is nonetheless the most foundational one, bestowing finality on the finis cui just as the finis
cui bestows finality on the finis cuius gratia. It is only on this deepest level that God can be said to

118

For more on the possible uses of this distinction, see section 6A below , pp. 100105.

It should be noted that this is a rather unhappy choice of terminology, since it would seem to imply that
anything willed for the benefit of a friend counts as a bonum utilewhereas in fact bona utilia are only the less
important subset of things that should be willed for ones friends. See note 114 above on the different senses in
which something may be said to be a means.
119

120 Editio Leonina 10:79b: In eodem articulo, in responsione ad primum, cum dicitur quod Deus quarerit gloriam
suam non propter se, sed propter nos, non intelligitur ut ly propter denotat causalitatem finalem: quoniam Deus gloriam
suam et omnia vult propter se tanquam finem omnium creatorum et creabilium. Sed intelligitur ly propter ut denotat
terminum utilitatis. Nos enim sumus ad quorum utilitatem Deus quaerit suam gloriam: nam de ipso scriptum est:
Bonorum nostrorum, inter que est gloria, non indiges (boldface mine).

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be acting for His own sake; as ST I.19.2 makes clear, creation is ordered to Gods goodness
not in the sense of serving it, but in the sense of receiving its self-communication and
participating in it.121 At first sight it seems as though this means that Gods goodness is the final
cause of creation simply in the sense of being its finis cuius gratia, the object of creations
concupiscence-love, its supreme animating benefit;122 but I think the right interpretation here
is to take the finality of Gods goodness on the deeper level of root-of-lovability. It is worth
noting, too, how closely St. Thomas here links the self-communication of goodness (on this
level) with its note of finality: it would seem, at least, to be strong confirmation of De Konincks
argument that, on the deepest level, the good is a final cause precisely by way of its tendency to
communicate itself, i.e., by way of its intrinsic commonness.123
We must be clear, however, that, while for God to act for His own sake is simply the
same as to act for the sake of the creatures intrinsic goodness, it is not the same as to do so
the way we would act for the sake of a creatures (abstract and, to our eyes, self-contained)
goodness. In the response to the second objection of 19.2,124 Aquinas explains that the reason

121 Sic igitur vult et se esse, et alia. Sed se ut finem, alia vero ut ad finem, inquantum condecet divinam
bonitatem etiam alia ipsam participare.
122 This is the interpretation that would best fit De Konincks understanding of goodness as primarily described
as perfectivum alterius (see In Defence of Saint Thomas, 55 and 95). We will turn to examine to the flaws of
this understanding shortly.
123 Inasmuch as acting for the sake of divine goodness and seeking the diffusion of divine goodness seem
here to be one and the same in St. Thomass eyes: the root-of-lovability that motivates God to create just is the
self-diffusiveness (or commonness) of His essence. On the highest level, then, final causality and intrinsic
commonness would seem to be formally identical.

Editio Leonina 4:233b: In his quae volumus propter finem, tota ratio movendi est finis, et hoc est quod
movet voluntatem. Et hoc maxime apparet in his quae volumus tantum propter finem. Qui enim vult sumere
potionem amaram, nihil in ea vult nisi sanitatem, et hoc solum est quod movet eius voluntatem. Secus autem est in
eo qui sumit potionem dulcem, quam non solum propter sanitatem, sed etiam propter se aliquis velle potest. Unde,
cum Deus alia a se non velit nisi propter finem qui est sua bonitas, ut dictum est, non sequitur quod aliquid aliud
moveat voluntatem eius nisi bonitas sua. Et sic, sicut alia a se intelligit intelligendo essentiam suam, ita alia a se vult,
volendo bonitatem suam.
124

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for this identity in the case of Gods creature-directed willing is that, for Him, the root-oflovability goodness of a creature stands to His own goodness in an analogous way to that in
which the concupiscible goodness of bitter (not sweet) medicine stands to health for us: the
creature has no goodness of its own, but rather derives all of its finality from the per se good
thing in which it participates.125 But what does it mean to say that a creature has no goodness of
its own (such that God cannot be said to will it for its own sake as well as for the sake of His
goodness, like in the analogy of the pleasant medicine)?
The answer, of course, will have to do with St. Thomass understanding of participation,
and especially his conviction that something which is only abstract in a creature (here, its
goodness) can be concrete in God. As a result, if one is already acquainted with, and loves, the
concrete Original, then the creatures abstract participation therein (i.e., its finite goodness) will
not constitute a new distinct motive for loving it. For us down here, however, it is quite possible,
and indeed necessary, to separate these two motives (i.e., inasmuch as we either love things both
on account of their own intrinsic goodness and as mirrors of God, or else omit the mirrors-ofGod motive entirely), simply because here we cannot see God as concrete Goodness
Instantiated. For us, the root-of-lovability can be either abstract or concrete; but when it is
concrete, it is so only by way of external reference rather than by intrinsic participation, as when
we love a human being because they remind us of another whom we love deeply, or because
they love, or are loved by, that belovednot because their perfection is a sharing in his, an
abstract, accidental version of what the beloved is concretely and substantially.

125 This is only analogous, of course, because, since the levels of goodness being compared (root-of-lovability
vs. secundum quid concupiscibility) are different, the way in which the participation occurs is likewise different: in the
case of the bitter medicine we are dealing with participation by way of efficient-causal utilitarian means, whereas in
the case of divine willing we are dealing with participation by way of formal-causal sharing.

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It is certainly worth remembering, despite this, that the two motives do collapse when
seen from the true point of view: to love something on account of its being an image of God
just is to love it on account of its intrinsic goodness, if one has already seen subsistent goodness
Himself.126 For us here, however, this fact is psychologically irrelevant; for us what is loved is
always a finis cuius gratia or a finis cui, and the root-of-lovability is only that through which one of
those two is loved.

2. The specter of totalitarianism: Rejection of transcendent-love-grounding commonness on the finis cui level
With this fourfold framework of finality in place, let us turn back to the Thomistic
argument, as interpreted by De Koninck, for the primacy of our love for the common good. We
must begin, first of all, by keeping in mind what this argument does not claim: namely that
society is a beneficiary-good, a finis cui. Although Fr. Eschmann (like, perhaps, Maritain) does not
seem to realize this, De Koninck wholeheartedly agrees with him that no transcendent order
or indeed any non-person whatsoevercan count as a finis cui, simply because no non-person
has a faculty for receiving goods as goods. This is an obviously Thomistic point, as is made clear
by ST II-II.25.3, where Aquinas gives us two reasons why it is impossible to have genuine

I should specify that, as I see it, the motives collapse only on the level of the root-of-lovability; as fines cui, I
would argue, they remain irreducibly distinct, even for the blessed in heaven, such that, while they of course can and
do will each others perfection primarily because this perfection gives glory to their supreme Beloved, they
nonetheless also do so simply out of love for each other, as a benefit to them. In other words, it seems to me that,
even though, for them, the root-of-lovability that they see in their fellow blessed just is the divine essence, they can
nevertheless be motivated thereby to two acts of friendship-love: one (or perhaps three) that terminates in the
divine Persons, for whom the perfection of their fellow blessed is simply willed as a gift, and another that terminates
in the fellow blessed himself as being worthy of the perfection he enjoys. I am not sure if St. Thomas would agree
with this statement. On the one hand, for him, any form of love not based on a sinful fellowship is orderable to
beatitude, and hence can be said to fall under the umbrella of charity-love (see QD de car. 79 [ed. Marietti 769b
778b], ST II-II.26.7 [Editio Leonina 8:21516], and also II-II.25.1 ad 2 [Editio Leonina 8:201b); but on the other
hand, at the end of QD de car. 4 c. (ed. Marietti 764a), St. Thomas seems to make room for legitimate loves for
others which are not formally manifestations of charity.
126

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friendship with any non-rational creatures, even with animals: 1) because they cannot share in
our lives, which are regulated by reason (i.e., because they lack the Aristotelian ground for a state
of mutual friendship); and more importantly 2) because, unlike us, they are not capable of truly
possessing the good, since they have no free will by which to be domina utendi bono quod
habet127which precludes not only the possibility of a state of mutual friendship, but also the
possibility of even uni-directional goodwill. In other words, only a substance endowed with a
faculty of possessing the good as good (i.e., a rational appetite) can qualify as a genuine recipient
for which we can wish good things for its own sake.128 De Koninck at least claims to agree to all
this; he also claims to fully agree with the following vivid pronouncement of Pope Pius XII, a
passage dear to Fr. Eschmanns heart:
Dum enim in naturali corpore unitatis principium ita partes iungit, ut propria,
quam vocant, subsistentia singulae prorsus careant; contra in mystico Corpore
mutuae coniunctionis vis, etiamsi intima, membra ita inter se copulat, ut singula
omnino fruantur persona propria. Accedit quod, si totius et singulorum
membrorum mutuam inter se rationem consideramus, in physico quolibet viventi
corpore totius concretionis emolumento membra singula universa postremum unice destinantur,
dum socialis quaelibet hominum compages, si modo ultimum utilitatis finem inspicimus, ad
omnium et uniuscuiusque membri profectum, utpote personae sunt, postremum ordinantur.129

Cf. ST I-II.6.2 (Editio Leonina 6:57b58a) for St. Thomass forceful emphasis on the need to desire the end
as end as the basis for the appetitive freedom that allows one to call the possessed good ones own.
127

It is worth noting, however, that just as the term voluntarium can be taken analogously between men and
animals (see ST I-II.6.12, Editio Leonina 6:5558), so it would seem logical that benevolence can likewise be taken
analogously as regarding men and animals: for, while animals cannot admittedly possess goods in the full, rational
sense, they nonetheless certainly do desire and delight in goods, and I think it is phenomenologically obvious that
the owner of a dog will often pet it and feed it treats primarily to give it delight after its fashion (rather than simply
for self-gratification or utilitarian purposes).
128

129 Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1942, p. 221 (emphasis mine); cited in Eschmann,
In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 186. Cf. the more succinct but equally strong words used by Pius XI in Divini
Redemptoris, in Acta Apostolicae sedis, 1927, p. 79, which Fr. Eschmann cites in the same place: Civitas homini, non
homo Civitati exsistit.

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Fr. Eschmann calls this the Magna Charta of the Christian doctrine of person;130 and yet De
Koninck, against whom Fr. Eschmann was intending to use this text, professes to agree with it
wholeheartedly.131 The real disagreement, then, would seem to have nothing to do with regarding
the common good itself as a finis cui; and this would make sense, for the De Koninckian
argument as we sketched it in the first chapter admits freely that political friendship (and God)
are goods to be enjoyed by its members. Already at the outset of his first work he had made this
clear:
Ds lors, le bien commun nest pas un bien qui ne serait pas le bien des
particuliers, et qui ne serait que le bien de la collectivit envisage comme une
sorte de singulier. Dans ce cas, il serait commun par accident seulement, il serait
proprement singulier, ou, si lon veut, il diffrerait du bien singulier des
particuliers en ce quil serait nullius. Or, quand nous distinguons le bien commun
du bien particulier, nous nentendons pas par l quil nest pas le bien des
particuliers: sil ntait pas le bien des particuliers, il ne serait pas vraiment
commun.132
Moreover, like Maritain and Eschmann, he declares himself vigorously opposed to
totalitarianism, to the idea of the state being a kind of super-individual to be served by its
subjects,133 indeed calling such a notion a monster of modern invention.134 His point, rather,

130

Eschmann, ibid.

131

See In Defence of Saint Thomas, 2021 and 9297.

132

La primaut du bien commun, 9.

Ibid., 6771, where he considers the line from Divini Redemptoris that would eventually be cited by Fr.
Eschmann and says that this common good itself is for the members of the society. . . . The city is not, it cannot
be, a for self congealed and closed upon itself, opposed as a singular to other singulars; its good must be none other than
the good of its members. If the common good were the good of the city as the latter is accidentally a sort of individual, it
would be by the very fact a particular good and properly foreign to the members of the society. In fact one would have
to attribute intellect and will to such an organization stolen from its members. The city would then be an anonymous tyrant
which enslaves man. Man would be for the city. This good would be neither common nor the good of rational
natures. Man would be subject to a foreign good (emphasis mine). Cf. pp. 1 and 5661, and In Defence of Saint
Thomas, 14, 83, and esp. 9495.
133

134

Ibid., 7677.

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was that the noblest fact about those membersand hence the greatest reason to friendship-love
themwas their share in those goods.
Yet De Koninck is not content simply to agree with his opponents on the subject of the
finis cui. On the contrary, he feels constrained to turn the tables on them and accuse personalism
(of which, of course, Maritain was at the time the chief Thomistic representative) of sharing
totalitarianisms fatal root, namely the belief that the common good is singularised.135 For De
Koninck, this reduction of the common to the singular good inevitably results in either a
singular person taking over the role of the common good (as in Fascism), or else in the
personification of the State (Communism);136 he sees this as the inescapable outgrowth of the
inborn human tendency to work for something transcendent and larger than oneself when the
common good, by being made subservient to the individual person, can no longer fill this role.
But how does he propose to save his own position from this danger, given that, as we just saw,
he himself does not regard the common good as a finis cui at all, but rather a finis cuius gratia? Is
this not precisely synonymous with saying that the common good is subservient to (a benefit

135

Ibid.; cf. In Defence of Saint Thomas, 95.

Indeed De Koninck will go even further, accusing Fr. Eschmann himself of maintaining no less than that
society constitutes a substantial unity (In Defence of Saint Thomas, 73), arguing on the basis of his (and Maritains)
use of Super Sent. 3.5.3.2, Ratio partis contrariatur rationi personae. Now, De Koninck is certainly right to point
out that both Fr. Eschmann and Maritain rest an altogether undue amount of weight on this passage (see Maritain,
The Person and the Common Good, 56 and Fr. Eschmann, In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 205), which in fact
fundamentally fails to serve their purpose. The context of that passage is St. Thomass contention that the separated
soul should not be called a person; and as De Koninck rightly notes (In Defence of Saint Thomas, 2223), and
the quoted passage is intended to support this contention by making the more general claim that the term person
can never denote a part of an unum per se or substance. Thus, St. Thomas is in fact specifically not arguing that the
term should not be applied to a part of an unum per accidens such as a society. (Maritain at least notes this context in a
footnote, and triesrather unconvincinglyto argue that it is only a specific application of a much broader
Thomistic principle; Fr. Eschmann does not even do that much.) Fr. Julio Meinvielle, in Crtica de la concepcin de
Maritain sobre la persona humana (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Epheta, 1993), 106109, likewise notes the fallacy of using
this text as an argument for maintaining, as Maritain does, that a person qua person can never be considered a part
of a larger whole. Still, it is manifestly clear from the whole tenor of Maritain and Fr. Eschmanns work that this
is an error or oversightnot, as De Koninck apparently pretends, a deliberate attempt to raise the social whole to
the unum-per-se status of a substantial whole.
136

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for) to the individual person? How would simply embracing a non-singularized

understanding of the common good allow a reversal of the primacy of the beneficiary (the
person) over the benefit (the common good)and what would such a non-singularized
notion of the common good even mean?
Let us begin with the last question. Perhaps De Konincks chief complaint against his
foe Fr. Eschmann is that, by insisting that the primary object of beatitude is not God qua
common to all the blessed but rather God qua visible to me,137 Fr. Eschmann would seem to
have reduced the divine essence to the individual level of our attainment of Him.138 But what
exactly would it mean to love God qua common? We just saw that it does not mean that God
is loved primarily as a benefit-good for society taken as an emergent, unitary finis cui. It also
certainly does not mean that God is loved above all as a benefit-good for society taken simply as
the collection of the other individual blessed souls; for not only does De Koninck seem to think
it is in any case impossible to will a good for any neighbor more intensely than for oneself (a
point to which we will return later), but also such a love would mean that the common good was
being prioritized only secundum multum et paucum, by way of a sort of utilitarian additive valuejudgment, rather than secundum formalem differentiam.139 Nor does it mean, exactly, that the vision of
God is loved as a kind of gift to God Himself, as finis cui (a point with which Maritain and Fr.
Eschmann seem to agreewrongly, in my opinion, but that is another matter), although, as we
will see, De Koninck is not entirely comfortable with loving the divine essence as a benefit-good

137

Eschmann, In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 19697.

See In Defence of Saint Thomas, 6062, 6768, 70, 7677, 8486, and 90, all of which accuse Fr.
Eschmann of having confused formal beatitude (our individual vision of Gods essence) with objective
beatitude (Gods essence itself, which is essentially common to us, though properin its fullnessto Him).
138

139

Cf. ST II-II.58.7 ad 2, Editio Leonina 9:15b, cited above at p. 11.

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either, and attempts instead to straddle a rather difficult middle ground. Overall, however, the
difference De Koninck envisions between taking God qua common and taking Him qua
visible to me seems not to lie on the plane of the finis cui: he does not consider God as a
possible beneficiary, and he admits freely that the emergent unity of society is not, as such, even
capable of being a beneficiary

3. Is the Vision an assecutio communis? Rejection of transcendent-love-grounding commonness on the

finis quo level
Does it lie, then, in the domain of the finis quo, in whether or not one attains God via a
cooperative, emergence-grounding act? Here things get even murkier. On the one hand, De
Koninck readily admits Fr. Eschmanns point that the act by which God is attained in beatitude
(what he calls formal beatitude) is a strictly individual, not collective and emergent, act;140 and
moreover, he seems to concede that formal beatitude, the direct attainment of God in the
Vision, is a nobler kind of attainment than the attainment of Him via similitude, which is the kind
of attainment involved in the (collective and emergent) reflection of Gods glory through the
order of the universe.141 (Indeed, he goes so far as to say that the sin of Lucifer was precisely the

140 See esp. In Defence of Saint Thomas, 60: Created beatitude, the formal, essential beatitude of the created
person as distinct from objective beatitude which is God Himself . . . is indeed a good which belongs to the person
as a purely personal good, in the strict sense, since it consists in the very operation of the intellect by which the
divine essence is attained. Cf. 6162, 6768, 70, 7677, 8486, and 90, in all of which passages De Koninck affirms
the individual nature of the finis quo of Visionand accuses Fr. Eschmann of imposing this individual nature on the
finis cuius gratia, namely the objective beatitude that is God Himself. We will have more to say on this accusation
below.
141 See ibid., 68, 70, and also 1718, which will be discussed at more length below. De Koninck understandably
hedges a little about this point, however, since (as we will also see below) he had committed himself fairly firmly in
his first work to the position that communal beatitude stands to individual beatitude in just the same way that the
excellence of the universe stands to any individual creaturely excellence.

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sin of wanting to attain God only by reflecting Him rather than seeing Him.142) This last point
would seem to rule out the position that there is an emergent feature or activity of the Blessed
which is nobler than the direct, individual Vision possessed by each one; and to this extent, De
Koninck would seem to be in agreement with Fr. Eschmann. Yet it is unclear how committed
De Koninck is to this agreement, for two reasons: 1) as we saw at the end of the first chapter, he
still seems to want to hold that many different Visions constitute a better, nobler thing than just
one;143 and 2) more importantly, he thinks that Fr. Eschmanns position necessarily implies that
the blessed would want to attain God in an exclusive way, i.e., with an active desire that others
should not enjoy him.144 Let us examine these two reservations in turn.
Regarding #1, De Koninck is in something of a bind. If #1 is true, it would seem to
follow that mans chief finis quo is to attain to the Vision precisely insofar as his Vision constitutes
a small tile of the mosaic of different Visions enjoyed by the blessed. Now, there is certainly
something intuitively appealing about this: it seems eminently right that it is better for God to be
seen and glorified in many different ways, corresponding to the unique characters of each of the
Blessed, than that He be seen and glorified in only one way. This is De Konincks point in

142 Ibid., 105: [The fallen angels] sought to be assimilated to God only with regard to this that God is good,
thus aiming to be most like to Him by being good in themselves, instead of seeking the assimilation secundum unionem
vel informationem to an object which is common and impossible to attain as a proper good. To be sure, De
Konincks whole point here is that the demons sought to attain God by an individual reflection of His goodness, not
by a joint, collective, hierarchical imitation; but the fact remains that De Koninck is here presenting Vision as a finis
quo superior to imitation. Cf. ibid., 6667, where he is discussing Fr. Eschmanns use of St. Thomass claim that to
attain God by Vision is a multo maior assimilatio than to attain Him by sheer imitation; see also pp. 17, 57, and
71.
143 See especially ibid., 7886, where he defends Peter of Auvergne and the claimhotly contested by Fr.
Eschmann at In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 19899that the speculatio totius civitatis is eligibilior than
any individual contemplation. We will discuss this claim immediately below.
144 See, e.g., ibid., 30, where he attributes to Fr. Eschmann the (absurd) claim that the ultimate end of all
individual creatures is a good which belongs to one creature to the exclusion of the other (emphasis mine); cf. all the
places (which we will examine in a moment) where De Koninck accuses Fr. Eschmann of making God the proper
good of the creature, since for De Koninck the term proper good (taken in its proper sense) means a good which
is not shared or common.

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saying, in a passage I cited earlier, that both Peter and John know that it is better that [God] be
present to both together. They see the infinite greatness of God is such that, in truth, it can
never be fully manifested neither [sic] to one nor the other, nor to both, nor even to all those
whom He has chosen;145 and this is why, for De Koninck, it is the manifestation of Himself to
the manifold which is [Gods] primary intention146 in the supernatural order, just as it is the
manifestation of Himself through the manifold which is Gods primary intention in the natural
order. Yet it is unclear exactly what would be attained here by the multiplicity of Visions as such,
i.e., what the finis cuius gratia would be. Indeed, De Koninck is so intent here on repudiating Fr.
Eschmanns charge of maintaining an assecutio communis of the divine essence in the Beatific
Vision147 that he essentially seems to be denying that there is an emergent attainment going on at
all (since emergent attainment and assecutio communis are for all intents and purposes
synonymous: an emergent attainment would be one in which the parts can only attain the finis
cuius gratia, at least in the relevant special way, if the attainment is a group effort148). This too
seems right: Vision qua Vision is not enhanced in any way (let alone fundamentally elevated, the
way that the beauty of a creature is given a new dimension by its integration into the mutually

145

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 84.

146

Ibid., 83.

147 Immediately after insisting that it is the common, not the singular, Vision that is Gods primary intention,
De Koninck then goes on to say that this does not mean, however, that He manifests Himself to the manifold in
such a way that, in this immediate manifestation, the many becomes, as it were one body reaching Him by an
assecutio communis as opposed to asseccutio singularis, for He obviously remains the object of this speculative intellect
and that (p. 83). See also ibid., 7778.
148 It is important to be clear when we talk of an assecutio communis as being emergent. The attainment (finis
quo) itself, I would argue, is not emergent; on the contrary, I think a large part of what Fr. Eschmann and Maritain
get right is precisely that the finis quoinasmuch as the term means the attainment of its end by somethingis
always necessarily singular. The term assecutio communis, then, would only describe a fact about each of the
individual fines quo, namely that none of them could be successful without the presence of the others; and what is
emergent would be the finis cuius gratia, the thing being attained. The point being made by Maritain and Fr.
Eschmannand, as we shall see, being denied by Fr. Meinvielle and, seemingly, by De Koninckis that the
noblest aspect of the Vision involves this mutual interdependence of fines quo.

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dependent structure of the universe) by the fact that others are seeing God in different,
complementary ways. What is being enhanced thereby is the painting of Gods handiwork,
which is its own finis cuius gratiaone whose root-of-lovability, to be sure, is indeed the divine
essence of which that handiwork is a reflection (just as the intelligible essence in a painting is
informed and given its beauty by the real nature being represented149), but which nonetheless
remains its own thing-to-be-attained distinct from the divine essence, which is what is directly
attained by Vision. So it would seem, then, that there is an assecutio communis, but not of the
highest good; and insofar as the nobility of the finis quo is determined by the nobility of what is
being attained, it would follow that the noblest component of mans beatitude would be a strictly
personal, independent activity. Fr. Eschmann would in this respect be completely vindicated;
mans chief glory would not be in his being a citizen of the heavenly City, but rather simply in
his enjoying his God-given rank as son of God.
One possible rebuttal to this would be for De Koninck to argue that even the nonemergent perfections of the parts (such as Vision) are still properly attributed to the whole as
such, such thateven though the Vision does not involve an assecutio communisthere is
nonetheless an assecutio communis of an overarching holistic perfection which includes all the
assecutiones singulares of the Blessed. If this were true, then it would not matter that mans
highest activity is not a part-type activity; according to this principle, so long as being a part of the
celestial City adds something to mans perfection (which it certainly does, and which neither
Maritain nor Fr. Eschmann would be at all inclined to dispute), then man-qua-part will still be
overall nobler than man-qua-individual.

149 For a fascinating exposition of the two sides of the representationalism debate within Thomistic philosophy
of art, see Maritain, Art et scolastique (Paris: Louis Rouart et fils, 1927) and Gilson, Painting and Reality (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1957). On this matter I tend to side with Maritain.

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De Koninck seems to support this principle (and its conclusion at least on the natural
plane, with respect to the universe) quite strongly in attacking Fr. Eschmanns heavy reliance on
a distinction made by St. Thomas (ST I.93.2 ad 3, Editio Leonina 5:403b) between perfection
taken extensive et diffusive and perfection taken intensive et collective.150 Fr. Eschmann had
taken this passage to imply that, in Aquinass eyes, the universe is better than an individual man
only quantitatively, inasmuch as it contains many images of God as its principal parts which, in a
sense, define it; but considering the fact that the essentially most perfect likeness is gathered
together in one single point, a single intellectual substance by far surpasses everything, that
might, in a certain sense, be said to be like God.151 In other words, the universe, when taken under
the formality that gives it its holistic unity (i.e., its emergent perfection, the only one that can be
regarded as gathered together in one single point), is lesser than the persons it comprises; it is
only greater than the persons it comprises if one does not consider it under the aspect of its
unifying formality, but rather as an aggregate. De Koninck rejects this, first, by denouncing the
use of the term quantitative and arguing that it is rather formal, not material, variety that gives
the universe its primacy of excellence (and that St. Thomas, as we saw in the first chapter, is an
ardent enthusiast of this formal kind of multiplicity).152 While he is technically correct in this,

Universum est perfectius in bonitate quam intellectualis creatura extensive et diffusive. Sed intensive et collective
similitudo divinae perfectionis magis invenitur in intellectuali creatura, quae est capax summi boni. Vel dicendum
quod pars non dividitur contra totum, sed contra aliam partem. Unde cum dicitur quod sola natura intellectualis est
ad imaginem Dei, non excluditur quin universum, secundum aliquam sui partem, sit ad imaginem Dei; sed
excluduntur aliae partes universi. The thesis of the article in question is that only man, and no irrational
creature, deserves the title of image of God; the objection being replied to here (citing the valde bona passage
from Genesis 1:31 which, as we mentioned above at n. 67, is frequently quoted by St. Thomas in passages where he
is affirming the primacy of the universes order as the best thing made by God) had argued that the whole universe
is nobler than man, and hence, like man, should be said to made in Gods image.
150

151

In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 19091.

152

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 35 and 39.

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however, I think he has missed the point, which is that even formal multiplicity only increases
perfection additively, except insofar as it supports an emergent activity/feature.
Much more to the point is a key principle he lays down in this section:
To demand that, in order to be better absolutely than any of its parts, the whole
possess intensively the perfection of its parts, is to misunderstand the nature and
purpose of the whole.153
Here De Koninckbasing himself on ST 1.47.2 ad 1 and its (uncontroversial) claim that an
animal with a variety of nobler and less noble parts is better off than it would have been if it had
been made entirely of its noblest parts, e.g., of eyesbegins by insisting that it would clearly be
foolish to argue that the eye was better than the animals whole body just because its operation
was the bodys highest154 (which of course it is not, but one could easily substitute brain for
eye). Then he goes on to use this intuition to essentially argue the broader point that, when
comparing the nobility of any whole with that of its parts, one should take the whole not only in
what it adds to its parts by way of emergence, but rather also in what its component parts already
possess on their own. Of course, this makes it logically impossible for the whole ever to lose the
contest: after all, it is necessarily the case that A + B > A. Here, then, in De Konincks eyes,
absolute perfection is aligned with the extensive et diffusive perspective, and not with the
intensive et collective perspective as Fr. Eschmann had interpreted Aquinas to say; and by this
reasoning, it seems logical to conclude that the same judgment of absolute betterness that is
applied to the universe vis--vis its parts would be applicable to the City of the Blessed as well.

153

Ibid., 38.

154 Ibid.: If the animal could not be better absolutely than its eye except by being better intensively, then, in
order to be superior to this single organ, the entire animal would have to be an eye. Likewise, the universe itself
would have to have an intellect and will; it would have to be a proper image of God.

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Fr. Julio Meinvielle, a strong supporter of De Konincks, indeed adopts this form of
rebuttal:
Cuando se habla de la preeminencia del universo, de su orden y preeminencia
sobre sus partes, se entiende en un sentido universal y dentro de su orden
respectivo, de suerte que el universo de los bienaventurados sea mejor que cada
bienaventurado, y el de los fieles mejor que cada fiel y el universo natural con todas y
cada una de las creaturas racionales, mejor que cada una de las mismas substancias
intelectuales.155
The principle at work here, which Fr. Meinvielle references explicitly later on,156 is one that De
Koninck had deployed quite explicitly in his first work, La primaut du bien commun: that to deny
the supreme excellence of the common good simply because a singular supernatural good (the
Vision) was a greater thing than a common natural good (the order of the universe) would be a
category mistake, a transgression of genera. Thus, at the end of his section of Objections and
Replies, De Koninck says,
La plupart de ces objections jouent donc sur la transgression des genres, elles
exploitent le par accident. De ce que quelque bien priv est meilleur que quelque
bien commun, comme c'est le cas de la virginit meilleure que le mariage, on
conclut que quelque bien priv pris comme bien priv est meilleur que quelque
bien commun pris comme bien commun; que le bien priv comme tel peut avoir
une minence qui chappe au bien commun comme tel; qu'on peut ds lors
prfrer un bien priv un bien commun, parce qu'il est priv. Nier par cette
voie tous les premiers principes, quoi de plus facile?157
It is worth noting that this passage is reiterated verbatim in his later article;158 and while it does
not explicitly say that the fallacy consists in a nature/supernature comparison, his reply to his

155 Meinvielle, 97 (emphasis in original), citing the same passage that we examined earlier about Gods selfmanifestation to the manifold being His primary intention in His plan of salvation (In Defence of Saint Thomas,
83 [mistakenly cited by Fr. Meinvielle as p. 77]).
156

Ibid., 100.

157

La primaut du bien commun, 71 (emphasis in original).

158

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 68.

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Objection 7 makes this point quite clear.159 Moreover, in his later article De Koninck devotes an
entire section160 to defending Peter of Auvergnes claim161 that the speculatio totius civitatis is
eligibilior than that of a single person against Fr. Eschmanns harsh criticism.162 It would seem,
then, that De Konincks answer to Fr. Eschmanns argument based on the intrinsic individuality
of speculative beatitude would have to be along these lines: that mans full beatitude is indeed
achieved in an assecutio communis,163 where what is attained (the finis cuius gratia) is a
hierarchical, exquisitely proportioned, ordered society that includes, and is indeed given its
defining beauty by, the panoply of complementary individual Visions.
This assecutio communis route, however, would be a deeply flawed one; and to De
Konincks credit, as we shall, he does not seem to end up taking it. It is flawed because I think
his principle that a whole need not possess the perfection of its parts intensively in order to be
absolutely better than they is fundamentally misguided. In the first place, his example of the
animal and the eye is drawn from substantial wholes; and even here he is simply wrong, I think,
to claim that the perfection of the eye belongs to the whole animal extensive et diffusive. On
the contrary, if intensive et collective means gathered together in one single point, as Fr.

159 La primaut du bien commun, 6263: On pourrait objecter aussi que le bien de grce dun seul est plus grand
que le bien de nature de lunivers tout entier [ST I-II.113.9 ad 2], pour en conclure que le bien commun intrinsque
de lunivers envisag dans sa nature, est subordonn au bien de la personne singulire. Cette objection sappuie
sur une transgression des genres, qui ne permet quun comparaison accidentelle. Or, il faut remarquer que saint Thomas
noppose pas le bien de grce dune personne singulire au bien de grce de la communaut, mais au bien de nature
de lunivers (emphasis mine).
160 In Defence of Saint Thomas, 7886. For a very similar point, see his reply to Objection 8 in his La
primaut du bien commun, 6365.
161

Petrus de Alvernia, In VII Pol., lect. 2 (cited first by De Koninck in La primaut du bien commun, 61, n. 56).

162

In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 198201.

163 The idea that the common good must be emergently common, i.e., attained by an assecutio communis, seems to
find support in Lewis, 29, where he contrasts collective goods (which he thinks instantiate a false, utilitarian idea
of the common good) with truly common goods by arguing that, while the former can be enjoyed by any person
individually, the latter can only be enjoyed by persons in their relation to others (emphasis mine).

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Eschmann takes it (and I see no reason to dispute this interpretation), then a substantial
composite whole would in fact be the par excellence example of a whole possessing its parts
perfections intensively,164 just because there is only one subjectone metaphysical hook, as it
werefor all the parts excellences to inhere in. (Obviously this only applies to monoformists;
but De Koninck, who professes himself to be a faithful disciple of Aquinas, presumably is one.)
But of course, we are not dealing here with substances at all, but rather with unities of
order. St. Thomas, in the description he gives of unities of order in his Ethics commentary,
indeed agrees that the operations/perfections of the parts belong to their wholes when the
whole is an unum simpliciter, i.e., a substance; but when dealing with unities of order, he makes it
very clear that, while some properties of the parts belong to the whole, others do not.165 De
Koninck does not seem to allow room for this. Instead, he seems to think that, if a whole
possesses its parts perfections at all, it must be in one of the following two ways: either (1)
having the perfection belong to it directly, qua whole (which would require an animal to be an eye
in order to have an eyes perfectionDe Konincks idea of intensive possession),166 or else (2)
possessing it just because it belongs to its parts (De Konincks version of extensive
possession). He does not allow room for St. Thomass (and Fr. Eschmanns) intermediate
category, where (3) the whole would possess its parts perfection just insofar as that perfection

164 It is worth noting, too, that the whole reason we call an animal a substance in the first place, rather than a
unity of order, is precisely because its own holistic, emergent perfection of animalityincluding its interior
sensation, especially the estimative poweris already intensively greater than the proper perfection of the eye (or
more precisely, than what would have been the proper perfection of the eye if the eye had been a substance). Only
if the wholes proper perfection is intensively greater than that of its parts can it arrogate to its absolute perfection
all those parts excellences, whatever they might be; and as we just saw, this arrogation would necessarily have to
be of the intensive sort as well.
165

Sent. lib. Ethic. I.1, Editio Leonina 47/1:4b; see my chapter 1, section 1, n. 16 for the text.

166

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 38.

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hinged on the wholes principle of unity (which is my understanding of intensive possession).167

But here the hinge, the metaphysical hook, is the emergent activity or feature that defines
the unity of order:168 the mosaics beauty and intelligible essence, or the teams victory.169 When
we say one team is better than another, we mean that its members each possess more of, and in
more complementary proportion, the individual and relational skills (e.g., sprinting speed and
passing ability) that will contribute to the perfection of the finis cuius gratia of victory; these
excellences pertain intensively to the team, i.e., they belong to its members qua members just
insofar as they are ordered to an emergent end. Conversely, a team is not made a better team by
the fact that its members possess other, non-sports-related excellences such as, say, a remarkable
aptitude for trigonometry; such perfections do not belong to the team intensively, i.e., qua

167 It should be noted that this hinge criterion is the same criterion at work in the case of substantial wholes,
like the animal with its eye: every parts perfection hinges radically on the substances principle of being.
168 If the reader is worried about the metaphysical implications of saying that there can be a numerically single
accident (namely the emergent feature or activity) that is shared by or rooted in multiple substantial subjects, see
chapter 1, section 4 for a defense of this idea, and especially the support I draw from St. Thomas (ST I.39.3) and
John Paul II at n. 65.
Also, one should keep in mind that, if it is impossible for there to be emergent, numerically one accidents, then
to speak of a society having a perfection over and above the perfection of its parts would simply be a category
mistake; there would be nothing there to which the parts could contribute. (It would make no sense even to speak of
a perfections inhering in a part qua member of the whole, since the whole itself would be a mere ens rationis to
which any relation would likewise perforce be merely a being of reason.) This whole discussion of the intrinsic
common good, then, is predicated upon the presupposition that there are some accidentsspecifically, emergent
oneswhich are not individuated by their substantial bearers.

One must be careful with ones distinctions here, since my loose term metaphysical hook applies
differently not only to substances vs. unities of order, but also to honest vs. utilitarian unities of order. As I
argued above (chapter 1, section 3, pp. 1924), the emergent features of a painting (or other beautiful object) and of
a team (or army) differ from each other in a crucial respect: the beauty of the painting is a genuine form, an order 2,
whereas the order of the team, because it is strictly utilitarian, is in reality no more than the collection of aggregateorder relations between the teammates (their complementary skill sets). Thus, the brilliant shade of red that
enhances the painting qua painting actually can be seen as an attribute of the paintings unitary emergent form,
inhering in it (or more properly, inhering in its paint-fleck through it) as a formally constitutive part thereof; but the
passing skills of a soccer player do not inhere in (or more properly, inhere through) the emergent team victory
as formally constitutive thereof, but only as causally connected thereto. The metaphysical hook, therefore, is more
solid in the case of the painting than in that of the team, just as it is more solid in the case of a substance than it is
in either of the two unities of order.
169

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gathered up in the teams unifying principle, because they do not contribute to the unity of
orders end. (The same is clearly true of the mosaic.)
But what about the case of the celestial City? Here we must be careful. If for a whole to
intensively possess a parts perfection simply means that the whole as whole is perfected by an
increase in the parts perfection, which is all we have said so far, then (pace Fr. Eschmann) the
celestial City certainly does possess the perfection of its component Visions intensively: for it
is fairly clear that those Visions, with their complementary insights into the divine plenitude,
formally enter into the emergent beauty of the City in just the same way that the brilliance and
arrangement of the mosaics tiles formally enter into the intelligible essence being shown forth
there, giving the Citys beauty its defining radiant depth. If, however, for a whole to intensively
possess a parts perfection means additionally that the achievement of the parts finis cuius gratia
is primarily for the sake of the emergent finis cuius gratia, then it is clear that the City and the mosaic
must part ways: for it is quite clear indeed that the Vision is and should be willed more for the
sake of the individually attained end (the divine essence itself) than for the sake of the further
end to be attained qua member of the City (an emergent reflected similitude of that essence).
The brilliance of a scarlet tile in a mosaic deserves to be attributed intensively to the emergent
beauty of the whole because its own perfection is primarily for the sake of that emergent beauty,
which is of a higher order than that of sheer color and hence can assume it; but it would be
downright blasphemous to say that we will to attain the divine essence primarily insofar as it
contributes to a further, creaturely finis cuius gratia (the beauty of the City), for here the beauty of
the component far outranks what the emergent whole has to add. The City may take the
Visions as its building-blocks, but it cannot assume them.

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If, then, this is the right understanding of what it means to have ones highest perfection
lie in pertaining to a unity of order (namely to have ones highest perfection intensively
assumed by the whole in the way just described),170 then it assuredly does not describe
personsat least, not persons in the supernatural order. I think, however, that the same holds
true even in the natural order, inasmuch as even the natural love and contemplation of God still
reaches out to Him while societal order at best only establishes a faint image of Him. Hence I
think both Maritain171 and Finnis172 are right, despite De Konincks objections,173 to cite ST III.21.4 as Thomistic support of their thesis that mans highest finis quo cannot lie in a
contribution to an emergent finis cuius gratia on any order, political or otherwise: Homo non
ordinatur ad communitatem politicam secundum se totum, et secundum omnia sua. . . . Sed
totum quod homo est, et quod potest et habet, ordinandum est ad Deum.
All the above goes to show that the argument for mans primary finis quo being an
assecutio communis (as held by Fr. Meinvielle, and as seemingly held by De Koninck) is defective,
and that Fr. Eschmanns position is the truer one. However, as we already said, De Koninck in

170 It is worth observing, too, that this makes the criteria for our question directly parallel to the criteria for
determining the substantiality of a collection of parts, which I think is a strong argument in its favor. The only way
to determine substantiality is by comparing the dignity of the collections overall emergent features with that of its
noblest parts (which is why beehives and wolf-packs are not substances); and similarly, I am arguing, the only way
to determine whether a parts highest perfection lies in pertaining to a unity of order is to compare the dignity of
that unitys emergent feature(s) with the dignity of the parts own proper features.
While we are on this subject, however, it should be noted that Maritain himself, in a rather surprising and, I
think, unwarranted move, implicitly denies the criteria I just laid down for substantiality by arguing that bees actually
are primarily for the sake of the hive, rather than vice versa; see La personne et le bien commun, 254. He makes
this claim because he is trying to reach his conclusions via his appeal to his notorious person/individual
distinction, which would not be available to the bees; but I think making this distinction the key to the problem is a
bad idea, both because it fails to achieve the conclusions he wants to reach and also because it requires him to posit
all other (natural) unities of order as reified, totalitarian-style fines cui.
171

La personne et le bien commun, 237.

172

Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, 237.

173

See La primaut du bien commun, 6667 (reproduced in its entirety at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 97.

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fact does not ultimately support this argument, at least not in his second article after having been
confronted with Fr. Eschmanns criticism of it (and at least not with regard to the supernatural
end). Instead, he shifts his argument entirely from the domain of the finis quo to the domain of
the finis cuius gratias root-of-lovabilitythough he insists that this is in fact what he had been
arguing all alongin what we mentioned above as his reservation #2: his claim that the only
alternative to saying that one desires to attain God as a common good is to say that one instead
desires to attain Him as an exclusive, privately held good, and his attribution of this second
alternative to Fr. Eschmann.
Before we examine this new argument, we should note two things. First, and most
crucially, De Konincks quiet dropping of the thesis of an assecutio communis of mans highest goal
in fact rings the death-knell for the claim that one can ground a transcendent love for neighbor
in a love for the intrinsic common good, the good of societal order and emergent mutual
friendshipthe claim that we spent most of chapter 1 trying to establish. If mans highest finis
quo takes place entirely without assistance from his fellows, then it is this individual aspect of
him which will be highest and most lovablenot his communal aspect as part of the order of
society and the universe. From here on out, De Koninck will be attempting instead to ground
our transcendent love of neighbor directly in our love for the fully extrinsic common good,
namely God Himself. This, however, has the enormously important consequence that the whole
argument for our love of God above self that we drew up in section 5 of chapter 1 would have to
be thrown out, or at least substantially modified: for that argument rooted our transcendent love
for God precisely in His generalship of an intrinsic common good (the order of the universe)
which we already transcendently loved. If we do not transcendently love the victory, we cannot
transfer that non-existent transcendent love to the general.

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Secondly, the fact that De Koninck does not seem to realize that he has switched from
the level of the finis quo to the level of the finis cuius gratia (and that indeed he is about to switch
again, as we will see, to the level of the root-of-lovability) indicates, I think, that he has not
grasped the difference between emergent commonness (where composition and cooperation is
involved) and diffusive commonness (where there is simply one good thing being received by a
multitude, without any need for an emergent order on the multitudes parti.e., an intrinsic
common goodin order to attain it).174 We will investigate this notion of diffusive
commonness carefully in sections 4B and 5, since it provides the foundation for the exclusivity
charge; first, however, let us lay that charge out in some more detail.

4. The problem of exclusivity: transcendent love as grounded in diffusive commonness

In attributing this view (namely, of God as something to be desired in an exclusive way) to
Fr. Eschmann, De Koninck makes it very clear that where he sees Fr. Eschmann at fault is not in
his having made individual formal beatitude a greater thing than any other created beauty or
hierarchy (which would include the hierarchy of the Society of the Blessed), but rather in his
having allegedly made it a greater thing than God Himself: The good which we maintain is
greater than the personal good of the Blessed is not a common good of an inferior order but the
common good of objective beatitude,175 which for De Koninck is simply the divine essence.176 But

174 See the ninth objection in La primaut du bien commun, 6667, where De Konincks argument seems to imply
that to belong to an order just is to share an end with otherswhich is simply not true: the notion of order requires
cooperation, of one sort or another, to reach that end.
175 In Defence of Saint Thomas, 68 (emphasis mine). Cf. ibid., 70: If my Opponent merely intends to prove
that this act and good of the speculative intellect [is] a personal good (In Defense of Jacques Maritain, 197), . . .
he is following the most roundabout way one could imagine, and to no purpose, for no one has denied that formal
beatitude is a purely personal inherent good of the Blessed. But this is not the end of the matter, for . . . [i]t is [the] finis exterior,
the formal and final cause of beatitude, that we are concerned to explain and defend (emphasis mine). Cf. also

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why does De Koninck think that this (obviously absurd) conclusion follows from Fr.
Eschmanns premises? Why would the claim that God is not loved primarily as a common good,
as the good of the celestial City (which for Fr. Eschmann at least is a claim about the finis quo),
necessarily imply that the Divine Essence itself (the finis cuius gratia) is being reserved and made
singular or private, desired for oneself to the deliberate exclusion of others?177
A) Common vs. proper goods, and the equating of Bonum summum with Bonum commune
To make this leap, De Koninck begins by defining the relevant sense178 of proper
good as an exclusive good, directly opposed to the common good, in the following
unequivocal terms:
The proper good of one person is never the proper good of another person; the
proper good of the one is never the proper good of another; if the good aimed at
by one person be a proper good, it is impossible for it to be the proper good of
another, for the good in these two cases differs by a numerical distinction. A
proper good may indeed be spoken of as common to many persons, but we are
ibid., 7677: The apparent opposition between the solitude of the speculative life and the community of its object
is due to a failure to distinguish beatitude on the part of those who enjoy it, from beatitude which is the very object.
Father Eschmann, though he will mention the distinction, completely ignores its relevance to our problem. . . .
[T]he felicity in question here [i.e., in Fr. Eschmanns argument] is formal felicity; while our problem turns on the
one that Father Eschmann has chosen to ignoreobjective felicity.
Finally, see his strong endorsement of St. Thomass statement at the end of ST I.65.2 c. (Editio Leonina
5:150b) that, over and above the indirect way in which God is the end of all creatures through their reflecting His
glory as parts of His ordered universe, there is also the direct way in which God is the end of rational creatures by
way of knowledge and love (In Defence of Saint Thomas, 1718)a direct way which does not seem to have
room for the ordered hierarchy of the Blessed.
176

See ibid., e.g., p. 60 et passim.

177 For the explicit link between the notion of exclusivity and the kind of proper good that De Koninck
thinks Fr. Eschmann supports, see esp. In Defence of Saint Thomas, 48: If God could be the proper good
(proper as opposed to common) of any created person, He could not be the good of another person; 41: Since
[the good of the universe] is a good which does not belong to one person to the exclusion of the other person, it is
strictly a common good (emphasis mine); and 30, where he claims that, for Fr. Eschmann, the ultimate end of all
individual creatures is a good which belongs to one creature to the exclusion of the other (emphasis mine).

De Koninck makes it clear that there is also another sense of proper good, synonymous with the bonum
suum, which encompasses rather than excludes the common good, being opposed only to the bonum alienum, i.e.,
to the exclusive goods of others (La primaut du bien commun, 911; cf. In Defence of Saint Thomas, 2021). This
broader meaning is not relevant to him in his controversy with Fr. Eschmann, however, because Fr. Eschmann had
stipulated that God is not loved as a common good; obviously, then, De Koninck has to try to discover the
implications of loving God as a proper good in this non-common sense.
178

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then using the term common in the sense of common according to

predication.179
In support of this position De Koninck cites QD de car. 4 ad 2, where St. Thomas distinguishes
sharply between the good of a person considered as such (with regard to which the chief finis cui is
the self) and the good of a person considered as a member of a whole (with regard to which the
chief finis cui is the person who has custody of the whole);180 the point De Koninck seems to be
drawing is that the personal level is the exclusive-good level, and that in order to transcend
this exclusivity one has to move to the level of man as part. Another key text for this
distinction is ST II-II.26.3 (Editio Leonina 8:211), where the crucial question of whether man
loves God more than himself is set up in terms of just this contrast between the particulare
bonum proprium and the commune bonum totius181; the other places where Aquinas argues
for a natural love of God above self (especially ST I.60.5, I-II.109.3, and De perf. 13) likewise
hinge on this distinction, as indeed we saw at the end of the first chapter.
But why should we think that bonum proprium in these Thomistic contexts means a
good that belongs exclusively to me, rather than a good in which I am only interested insofar as it

179 In Defence of Saint Thomas, 42. Cf. ibid., 79 and 94 (where he draws a sharp distinction between the
common good vs. either ones own proper good or the alien good, i.e., the proper good of others); see also La
primaut du bien commun, esp. 25 and 5556.
180 Ed. Marietti 764a: Cum amor respiciat bonum, secundum diversitatem boni est diversitas amoris. Est
autem quoddam bonum proprium alicuius hominis in quantum est singularis persona; et quantum ad dilectionem
respicientem hoc bonum, unusquisque est sibi principale obiectum dilectionis. Est autem quoddam bonum commune quod
pertinet ad hunc vel ad illum in quantum est pars alicuius totius, sicut ad militem, in quantum est pars exercitus, et ad
civem, in quantum est civitatis; et quantum ad dilectionem respicientem hoc bonum, principale obiectum dilectionis est
illud in quo principaliter illum bonum consistit, sicut bonum exercitus in duce, et bonum civitatis in rege; unde ad officium
boni militis pertinet ut etiam salutem suam negligat ad conservandum bonum ducis; sicut etiam homo naturaliter ad
conservandum caput, brachium exponit. Et hoc modo caritas respicit sicut principale obiectum, bonum divinum,
quod pertinet ad unumquemque, secundum quod esse potest particeps beatitudinis (emphasis mine; De Koninck
leans heavily on this text in La primaut du bien commun, 2425 [n. 25], and In Defence of Saint Thomas, 48 and 44
n. 3). (The reader might remember that this same text was pivotal in pinpointing the sense in which the general can
be said to be loved as the common good of the army.)
181

Cited in In Defence of Saint Thomas, 46.

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belongs to me? (In other words, why should I assume that we are discussing the nature of the
benefit-good involved, i.e., its inherent shareability vs. non-shareability, rather than the finis cui
for whom it is being willed?) Here De Koninck makes substantial use of ST II-II.58.9 ad 3
(Editio Leonina 9:17b) and its apparent claim that bonum autem unius personae singularis non
est finis alterius182 to argue that the one cannot will the good of another considered as such;183
but it should be noted that De Koninck has taken this latter passage rather severely out of
context.184
Let us assume, however, that St. Thomas does mean that the term bonum proprium
refers exclusively to exclusive-by-nature goods. Why should we assume that there is no middle
ground between these goods and common goods willed qua common? Why could one not
legitimately be interested in an (intrinsically) common good, such as a statue in a museum,

182 This text plays a substantial role in the development of De Konincks theory of bonum proprium and bonum
alienum at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 20, and is reaffirmed in a similar discussion at p. 48; Fr. Meinvielle
likewise leans on this text for a similar purpose in Crtica de la concepcin de Maritain sobre la persona humana, 90.
Froelich, though he does not cite this passage, makes a somewhat more sophisticated argument along the same lines
in Friendship and the Common Good, 55. He claims there that one cannot be ordered to the friend as to an
end; rather, doing something for the friends sake, even if it does not directly benefit one, still counts as working for
the common good insofar as genuine friendship really does cause ones friends joys and sorrows to be received as
directly gladdening/saddening one. This is a subtle point, the discussion of which would take more space than we
have available here; but I tend to agree with Dietrich von Hildebrand (see The Nature of Love, trans. John F. Crosby
[South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustines Press, 2009], 89, 159, and 162, among others) that this would be to confuse
genuine friendship-love, which revolves around taking the friends goods as indirect goods for oneself, with what von
Hildebrand calls an extension of the ego, which involves taking them as directly beneficial.
183

See La primaut du bien commun, 11 and 129.

The reason St. Thomas lays this principle down is to argue that general justice, but not particular justice,
deals with the regulation of ones own internal passions. The point is simply that my own intrinsic goodness cannot
be regarded as a relationaland hence justice-relatedgood-for-another except indirectly, through its contribution to
the harmony of the overall social whole (which is the province of general justice). In no way does St. Thomas mean
to say here that one cannot desire anothers proper, exclusive good strictly for the others sake, as De Koninck
would seem to be implying; St. Thomass position in that regard, which we will briefly critique below, is only that
such individual altruistic love cannot trump our self-love, not that it cannot exist at all. However, despite this
criticism, it remains true that De Konincks purpose in citing this text is a laudable one: he is trying to detotalitarianize the readers image of the common good by emphasizing that, if it is genuine, it is not a bonum
proprium of someone else or of the State, i.e., a bonum alienum, but rather truly is something that belongs to
me (cf., e.g., La primaut du bien commun, 11 and 3031). In this regard, cf. Waldstein, The Common Good in St.
Thomas and John Paul II, 570.
184

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primarily with regard to ones own share in it? At least when I go to a museum, my main interest
is that I should see a thing of beauty; I am indeed glad, perhaps even very glad, that the work of
art has been made public so that others can contemplate it too, but it is not its availability to the
rest of public that draws me. Yet De Koninck is quite clear that, in his eyes, the two terms are
mutually exhaustiveIf it is not a proper good and yet a good, it can only be a common
good185and that to fail to will a common good as common just is to will it as a private good,
and indeed (when dealing with the good which is the divine essence) to commit the sin of
Lucifer.186 Why should one deem contradictory Maritains vision of an attainment of the divine
essence which is both supremely solitary and yet also, at the same time, supremely open and
generous?187
To answer this we should begin by noting that De Koninck, though claiming to be
speaking of the finis cuius gratia, is in fact using the term to refer to the root-of-lovability, thus
shifting the level of the discussion yet again; for, as the reader may recall, it began with an

185

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 77. See also 30, 41, and 48, cited above at n. 177, and 62.

La primaut du bien commun, 5556: Si de soi la batitude de la personne singulire ne dpend pas de la
communication actuelle de cette batitude plusieurs, elle nen dpend pas moins de son essentielle
communicabilit plusieurs. Et la raison en est la surabondance de ce bien quest la batitude, et son
incommensurabilit au bien singulier de la personne. Le pch des anges consistait vouloir tout bien
commensurable leur bien propre. Lhomme pche quand il veut le bien de lintelligence commensurable au bien
priv. See also De Konincks striking comments at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 1045.
186

187 Maritain, La personne et le bien commun, 242: La vision batifique, bien tellement personnel,
connaissance tellement incommunicable que lme du bienheureux ne peut mme pas se lexprimer elle-mme
dans un verbe intrieur, est la plus parfaite, la plus secrte, la plus divine solitude avec Dieu. Mais cest la
solitude la plus ouverte et la plus gnreuse et la plus peuple. Car en raison delle se constitue une autre
socit, celle de la multitude des mes bienheureuses qui chacune pour son propre compte voient lessence divine et
jouissent du mme Bien incr, et qui saiment en Dieu les unes les autres et pour lesquelles ce Bien commun incr
quelles participent toutes constitue le bien commun de la cit cleste en laquelle elles sont assembles. . . . Elle nest
pas, dit saint Thomas, essentielle la parfaite batitude ni requise de ncessit par elle ; elle laccompagne: quasi
concomitanter se habet amicitia ad perfectam beatitudinem [ST I-II.4.8 ad 3; Editio Leonina 6:46b] (boldface mine)

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argument over emergence, which belongs to the finis quo level.188 It is not really the nature of the
divine essence, of objective beatitude, that is under discussion; Fr. Eschmann neither claimed
that the divine essence was a non-shareable type of good, nor that the Blessed should (or would)
see it that way,189 nor indeed that anyone could see it that way. Nor did he claim that our share of
God in the Vision was as great as God Himself in His fullness, as De Koninck thought that a
personalist must.190 He did think, however, that what we find lovable about that divine essence is,
quite simply, its sheer supreme perfectionnot, at least not primarily, its commonness, either
actual or potential. De Koninck, on the other hand, seems to equate two meanings of the term
bonum universale as applicable to God: 1) the sense (espoused by Fr. Eschmann) of
encompassing all perfections within itself, and 2) the sense (espoused by De Koninck) of being
intrinsically (i.e., potentially191) superabundantly communicable. We already saw, at the end of chapter 1,
De Konincks claim regarding the common good that la communicabilit est de la raison mme

This is made especially clear at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 59, where De Koninck uses the term to
describe the sense in which Gods goodness is His own end in creationa sense which is certainly not that of the
benefit-good, any more than it is that of the beneficiary-good.
188

For evidence that De Koninck really does think that, given Fr. Eschmanns premises, it would follow
logically that the Blessed would have no desire at all that others should enjoy Him, see this passage from In
Defence of Saint Thomas, 77: If we did not love our neighbour; if the fact that he too shared in the same
numerical good, perhaps to a much greater extent, were either indifferent or repugnant to us, it could only be because we
did not love the divine good as a common good, that is, because we would be placing above all else our singularity,
and hence, the proper good (emphasis mine).
189

190 See In Defence of Saint Thomas, 4648, 6162, and 85, citing the dictum of ST II-II.26.3 ad 3 (Editio
Leonina 8:212ab) that maius est in se bonum Dei quam participare possumus fruendo ipso; cf. La primaut du
bien commun, 25, 30, 57, and 126.
191 De Koninck takes Fr. Eschmann sharply to task (In Defence of Saint Thomas, 47, 62, and 76) for
thinking De Koninck had implied that God should be loved above all as being actively, rather than potentially, shared
in by the Blessed. Surely, however, this was at the very least a forgivable misinterpretation, given that, as we saw
above, De Koninck comes very close indeed to saying that mans highest good lies in seeing God insofar as man is
part of the heavenly City; for this would seem to be equivalent to saying that the primary object of our Vision is
God precisely as present to the heavenly multitude. De Koninck would have to counter by arguing that, even in the
Maritain/Eschmann scenario where there existed only one blessed soul and God, the most perfect thing about the
souls Vision would be its role as a part of a potential Citywhich is at least a strange idea.

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de sa perfection;192 he similarly insists that it is impossible to love God as He is in Himself

without loving Him in His communicability to others,193 and that we must love the universal
good as a common good, otherwise we shall not truly love the universal good.194 If this is true,
however, then indeed Maritains proposed middle ground could not stand: to love God as the
Supreme Good just would be to love Him under the aspect of His communicability to many.
There would be no option of loving God because He is the Supreme Good, but as present to
me, even accompanied by willing desire that He should be present to others as well. Is it true,
however? Is the difference between supreme and common, in the case of God, merely one
of language?
Now, there is certainly a close link between these two kinds of universality: it is plain that
the noblest kinds of good are indeed the ones that are intrinsically communicable to many
without diminishment, and also that God is indeed richer than any single finite mind can grasp
(even in the Vision). It is true also that the defining aspect of the Good is indeed its inherent
diffusiveness, which only increases with the nobility of the good in question, and that this very
generous diffusiveness is (at least in human affairs) one of the most resplendent aspects of the
good as such; and finally, there can be no doubt that, at least for a Christian, if any man say, I
love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar (1 Jn 4:20). If God is the Summum Bonum, He
will necessarily also be the Bonum Commune par excellence; if we love Him as the former, we will
also love Him in the latter way. But does that mean that these two formalities are in fact
identical?

192

La primaut du bien commun, 8.

193

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 47 (emphasis mine).

194

Ibid., 51.

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(1) It seems much more reasonable to suppose that the formality of commonness is
simply a sign of Gods superabundant, transcendent nobility, and that when we love God we are
loving Him above all simply on account of that nobility, not on account of its logical corollary
(for though that corollary is certainly praiseworthy in its own right, it does not seem to strike at
the heart of what it means to be good). Moreover (2), we should remember that, while it is true
that God is too great to be made anyones proper good, the same can be said of any honest
good that is attained by contemplation: the beauty of the ocean, or of a sunset, is not and never
can be a proper good either, simply because the finis quo by which we attain beauty (an act of the
intellect) is one that does not consume the beautiful object. Beauty does not become less
consumable the higher one turns ones gaze; it is simply a non-consumable good across the
board. Now, admittedly (3) De Konincks argument goes beyond this (though he seems to think
it is the same point) with the additional claim that God is not proportionate to any of our intellects,
and that hence it is fitting that there be many Visions to enjoy the infinite facets of His beauty;195
but, while this is certainly true, it is still a truth that is only logically consequent on, not identical
to, Gods infinite, superabundant goodness, which remains His chief root-of-lovability. We do
not love His disproportion to us as such, nor yet do we (primarily) love the fittingness that that
transcendent goodness be manifested to His creatures in many ways, but rather we love the
supreme goodness that is, indeed, both transcendent and apt to be manifested in a multifaceted
way. (4) Now we do, certainly, love God for His generous self-diffusiveness, and praise Him (or
should praise Him) for this constantly; but (a) this divine generosity seems to me to be a
different formality than the inherent transcendent, metaphysical commonness of the divine

De Koninck equates proper good and proportionate good in this way at, e.g., In Defence of Saint
Thomas, 61.
195

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beauty, and (b) in any case I would still argue that it is neither the generosity nor the beautys
commonness, but rather the beauty itself, that is what most fundamentally grounds the Blesseds
undying love for Him. And lastly (5), while granting that charity does indeed require love of
neighbor, it would seem that there is a much simpler explanation of this: that God loves our
neighbor, and that to love ones Beloved involves, among other things, loving those whom He
loves (and who love Him). It does not seem necessary to appeal to commonness or selfdiffusiveness as being Gods root-of-lovability to explain the essential connection of love of
neighbor to love of God.
B) Ut permaneat et diffundatur: Transcendent-love-grounding commonness on the root-of-lovability
level
Why, then, would De Koninck nonetheless hold that the divine commonness is His very
root-of-lovability, given that phenomenological experience and common sense seem to tell so
strongly otherwise? I think there are several important reasons for this, all closely bound up
together, but the best starting point might be his understanding of love of neighbor. For him, I
think, there are two theoretical ways to achieve the openness of the generous solitude
spoken of by Maritain.196 On the one hand, there is the way (the one I think Maritain would
endorse) grounded in my friendship-love for all the other Blessed: just as I want to taste the
divine glory myself, so, because of my love for them (inspired by their radiant beauty, and by
their having in common with me the divine life), I want them to taste that glory as well. On the
other hand, there is the way (clearly endorsed by De Koninck) grounded in my love for the

196 This is not to say that the two men hold the same view of what solitude means here: for Maritain, it
means that God is loved primarily under the aspect of His being the object of my individual Vision, whereas for De
Koninck it means only that the act of attaining God is an essentially individual, non-emergent act of the intellect
not that we love Him primarily and above all qua present to us in that solitude.

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common good itself. If one takes this route, then my friendship-love for the Blessed is not the
cause but, actually, the logically consequent effect of my willing the Vision for them; the cause of
my so willing would be my prior, foundational desire that the common good should be
disseminated and broadcast, so to speak, to the worldin St. Thomass words, my desire that it
permaneat et diffundatur.197 It is only inasmuch as I want it to be thus disseminated (perhaps
glorified would be a better term) that I would want the Blessed to enjoy it; my concern is for
the common good primarily, and for its beneficiaries only secondarily.
The important thing to see here is that if the first way (which, of course, would be the
middle ground between De Konincks proper good and common good) were the only
available option, then, for De Koninck, two conclusions would follow: 1) this would not be a
love of charity; and 2) it would involve loving our neighbors good (which is God Himself) less
than ourselves, which would seem blasphemous. The reasoning behind the first conclusion is
straightforward: it would not be a love of charity because it would not have our love for God
Himself as its root, but rather would be a merely human love that simply happened to involve
desiring a supernatural good for the beloved.198 The reasoning behind the second conclusion is

197 QD de car. 2 c., ed. Marietti 759a: Amare bonum quod a beatis participatur ut habeatur vel possideatur, non facit
hominem bene se habentem ad beatitudinem, quia etiam mali illud bonum concupiscunt; sed amare illud bonum
secundum se, ut permaneat et diffundatur, et ut nihil contra illud bonum agatur, hoc facit hominem bene se habentem
ad illam societatem beatorum. Et hc est caritas, qu Deum per se diligit, et proximos qui sunt capaces beatitudinis,
sicut seipsos (emphasis mine). Cited by De Koninck at In Defence of Saint Thomas, 4952. See also La
primaut du bien commun, 1921, where De Koninck cites this same passage to argue that we only love the
supernatural common good with a love of diffusion rather than possession (i.e., generously rather than
selfishly) when we will beatitude for our fellow man taken as a citizen of the celestial City, rather than simply as man.
Exactly how De Koninck makes the leap from St. Thomass text (which is simply arguing the very obvious point
that to embrace and reserve the public patrimony for ones own does not count as loving the common good) to
the claim that it is somehow selfish to desire ones fellow man as man to receive beatitude is, however, unclear. See
below.
198 In Defence of Saint Thomas, 63: The love of a good which presupposes our neighbor and which
radically and formally proceeds from this presupposition alone, is not a love of our neighbor, for the sake of God,
but for the sake of our neighbor. This love may be generous, but . . . when thus isolated it has formally nothing to
do with the divine common good prout est beatitudinis objectum.

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rather less straightforward, and deeply revealing. The argument is that such a love would involve
placing self above God because
(a) friendship for individuals, in Aristotles time-honored phrase, proceeds ex
amicabilibus ad seipsum,199 such that it is always lesser than love of self; but
(b) any proper good is always subordinated to the person for whom it is willed;200 hence
(c) if God is willed as a proper good for a friend who is loved as an individual, it follows
that God is doubly subordinated to self (i.e., He is subordinated to an already
subordinate good).201
Assuming the validity of these arguments, the only way for De Koninck to establish a way of
loving our neighbor out of charity without elevating ourselves above God is via the claim that
to love God qua Supreme Good just is to love God qua Common Good, and that this in
turn just is to love God ut permaneat et diffundatur. To love God simply as the supreme,
transcendent Beauty that ravishes my intellect, without introducing into His very root-oflovability the note of commonness (where to love X qua common includes the desire that Xs
potential commonness be actualized, diffundatur) is not to love God at all: by cutting off
charity to neighbor, it cuts off love for God in His true transcendence, since love for God in
that transcendence just is charity to neighbor.202 So runs the reasoning.

Aristotle Nic. Eth. IX.4.1166a12: , ,

(cited as part of this argument by De Koninck at In Defence of Saint Thomas,
62). Cf. ibid., IX.8, especially 1168b19.
199

See In Defence of Saint Thomas, 77: No created person dare think of the divine good as ordered to himself
(which he most certainly should do if God were his proper good) but must rather see himself as ordered to God
(emphasis mine).
200

201

Ibid., 62.

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 51: Unless we love God secundum se, ut permaneat et diffundaturand
this means to love Him as a common good, we simply do not love Him by charity. We must love the universal good
202

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Now, one might object to this reasoning on the relatively simple grounds that there is no
need to insist on identity between loving God as Supreme Good and loving God as Common
Good to achieve the desired results: it would be enough to say that the latter follows necessarily
from the former, such that if I love God on account simply of His transcendent beauty (root-oflovability), then I will also want that beauty to be disseminated and glorifiedbut in a logically
subsequent step, and one which does not require making the counterintuitive claim that
commonness itself is the feature that attracts my love.203 There are, however, at least four
reasons why De Koninck does not accept this separation, and insists that to love God as the
Highest Good just is to love Him as diffusively common. Of these, the most immediately
important is the one I will discuss in the next section: De Konincks notion of the relative
priority of the different kinds of finality, specifically of the finis cuius gratia vs. the finis cui, and his
understanding of the term good. The other three reasons provide the foundation, I think, for
this first reason; I will discuss them in section 6.204

5. The fallacy of subordinating beneficiary-good to benefit-good in love of neighbor

Beginning with the first, one should immediately notice something strange about claim
(b) above, the claim that only proper goodsnot common goodsare ordered to their
recipients. What in the world could it mean for a recipient to be ordered to a received goodas a common good, otherwise we shall not truly love the universal good; we shall love it merely ut habeatur et
possideatur, that is, in the manner in which etiam mali illud bonum concupiscunt (emphasis mine).
203 Indeed, the reader will have probably noticed that the jump from loving God on account of His
communicability to loving God with the desire that He be communicated looks suspiciously like a surreptitious switch
in the kind of finality involved.
204 The third of these three, which has to do with self-love, not only provides a reason for supporting De
Konincks prioritization of the benefit-good over the beneficiary-good (which is in turn, I am arguing, the main
reason why De Koninck cannot accept the separation of the formalities of Supreme Good and Common
Good), but also is at work in premise (a) of his argument above, p. 86.

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for-it? If to be ordered to X means to be for the sake of X, then it is always the case that a
benefit-good (finis cuius gratia), as such, will be ordered to its beneficiary (its finis cui). Even
when a consummately noble good is received by a much less noble recipient (for example, a
saintly woman who is married to a cruel, selfish husband), it is still the case that, insofar as she
benefits him by her beauty and holiness, it is she who is ordered to himeven though she is
intrinsically of a higher order than he, and is more deserving of being the beneficiary than he is.
Now, to be sure, there is indeed a sense of being ordered to X which does not mean being for
the sake of X, but rather means simply to have ones desires oriented to X (or, more
narrowly and teleologically, to have ones desires naturally oriented to being perfected by X); but
this sense would apply equally to all classes of benefit-goods (fines cuius gratia), not just to the
common ones.
Moreover, on these same lines, there is the decidedly odd talk of desiring that the
common good, this common finis cuius gratia, permaneat et diffundatur for its own sake. What in
the world does this mean? Now there certainly are many common goods in causandoexquisite
churches, pristine vistas, (possibly205) profound truthswhich I can and do wish to be preserved
and made accessible to all. First, however, it should be noted that I have this very same ut
diffundatur desire for beautiful things which cannot be made public, such as friendships, or
virtue, which are common to the whole society only in praedicandoand which hence are useless
for De Koninck, since for him the bonum commune in praedicando cannot be the object of love.206
But secondly, and much more importantly, we must remember that while, on one level, I do
indeed wish that these things be preserved and made manifest for the sake of their beauty (i.e.,

205

I am not entirely sure whether a good this abstract should be regarded as numerically one.

206

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 62; cf. ibid., 56 and 60.

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because they are noble rather than useful goods), there is a much more important level on which
I wish this for the sake of those who are to enjoy them, and wish it thus necessarily, simply
because these are essentially benefit-type, not beneficiary-type, goods. De Koninck, rather
curiously, seems to have made the mistake of Dietrich von Hildebrand, of all peoplea genuine
personalist if ever there was one, and, unlike Maritain, one not committed to Thomism. Von
Hildebrand was of the opinion that one could wish beautiful things to endure for their own sake,
even apart from any reference to a beholder;207 and similarly, De Koninck appears to be holding
that we can and, indeed, are morally bound to want common goods to endure and increase
without having rooted this desire in any prior friendship-love for persons. The only possible
conclusion from thisif one agrees with St. Thomas (and with common sense) that a
beneficiary of some sort is one of the two logically necessary terms of the act of love and that,
moreover, it is the primary, foundational oneis that for De Koninck our friendship-love is
directed to the beautiful common thing itself, precisely as benefit-good. Now, this is not totally
absurd; as we mentioned above, it seems right to say that we can have an analogical friendshiplove for non-rational beings that we would normally think of as benefit-goods, insofar as they
still have some sort of natural appetite to receive their own proper goods.208 This weak analogue

The Nature of Love, 102: The existence of everything having value [which in von Hildebrands terminology is
roughly equivalent to honestas or nobility] is objectively gladdening. . . . It is objectively gladdening that there exist
great works of art. . . . One could object that this quality of the objectively gladdening even in the mentioned
examples is only something potentially gladdening for persons. . . . This objecting is surely valid in many of the cases
in which we speak of gladdening and saddening events . . . [b]ut in no way does that mean that there is not also an
entirely objective quality of gladdening and saddening in events. For the broader principle involved, see ibid.,
36: In value-response the object and its importance is itself the theme: I ought to give it an adequate response for its
own sake (emphasis mine). This is true, of course, inasmuch as a valuable or honest good is indeed good in
itself, rather than merely deriving its goodness from its satisfaction of our needs as a bonum utile would; but, insofar
as it is still an essentially a secundum quid, concupiscible good, it still remains for our sake in a much deeper and
more important sense.
207

208 See section 2 of this chapter and its discussion of ST II-II.25.3even despite the fact that St. Thomas does
say in II-II.23.1 (Editio Leonina 8:163b) that ridiculum enim est dicere that someone has friendship-love for a
horse.

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of friendship-love, however, is certainly not capable of being the chief driving factor in our love
for God or neighbor! It would seem, then, that our friendship-love for the Blessed cannot be
logically posterior to our desire that the common goodtaken as benefit-goodshould be made
manifest to them.
But is it necessary to take it as benefit-good here? Could one not argue that, while indeed
De Koninck may have been wrong to lay it down as a general principle that the diffusion of all
common goods (most of which are strictly benefit-goods) should be loved for their own sake, it
nonetheless works perfectly well in the case of God here under consideration? Is He not indeed
an eminently personal good, and hence eminently capable of being instead a beneficiary-good, the
object of friendship-love (and does not St. Thomas indeed define charity precisely as an amor
amicitiae209)? Is not this desire that He permaneat et diffundatur precisely what is meant by
desiring His glory, which is the obvious central expression of our friendship-love for Him in
charity?
Now, there is at least a case to be made that this is, in fact, what St. Thomas means. In
ST II-II.25.11, for example, St. Thomas distinguishes between two ways to love something out
of charity: with friendship-love, and as the good of another (essentially, a reiteration of the
friendship-love/concupiscence-love distinction in the specific context of charity). The former
way does not apply to non-rational goods; however, we can indeed desire out of charity that
non-rational goods permaneant in the second way, as the good of another (i.e., with
concupiscence-love), where the another is either God, through glorifying Him, or our fellow

209

See ST II-II.23.1 (Editio Leonina 8:16364), et passim in the Treatise on Charity.

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man, through serving him.210 It seems reasonable to me then to assume that when St. Thomas
says, in the passage from QD de car. 2 quoted by De Koninck, that the right, non-malicious way
to love the common good (where common good seems to mean common treasure or
patrimony) is to do so secundum se, ut permaneat et diffundatur, he means this
permaneat in the second sense just described, i.e., clearly for the sake of the finis cui, whether it be
God or man. Amare X secundum se, by this reading, would not mean to love X for its own
sake (the normal Latin rendering of which would in any case have been propter se) but rather
to love X in the way fitting to it, i.e., in the public way in which public treasures were clearly
designed to be received; by loving X in this way, we would be loving it secundum se but propter
alterum, namely its receivers.211 This would apply not only to things like landscapes and churches
but also even to God taken as benefit-goodthe greatest of benefit-goodsfor our fellow
man.212 But this would not, of course, be the primary way of charity-loving God; rather, the
primary way to do so would be to desire His glory for His sake, since His external glory (namely
the manifestation of His beauty to the world and His possession of its hearts) is the only thing

210 ST II-II.25.11, Editio Leonina 8:207a: Aliquid ex caritate diligitur dupliciter. Uno modo, sicut ad quem
amicitia habetur. . . . Alio modo diligitur aliquid sicut quod volumus permanere ut bonum alterius, per quem
modum ex caritate diligimus irrationales creaturas, inquantum volumus eas permanere ad gloriam Dei et utilitatem
hominum, ut supra dictum est.
211 It is also important to note that, in the QD de car. 2 passage, St. Thomasunlike De Koninckdoes not
contrast loving the common good secundum se with loving the common good for the sake of the citizens. Rather, he
contrasts it only with loving the common good so that I may possess it, which would be morally wrong no matter
whether the foundation of its virtuous counterpart was love-for-the-citizens or love-for-their-good. Even if De
Konincks interpretation of the expression secundum se were true, then, it would at best be only implicit in the
text.
212 The root-of-lovability that moves us to love our neighbor with this friendship-love, on this reading, would
be (a) the fact that our divine Beloved loves him (since one of the best ways to please ones beloved is to extend
ones love to those whom that beloved loves), and (b) the fact that our neighbor (at least if he has Gods grace in
him) shares with us this love for and delight in the divine Beloved, since of all possible foundations for friendship
this is the greatest.

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our friendship-love for Him can possibly give Him.213 In the case of God, then, we would desire
His beauty to be made manifest both out of friendship-love for Him directly, as the greatest way
of praising Him, and indirectly, inasmuch as He is the greatest benefit-good to those whom we
friendship-love out of our friendship-love for Him. Ordinary non-personal common goods,
however, would be loved only out of friendship-love for their recipients.
If this were what De Koninck meant, then, I would support him wholeheartedly.
Unfortunately, he rather explicitly holds the opposite. For him, it is a plain fact that the finis cui,
the beneficiary-good, draws his dignity from its proper benefit-goodnot vice versa. Thus, in La
primaut du bien commun, he claims it is false to say that
la crature raisonnable existe pour la dignit de son tre propre et quelle est ellemme la dignit pour laquelle elle existe. Elle tire sa dignit de la fin laquelle elle
peut et doit atteindre; sa dignit consiste en ce quelle peut atteindre la fin de
lunivers, la fin de lunivers tant, sous ce rapport, pour les cratures raisonnables,
savoir, pour chacune delles.214
In other words, it is not the dignity of the beneficiary that grounds the dignity of the benefit, but
rather vice versa. Now, here too there is an element of truth: it is undeniably the case that the
dignity of rationality is precisely a dignity of being able to receive benefit-goods of the honest,
or beautiful, type. But goods of this type include music and sunsets; yet we do not say that music
and sunsets are of a greater dignity than man, or that man exists to serve them, or that man
derives his dignity from them. A benefit-good, taken as such, is by that very fact subordinated to
the dignity of its recipienteven if that same benefit-good is itself a person who has his own

213 Even here, of course, one probably cannot give anything to God directly; it is highly unlikely that God feels
any desire or need, out of friendship-love for Himself, to receive our self-sacrifice or our praise. I think, however, that it is
crucial to maintain that we can indeed give gifts to God indirectly: in other words, that God truly does desire our selfsacrifice and our praise out of friendship-love for us. See section 6B of this chapter, pp. 100105. Unfortunately,
however, this matter (touching, as it does, perilously closely on the issue of divine simplicity) is far too large to be
delved into here.
214

La primaut du bien commun, 38.

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beneficiary-dignity in his own right (as is the case in every friendship and every marriage, as well
as in the case of Gods relation to man). Yet nonetheless De Koninck continues to maintain that
the finis cui is ordered to the finis cuius gratia:
lindividualisme, [les personnalistes] opposent et recommandent la gnrosit de
la personne et une fraternit en dehors de tout bien commun, comme si le bien
commun avait son principe dans la gnrosit des personnes, comme sil ntait
pas dabord ce pour quoi les personnes doivent agir.
The point is clear: for De Koninck, friendship-love for other fines cui (i.e., generosity) does not
ground love for the common good, but rather vice versa: we love the common good, and in
loving it as it deserves we will, as a result, wish it for others, since only thus can the common
good be duly exalted.
Other examples of this abound in De Konincks work.215 Perhaps the most striking of
these, however, comes near the end of his rebuttal to Fr. Eschmann, where he is explaining what
he thinks is the methodological root of his disagreement with the personalists:
Instead of discussing the problem in terms of person and society, I
approach it in the fundamental terms of proper good and common good.
Ultimately, person and society are not to be judged by what they are absolutely,
but by what is their perfection, i.e. by what is their good; that is the only way in
which Aristotle and St. Thomas ever discussed this problem. To look upon the
absolute comparison of person and society as the most basic consideration is
distinctly modern. It is also distinctly modern to accord absolute priority to the
subject and to believe, with Spinoza (who, in this respect, follows in the
footsteps of David of Dinant) that to be absolutely is to be good absolutely,
i.e. that ens simpliciter is bonum simpliciter. . . . Finis cui becomes finis qui.
From such a point of view, the problem of person and society quite naturally
becomes the question: is the person better than society? instead of: is the proper

See, for example, In Defence of Saint Thomas, 19 (where De Koninck carefully distinguishes between the
finis cui and the final causeas though the finis cui were not a final cause in its own right, and indeed the most
important kind thereof), 51, 6263 (which we have already mentioned), 71, 85, 9395 (which we are about to
discuss), and 105, as well as La primaut du bien commun, 9, where De Koninck claims it is false to say that les autres
sont la raison de lamabilit du bien commun; au contraire, sous ce rapport formel, les autres sont aimables en tant
quils peuvent participer ce bien.
215

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good of the person better than his common good? When the problem itself has
been so distorted, what can be expected in the solution?216
In other words, to even ask the question of whom (or what) one is chiefly serving is somehow
taboo, a dangerous modern question. The dignity of the object of friendship-love, the bonum
simpliciter of ST I-II.26.4, is at best a secondary consideration, and one entirely dependent on the
real question of whether its respective benefit-good is a common or proper good. In other
words, the city is indeed greater than the personbut only insofar as the city, as such, is the
proper recipient of the common good when that good is loved in a common way, i.e., ut
permaneat ut diffundatur. It is our love for the finis cuius gratia that determines our friendship-love
for members of that City; to think otherwise is to put oneself in company with (horrors!)
Spinoza.
Now, there is certainly a reason why De Koninck holds this. The fact is that St. Thomas
has two different, indeed seemingly directly opposed, ways of dividing the good into primary
and secondary, into bonum simpliciter and bonum secundum quid. My argument hinges on one of
these two, the one from ST II-II.26.4 that aligns bonum simpliciter with the (substantial)
beneficiary-good and bonum secundum quid with the (often accidental) benefit-good; De Konincks
argument, however, hinges on the other (described, e.g., at ST I.5.1 ad 1, Editio Leonina 4:56,
and De ver. 21.5, Editio Leonina 22:605b6b), which instead aligns the bonum simpliciter with the
possession of perfective accidents (i.e., benefit-goods) and the bonum secundum quid with the
substance that possesses those accidents (i.e., their beneficiary). But are these two in fact
irreconcilable? We should note that even in the second set of texts St. Thomas never says that
the bonum simpliciter just is the perfective accident(s); on the contrary, the good simply speaking

In Defence of Saint Thomas, 93. Finis qui, it should be noted, is shorthand for finis qui desideratur, which
is a synonym for finis cuius gratia.
216

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is still the substance, but now taken as perfected by all its due accidents (including its relations of
knowledge and love to other substances).217 We are, in fact, still speaking of the nobility of the
beneficiary. St. Thomass point is simply that when we say this man is good, the principal
meaning of that statement is that the man is good as man, i.e., that he possesses the habits and is
engaged in the acts suitable to his nature; and there is no doubt that a man is betterand, hence,
more loveable with friendship-lovethe more he is bathed in perfection interior and exterior.
What this means, however, is simply that, if person X possesses a finis cuius gratia, that possession
will itself constitute an additional root-of-lovability in him, increasing his personal dignity.218 It
does not mean that the primary object of our love is the finis cuius gratia, common or otherwise. It
is not that we friendship-love X just insofar as we want the benefit-good he is receiving to be
spread far and wide (out of some strange friendship-love for that benefit qua benefit); rather, it is
out of friendship-love for him, on account of his dignitywhich was increased by his having

217 Though St. Thomas speaks only of accidents in this context, it is important not to leave a things
connections to its substantial fines cuius gratia out of the picture, as David Gallagher seems to do in limiting
concupiscence-love strictly to accidents: by Gallaghers picture, even in concupiscence-loving a thing on account of
its beauty, I still am loving only its accidents, not the thing (Person and Ethics, esp. 5963). This, I think, is to
confuse finis cuius gratia with root-of-lovability. Rather, St. Thomas makes it clear at ST I.6.3 (Editio Leonina 4:68), in
the threefold division of perfection that he gives us there, that the bonum simpliciter is itself twofold: 1) constitutive,
non-relational perfective accidents such as moral virtue, intellectual acumen and the like; and 2) relational acts of
attainment of external substances, i.e., of contemplatable fines cuius gratia. It is this second category, where the
perfective accident (finis quo) is an attainment of an external substance, that St. Thomas seems to regard as the most
ultimate of the three. (It is worth noting, too, that it is only in this second category of relational perfections that there
is a distinction between finis cuius gratia and finis quo; in the case of constitutively possessed perfections, the
attainment is simply the very inherent existence of the habit which is the finis cuius gratia.)
218 It is helpful to remember that the root-of-lovability is not, properly speaking, what is loved, but rather that
through which something is loved (either with friendship or with concupiscence); like concepts, it can be thought of as
a lens. I do not concupiscence-love flavor, but rather the food which is flavored; I do not friendship-love courage,
but rather fellow soldiers who are courageous. Similarly, I do not love my friends possession of the finis cuius gratia,
but rather I love my friend because of this possession.

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acquired new fines cuius gratiathat we will continue to wish him to receive more and yet greater
benefit-goods.219

6. Key background assumptions behind De Konincks position

Ultimately, however, I think there are three still deeper reasons why De Koninck cannot
accept the primacy of the finis cui over the finis cuius gratia: one having to do with the meaning of
the term good itself, another having to do with the implications of divine simplicity, and a
third having to do with the psychology of self-love. We will now examine these in order,
beginning with the first.
A) The good as perfectivum
De Koninck is firmly committed to what I think is one of the less fortunately phrased of
the Scholastic axioms: that the good should be understood, primarily and above all, as quod
omnia appetunt.220 Now, this is fine so long as appetunt is taken to refer to any movement of
the appetite, including the movement of friendship-love. It lends itself, however, much too
readily to a narrower reading, namely desire or seek221which is strictly a movement of
concupiscence-love. De Konincks favorite formulation of this is drawn from De ver. 21.1,222

219 In this regard, a Christian philosopher might remember the parable of the talents (Mt 25:1430, Lk 19:12
27), according to which the more perfection one has, the more additional perfection one becomes worthy of.

This axiom has its root in the opening paragraph of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, I.1.1094a2:
, . The number of passages where St. Thomas cites this principle is too large
to note here.
220

I believe these are the most common English translations of appetunt. Seek is better than desire, but
aim at would probably be better than either, insofar as it has less of a connotation of possession.
221

222 An almost identical formulation is found in the next article, De ver. 21.2, Editio Leonina 22:596b: Cum ratio
boni in hoc consistat quod aliquid sit perfectivum alterius per modum finis, omne id quod invenitur habere
rationem finis, habet et rationem boni.

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where St. Thomas claims that primo et principaliter dicitur bonum ens perfectivum alterius per
modum finis.223 De Koninck does not hesitate to take this as a universal principle describing the
most proper and profound meaning of the term good;224 and, importantly, he takes this
perfective meaning of the good specifically in contrast with the notion of the good as
perfection.225 But this would seem to mean that the movement of friendship-love somehow
does not have the good as its object at all (except perhaps in some secondary, analogical sense),
since the root-of-lovability that grounds friendship-love as such is precisely the beloveds
perfection, not the beloveds ability to perfect us (which is the proper root-of-lovability of
concupiscence-love226). But if our chief ethical concern is to direct our wills to the good, and if
the object (or more accurately, root-of-lovability) of friendship-love is not the good properly
speaking, it would follow that friendship-love is at best a secondary consideration in right
willing.
Now, I think this is, first of all, a faulty interpretation of the texts cited from the De
veritate. In the first two articles of q. 21 (where the principle is laid down), he is simply trying to
distinguish goodness (and truth) from being, and he does so (as he does elsewhere in his
discussions of the division of the transcendentals, famously at De ver. 1.1 [Editio Leonina 22:56]
but also at ST I.5.12 and 16.3 [Editio Leonina 4:5658 and 210]) by saying that they add to the
notion of being the notion of being teleologically or perfectively related to a facultynot to a

223 This phrase is quoted numerous times in In Defence of Saint Thomas, as a key element of De Konincks
prioritization of the common finis cuius gratia; see pp. 19, 30, 5457, 59, and 75 n. 1.
224

Ibid., 55.

225

At ibid., 56, he cites De ver. 21.3 ad 2 (Editio Leonina 22:599a) in support of this.

226 Of course, if X has the ability to perfect another, it follows that X itself must be perfect, since nemo dat quod
non habet. De Koninck would just reply, however, that, while the ratio of goodness presupposes perfection, perfection
is not enough; the object must also be perfective to count as genuinely good.

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substantial whole. The finis cuius gratia is related as perfective both to the faculty of the will and
to the whole rational substance whom it benefits; but the finis cui, the object of friendship-love, is
also perfective of our wills by being related to it as one of its proper objects, even though it is
not received as a benefit-good that perfects our whole substance. The same point applies to the
contrast between perfection and perfectiveness that St. Thomas draws at 21.3 ad 2: he is
concerned there with making goodness be posterior to rather than prior to truth, and he
does so by arguing, against an objector, that both truth and goodness are perfectivebut of
our faculties, not of our selves. Presumably, perfection in this context would, for St. Thomas,
simply describe being itself. It does not, however, always do so; indeed, in the famous passage of
ST I.5.1 ad 1 [Editio Leonina 4:56], St. Thomas explicitly insists that bonum dicit rationem
perfecti (not perfectivi) and that id quod est ultimo perfectum, dicitur bonum simpliciter.
Secondly, however, and leaving exegesis aside, I think it is simply a manifest fallacy to
argue that we can only think of the good in terms of the good-for. On the contrary, it seems to
be phenomenologically obvious that (a) intrinsic perfection or nobility is what we are referring to
when we say that a person is good, and (b) that perceived goodness of this sort is, in fact, the
prime motivator of direct friendship-love.
It is not, however, the only motivator of all friendship-love; this is an important point for
securing the unity of charity. I specified direct friendship-love just now because, as I said
above, it also makes eminent sense to speak of friendship-loving a person because they are loved
by our beloved, even if we ourselves either do not know their goodness or would find them
outright unattractive on their own perceived merits (the case of in-laws perhaps being the most
classic example of this phenomenon); this, I think, one could call indirect friendship-love. I
think one also can be said to indirectly friendship-love those who are in the opposite situation,

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namely those about whom one knows nothing except that they love (rather than being loved by)
ones beloved; for part of what it means to regard ones beloved as an alter ego is to be able to put
oneself in his shoes, and this will involve experiencing the same gratitude-based love toward
those who wish him well that one would have experienced if that well-wishing had been directed
at oneself instead.
It is important to keep these two kinds of indirect friendship-love in the picture (De
Koninck does not seem to consider either of them) because they provide the only way to
maintain (a) that charity-love for God is a love for Him as finis cui (object of friendship-love)
rather than as finis cuius gratia, and yet that (b) our love for our neighbor truly deserves the name
of charity. De Koninck, as the reader might recall,227 had argued that charity-love for neighbor
had to be grounded in love for objective-beatitude-as-common (i.e., with the desire that
beatitude permaneat et diffundatur) on the grounds that the only other available optionthat of
grounding neighbor-love in generosity, i.e., in friendship-lovewould in fact not be charity at
all. This, however, would only be true if we were to limit the friendship-love/generosity ground
to direct friendship-love, i.e., to friendship-love motivated by the beloveds own intrinsic
goodness. If, on the other hand, we make love of neighbor consist in indirect friendship, we can
still say that perfection is the root-of-lovability for our loving the chief finis cui (God), but without
compromising the God-rootedness of love of neighbor; and this is, I think, exactly what St.
Thomas does in QD de car. 4, as his solution to the problem of how charity-love for neighbor
and for God can be considered to be the identical act.228

227

See above, p. 85.

228 Ed. Marietti 764a: Ex hoc enim ipso quod diligimus aliquem secundum se, diligimus omnes et familiares et
consanguineos et amicos ipsius, in quantum ei attinent; sed tamen in omnibus illis est una ratio formalis dilectionis, scilicet
bonum illius, quem ratione sui diligimus, et ipsum quodammodo in omnibus aliis diligimus. Sic igitur dicendum,

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One prong of my answer to De Koninck, then, is simply to deny his premise that the
primary sense of good is the perfectivum alterius (at least where alterius is understood to refer
to the beneficiary as a whole substance, rather than specifically to his appetitive faculty). Doing
so eliminates one of the major background assumptions that force De Koninck into the position
he holds, namely that (a) the right primary way to love God is as self-diffusive finis cuius gratia,
and that (b) the right primary to love neighbor is as a sort of logical corollary to desiring the selfdiffusiveness of that finis cuius gratia. The elimination of this assumption releases him from this
position because, if friendship-love does have the good properly speaking as its object, and if it
is indeed our primary kind of love, then it would seem that De Konincks position is no longer
the only way to keep man from becoming strictly ego-centered: Maritains middle ground
between proper good and common good becomes viable after all. Before acceding to this
conclusion, however, we must examine the other two background assumptions I mentioned
behind De Konincks position.
B) God as finis cui
The first of these De Koninck does not mention explicitly at all, so this is largely
speculation on my part; but even if he did not hold this assumption, he should have, for it is a
quod caritas diligit Deum ratione sui ipsius; et ratione eius diligit omnes alios in quantum ordinantur ad Deum: unde
quodammodo Deum diligit in omnibus proximis; sic enim proximus caritate diligitur, quia in eo est Deus, vel ut in eo sit
Deus. . . . Sed si diligeremus proximum ratione sui ipsius, et non ratione Dei, hoc ad aliam dilectionem pertineret:
puta ad dilectionem naturalem, vel politicam, vel ad aliquam aliarum quas philosophus tangit in VIII Ethic.
(emphasis mine).
Now, admittedly, one can have different interpretations of what the crucial phrase ei attingere means. I am
interpreting it as belonging to, in the sense in which a family (Aquinass example) belongs to one in the sense of
ones having a special bond of love to them, and vice versa. One could, however, still take this paragraph according
to the De Koninck interpretation if ei attingere simply means to receive (e.g., to contemplate); but this seems to
make the familiares et consanguineous et amicos example somewhat worthless. Another, more likely competitor
with my interpretation of this passage, however, would be that we love our neighbor in charity on account of his
similitude to God. (See Osborne, Love of Self and Love of God, 7475.) This option would, like mine, have the advantage
over De Konincks of keeping love of neighbor rooted in God while still being essentially finis cui-based (rather than
dependent on desiring that the finis cuius gratia permaneat et diffundatur for its own sake). Though more much
credible than De Konincks theory, though, I still disagree with this interpretation; for my reasoning on this matter,
see below.

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serious objection against my position, and an important defense of his. The presupposition in
question is that God cannot be loved as finis cuior more precisely, that we cannot will external
goods (and for our purposes here, specifically our friendship-love for our neighbor) as goodsfor-Him.229 (It is fairly uncontroversial to say that we can will Gods own intrinsic beatitude,
which He cannot lose, for Him, and to rejoice in His having it.) This question is important,
because if we cannot do so then De Koninck would again be right to say that love for neighbor
would not be charity: the indirect friendship-love mechanism I laid out, by which God and
neighbor could be loved in the same act of friendship-love, would fail if nothing outside of God
could be willed as a benefit to God. This would seem to leave De Konincks solution, namely
love of the common finis cuius gratia ut permaneat et diffundatur, as the only available option for a
God-centric love of neighbor.
In reply, one could first point out that De Konincks solution is not the only available
alternative to my indirect friendship-love solution: one can also argue that charity-love for
neighbor counts as God-centric because of the similitude to (or relation of belonging-to) God
that we perceive in our neighbor. The idea would be that, insofar as we see our neighbor
becoming God-like in the life of grace, we would friendship-love him directly precisely because
God Himself, present in our neighbor in some mysterious way, constitutes our neighbors chief
root-of-lovability. This might seem to make better sense than my indirect friendship-love
theory of Aquinass claim at QD de car. 4230 (to be found also at ST II-II.25.1, Editio Leonina
8:19798) that the reason God and neighbor are loved with the same act of love is because the

St. Thomas seems to come down fairly vigorously against the possibility of beneficentia towards God in
ST II-II.31.1 ad 1 (Editio Leonina 8:245b), although he does at least acknowledge that we can give Him our
honor and our obedience. Exactly how, and why, we want Him to receive our honor and obedience, if it is not by
way of beneficentia, is left rather unclear.
229

230

For this ideas basis in this Thomistic text, see above, n. 228.

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ratio formalis is the same.231 It also makes some phenomenological sense, since, like my
indirect friendship-love, it too is based on the well-known fact that, when one is in love,
everything connected to the beloved is in a way ennobled or glorified in our eyes, predisposing
us to benevolence to that persons family and friends. The difference from my theory would be
twofold: 1) the family and friends connection to the beloved, rather than being identified strictly
with loves and is loved by him, would be the broader and logically prior relation of shares his
life; and this broader relation would suffice because 2) my friendship-love for the beloveds
friends would not depend on my putting myself in my beloveds shoes, but rather simply on
recognizing that their sharing my beloveds life is itself, under that formality, a powerful rootof-lovability for me.
My worry with this, however, is that it seems to either slip indirect friendship-love
through the back door, or else to fail to be a genuine friendship-love for the beloved at all. Thus,
either I love my neighbor because his share in Gods life is an ennobling thing in itself, in which
case I love him in a neighbor-centric, not God-centric, way (the similitude view); or else I love
him because his share in the divine life makes him pleasing in the eyes of God, in which case I am
genuinely friendship-loving him in a God-centric way (my indirect friendship-love view).
Now, the supporter of the similitude view will say that there is a middle ground between these
two alternatives, where 1) the love for neighbor would be rooted in his similarity to God qua
similarity, not qua ennobling, but where nonetheless 2) I am not stepping into Gods shoes and
willing what He wills because that is the greatest gift I can give Him. I do not think this middle
ground exists, however; and the reason is that, as I see it, acts of friendship-love are individuated

231 At 23.1 ad 3 (Editio Leonina 8:164b) and 23.5 ad 1 (Editio Leonina 8:169b) St. Thomas only makes the
frustratingly ambiguous claim that it is the identical act of love in both cases because our neighbor is loved propter
Deum.

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not by their root-of-lovability but by their (primary) finis cuinot by what it is about my fellow
human beings that I love, but for whose sake I am loving them.232 Or to put the same point
another way, friendship-love, as I understand it, just is to see the world through the eyes of the
beloved; if my love for my beloveds friends and family does not arise from seeing them from his
point of view, as related to his happiness, then I am loving them not for his sake but for theirs.
But to desire something (namely the well-being of the beloveds friends) just because and insofar
as he desires it is precisely what is meant by willing it as a gift to him; hence, I think, my
indirect friendship-love theory is the only non-De Koninckian way to safeguard the unity of
charity.
If this is right, then my defense against De Koninck would have to show that willing X
as a gift to God is not a logical contradiction, an affront against Gods complete independence
and impassibility. This is, unfortunately, a task for another work entirely, and a much larger one
than this. The rough sketch of my answer, however, would be that this does not impinge upon
Gods independence and superabundant happiness because the gift in question would not be a
direct gift. It would still be a genuine gift, because we would be desiring for Him something that

St. Thomas mentions a problem similar to this one in ST II-II.25.1 ad 2, Editio Leonina 8:197b98a. In this
rather cryptic passage he distinguishes between honor, which for him is based upon the proper goodness of the one
being honored and is non-transferable, and love, which is based upon the beloveds goodness in communi;
because of this distinction, St. Thomas thinks it makes sense that there should be a specific kind of honor reserved
for God Himself (latria) but that love for His goodness should extend to those whose individual goodnesses are
referred (referuntur) to Gods goodness as to a common good. Now, the basic idea makes sense: you can love
someone for someone elses sake, but you cannot honor someone for someone elses sakethe honor-deserving
quality has to actually belong to the person being honored, whereas the love-deserving quality need not belong to the
person being loved but rather must merely be referred to by him. This would at first seem to indicate that the
connection to the primary beloved lies on the level of the root-of-lovability; but if this were the case I would tend to
agree with Gabriel Vasquez (Commentariorum ac disputationum in Tertiam Partem Sancti thomae tomus primus [Antverpiae:
apud Petrum et Joannem Belleros, 1621], 25.5.98.2, p. 773; cited in De Koninck, In Defence of Saint Thomas,
6566) that this passage was singularly abstruse if not outright wrong, inasmuch as it is the term of friendship-love,
not the abstract root-of-lovability involved, that identifies the love-act and gives it its individuality. (After all, I can
friendship-love both X and Y on account of their possession of the same, e.g., courageous loyalty, and yet we would
not say that this means I love both of them in the same identical act.) Rather, the only way I can see of making this
passage work is to make the common focal point for the different secondary movements of friendship-loves be
the primary finis cui itself, not its root-of-lovability (which, as De Koninck would say, is common only in praedicando).
232

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He really does not possess essentially, namely our own free wills. It need not be direct, however,
because we need not say that God wishes to possess this gift out of friendship-love for Himself,
i.e., that He desires our free wills as a good for Himself. Rather, it could be the case that He
desired our love as a good strictly for us, and this would still be entirely compatible with our
loving Him for His sakejust as a child who stays away from unhealthy food solely because he
knows his father wants him to do so is still clearly acting only out of love for his father, even
though the father himself does not benefit from the childs obedience at all.
This rough answer would still not be quite right, however. A somewhat more accurate
and more sophisticated account, I think, would be to say that the above description (by which
we can speak of gifts and offenses to God only indirectly, via His friendship-love for us) is
true so long as one is speaking of the negative level of divine sorrow: it seems obviously right to
me that God could not experience suffering except indirectly, i.e., insofar as He had, through
friendship-love, taken our sorrows and woes as His ownbut without their ever actually becoming
His own. On the positive level, however, the level of joy rather than sorrow, I think one could
say more. Just as, on the human scale, one appreciates and is warmed by the smallest gifts more,
not less, the holier and more overflowing in interior perfection one is, so it would seem that
without feeling any need or lack whatsoeverGod could still desire the gift of our free wills both
ways, i.e., both as what is best for His beloved children and as a gift to Himself. It would
certainly be the case that only the first of these two ways (namely desiring our wills for the sake
of our perfection) would motivate God in His dealings with us, just as a supremely happy and
holy person will gladly do good deeds for others entirely out of generosity, without any thought
of (much less need for) return; yet nonetheless such a supremely happy and holy man would,

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more than anyone, be able to keenly appreciate such a return, and it seems that the same would
have to be true of God.
In other words, it would seem that the greater ones intrinsic perfection and happiness,
the greater will be ones positive attitude to good things received, but the lesser will be ones
negative attitude towards the lack thereof. If this is true, then we should say that we can give
God joy both with respect to His friendship-love for us and with respect to His friendship-love
for Himself, but that we can give Him sorrow (and exercise perfect contrition for having
inflicted said sorrow) only with respect to His friendship-love for usand that this solution in no
way compromises His essential infinite actuality and superabundant beatitude. Only thus, I
think, can one ultimately make room for a friendship-love of neighbor that is genuinely part and
parcel of a friendship-love for God.
C) Self-love
There is, however, still one final, and potentially lethal, objection to be made to my claim
that it is perceived-dignity-based friendship-love, rather than concupiscence-love for a common
finis cuius gratia, that is foundational for our love for God and for society: the primacy of selflove, which is, I think, the most foundational of all the background assumptions that forbid De
Koninck from accepting a position like Maritains or mine. Unlike the previous assumption
regarding Gods impassibility, this principle does play an explicit role in De Konincks argument,
233

as indeed we saw earlier in his citation of the Aristotelian maxim that all friendship for other

See especially In Defence of Saint Thomas, 9394: The totalitarian solution is that the individual person
is ordered and subjected to society. We are inclined, in rejecting this doctrine, to swing to the opposite extreme; but
if we prescind from the common good of the persons which is the final, and therefore first cause of society, we are
left with a mere aggregate of individuals. Now, in this formal consideration, each and every one of that group could
never be more than an alter ego, and the group itself could never be more than an aggregate, a mere unum coacervatione
of alter ego's. Hence, in this perspective, the whole question of our relation to the common good and to our particular good becomes
a problem entirely different from that over which the battle has raged until now, resolving itself into the simple question: must one love
233

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individuals is derived from friendship for self234 (although he does not seem to see it as being
under contention in the argument, but merely as an important point whose relevance was missed
by his opponents); and unlike the first background assumption of the good as being strictly
perfectivum, it is fairly indubitable that Aquinas held it too.235 The difficulty this maxim
presents for my position is essentially that, if indeed
(a) man could not love another individual, taken as such, more than himself on the finis
cui level, but nonetheless
(b) the finis cui level were the foundational level for all friendship-loves, as I have been
holding, then it would follow that
(c) we would love ourselves more than neighbor or even than God; self-transcendence
would be impossible.
If one accepts premise (a) and wants to conclude instead that we do love God and the social
whole more than ourselves, then one would indeed have to deny (b) and instead say with De
Koninck that the real ground of friendship-love is on the finis cuius gratia level, in desiring the
diffusion of the common benefit-good for its own sake.
Now, it is simply an undeniable fact that St. Thomas holds (a); and he does so, as ST III.27.3 (Editio Leonina 6:194) makes clear, because for him there is another cause of love
besides perceived goodness, namely likeness or perceived closeness to oneself. As it stands,
oneself more than one's neighbour? There is not the slightest doubt that we must love ourselves more (emphasis mine). For De
Koninck, to move the discussion from the plane of the finis cuius gratia to the plane of the finis cui is a fatal mistake
precisely for this reason: on the level of the finis cui, only the self is supremeand for a Christian philosopher, the
self cannot be supreme on the primary, foundational level. Hence it follows that the primary level must be that of
the benefit-good, not that of the beneficiary-good.
See premise (a) of the De Koninckian argument against finis cui-based charity-love for neighbor, which I laid
out on p. 86.
234

235 See esp. ST I-II.27.3 (Editio Leonina 6:194), II-II.25.4 (Editio Leonina 8:199200), and II-II.26.4, esp. ad 3
(Editio Leonina 8:213). For commentary, see Gallagher, Desire for Beatitude and Love of Friendship, 2939, esp.
3334; cf. his earlier Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others.

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this principle makes excellent sense. At least by and large, we clearly love those who are closer to
us more than we love others whom we are more distant from, even when we can see that the
latter are more intrinsically noble and lovableor more precisely, to use a distinction that St.
Thomas deploys in ST II-II.26.68 (Editio Leonina 8:21417), we love those who are closer to
us more intensely, with a stronger desire that they should achieve their good (thus leaving room
for the equally clear phenomenological fact that we can recognize that those more distant from
us may deserve greater things than those near to us, and that we can desire them to achieve what
they deserve). It also would seem fairly obvious that our friendship-love towards ourselves is
more intense, more visceral, than any friendship-love we could have towards even those who
are most closely bound up with us; and as St. Thomas says in ST II-II.26.4, Editio Leonina
8:213ab (repeating a point from I.60.3 ad 2 [Editio Leonina 5:102b], II-II.25.4 [Editio Leonina
8:200b], and I-II.27.3 [Editio Leonina 6:194b]), this is simply because unitas potior est quam
unio, i.e., substantial oneness is greater and deeper than any bond of likeness could possibly be.
Hence he claims in that article that even in charity we necessarily love ourselves more than our
neighbor:
Deus diligitur ut principium boni super quo fundatur dilectio caritatis; homo
autem seipsum diligit ex caritate secundum rationem qua est particeps praedicti
boni; proximus autem diligitur secundum rationem societatis in isto bono.
Consociatio autem est ratio dilectionis secundum quandam unionem in ordine ad
Deum. Unde sicut unitas potior est quam unio, ita quod homo ipse participet bonum
divinum est potior ratio diligendi quam quod alius associetur sibi in hac
participatione. Et ideo homo ex caritate debet magis seipsum diligere quam
proximum. Et huius signum est quod homo non debet subire aliquod malum
peccati, quod contrariatur participationi beatitudinis, ut proximum liberet a
peccato.236
236 ST II-II.26.4, Editio Leonina 8:213ab. This last line is, I think, simply a mistake, though a revealing one. It
is a mistake because there is another, better reason why we should not sin even in order to free our neighbor from
sin: simply because it would go against our friendship-love for God by offending Him, not because it would go
against our friendship-love for ourselves by destroying our own reception of beatitude. Even if we loved our neighbor
more than ourselves, so long as we loved God more than either we would still not be able to sin. This is true,

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But how, then, to secure the Pauline claim (1 Cor 13:5) that charity is selfless, that caritas non
quaerit quae sua sunt? This is the articles final objection; and Aquinass answer is to quote St.
Augustine,237 who interpreted this passage to mean simply that charity puts common goods before
private ones:
sicut Augustinus dicit, in Regula, quod dicitur, Caritas non quaerit quae sua sunt, sic
intelligitur quia communia propriis anteponit. Semper autem commune bonum est
magis amabile unicuique quam proprium bonum: sicut etiam ipsi parti est magis
amabile bonum totius quam bonum partiale sui ipsius, ut dictum est. (ST IIII.26.4 ad 3, Editio Leonina 8:213b)
In other words, St. Thomas seems to have drawn a distinction between primacy on the level of
the finis cui (which belongs to the self) and primacy on the level of the finis cuius gratia (which
belongs to the common benefit-good, or goods), and assigned a sort of meta-primacy to the
second level as his way of defending the overall truth of the selflessness of charity. (Importantly,
he defends this technique by referring to the argument of the preceding article, the one that
established the primacy of our love for God Himself; the implication seems to be that the term
common goodand the corresponding term totum which defines that common goodis
being used in the same sense to establish conclusions both about love of God and love of
society.)
But is this technique not exactly the same one that De Koninck built his case on? As
soon as one accepts the premise that mans ability to transcend himself cannot be grounded in
the level of the finis cui (i.e., that the sheer dignity and lovability of others will not suffice to
enable him to love them more intensely than himself), and seeks to safeguard that ability by
however, only if willing things for Gods sake, as gifts (albeit indirect ones) to Him, is considered metaphysically
acceptable. This is why I find this oversight revealing: it seems to indicate that, although St. Thomas embraced the
notion of charity as being friendship-love for God, he still seems unwilling to come to grips with the necessary
consequences of that position, namely that God can in some sense be said to receive things from us.
237

Augustine Epistula CCXI, PL 33:963a.

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pinning it instead on our ability to love one kind of finis cuius gratia over another (namely
common over private), the question immediately becomes: why would one love the good of the
social whole over the private good? The options are limited. On the one hand, it is evident and
agreed to by all in this debate that it is not because one loves the whole as a finis cui in its own
right, since it is not a substance that can receive benefit-goods. On the other hand, by ST IIII.58.7 ad 2 (and the Aristotelian text it cites of Politics I.1.1252a710), it cannot be simply for the
utilitarian reason that the lovability of many other fines cui outweighs my love for myself in a
way in which no single other finis cui could. The only remaining option would seem to be
precisely the elaborate route traced by De Koninck, namely that of equating loving the
common good in its transcendence with loving it in its commonness, and then equating that in turn
with loving it in its diffusiveness: the idea would be that the reason why we would love common
goods as common would be because this was the only way to love them for what they truly were.
But as we saw above, De Konincks path seems to be saddled with the insoluble problem of
attributing friendship-love properties to a concupiscence-love for a benefit-good. I think, then,
that we are facing an irreconcilable tension between different strains of St. Thomass thought: on
the one hand, his commitment to his theory of the structure of love, where priority belongs to
friendship-love and its finis cui, and on the other hand his commitment to a metaphysically
necessary primacy of love of self above love of neighbor.
The same problem, I think, is present in St. Thomass arguments regarding the primacy
of our love for God, which we examined in the first chapter. This is why he has to hold that we
love God above all as the general, as the one on whom our own goodness and, more to the
point, the goodness of that which we love more than ourselves, namely the overarching wholes
of society and the universe, depends. For if one thinks about it, there are only two ways to love

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the general specifically as a common good. On the one hand, (a) we can love him on account of his
diffusiveness, i.e., in such a way that the root-of-lovability in him which attracts our love is the
very universality of his care and guidancein which case we would indeed be truly loving him
on account of something which he is in himself, but which, unfortunately, is simply not
psychologically lovable. On the other hand, (b) we can love Him simply as the chief Contributor
to the order which is what we primarily lovein which case, while this time the root-oflovability would indeed be goodness rather than commonness, as it should be, it would not
belong to him as he is in himself but rather to the good under his charge, which is what would
be the principal target of our love. To love God qua general is not synonymous, as Fr. Dewan
thinks it is, with loving Him insofar as He is the entire intelligibility of the existence and goodness
of creatures.238 To conflate the two is to conflate the universal gooduniversal in the sense of
per se or summumwith the common good taken as perfectivum alterius. To love God as He is
in Himself, we must, so to speak, transfer the locus of the root-of-lovability that we are seeking
from the good of the universe to Him; only thus can we truly be said to love Him for His own
sake. But this is impossible unless we can genuinely transcend ourselves on the level of the finis
cui, bypassing the need for an overarching finis cuius gratia.

7. Conclusion
But is it, after all, necessary for St. Thomas to maintain that we love self more than
others? I would like to conclude by offering a very brief sketch of how this might be avoided,
and what a love for the common good might then look like. The basic principle from which St.

238

Dewan, Is Thomas Aquinas a Spiritual Hedonist? 113.

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Thomas draws his conclusions is the psychologically indubitable claim that unity is a cause of
love. The crucial question is, what kind of cause? If perceived unity enters, along with goodness,
into the very object of love, such that what we love, in terms of intensity, is precisely the beloveds
closeness to us, then indeed our own self will serve as a limit to our love; and this indeed seems
to be what St. Thomas maintains in ST II-II.26.7.239 If, however, we were instead to take a
filter-model approach to unitys causal role, I think a different result might ensue. By this
approach, ones closeness to ones beloved (whether it be closeness of likeness or of
acquaintance, of shared qualities or shared life and experiences) would increase loves intensity
indirectly, by allowing the others goodness to become much more vividly impressed on us. It would
not be that we love the beloveds similarity to us as such; rather, this similarity would stoke our
love because goodness of a sort that we possess ourselves has become connatural to us, we
have become acquainted with and appreciative of its every facet. But if this is indeed the role
that unity plays in love, then there would be nothing to prevent someone from far surpassing us
in the same kind of goodness that we ourselves know and recognize; and it seems to me that in
such a case (provided there had been opportunity for close acquaintance) there would,
phenomenologically speaking, be nothing to prevent me from being more intensely drawn to
desire their good than mine. Or, to speak more precisely, there would be nothing to prevent me
from being so drawn on the rationally based level, the level which has the bonum simpliciter as its
object; for I would agree with Dietrich von Hildebrand240 and Scotus241 that we can love

Sed intensio dilectionis est attendenda per comparationem ad ipsum hominem qui diligit. Et secundum hoc
illos qui sunt sibi propinquiores intensiori affectu diligit homo ad illud bonum ad quod eos diligit, quam meliores ad
maius bonum.
239

240

The Nature of Love, 68.

Ord. IV, suppl. d. 49, qq. 910, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, trans. Allan Wolter, ed. William A. Frank
(Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1997), 156157.
241

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ourselves on two levels, a higher one which is based on perceived honest goodness in the
beloved (von Hildebrands value-response, Scotuss affectio iustitiae) and another lower one in
which perceived honest goodness does not enter into the root-of-lovability at all, but which
rather does indeed have unity as its object (von Hildebrands solidarity with one self, Scotuss
affectio commodi). Only on the higher, rationally based psychological plane would anothers vividly
perceived goodness draw me to love him more intensely than myself; but surely a Thomist
would agree that it is the level which is most fully grounded in my rationality that should count
most truly as myself.
If this filter-model is true, then it seems to me we would have a clear way to providing
a different kind of framework for common-good-based love. By this framework, the most
relevant kind of common good would not be the bonum commune in causando at all, but rather, on
the contrary, the bonum commune in praedicando: it would primarily be the qualities I shared with
others (especially my vision of the world and my deepest desires, but also qualities like a love for
a shared history and a shared culture, as well as more superficial things) that would ground my
friendship-love for othersand which would do so not as a limiting object but rather as a window
into their roots-of-lovability as bona simpliciter, as fines cui. Like the other framework that we have
spent the last hundred pages discussing, this framework would also allow for a formal rather
than a Bentham-type, merely quantitative (secundum multum et paucum) difference between
simply loving many individuals and loving the citizens of my country: for in the latter case I
would be loving them according to a certain kind of window into their intrinsic goodness, a
window which I have into all of them equally. It would allow for transcendent, self-sacrificial
love; but rather than taking the strange and, I think, ultimately unworkable step of grounding
this transcendent love in the strictly secundum quid good of an overarching shared finis cuius gratia

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which would somehow define my fellow citizens and me, it would instead ground it in the
proper foundation of the bonum simpliciter, on the level of the finis cui. And, while closeness
would indeed still play a powerful role in determining the intensity with which I would be
inclined to this self-sacrifice, such closeness would I think center largely on perceived
dependence of others upon oneself; for, phenomenologically speaking at least, it seems that a large
part of what drives home to us the intrinsic goodness of our fellow man in need is if we are
the only ones at hand who can help him. Finally, this framework would give us the tools to make
the leap from loving God as general of the good that we know and love to loving Him on
account of His own intrinsic root-of-lovability, inasmuch as our knowledge of His love and care
for what we love constitutes our deepest possible window into His intrinsic goodness.
All this is, of course, the crudest of sketches, which it would take another work entirely
to fill out. Nonetheless, it seems to me that something like such an approach would have the
advantage of securing transcendence and formal wholes without the disadvantage of pinning
them on such premises as (1) that we love the beneficiary-good for the sake of the benefit-good;
(2) that commonness is the same identical formality as goodness, and as such should call forth
our most intense love; or (3) that we can be said to love God in Himself above all things either
by a love grounded in a love for His creation or by a love of Him as emergently attained (which,
as far as I can tell, are the only two possible meanings of loving something as common in the
sense of common to many). Still, whether this criticism is ultimately justified or not, there can
at least be no doubt that the approach taken by St. Thomas and developed by De Koninck is
both a highly sophisticated and a deeply noble attempt to preserve man from being trapped in
his own ego, given the premises with which they were working.

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