Thomistic Summer Conference 2024 Lecture: Esther Berry (’23)

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“The Common Good and the Bonum Proprium of Man”

   

by Esther Berry (’23)
Franciscan University of Steubenville
Thomistic Summer Conference 2024

 

 

Throughout the Summa, there are found some questions where even the shrewdest of Christian believers might not be able to guess what Thomas’s answer is going to be, until they read the dread videtur. The article on whether we ought to love God more than ourselves is not one of those. But although it does not take much guessing to determine that Thomas Aquinas thinks we ought to love God more than ourselves, it is not as simple as it might seem to reconcile this conclusion with Thomas’s own philosophy of love, and in particular the teleological nature of man — and of man’s love. This tension is especially manifest in the second objection, which is answered in part by the Respondeo, and more thoroughly by the Ad Secundum. Here is the text of the objection:

Moreover, anything whatsoever is loved insofar as it is the proper good. But that which is the ratio for loving is loved more than that which is loved on account of this ratio, just as the principle which is the ratio for knowing, is more known. Therefore man loves himself more than any other good loved by him. Therefore he does not love God more than himself.^[1]

In the Respondeo, Thomas simply claims that all creatures in the world love God more than themselves, explaining:

Each part naturally loves the common good of the whole more than its own particular good. This is evidenced by its operation, since the principal inclination of each part is towards common action conducive to the good of the whole. It may also be seen in civic virtues whereby sometimes the citizens suffer damage even to their own property and persons for the sake of the common good.^[2]

If this is the case on the natural level, Thomas explains, so much more will it be true on the supernatural level. In his specific response to the objection, he says:

The part does indeed love the good of the whole as is fitting to a part, not however so as to refer the good of the whole to itself, but rather itself to the good of the whole.^[3]

At first glance, it may not be clear that these passages constitute a response to the objection at all. The real force of the difficulty seems to be missed somehow. What is the philosophical point of contact between the objection and Thomas’s answer?

I propose that the core of the objector’s claim is that the bonum proprium of man is nothing other than those goods which are “referred to” him, and that in his response, Thomas shows that this false identification must give way as soon as we affirm that the good proper to man, as to all creatures, is the common good. In this paper I first explain the meaning of the objection, its full argumentative force, and the general philosophical outlook that it reflects. Second, I recapitulate the Respondeo, and discuss two different ways it could be understood to address the objector’s claims. I will explain why one of these is a “naive reading” of Thomas’s response, which shares the same understanding of the relation between the bonum proprium and the common good that the objector has, and as a result fails to sufficiently answer the objection. Finally, I describe what I believe Thomas’s response to the objection actually consists in: how it pinpoints just where the objector goes astray, and corrects his view by instituting a more mature vision of the bonum proprium and how exactly it relates to the common good.

First it is necessary to explain just what the objector means. Why does he think it is absurd, almost by definition, for us to love other things more than ourselves? The objector is getting his terminology straight from Thomas. Many passages, especially in the Contra Gentiles and the Compendium spring to mind. Here’s a passage from the Compendium:

But the proper good of anything whatsoever is that which perfects itself: for we say that anything whatsoever is good insofar as it attains its proper perfection. Insofar as it lacks the good, so far it lacks its proper perfection, whence it follows that everything desires its own perfection, whence also man naturally desires perfection.^[4]

So all things seek their own perfection, whatever perfection makes sense for them. For instance, animals are really only capable of loving the kinds of things that are proper for animals; beetles do not desire eternity, because individual eternal survival is not a perfection for a beetle. Practically, then, this means that the natural aspirations of each creature are limited in scope, since the measure of what they have an affinity for is their own potential perfection. Now according to the objector, this implies that man loves everything else on account of himself, since anything else is loved only insofar as it is perfective for him — that is, insofar as it is his very own bonum proprium. Just as I might love food because it nourishes me and I want it to nourish me because I love myself, so is it with each and every object of love. But if I love food because I love myself, this implies that I love myself more. Thus, man loves himself more than anything.

This comes across as a very Thomistic argument, at least in its premises. So it is extremely interesting that Thomas himself does not in fact take this position.

His response is in two parts: the Respondeo, where he addresses the question head on, and then the response to objection two, where he deals more precisely with the objector's own logic. Instead of beginning with his response to the second objection, I will first discuss the Respondeo as it intersects with the objector’s argument. The reason for this is that in this article, as in most, the particular answer to an objection is not what we might consider a “stand-alone argument”. Rather, it is a particular application of the logic found in the Respondeo to a certain case, which presupposes that the reader has read and understood the corpus of the article. (This is why the Respondeo comes first, and why the responses to objections are often very short, or sometimes omitted entirely.)

If Thomas doesn’t agree with the objector, what does he think? He thinks that the key to understanding a love that transcends the self is the common good. Thus in the Respondeo he responds that not only is it possible through the supernatural virtue of charity to love God more than ourselves, but it belongs to the natural order as well. To love God more than self is the vocation of rocks and vegetables, as well as saints.

We know this because we see that any time something is a part of a greater whole, it always acts for the sake of that whole; that is, it always acts for the sake of the common good. This would be true of the parts of the body, for instance, or of a termite colony. But it also is true in the political sphere, where the parts are not “merely” parts, but real substances of their own. We see that even persons are willing to give up their possessions and their safety and even their lives for the good of their family or community. Therefore, it has to be the case that people are capable of loving the common good more than they love themselves; otherwise we wouldn’t see them give up their lives for it.

All of this is evidence against the objector’s conclusion, but does it challenge his premises? Does it indicate to us where his argument is weak? I think it does, although the way it does so is a little counter-intuitive.

Let us revisit the objector’s logic. To put it very simply, it is like this. 

1. I only love anything insofar as it is my proper good.

2. This means I love it on account of myself.

3. This means that I love myself more than anything else I love.

And then the conclusion is of course that I must love myself more than God.

There are two ways to understand how the Respondeo’s treatment of the common good constitutes a response to this argument.

The first of these is what I have dubbed the “naïve reading”, but perhaps it’s more fair to call it the intuitive reading. This to take the common good as evidence against the first premise: that I love something insofar as it is my proper good. In this reading, Thomas brings up the common good as a counterexample, something that we love that isn’t our bonum proprium. According to this reading, all proper goods are loved on account of myself. But God is not only my proper good; he is good for many other creatures, and that makes him a common good. Because God is good for many, I may reasonably love him more than I would love something that is merely good for me. When I love something that is only good for me, that is called my bonum proprium. On this reading, Thomas and the objector are both understanding the bonum proprium to be the same as the bonum privatum — a private good.

There are several problems with this answer to the objection. The first is that the objector’s claim that we love things only insofar as they are our proper goods is not only observational, but, so to speak, a priori. It proceeds directly from a Thomistic understanding of love. According to Thomas, to love something means to desire it for my own perfection. I cannot through any nobility of spirit choose to desire it insofar as it is someone else’s proper good, let alone the sum of the proper goods of everything in the universe, because I am only a single creature. Perhaps a thing is better for me if it happens to also be good for other creatures (e.g. it eases my conscience about loving it so much), but nonetheless it must always be loved as it is my bonum proprium. So to dispense with the objector’s premise that we love all things insofar as they are our proper good amounts to throwing out Thomas’s whole metaphysics of love.

The second problem is this: even if the objector was in fact mistaken about everything being loved insofar as it is a bonum proprium, the problem is only pushed back further. If God is loveable not merely because he is my good, but because he is the good of all the creatures in the universe, then the objector’s logic still holds, albeit in a modified way. God must be loved less than all the creatures in the universe, whose summed proper goods are the ratio for my loving God. It remains impossible to love God most of all.

So what is the correct reading of the Respondeo? The other possibility is this: the real bonum proprium of man IS the common good. They are not opposed to each other, as both the objector and the naïve responder both believe. To see the identity between them requires understanding that the proper good is different from the private good; the private good is essentially opposed to the common good, whereas the proper good is not. The weak premise in the objector’s argument is therefore the claim that loving my proper good means loving it on account of myself.

This fits with what Thomas says in the ad secundum. The way he puts it is like this. It is true, he says, that the part must love in a way that is conveniens — fitting — for the part. (I take this to mean that he agrees with the first part of the objector’s claim, that everything is loved insofar as it is a proper good.) So if I am a part, I have to love things insofar as they’re proper goods for me — that is, I must love in a way that is appropriate to myself as a part.

But the point of disagreement is this: the objector thinks that “fitting for a part” means that everything is reduced to the private interest of the part, it is “referred” to the part, the part itself is the ratio for loving. (If you are the IT guy at a company, you can only care about things said at the meeting that refer to IT. Things said about the good of the company as a whole, for example, must not interest you.). Thomas, on the other hand, thinks that because the part is defined in terms of the whole, the interests and desires of the part MUST be referred to the whole. A part, no matter how small it is, is not a universe unto itself, it is not isolated. And so of course we see the phenomena he describes in the Respondeo — of course we see that parts act for the good of the whole — that makes perfect sense, given their nature as parts. Actually, to act exclusively for their own sake doesn’t make any sense at all; that is the kind of behavior that you would expect from a whole and not a part.

To put it another way, the objector has a very definite understanding of what it means to call a good “mine”, and Thomas turns that understanding on its head. For Thomas, the bonum proprium is not a petty private interest simply on account of it being proprium; in other words, “my good” is not entirely referred to me just because it is “mine”. In his account, “my good” is not fully expressed in phrases like “my food” or “my drink”; its true meaning comes out in phrases like “my vocation”, or even “my destiny”. What is properly ours to love is not something for us to consume, but something that will consume us.

Before offering final thoughts on the importance of this article for an authentically Thomist teleology, let us return to the account of the “naive reading”. Why did I dedicate so much time in this paper to discussing a wrong interpretation of Thomas?

It’s important to understand the naive answer to this objection because it’s in many ways the intuitive answer. The objector posits that the proper good of man is essentially selfish; it places its subject at the center of things, in such a way that transcendent, self-sacrificial love would be impossible. And it turns out that it is difficult, in some ways counterintuitive, to understand how the good that is proper to you could be at the same time beyond you, bigger than you. It is much easier to tacitly agree with the objector’s ultimatum and either accept that man is inherently self-centered, or else discard Aquinas’s entire metaphysics of love. Sometimes this is done explicitly, as in the case of scholars that reject a Thomistic teleology because it seems too selfish. But sometimes it is done implicitly, by scholars who wholeheartedly embrace what might be called a “selfish teleology”, and yet don’t see it as a threat to our love for God.^[5]

This happens because it is easy to understand that Thomas’s doctrine of God as the common good is a safeguard against selfishness. However, it is important not only to understand both the teleological nature of man and the common good, but to grasp also the interplay between them. If he fails to see the true identity between the proper good and the common good, then the Thomist who is accused of supporting a “selfish” teleology will find himself either supporting the objector’s position, or else only being armed with a vague notion that it can’t be as bad as all that, because Thomas also says we love the common good. But to merely hold the common good as a counterexample to selfishness, without understanding how it synthetically merges with man’s teleology, ultimately fails to answer the objection.

For Aquinas, the common good is not a “balance” or a counterexample to man’s natural desire for his proper good; rather, they are necessarily interlinked. Creatures are not “private” things; they are not self-sufficient; God is in a way in the definition of every created being. And because being and goodness are convertible, if a creature’s being is referred to God, so is its goodness.

This paper is a relatively narrow study of one particular article in Aquinas, but obviously it’s my own conviction that this text was worth considering in depth. I have two reasons.

First, the objector’s position is one which is frequently attributed to Thomas himself — unfairly, and also to Thomists — sometimes fairly. Many scholars are unfriendly to a teleological vision of man precisely because it seems selfish, and Thomists should be able to defend Thomas’s authentic position on the matter, instead of implicitly or explicitly accepting the objector’s ultimatum between the bonum proprium and the common good.

But secondly, and more importantly, every reflective human being will at some point face the vertigo of their own smallness in the face of a massive and complex universe. This experience presents this question: what is proper for us, in light of our smallness? What is conveniens to our situation? The objector would say that we ought to know our place, mind our own petty interests, and not pretend that we can transcend ourselves in love or ambition. But for Thomas it is different. The loftiest love of all is in fact the love proper to the creature; it is the inevitable determination of nature to its “proper good” — or, to put it simply, “my good”. Even the smallest, dustiest corner of the universe serves as a vantage point to look out at the stars and whole-heartedly will the good of the cosmos.

 

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