SOURCE: "Aquinas on Faith and Goodness" in Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology, edited by Scott Mac-Donald, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 179-207.

[In the following essay, Stump explains Aquinas's theory of the will and its relationship to the intellect, faith, and goodness; frames objections to Aquinas's accounts; and responds to those objections.]

1. Introduction

Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them.¹ Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the foundation of a rational noetic structure.² This sort of work has been useful in drawing attention to significant issues in the epistemology of religion, but these approaches to faith seem to me also to deepen some long-standing perplexities about traditional Christian views of faith.

First, if there is an omniscient and omnipotent God, why would he want human relationships with him to be based on faith? Why wouldn't he make his existence and nature as obvious and uncontroversial to all human beings as the existence of their physical surroundings is?³ Second, why should having faith be meritorious, as Christian doctrine maintains it is? And why should faith be supposed to make acceptable to God a person whom God would otherwise reject?⁴ Finally, why is it that epistemological considerations seem to play so little role in adult conversions? Anecdotal evidence suggests that in many cases conversion to religious belief is not at all the result of the judicious weighing of evidence or a consideration of the requirements of rationality. We might be inclined to account for this state of affairs by supposing there to be some sort of epistemological inadequacy or defect on the part ofthose being converted. But such a quick and familiar assessment seems blind to an interesting feature of some kinds of conversion stories with which we are all familiar: it is not the case that the person undergoing the conversion weighs epistemological con-siderations but in an insufficient or confused way; rather, the person undergoing the conversion does not take epistemological considerations into account at all.

These questions suggest that epistemological considerations alone don't do justice to the nature of faith, that more than epistemology is needed to complete the account. Such an additional element in faith was commonly discussed in the works of medieval philosophers and theologians. In this essay I look at Aquinas's account of the nature of faith in order to show something about this other, often unexamined side of faith. At first hearing, Aquinas's account of faith may strike us as implausible and philosophically problematic. I first present his account and then discuss some of the problems it raises. After that I consider the sort of response Aquinas's account provides to the questions concerning faith just raised.

2. Aquinas's Understanding of the Will

Because Aquinas's account of faith assigns an important role to the will, it is helpful to begin with a brief discussion of Aquinas's understanding of the nature of the will. Aquinas's conception of the will is different from the one most of us take for granted. He understands the will not as the neutral steering capacity of a person's psyche, but as a particular bent or inclination. On his view, the will is an innate hunger, a natural appetite, for goodness. By 'goodness' here, Aquinas means goodness in general and not this or that specific good thing. Determining that this or that particular thing (or event or state of affairs) is in fact good is not the business of the will, but rather of the intellect.⁵ The intellect presents to the will as good certain things or states of affairs, under certain descriptions. (It is important to emphasize that these representations of the intellect need not be rational or well thought out; they need not even be explicit or conscious. They may be only tacit or implicit, and not in any way conscious, and still count as the reason for a person's willing what she does, if she would refer to those representations in explaining her act of will.) The will wills the things represented as good by the intellect because the will is an appetite for the good and they are apprehended as good. For this reason, the intellect is said to move the will not as an efficient cause moves but as a final cause does, because what is understood as good moves the will as an end.⁶

(This line of approach may strike some people as implausible, perhaps in part because their introspection seems to them to reveal more of a unity than Aquinas's division into intellect and will suggests. Introspection is, of course, a notoriously unreliable guide when it comes to the details of cognitive organization or functioning. That the capacity for semantics and the capacity for syntax are not part of one and the same cognitive capacity is not something readily noticeable on the basis of introspection, for example, and yet that they are not is indicated by the radical difference between Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia. Having said so much, however, I should also make clear that Aquinas stresses the unity of the agent. Just as neither Broca's area nor Wernicke's area of the brain is sufficient by itself for full functioning as regards language, so neither will nor intellect by itself can function as a person does. Rather, will and intellect are components of a single person, whose functioning as a person is dependent on the joint and interactive functioning of both will and intellect. As long as we are clear on this score and not inclined to identify will and intellect with innerhomunculi, we can with equal appropriateness speak of a person's willing something or his will's willing that thing, of a person's understanding or of his intellect's understanding. In this respect we will be in line with current linguistic convention that permits such locutions as 'The hippocampus constructs, stores, and reads cognitive maps.')

On Aquinas's view, the will wills some things by necessity. Because it is a hunger for the good, whatever is good to such an extent and in such a way that a person cannot help but see it as good, the will wills by natural necessity. One's own happiness is of this sort, and so it is not possible for a person to will not to be happy. But even those few things (such as obedience to God's commands, on Aquinas's view) that, independent of circumstances, have a necessary connection to happiness aren't for that reason alone willed necessarily. The willer might not be cognizant of their necessary connection to happiness,⁷ or it might be the case that they could be thought of under descriptions (such as unenlightened fundamentalism, in the case of obedience to God's commands) that obscure the connection to happiness. And something of the same sort can be said for the things a person might mistakenly suppose to have a necessary connection with her happiness (such as winning a figure-skating competition she has trained many months for). Because these things are in fact not necessary for happiness, they can always be thought of under other descriptions (such as distraction from her long-term goal of becoming a doctor) that sever their connection to happiness. They are therefore not willed necessarily either. Consequently, except for happiness and those things so obviously connected with happiness that their connection is overwhelming and indubitable, the will is not determined to one thing because of its relation to the intellect.

What the intellect determines with respect to goodness is somewhat complicated because the intellect is itself moved by other things. In particular, the will moves the intellect as an efficient cause, by willing it to attend to some things and to neglect others.⁸ (The psychological act accompanying the common locution 'I don't want to think about it' is an example of what Aquinas has in mind here.) Second, the passions, such as wrath and fear, can influence the intellect, because to a person in the grip of such a passion something may seem good which wouldn't seem good to him if he were calm.⁹ The intellect, however, isn't compelled by the passions in any way but can resist them,¹⁰ for example, by being aware of the passion and correcting for its effects on judgment, as one does when one decides to leave a letter written in anger until the next morning rather than mailing it right away.

On Aquinas's views, the will cannot in general be constrained to move in a particular way be something outside the willer, because (with the exception of one's own happiness and divine goodness as seen in the beatific vision) no matter what object is presented to the intellect, it is open to the intellect to consider it under some description that makes it seem not good. So, for example, the further acquisition of money can be considered good under the description means of sending the children to school and not good under some other description, such as wages from an immoral and disgusting job. On the other hand, it is still possible for the will not to will even things that are clearly and obviously good, because it is always in a person's power not to think of such things and consequently not to will them actually. That is, it is open to the will not to will such things by willing that the intellect not attend to them. (Of course, if the will does so, on Aquinas's account, it is in virtue of some representation on the part of the intellect that doing so is good, at that time, under some description.)

It is apparent, then, that on Aquinas's account of the will, it is part of a complicated feedback system, composed of will, intellect, and the passions, and set in motion by the nature of the will as a hunger for the good.¹¹

3. Aquinas's Account of Faith

On Aquinas's view of the relation between intellect and will, intellect clearly has a role to play in all acts of the will. But he also holds that will has a role to play in most, though not all, acts of intellect. That this is so can be seen just from his account of the nature of the will, where he maintains that the will can command the intellect to attend or not to attend to something. But will also enters into acts of intellect in another way, because cognitive assent (that is, acceptance of a proposition or set of propositions) is part of many intellectual acts, and assent of certain sorts pertains to the will.¹²

According to Aquinas, intellectual assent (assensus) can be brought about in different ways. Assent to a proposition (about the existence of an entity, the occurrence of an event, or the obtaining of a state of affairs) can be brought about entirely by the object of the intellect (the entity, event, or state of affairs being cognized). Aquinas gives as examples cases in which a person assents to first principles, where the object is known directly, and cases in which a person assents to the conclusions of demonstrations, where the object is known on the basis of other propositions.¹³ In either of these sorts of cases, the object of the intellectual act moves the intellect by itself and by itself produces intellectual assent to one thing rather than another. In such cases Aquinas maintains that the object of. the intellectual act is sufficient to move the intellect to assent. By this expression he seems to mean that the agent is at that time in an epistemic state in which, as a result of his cognitive relation to the entity, event, or state of affairs being cognized, it is natural and easy for him to assent to a certain proposition and difficult or even psychologically impossible for him not to assent. (A person in this epistemic state might assign a high probability to the proposition he accepts, but he need not. In Trollope's Barchester Towers Eleanor Bold considers the following propositions: [I] she will marry Mr. Slope, [2] she will marry Mr. Stanhope, [3] she will marry Mr. Arabin, and [4] she will marry none of the three. Given her introspection, her observations of Arabin, and her background knowledge, she finds it difficult not to believe [3], but as she herself knows, she is not in a position to assign even a probability of. 5 to that proposition.) As an ordinary example of a case in which the object of the intellectual act is sufficient to move the intellect, consider a mother who, whether she wants to do so or not, finds herself assenting to the proposition that the judge dislikes her son's performance in the piano recital because of the way the judge behaves as he listens, his movements and facial expression.

In other cases, however, intellectual assent is obtained in a different way, because the intellect is moved to assent not by its object but by the will, which assents to one proposition rather than another on the basis of considerations sufficient to move the will but not the intellect. Considerations are sufficient to move the will when an agent is at that time in a volitional state in which, as a result of his cognitive and conative relation to the entity, event, or state of affairs being cognized, it is natural and easy for him to form a desire or volition for something and difficult or even unthinkable for him not to form it. In such a case there are considerations presented to the intellect, but by themselves they are not sufficient to move the intellect to assent to a proposition. That the intellect does assent in those circumstances is a function of the will's influence. (How exactly the will, the intellect, and thepassions [or desires] are related in a case in which the will brings it about that the intellect assents is beyond the scope of this discussion. For present purposes I will suppose that for Aquinas if a person accepts a belief largely in consequence of the will's action either alone or in conjunction with any of the many ways in which desires influence beliefs, that acceptance would count as a case of the will's bringing about intellectual assent.) For example, the mother might believe that the judge takes bribes, and her belief might result not from overwhelming evidence against the judge but from some evidence combined with her dislike of the man, so that the other parents might say of her that she wants to think ill of the judge.

It is important to point out that where the object of the intellectual act is sufficient to move the intellect by itself (as distinct from cases in which a person simply has good evidence for a belief), there is no room for will to have a role of this sort in intellectual assent. If the mother's evidence that the judge does not take bribes is overwhelming and unquestionable, then in that epistemic state it will not be possible for her to form the belief that the judge takes bribes, no matter how much she dislikes the judge. Nothing in Aquinas's view about the relations between intellect and will contravenes the common view that we do not in general have direct voluntary control over our beliefs. But in cases where the object of the intellect is not sufficient to move the intellect by itself, then it is possible for will to have an effect on intellectual assent to propositions. In cases of this sort, acts of will enter into the attitudes of believing, forming an opinion, and having faith.¹⁴

That will can affect intellectual assent in such cases is widely recognized, for example, in science, where experimenters frequently must design their experiments to take account of the fact that, as Aquinas would put it, their wills may bring about intellectual assent largely in consequence of their desire to have results turn out a particular way. (I have in mind, for example, the sort of case double-blind experimental design is meant to exclude.) In cases of this kind Aquinas tends to talk about the will's directing the intellect to assent; we are more likely to explain the situation by focusing on the influence of desires on beliefs. But in spite of the different emphasis, the point is fundamentally the same: in cases where the object of the intellect is not sufficient to move the intellect by itself, that is, where belief is not constrained or compelled by the object of the intellect, it is possible that a person accepts a certain belief largely because of some movement of his will, in consequence of the desires he has in that situation.

The sorts of cases in which will enters into belief that are most likely to occur to us are those in which someone acts badly, as in the example above in which the mother believes the worst of the judge. But it is also possible to think of examples in which a belief based on both will and intellect has something admirable about it. In George Eliot's Middlemarch, when Dorothea Casaubon finds her friend and admirer Will Ladislaw in a compromising embrace with the wife of one of his friends, she does not immediately believe the worst of him. Although it is possible (and in the novel is true) that there is an exonerating explanation of Ladislaw's conduct, the evidence available to Dorothea, though not sufficient to determine that Ladislaw's behavior merits disapprobation, is nonetheless powerfully against him. (Another way of putting the same point is to say that although the evidence does not allow Dorothea to assign a probability of I to the proposition that Ladislaw is a scoundrel, it does allow her to assign a probability greater than. 5.) But because of her commitment to him, Dorothea, in spite of the evidence, cleaves to her view that Ladislaw is not a scoundrel and a traitor to his friend.¹⁵ (Whether Dorothea should be lumped together with the mother who leapt to the conclusionthat the judge took bribes and should be considered irrational in consequence of her commitment to Ladislaw in these circumstances is a separate question that I will not consider here.)

We can spell out this case a little more, using Aquinas's theory of the will, by saying that Dorothea's will brings about her intellectual assent to the exoneration of Ladislaw in consequence of her desire to maintain her personal relationship with him. Dorothea may have had moral reasons for this position; she may have thought that loyalty to friends prohibited adopting a harsh view of them if it could possibly be avoided. Or she may have had more self-interested reasons; if Ladislaw turned out to be a scoundrel, then Dorothea would have lost the good of a relationship with a man who admired her and whose character she could respect. Either way, although her intellect isn't sufficiently moved by its object to determine it to one or another view, her will is; and her belief that Ladislaw is not treacherous to his friend constitutes intellectual assent in which will has a crucial role.

According to Aquinas, will plays a similar role in faith. Considered in its own right, the object of faith is God himself, but since (in this life) our minds cannot comprehend God directly or immediately, the object of faith, considered from the point of view of human knowers, is not God but propositions about him.¹⁶ On Aquinas's view, assent to the propositions of faith lies between knowledge and opinion. (In this paper I will take 'the propositions of faith' broadly to mean all those propositions that are appropriately believed in faith, including those propositions, such as 'God exists,' that in Aquinas's view some persons can know by natural reason and therefore do not need to hold only by faith.) In faith, the intellect assents to propositions believed, as it does in knowledge or opinion, but the assent of faith is not generated by the intellect's being sufficiently moved by its object, as it is in the case of knowledge. Rather, in faith assent is generated by the will, which is moved by the object of faith sufficiently to bring the intellect to assent. In this respect, faith is like opinion, in which will also has a role in the generation of assent. On the other hand, unlike opinion, faith holds to its object with certainty, without any hesitation or hanging back; and in this respect faith is like knowledge.¹⁷ (What Aquinas means by 'certainty' in this connection I will consider in a later section.)

The contribution of will to the intellectual assent in faith occurs in this way. By nature, the will is moved by considerations of goodness. The ultimate end of the will can be thought of in either of two ways. On the one hand, it is the happiness of the willer; and, on the other hand, it is God, who is himself the true good and thus the perfect happiness of the willer. The propositions of faith, entertained by the intellect, describe the combination of both these ultimate goods, namely, the beatitude of eternal life in union with God, and present it as available to the believer. By themselves, the propositions of faith, together with whatever else is known or believed by the intellect, are not sufficient to move the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith.¹⁸ But the will is drawn to the great good presented in the propositions of faith, and it influences the intellect to assent, in the sort of way familiar to us from science, where the design of experiments is often tailored to rule out just this kind of influence of will on intellect. In the case of faith, on Aquinas's view, will does and should influence the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith. For faith, then, a motion is required both on the part of the intellect and on the part of the will. Furthermore, in consequence of this influence of will on intellect, intellect and will cleave to the propositions of faith with the sort of certainty normally found only in cases of knowledge.¹⁹

This description of Aquinas's conception of faith, however, doesn't yet distinguish between the faithof committed religious believers and the faith of devils. The devils also believe, and tremble (James 2:19). On traditional Christian doctrine, of course, for some of the propositions of faith, devils have knowledge, and not faith; the proposition that God exists is a prime example. But for some of the propositions of faith, such as that the man Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the promised redeemer of the world, or that Christ will come again to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth, the devils must rely on belief rather than knowledge. Nothing in their experience of God or the supernatural realm (at least up to a certain time, such as the time of the harrowing of hell or the second coming) puts them in a position to know that that particular human being is God's chosen means of saving the fallen human race or restoring the earth. With regard to such propositions, on Aquinas's account, the difference between devils and religious believers isnot that believers have faith and devils do not, but rather that devils (or any others who are convinced of the truth of Christianity and hate it) do not have what Aquinas calls formed faith, whereas believers do.

The will can move the intellect to assent in two different ways, according to Aquinas. In the case of believers, the will is drawn by God's goodness to move the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith. This way of having the will move the intellect in faith is called 'formed faith' because in it the intellectual assent to the propositions of faith takes its form from the love of God's goodness which animates the will. In the case of the devils, however, the faith they have is unformed by charity and remains perfectly consistent with malice. Even though the devils do not see for themselves the truth of what the church teaches, their will commands the intellect to assent to the teachings of the church, Aquinas says, because they see manifest signs that the doctrine of the church is from God.²⁰

This point of Aquinas's is not clear. Why should belief based on evident signs testifying to the truth of what is believed count as a case of will's influencing intellectual assent? Why shouldn't it count instead as a case in which the object of the belief is sufficient by itself to move the intellect? And how does this description of the devils' belief distinguish their sort of faith from the faith of believers? The first part of the answer to these questions comes from noticing that the manifest signs are not direct evidence for the truth of the propositions believed, but rather evidence for the authority of the people and institutions promulgating those propositions (and therefore only indirect evidence for the propositions). The example of unformed faith Aquinas gives in this connection is one where belief in a prophet's prediction arises from seeing that prophet raise a person from the dead. This example suggests that what Aquinas means by manifest signs inclining the devils to belief is a demonstration of superhuman power that seems attributable only to God. If this is right, then the manifest signs testify to the authority of those promulgating what is believed, and so indirectly to the truth of what is believed, because they indicate that the authority of God supports those who teach the beliefs in question.

(Of course, not every case in which a person holds a belief based on authority is a case in which will enters into the assent to that belief. If a person believes that genes are the unit of inheritance because all reputable biologists say so, it does not seem as if will has a role to play in the formation of his belief. Aquinas's example of a belief based on authority, however, is different. In his example the belief in question is a belief in the truth of a prediction uttered by a person who claims to be a prophet, and assent is given to the belief because the prophet has demonstrated supernatural power. In this sort of case the evidence does not seem sufficient to move the intellect to belief. Even if there were no question about the prophet's power, it would not immediately follow that the prophet's prediction wastrue. The source of the power might be such as not to guarantee the truth of claims made by the wielder of that power. In this sort of case, then, there is room for the intellect to be moved to assent by the will.)

If we now take seriously Aquinas's claim that what distinguishes diabolical from human belief in God is the kind of contribution made by the will to intellectual assent, we will have a clearer understanding of the distinction between formed and unformed faith. In the case of both devils and committed believers, will brings about intellectual assent in virtue of certain strong desires, but in the case of believers the desire in question is a desire directed toward goodness, and in the case of devils it is not. The act of faith on the part of committed believers is formed by charity, or love of God's goodness; and their faith is a virtue, a habit that contributes to perfecting a power or capacity. Since both will and intellect are involved in faith, for faith to be a virtue it has to contribute to perfecting a capacity of the will as well as an intellectual capacity. Now, for Aquinas, the intellect is perfected by the acquisition of truth; and since the propositions of faith are in his view true, the beliefs accepted in faith are perfective of the intellect. In this respect, there is no difference between diabolical and human faith. The act of will on the part of a committed believer, however, takes the form it does because of the charity she has, that is, because of her love of God's goodness. What inclines her will to move her intellect to assent to the propositions of faith, then, is the goodness represented by them. What inclines the will of the devils, on the other hand, is not the goodness of God perceived in the claims of faith, but their perception of God's power—power to be envied, hated, or sought for oneself—allied with those teaching the faith. Power considered just in its own right, however, is not a moral good; and so in being moved by considerations of power alone, the will is moved by an apparent, rather than a real, good. In this way, the devils' act of faith is unformed by charity or love of God's goodness and does not count as a virtue, because it leaves the will unperfected, and the will is one of the two powers involved in the act of faith.²¹

On Aquinas's account of faith, then, the propositions of faith entertained by a believer's intellect are not sufficient to move the intellect to assent; but the will, which is a hunger for goodness, is drawn by them because of the good of eternal life in union with God which the propositions of faith taken together present. Because the will is drawn to this good, it moves the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith; and it moves the intellect in such a way that the consequent intellectual assent has the kind of certainty ordinarily found only in cases of knowledge. It is clear that this account raises many questions; I want to focus on just three of them.²²

Objection 1

The role Aquinas assigns to the will in faith seems to imply (a) an acknowledgment that faith is without epistemic justification and (b) a concession of the sorts of charges Freudians often level against faith, namely, that faith is simply another case of wish-fulfillment belief. (a) If a believer's intellectual assent to the propositions of faith results primarily from her will's being drawn to the good represented in those propositions, there seems to be no reason for supposing that the propositions of faith are true or that her belief in them is justified. (b) On the other hand, if there is some way of warding off this sort of objection, then it seems as if precisely analogous sorts of reasoning ought to support as true or justified any belief a person wants to be true, such as Cromwell's false but firmly held belief during his last illness that he would be completely restored to health and continue to lead the nation.

Objection 2

Since the certainty of faith seems based at least largely on the action of the will, when the object of faith is not sufficient by itself to move the intellect to assent, why should faith be thought to have any certainty? The certainty of a set of beliefs seems to be or be dependent on some epistemic property of those beliefs. But on Aquinas's account, the certainty of faith stems from the will's being moved by the object of faith. Why would he suppose that an act of will is even relevant to the epistemic properties of beliefs?

Objection 3

Aquinas thinks that the way a human believer believes in God is preferable to the way devils believe. But why should he think so? Wouldn't it be better if human intellectual assent were obtained on the basis of considerations that by themselves moved the intellect sufficiently for assent, as in cases of knowledge, or, at least, if assent to beliefs were (like the assent of the devils) based on grounds sufficient to establish the authority of those promulgating the beliefs? There is something apparently inappropriate about obtaining intellectual assent by attracting the will to goodness rather than bv moving the intellect, the sort of inappropriateness there is, for example, in using a sewing machine to join two pieces of cloth by gluing the two pieces of cloth together and using the machine as a weight to hold them in place as the glue dries. Aquinas takes God to be the designer and creator of the intellect. Since God is omniscient and omnipotent, he could easily provide the sort of object for the intellect which would enable the intellect to function in the way it was made to do, either by making the propositions of faith so evident that they move the intellect to knowledge, or at least by providing for human beings the sort of evidence that according to Aquinas inclines devils to believe in some propositions of faith on the authority of the church. Why, then, should Aquinas think it is better for belief in the propositions of faith to be generated by the will's inclining to goodness?

4. Aquinas's Account of Goodness

Aquinas's understanding of the nature of goodness provides an important part of the basis on which to reply to these objections, especially to Objection (1a), that faith is unjustified since it is based on the will's hunger for goodness.

The central thesis of Aquinas's metaethics is that the terms 'being' and 'goodness' are the same in reference but different in sense.²³ This claim is likely to strike us as obscure and peculiar, at least in part because we equate being with existence in the actual world, and it is quite clear that goodness is not to be identified with existence in the actual world. But Aquinas's concept of being is much broader than our concept of existence. By 'being,' Aquinas has in mind something like the full actualization of the potentialities a thing has in virtue of belonging to a natural kind; and this is what both 'being' and 'goodness' refer to, though they refer to it under two different descriptions. The expressions 'being' and 'goodness' are thus analogous to the expressions 'morning star' and 'evening star' in referring to the same thing but with different senses.

Aquinas takes the specifying potentiality of human beings to be reason, and he understands the actualization of it to consist in acting in accordance with reason. By converting the specific potentiality of humans into actuality, an agent's actions in accordance with reason increase the extent to which that agent has being as a human person. Because of the connection between being and goodness, such actions consequently also increase the extent to which the agent has goodness as a human person. So human goodness, like any other goodness appropriate to a particular species, is acquired in actualizing the potentiality specific to that species. The actions that contribute to a human agent's moral goodness, then, will be acts of will in accordance with reason.²⁴ Since, on Aquinas's view, whatever actualizes a thing's specifying potentiality thereby also perfects the nature of the thing, his view about goodness can be summarized by saying that what is good for a thing is what is natural to it, and what is unnatural to a thing is bad for it. As for human nature, since it is characterized essentially by a capacity for rationality, what is irrational is contrary to human nature and so also not moral.²⁵ Virtues, on this account, are habits disposing a person to act in accordance with essential human nature; vices are habits disposing a person to irrationality and are therefore discordant with human nature.²⁶

Aquinas's attempt to ground a virtue theory of ethics in a metaethical claim relating goodness and being raises many questions and objections; but because I have discussed them elsewhere,²⁷ I will leave them to one side here and add just one point about the relation of Aquinas's metaethics to his theology. Aquinas takes God to be essentially and uniquely "being itself." Given his metaethical thesis, it is no surprise to discover that Aquinas also takes God to be essentially and uniquely goodness itself. This theological interpretation of Aquinas's thesis regarding being and goodness entails a relationship between God and mo-rality that is an interesting alternative to divine-command theories of morality, which connect theology to morality by making morality a function of God's will or God's commands. Like divine-command theories, the relation between God and morality Aquinas adopts entails that there is a strong connection between God and the standard for morality. The goodness for the sake of which and in accordance with which God wills whatever he wills regarding human morality is identical with the divine nature. But because it is God's very nature and not any arbitrary decision of his that thereby constitutes the standard for morality, only things consonant with God's nature could be morally good. The theological interpretation of the central thesis of Aquinas's ethical theory thus provides the basis for an objective religious morality and avoids the subjectivism that often characterizes divine-command theories.

5. The Relation of Faith to Goodness

On the basis of this sketch of Aquinas's account of goodness and the preceding description of Aquinas's theory of the will, we can consider the objections to Aquinas's views of faith.

Objection (1) has two parts. Objection (1a) is that the propositions accepted in faith are unjustified, because it is the will's inclining to the good presented in them, rather than the intellect's being sufficiently moved by its object, that is primarily responsible for intellectual assent to those propositions. Objection (1b) is that this way of justifying beliefs held in faith seems to justify wish-fulfillment beliefs in general.

In order for a belief to be justified, there are certain criteria the belief must satisfy. An agent musthave acquired it by a reliable method, or it must cohere in the right sorts of ways with his other beliefs, or he must violate no epistemic obligations in holding it, or something else of the sort. In one or another of these ways, depending on the theory we adopt, we suppose that a belief is justified and that a believer may have some reasonable confidence in supposing that what he believes is in fact true.²⁸ If a belief does not meet such criteria, we regard it as unjustified, or irrational. In general, Aquinas shares such views; he espouses a version of Aristotelian epistemology, and he is often careful to distinguish the epistemological status of the propositions in arguments he is considering. But in the case of faith, epistemological considerations seem not to play a major evaluative role at all for Aquinas. What, then, keeps faith from being unjustified or irrational?

The easiest way to answer this question will be to focus on one particular proposition appropriately held in faith, namely, the proposition that God exists. (Although Aquinas thinks that this proposition can be known to be true by natural reason, he also holds that not all people are in a position to know it by natural reason and that those who are not are justified in holding it on faith.) For different propositions of faith, such as that Christ rose from the dead, different but analogous answers can be given.

To see the answer to the question with regard to the proposition that God exists, we need to consider the connection Aquinas makes between being and goodness. Since 'goodness' and 'being' are the same in reference, where there is being there is also goodness, at least goodness in some respect and to some degree. For that reason, on Aquinas's account, even the worst of human beings, even Satan in fact, is not wholly bad, but has some goodness in some respect. But the relationship between being and goodness also holds the other way around. The presence of goodness entails the presence of being. Now, since, as we saw, Aquinas does not take being to be identical to existence in the actual world, this claim does not entail that any good thing we can imagine actually exists. Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is basically a good person but may be an entirely fictional character who never existed in reality. The sort of being Oedipus has in that case is just the sort of being appropriate to fictional characters (however exactly we explain that sort of being); Aquinas would not suppose that characters such as Oedipus have existence, even existence of some peculiar or attenuated sort. So in the case of any limited good, however we explain the attribution of being to it, on Aquinas's account the being it has will also be limited and need not include actual existence.

In the case of perfect goodness, on the other hand, things are different. The sort of being entailed by perfect goodness is perfect being, and Aquinas maintains that perfect being not only exists but exists necessarily. At this stage we can simply take this claim about the necessary existence of perfect being as a stipulation on Aquinas's part, although, in fact, the motivation for it is fundamental to his metaphysics.²⁹ What is important to notice here is that since perfect being is entailed by perfect goodness, if perfect being necessarily exists, then perfect goodness is also necessarily exemplified.

What these reflections on Aquinas's claim about the connection between being and goodness show us is this. If the will hungers for a certain good thing whose goodness falls short of perfect goodness, and if the intellect is moved to assent to the proposition that that thing exists largely because of that hunger on the part of the will, the resulting belief will be unjustified or irrational. This is so because, although it follows from Aquinas's basic metaethical thesis that any particular good thing that is limited in goodness has being of some sort, it does not follow that it actually exists. On the otherhand, if the will hungers for goodness that is perfect and unlimited, and if the intellect is moved to assent to the proposition that what is hungered for exists or obtains largely because of that hunger on the part of the will, the resulting belief will not similarly be unjustified, for where there is perfect goodness, there is perfect being; and perfect being necessarily exists.

Does Aquinas's clarification of the interrelation of being and goodness constitute an argument for the claim that God exists?³⁰ It is helpful here to distinguish between what we might call the metaphysical and the epistemological strands of an account of the justification of beliefs. The epistemological strand gives us criteria for determining which beliefs of ours are justified and which are not; for any individual belief, such criteria (at least in theory) enable us to tell whether we are justified in holding that belief. The metaphysical strand, on the other hand, provides an account of the nature of human knowing or of the world and our epistemic relation to it, or something of this sort, which explains the fact that some of our beliefs are justified, but it may do nothing to enable us to differentiate justified from unjustified beliefs in individual cases. Another approach to the same question is to think in terms of levels of justification. We can distinguish between S's being justified in believing p, on the one hand, and S's being justified in believing that S is justified in believing p, on the other. S might be justified in believing p without being in a position to know, or even to believe justifiedly, that she is justified in her belief that p.³¹ (As we shall see, Aquinas himself makes a distinction somewhat similar to this one, in distinguishing between the certainty of a belief and the subjective certainty of the believer who holds that belief.)

The explanation of the justification for the propositions of faith provided by Aquinas's account of being and goodness contains only the metaphysical strand, and not the epistemological one as well. It gives reasons for thinking that a believer is justified in believing that God exists, but not for thinking that a believer is in a position to determine that he is so justified. Aquinas's views explain what it is about reality and our relation to it which accounts for the justification of this belief held in faith. In ordinary cases, as in the kinds of cases good experimental design is intended to prevent in science, beliefs stemming primarily from the will's moving the intellect to assent to something because of the will's hungering for some good would not have much (if any) justification. Because goodness supervenes on being, limited goods have limited being, on Aquinas's understanding of being; but they may or may not actually exist. Perfect goodness, however, supervenes on perfect being; and, according to Aquinas, perfect being necessarily exists. If the will moves the intellect to assent to the existence of a thing on the basis of the will's hungering for the good of that thing, and if the good of that thing is not some limited good but perfect goodness, then in that case, on Aquinas's account, the resulting belief in the existence of that thing will have a great deal of justification. What is perfectly good not only is something that exists but in fact something that exists necessarily, since it supervenes on perfect being, which exists necessarily. Given this metaphysical theory, that is, given the supposition that goodness and being have the characteristics this theory ascribes to them, a believer S is justified in believing the claim he holds on faith.

But, of course, to say this is not to say that we are in a position to determine that we are justified in this belief. We might not have a good argument for (or we might not even accept) some or all of the metaphysical theory in question here; or we might accept it but not believe that any goodness or any being is perfect, so that the will's hungering for the good represented by the propositions of faith is just another instance of the will's hungering for a limited good, which may or may not exist. And Aquinas's account gives us no certain procedure for deciding whether a good that the will hungers for is a perfect or a limited good. For these reasons, Aquinas's account constitutes only the metaphysical and not the epistemological strand of a theory of justification for the belief held in faith. His account tells us what justifies this belief, namely, the nature of God, but not how we can determine with any high degree of probability that it is justified. And for these reasons, although his account constitutes an argument that a believer S is justified in believing the propositions held in faith, it does not give us an argument that S is justified in believing that he is justified in believing the propositions held in faith.

Although I have focused here on the belief that God exists (and will continue to emphasize that belief in what follows), it is not too hard to see how to extend this account to deal with other beliefs of faith. They might be acquired and justified in a manner similar to the belief that God exists. Consider, for example, the belief that Christ rose from the dead. We would have to add some considerations either of other metaphysical attributes of God and their relation to the divine goodness or of the perfectly good will of God, and these additional considerations will be the basis of a metaphysical (but not epistemological) strand of a theory of justification for this belief. On the other hand, other beliefs of faith, such as the belief in "one catholic and apostolic church," might be acquired or justified derivatively from a belief justified in the first way.³²

As I have developed the reply to Objection (la), that on Aquinas's account beliefs held in faith are unjustified, it has implicit within it also a reply against Objection (1b), that Aquinas's account of faith warrants wish-fulfillment beliefs in general. In wish-fulfillment beliefs, such as the belief of a lazy, untalented student that he has done well on the exam he did not study for, the will moves the intellect to assent to the truth of a proposition asserting the existence of some good because of the will's desire for that good. But since for Aquinas limited goods may fail to exist, nothing in the will's hungering for limited goodness constitutes a reason for supposing that such a proposition is true; and so the belief that results from this process is unjustified. But since what the will hungers for in the case of faith is perfect goodness, there is not the same disconnection between the good hungered for and the existence of that good in the case of faith as there is in the case of wish-fulfillment. For this reason, the beliefs held in faith are not in the same camp as wish-fulfillment beliefs.

But there is perhaps one other thing to say about the objection that Aquinas's account of faith warrants wish-fulfillment beliefs. Besides the worry about the epistemological status of wish-fulfillment beliefs, we are inclined to find such beliefs objectionable because we think allowing will to guide intellect as it does in the case of wish-fulfillment beliefs is bound to lead to frustration or disappointment on the believer's part (or, as in the case of Cromwell, on the part of one's friends or followers). Without taking anything at all away from such commonsensical objections to wish-fulfillment beliefs, I want to point out that on Aquinas's account of the will there is another side to the story. According to Aquinas, a person necessarily wills her own happiness, and happiness is the ultimate end for the will; but a person's true happiness consists in her uniting with God. Therefore, the hunger of the will is not stilled until the willer is either in union with God or on the road to union with God, with the other desires of the will in harmony with that final goal. As Augustine puts it, addressing God, "Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee." But in that case, following the lead of the will, though frustrating or otherwise inadequate and deficient in the short run, is not an obstacle to human flourishing in the long run, if the process of following the will's hunger is carried on to itsnatural conclusion. If a person doesn't give up prematurely and settle for something ultimately unsatisfactory (as she may be inclined to do by desires preferring her own immediate pleasure or power to greater goods), following the desires of her heart, on this account, does end not only in her flourishing but also in the fulfillment of her heart's desire.

These replies to Objection (1) may serve only to exacerbate the worry embodied in Objection (2), that nothing in Aquinas's theory can account for the certainty he ascribes to those who have faith. As I argued above, Aquinas's account of the will as a hunger for the good and his conception of goodness and being provide the metaphysical strand of a theory of justification of belief but not the epistemological strand. They explain what it is about the world which, on Aquinas's view, makes the belief that God exists justified, but they don't put us in a position to determine with any great degree of probability that that belief is in fact so justified. What, then, allows Aquinas to say that believers have certainty with regard to the propositions of faith?

In fact, Aquinas concedes the main point of this objection. In a distinction analogous to the one I draw above between the metaphysical and the epistemological strands of the justification of belief, or between levels of justification, Aquinas says we can think of certainty in two different ways: either in terms of the cause of the certainty of the propositions' truth or as a characteristic of the person believing those propositions. The cause of the certainty of the propositions of faith is something altogether necessary, namely, God himself. Considered with regard to the cause of the certainty of the propositions' truth, then, faith is at least as certain as any other true beliefs entertained by human reason. That is, given God's nature and will, the propositions of faith are as certain as any propositions can be. On the other hand, however, if we consider the certainty of faith with regard to the person who believes, then the certainty of faith is considerably less than the certainty of many things about which human beings have knowledge, because some or all the propositions of faith are beyond reason for any human being.³³ The certainty of faith, then, is a certainty based on the cause of the certainty of the propositions' truth and not a certainty that is a characteristic of believers.

Aquinas's position here may strike us as lame or defeated. He begins with the bold claim that the propositions of faith have the same sort of certainty as mathematical propositions known to be true, and he ends with the disappointingly weak claim that, even so, believers can't be anything like as certain about the propositions of faith as mathematicians can be about mathematical truths. What exactly is this distinction of Aquinas's with regard to certainty? And does it undermine what is generally seen as a key characteristic of faith, namely, the deep confidence of believers in the truth of the propositions believed?³⁴

One way to understand Aquinas's distinction with regard to certainty is to recast it in terms of levels of justification. So understood, Aquinas's concern is to differentiate between a person's justification in believing the propositions of faith and her justification in believing that she is justified in believing the propositions of faith. From the fact that a person S is justified in a belief p, for example, that there is a tree in front of her, it does not follow that she is justified in believing that she is justified in believing p. A child, for example, might hold p and be entirely justified in doing so without even having (much less being justified in having) the belief that he was justified in believing p. Aquinas's view is that as regards the cause of the certainty of the propositions of faith, they are as certain as any propositions, but that as regards their certainty with regard to the person who believes them, theircertainty is less than other propositions known. Perhaps what he has in mind is that a person S who believes the propositions of faith is as justified in holding those beliefs as it is possible for him to be, because the "cause of the certainty" of the propositions of faith is God himself. But it does not follow that S is justified to the same degree in believing that he is justified in believing the propositions of faith, so that with respect to this level of justification the believer is more justified as regards, for instance, mathematical truths he knows than as regards the propositions of faith.

Though this approach may help in understanding Aquinas's distinction, it only exacerbates the worry about his position because, on the face of it, it seems as if it is the higher-order level of justification that must play a role in the assurance of religious believers. Does Aquinas's point about the certainty of faith leave him unable to account for the confidence believers have in the truth of the propositions believed in faith? If Aquinas thought that believers' confidence consisted in simple cognitive certainty, then the answer to this question might be affirmative. But his view is more complicated, in part because of the crucial role of will in faith. On Aquinas's view, we can explain the assurance and confidence of believers in two ways, based either on intellect or on will. As regards intellect, a believer might not be in a position to know, or even to have a great deal of justification in the belief, that his belief in the propositions of faith is justified. But if he thinks of the propositions of faith as Aquinas does, as based on the necessary nature and perfectly good decrees of God, then he is in a position to believe justifiedly that if his belief in the propositions of faith is justified at all, it is justified with the maximal justification possible for human beliefs. On the other hand, as regards the will, although a believer may not know, or even have a great deal of justification in the belief, that his belief in the propositions of faith is justified, he is in a position to know that if the propositions of faith are true, then his happiness can be achieved and the deepest desires of his heart can be fulfilled only by adherence to the propositions of faith. So while a person will not hold the propositions of faith with the sort of simple cognitive certainty he holds mathematical truths he knows, if he assents to the propositions of faith at all, on Aquinas's view he will hold them with the greatest possible commitment. This way of interpreting Aquinas's position, then, helps to explain his claim that although in the case of faith the object of the intellect isn't sufficient to move the intellect by itself, it nonetheless inclines the will to move the intellect to the sort of unwavering assent given in cases of knowledge.

These replies to Objections (1) and (2) seem only to sharpen the point of Objection (3). Why would Aquinas think that the will's moving the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith is the way such assent ought to be obtained? He clearly supposes that for human persons in this life basing assent to the propositions of faith on the will in virtue of a desire for God's goodness is in general preferable to the way intellectual assent is obtained in the case of knowledge, when the object known is sufficient by itself to move the intellect, or to the way intellectual assent is produced in the case of the devils who, he thinks, see God's power working in those promulgating the faith and accept some of the propositions of the faith because of their concern with power. An omniscient, omnipotent God could make the propositions of faith so manifest that intellectual assent would be generated without any intervention on the part of the will. And we might be inclined to join Bertrand Russell in charging God with having provided "not enough evidence." But Aquinas is so far from supposing that God ought to have provided sufficient evidence that he plainly takes it to be an important feature of faith that the object of intellect in the case of faith is not enough by itself to move the intellect, that, instead, the intellect has to be moved by the will, which is drawn to the good represented in the propositions of faith.

To understand why Aquinas takes this position, it is important to see what he thinks the point of faith is. Both intellect and will have a role in faith, but we tend to assume unreflectively, as Russell clearly did, that the first and most important effect the acquisition of faith produces in the believer is a change in intellectual states. Consequently, we might suppose, the immediate point of faith is some alteration of the intellect.³⁵ If we think of the efficacy of faith in this way, it is certainly understandable that we should feel some perplexity. Why would an omniscient, omnipotent God, himself the creator of the intellect, arrange things in such a way that certain crucial states of intellect must be brought about by means that bypass the natural functioning of the intellect? Aquinas, however, sees the role of faith differently, and in his position there is the solution of this difficulty. On Aquinas's view, the most important immediate point of faith is not its influence on the Intellect, but its operation on the will. Of course, given the kind of connection Aquinas postulates between intellect and will, it is plain that whatever has an effect on the will first operates on the intellect (in the way I have described in section 2 above). But, on Aquinas's view, the purpose of the changes in intellect brought about in the acquisition of faith has to do with the consequent and corresponding changes in the will.

On traditional Christian doctrine, which Aquinas accepts, all human beings are marred by original sin. Original sin entails, among other things, that a post-fall person tends to will what he ought not to will, that he tends to will his own immediate pleasure and power over greater goods, and that this inborn tendency of will results sooner or later in sinful actions, with consequent moral deterioration. In such a state a person cannot be united with God in heaven but is rather destined to be left to himself in hell. God in his goodness, however, has provided salvation from this state, which is available for all, although not all avail themselves of it. The story of how this salvation is brought about has two parts, one the doctrine of the atonement, which is outside the scope of this paper, and the other the doctrine of justification by faith.³⁶ Justification is the process by which the inborn defect of the will is corrected and in which God brings a person from a state of sin to a state of justice. In faith the will desires the goodness of God, which is what the propositions of faith taken together show the will. This desire for God's goodness naturally carries with it a repugnance for what is incompatible with God's goodness, and so for one's own sins. When a believer has such a love of God's goodness and hatred of her own sins, then God can carry on the work of fixing the bent will of the believer without violating her free will and turning her into a sort of robot. In loving God's goodness and hating her own sins, the believer in effect wants to have a will that wills what is good; and so by working to cure her will of its evil, God is giving her the sort of will she herself wants to have.³⁷ Without the believer's act of will in faith, however, God could not act on her will to fix it without violating the very nature of the will he was trying to make whole. Since it is also a central part of Christian doctrine that the believer cannot fix the defect in her will herself,³⁸ it is clear that on traditional Christian views the act of will in faith is essential to salvation.

But if the act of will in faith has the importance it does in the scheme of salvation, then since on Aquinas's theory the will is moved by the intellect's representating certain things as good, the point of Objection 3 seems only sharpened. In view of all that has just been said, a proponent of this objection might hold, isn't it clear that a good God ought to make the propositions of faith manifest to everyone, either by making the object of the intellect sufficient by itself to move the intellect or by making the authority of those promulgating those propositions evident, so that everyone wouldnaturally form the act of will requisite for salvation?

On Aquinas's account of the way faith works, a believer's will is drawn by the goodness represented in the propositions of faith, although her intellect is not sufficiently moved by its object to assent to the propositions of faith. That is, the goodness of God is made manifest through the propositions of faith (for instance, in the claims that Christ suffered and died for the salvation of all people), but the truth of those propositions is not. Suppose now, however, that a person were to see manifestly and evidently either the truth of the propositions of faith or the authority of those promulgating such propositions. Then what such a person would know is that there exists an entity of unlimited power, the ruler of the universe, who draws human beings into union with himself through the redemptive power of the incarnate Christ. If such a person were then to ally herself with God, it might be because of an attraction to God's goodness, or it might also be because of a desire to be on the side of power.

Since, on the doctrine of original sin, human beings are already marred by a tendency to prefer their own power to greater goods, a tendency that faith is precisely designed to cure, there is consequently a great danger in allowing the things asserted in the propositions of faith to be overwhelmingly obvious. There would be a danger in trying to attract overweight people to Weight Watchers meetings by promising to begin the meetings with a lavish banquet; but it would be a limited danger, because one could plan more ascetic meetings for later. Eventually, then, one could decouple the excessive desire for food and the desire for the good of temperance represented by Weight Watchers meetings, so that the former desire would be diminished and the latter enhanced. But in the case of God, if it once becomes overwhelmingly obvious that an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God exists and has a redemptive plan of the sort presented in the propositions of faith, then it also becomes overwhelmingly obvious that endless power is necessarily coexemplified with perfect goodness and that human beings can be on the side of power in allying themselves with goodness.³⁹ In that case, however, it ceases to be possible to decouple the desire for power and the desire for goodness, so that the former is diminished and the latter is enhanced. What these sketchy considerations suggest is that the failure to provide sufficient evidence for all the propositions of faith and the requirement that intellectual assent be produced by the will's attraction to goodness not only are no embarrassment for Aquinas's account of faith but in fact constitute an important means of furthering the purpose he takes faith to have, namely, the moral regeneration of postfall human beings.

6. Conclusion

There is, then, another way of thinking about faith, which sees the main and immediate purpose of faith in its role in the moral life of the believer, rather than in its influence on the intellect. On this way of thinking about faith, the justification for faith is different from that for most other sorts of belief, because it is grounded not primarily in some relation of the intellect to its object, but rather in the will's relation to its object, where the nature of the will is understood as Aquinas takes it. Aquinas's understanding of faith does not enable us to know what is believed in faith (in his sense of knowledge), but it can nonetheless explain how what is believed in faith is maximally justified. Furthermore, this approach to faith has the advantage of explaining why an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God would let the epistemic relation of human beings to himself rest on faith, rather than knowledge, and why a person's having faith should be thought to be meritorious in any way, because it holds faith to be the beginning of a moral reform of the will, of a kind that simple knowledge of the propositions of faith by itself could not bring about. And, finally, this way of thinking about faith accounts for the common conviction that epistemological considerations play little role in initiating most conversions. On Aquinas's account of faith, what is happening in such cases (or, at any rate, in the case of true conversions) is not that the intellect is weighing and judging epistemological considerations but that the will is drawn to a love of God's goodness and in consequence moves the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith.

It is important to say explicitly and emphatically that nothing in this position of Aquinas's denies reason a role in the life of faith. In a tradition going back at least as far as Augustine, Aquinas takes understanding the propositions of faith to be the outcome of a process for which faith is a necessary condition. Having once acquired faith in the way spelled out here, the believer is then in a position to reflect philosophically on the propositions of faith, to engage in the enterprise of natural or philosophical theology.⁴⁰ But on Aquinas's view it would be a mistake to suppose that faith is acquired by such an exercise of reason. Although reason may clear away some intellectual obstacles that bar the believer's way to faith, assent to the propositions of faith is initially produced by the will's hungering for God's goodness and moving the intellect in consequence. And the point of this proceedings on the part of the intellect and will is not a peculiar acquisition of certain states of intellect but the moral regeneration of a post-fall human being from his tendency to prefer his own power and pleasure to greater goods.

With this understanding of faith, then, it is possible to see a solution to some long-standing puzzles about faith and to integrate the justification for faith with general Christian views about the role of faith in the scheme of salvation.⁴¹

Notes

This paper is a substantially revised version of Stump 1989b, which was published in The Philosophy in Christianity, ed. Godfrey Versey, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 23, Supplement to Philosophy 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

¹ Swinburne 1981.

² See, e.g., Plantinga 1983.

³ To answer this sort of question, it is sometimes suggested that if it were indubitable to all of us that God exists, we would be overwhelmed by him, and our capacity to use our free will to make significant choices would be undermined. (See, e.g., Swinburne 1979, pp. 211-12.) But this answer can't adequately serve as a defense of Christian views of faith. According to traditional Christian doctrine, angels who stood in the presence of God were nonetheless able to make the significant free choice of rebelling against him.

⁴ For an interesting answer to these questions, different from the one I pursue in this paper, see Robert Adams 1984. Adams answers the questions I raise here by arguing that some involuntary cognitive failures are nonetheless blameworthy and that sometimes the rightness of beliefs is the feature of them that occasions praise.

⁵ Those who are uncomfortable with the apparent hypostatization of medieval terminology here may recast the discussion in the more fashionable terms of either programs or modules. For example, talk about the will in this context can be recast in terms of the module responsible for what neuropsychologists sometimes call 'the executive function.' The particular claim of Aquinas's at issue here can then be understood in this way: the module that is responsible for the executive function is organized in such a way as to be activated by the recognition of goodness, but some other module, some component unit of what Aquinas calls intellect, is responsible for processing the recognition of goodness and passing it on to the module that corresponds to what he calls will.

⁶ See ST Iallae.6.4.adl; Ia.82.1, 83.1, and 82.4.

⁷ST Ia.82.1 and 2. To those who suppose that cases of suicide are an obvious counterexample to Aquinas's account here, Aquinas might reply that the action of a suicide, and the despair in which it is done, can be explained precisely by assuming that in the view of the suicide, the closest he can get to happiness is the oblivion of death. He chooses the evasion of unhappiness as his nearest approach to happiness.

⁸ Cf. ST IaIIae.17.1. Of course, on Aquinas's theory, the will does so only in case the intellect represents doing so at that time, under some description, as good. Every act of willing is preceded by some apprehension on the part of the intellect, but not every apprehension on the part of the intellect need be preceded by an act of will. (See ST Ia.82.4.)

⁹ST Iallae.9.2.

¹⁰ Cf. ST Ia.81.3 and IaIlae.10.3.

¹¹ I discuss Aquinas's theory of the will and his account of the will's freedom more fully in Stump 1990.

¹² See ST IIaIIae.2.1; DV XIV. 1.

¹³ST IIaIIae.1.4.

¹⁴ See, e.g., ST IIaIIae.5.2; cf also DV XIV. 1. Aquinas's example illustrating the role of the will in intellectual acts involves belief based on the testimony of another, as in the case of someone who sees a prophet raise a person from the dead and consequently comes to believe the prophet's prediction about the future. This example, however, doesn't make clear just how the will is supposed to contribute to the act of the intellect.

¹⁵ We might suppose that this is just a case in which Dorothea is weighing evidence, the evidence of what she has seen against the evidence of her knowledge of Ladislaw's character, and coming down on the side of the evidence based on her knowledge of his character. If this were a correct analysis of the case, then it would not constitute an example of will's effecting assent to a belief. But, in fact, I think this analysis isn't true to the phenomena in more than one way. In the first place, Dorothea doesn't deliberate or weigh evidence. Although she reflects on what she has seen, her tendency fromthe outset is to exonerate Ladislaw. Furthermore, this analysis by itself can't account for Dorothea's standing by Ladislaw. The evidence of the scene she sees is sufficient to outweigh her past experience of him. It is not psychologically possible for her in the immediate aftermath of that scene to think of an innocuous explanation of his conduct, and she is aware of the sad truth that no one, however splendid his character has been, is immune from a moral fall.

¹⁶ST IIaIIae.1.2.

¹⁷ST IIaIIae. 1.4,2.1 and 2.

¹⁸ Some propositions of faith, such as the proposition that God is one substance but three persons, might seem to some people sufficient to move the will to dissent from them. For considerations of space I leave such propositions of faith and their problems to one side. But for an example of what can be done even in such cases to disarm the claim that some propositions of faith are repugnant to reason, see van Inwagen 1988.

¹⁹ Cf. ST IIaIIae.4.1; DV XIV. 1 and 2. In the exposition of Aquinas's account of faith which follows, I leave to one side entirely Aquinas's views of the relation between faith and grace, simply because one cannot work on everything at once. The fact that I do not expound Aquinas's views of grace here should not mislead anyone into thinking that when the will is drawn to goodness in faith, on Aquinas's account we have a natural operation of the will, or one instigated solely by human action. The movement of the will in faith, on Aquinas's view, includes both an act of free will on the believer's part and an infusion of grace on God's part. In this essay I am focusing on the nature of that act of free will and leaving to one side what Aquinas says about its supernatural cause. For discussion of that side of Aquinas's views and a detailed exposition of his theory of faith and grace, see Stump 1989a. In correspondence, William Alston has suggested to me that since on Aquinas's views divine grace brings about faith, one way to explain the justification of beliefs held in faith is to take divine grace as the reliable mechanism responsible for the formation of beliefs held in faith. This is an ingenious and intriguing suggestion, which is not incompatible with but perhaps complementary to the account of the justification of faith defended in this paper.

²⁰ST IIaIIae.5.2.

²¹ST IIaIIae.4.1, 4, 5; 7.1; DV XIV.2, 5, and 6.

²² Somewhat different analyses of Aquinas's account of faith are given in the following works: Penelhum 1977; Pojman 1986, esp. pp. 32-40; Potts 1971; Ross 1985 and 1986. My objections to the interpretations of Aquinas in the work of Penelhum and Potts are given in effect in my own analysis above; and the problems they raise for Aquinas's account in my view either are solved or do not arise in the first place on the interpretation of Aquinas presented here. Although there are some superficial differences between my interpretation of Aquinas and that argued for by Ross, my account is in many respects similar to his, and I am indebted to his papers for stimulating my interest in Aquinas's views of faith. Ross insists on rendering 'cognitio' as 'knowledge' and thus making faith a species of knowledge for Aquinas. In my view, this insistence is more confusing than helpful. Aquinas's criteria for knowledge are much stricter than contemporary standards, which allow as knowledge much that Aquinas would have classified under dialectic rather than demonstration. To render both 'cognitio' and 'scientia' as 'knowledge' is to blur what is a distinction for Aquinas and to make his epistemology sound more contemporary than it is.

²³ST Ia.5.1; DVXXI. 1 and 2. Aquinas's metaethics is discussed in detail in Chapter 4 of this book; see also Aertsen 1988a. For the medieval tradition before Aquinas, see MacDonald 1986.

²⁴ See, e.g., SCG III.9.1 (n. 1928); ST IaIIae.18.5.

²⁵SCG III.7.6 (n. 1915); ST IaIIae.71.1.

²⁶ST IaIIae.54.3.

²⁷ Chapter 4 above.

²⁸ Nothing in this chapter requires one account of justification rather than another, but of the currently discussed accounts, the one I am inclined to find most plausible is that of William Alston. See, e.g., Alston 1985. On Alston's view, to be justified in believing that p is to believe that p in such a way as to be in a strong position to believe something true.

²⁹ For Aquinas, perfect being is being that is whole and complete, without defect or limit. But to be entirely whole and without defect, on Aquinas's view, is to be without any unactualized potentiality. Perfect being, then, is altogether actual. Anything that is altogether actual, however, must have its existence included within its essence; otherwise, according to Aquinas, there would be in it the potential for nonexistence. But if perfect being has its existence as part of its essence, if it has no potential for nonexistence, then it is necessarily existent. See, e.g., ST Ia.3.4: "Secundo, [in Deo est idem essentia et esse] quia esse est actualitas omnis formae vel naturae.… Oportet igitur quod ipsum esse comparetur ad essentiam quae est aliud ab ipso, sicut actus ad potentiam. Cum igitur in Deo nihil sit potentiale, ut ostensum est supra, sequitur quod non sit aliud in eo essentia quam suum esse. Sua igitur essentia est suum esse." Considerations of this sort lie behind his view that perfect being necessarily exists. For a defense of Aquinas's account of divine simplicity, see Stump and Kretzmann 1985.

³⁰ Since Aquinas identifies perfect being with God, someone might object at this point that if we do not take Aquinas's claim about the necessary existence of perfect being as a stipulation but follow his reasoning from the nature of perfect being to that conclusion, we have an attempt at a proof—a peculiar variation on the ontological argument—of God's existence, so that what Aquinas maintains about perfect goodness can be admitted only by those willing to accept such a proof and its conclusion. But this objection is just confused. The premises of this putative proof are such that they would be accepted only by someone who already accepted the conclusion, so that the putative proof would be blatantly question-begging. Aquinas's reasoning, then, does not constitute a proof for God's existence; it is, rather, a clarification of two standard divine attributes and their interrelations.

³¹ See, e.g., Alston 1980 (reprinted Alston 1989).

³² I am grateful to William Alston for helping me work through this point. As a rough example of the way in which the account of faith presented here could be extended to other beliefs of faith, consider an unreflective, historically uninformed undergraduate S who reads the Acts of John for the first time and rejects it, although he accepts the Gospel of John as authoritative for Christianity, because he unreflectively rejects as not good the character presented as the Apostle John in the Acts. S believes on faith that (p) the Gospel of John is authoritative but the Acts is not. His belief, however, is not an example of a case in which the object of the intellect is sufficient to move the intellect; rather, his belief results at least in part from some influence of the will, based on his dislike of the character presented as the apostle in the Acts and his desire not to admit such a character into his list of religious heroes. For the sake of the example, let it also be the case that his reaction is appropriate, that the character presented as the Apostle John in the Acts is not worthy of moral praise. Then the existence of a perfectly good, necessarily existent God, all of whose decrees and interactions with human beings are also perfectly good, is what justifies S's belief that p. It does not follow, however, that S is justified in believing that he is justified in believing p. These suggestions for extending the account defended in this paper are, of course, very sketchy; filling them out would require a great deal more detailed work.

³³ST IIaIIae.4.8.

³⁴ As everyone must recognize, a believer's adherence to the propositions of faith has a manifold basis, which includes religious experience, participation in a religious community such as a church, and so on. I certainly do not intend to ignore the importance of such elements in forming or sustaining adherence to faith. But what is of concern to me here is just that part of the explanation of a believer's adherence to the propositions of faith which is provided by Aquinas's account of goodness and being and his theory of the nature of the will, and so I will say nothing here about religious experience or Christian community. For an account of the importance of religious experience in forming and sustaining belief in God, see Alston forthcoming.

³⁵ The ultimate point of faith is, of course, salvation.

³⁶ I discuss the doctrine of the atonement in Stump 1988a, and I consider justification by faith in more detail in Stump 1989a.

³⁷ For elaboration of this point, see Stump 1988b.

³⁸ For some explanation and argument in support of this view, see Stump 1989a.

³⁹ Someone might object that anyone who believes God to be both omnipotent and perfectly good will also believe that in allying himself with perfect goodness he is putting himself on the side of power and that therefore it is not possible to decouple the desire for goodness from the desire for power in the case of believers. The objector's premise seems to me fundamentally correct, but the conclusion he seeks to draw from it doesn't follow. Someone who believes in an omnipotent, perfectly good God will believe that in following goodness he is also associating himself with power. But as long as it is not overwhelmingly obvious to a believer that there is a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good, it will not be overwhelmingly obvious that in following what seems to him good he is allyinghimself with power. For example, in the case of someone such as Mother Teresa, although it is clear that she has dedicated herself to goodness, it is not equally obvious, to believers observing her and even (one supposes) to her herself, that she is on the side of power. In such a case it is possible for the desire for goodness and the desire for power to pull a person in different directions, in spite of her belief in an omnipotent, perfectly good God; and so it is possible to decouple the desire for goodness from a desire for power when it is not overwhelmingly obvious that there is an omnipotent, perfectly good God. For a sensitive and penetrating portrayal of this point, see the representation of the temptations of Christ in Milton's Paradise Regained. I am grateful to Steve Maitzen for calling my attention to this objection.

⁴⁰ For a discussion of the role of reason in the life of faith and a consideration of the different states of acquiring faith and reflecting on it, see Kretzmann forthcoming.

⁴¹ I am indebted to Norman Kretzmann, Scott MacDonald, Steven Maitzen, and Alvin Plantinga for comments or suggestions, and I am particularly grateful to William Alston for his many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.