The Primacy of Love: an introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas

Written by Paul J. Waddell Reviewed By Stephen N. Williams

This is a rather unexpected book. Its matter is stated in the title but one might little guess at its form which is not just popular but homiletic. Aquinas is removed from the volumes in which his person and teaching have been incarcerated (though the author does not quite put it like that!) and put back into the lecture room where he handled the theological material for students and beginners we find in the Summa Theologiae. But he is not put back in time; Thomas is very much our contemporary.

Waddell expounds a vision of the moral life meant to transform us. He aspires to kindle within the flame of sacred love. Concentrating on the second part of the Summa, he begins with the ascription of purpose to all personal life. Our purpose is happiness. Aquinas will not divert us from that; he claims it for God, our Creator, and describes how love is the sanctified and sanctifying means of attaining it. The kind of love in mind is cardinally the astounding love of friendship—friendship with God. After a crucial chapter establishing and explaining that, Waddell contests an interpretation of Aquinas which plays down the role of the passions; on the contrary; ‘For Aquinas the most important concern of the moral life is the development of our feelings according to what is best for us’ (p. 79). But they must be transformed and directed toward the good in love. Waddell describes the form which life takes in moral battle and Aquinas’ examination of this in terms of affective emotions (love, hatred, desire, aversion, joy, sadness) and the spirited emotions (hope, despair, fear, courage, anger) that signal our combative engagement in a life shaped by affective emotions. Waddell then treats of how virtue is won in growth as qualities of action become qualities of the person and finally of how the Spirit crowns and brings to perfection those virtues bonded by love which from the beginning are the product of God at work in and with us. In the end, God.

The design of this book is highly commendable. Aquinas, like the great theologians of the past, was concerned for the lives of the faithful. Waddell makes him eminently accessible although there is excessive repetition. Students may certainly be urged to read it as a lucid presentation of aspects of Thomas’ moral theology but they will not at all be safe in doing so unless they read more widely in and on Thomas. For one would not guess that the moral theologian of Summa Part Two had established both the immutability of God and the analogical status of language about him in Part One. We do not have a context, then, for Waddell’s exposition of reciprocity and friendship. Further, the author presents talk of our assisting God, interceding for God, divine powerlessness and, it seems, our protection of God (!! p. 67) as an exposition of Summa 1.11.65, 5 and 11.11.23, 1. Thomas says no such thing in these sections and what he does say, if read carefully, indicates the analogical qualification.

Does or should the author succeed in luring us into Thomas’ world? Its dose of moral realism, single-minded passion for God and constantly good instinct for the topography of moral experience make it attractive, yet in his Disputation against Scholastic Theology (1517) Luther wrote: ‘We are not made righteous by doing righteous deeds; but when we have been made righteous we effect righteous deeds.’ Waddell, however, presents on behalf of Aquinas an answer to the question ‘How might we become just people?’ in terms of: ‘By practicing [sic] acts of justice’, adding that ‘a just person is one who by habitually being just takes on the quality of justice’ (p. 113). These attitudes need not be polar. Personal identity is a complex notion but one aspect of it is unquestionably that we become what we do and that there is such a sequence as action-habit-character-identity. But one fears throughout that Waddell’s Aquinas is the exponent of a theological anthropology that Luther singled out for eradication. The fear is fuelled by the fact that this ethics is virtually Christ-less and certainly without the atonement which gives its proper meaning to sin. And yet Aquinas would not have it so, nor, I believe, would Waddell. As the author isolates Aquinas’ ethics from the rest of the Summa, we ought to suspend judgment on whether the very possibilities of such isolation confirm a Protestant’s fear or whether Aquinas can hold fast his ethics in an adequate soteriology. A judgment of charity on this point will, I hope, be supportable by a judgment of scholarship, but at least the book exudes something of the love of holiness, goodness and God which gives such charity its grace.


Stephen N. Williams

Stephen Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and served as general editor of Themelios from 1995 to 1999.