Article III. Supplements to the Doctrine

16. Right taken as a faculty is rightly called the formal object cui of justice; for it is the reason why something is owed from justice.

The formal object quod, on the contrary, is the rationale of a debt on account of a right. For under this rationale justice attains its matter, just as sight attains color and hearing sound.

17. The just thing which justice furnishes is rightly called an equal debt.

For in the rationale of the just, even when the term is employed in a signification other than a moral one, there is contained a certain equality which, because it is the equality of the measured to the measure, is in some manner owed. The just, therefore, is something equal. Here, however, the measure is the right of another; to that right there corresponds something strictly owed. The just, therefore, is at once equal to the right and owed.

18. Justice safeguards the personal equality of men. Further, rights, as we have seen, correspond to the personal dignity which inheres equally in all and safeguard this equal dignity of all. Therefore justice itself, which observes rights, must be said to safeguard the personal equality of men.

19. You will ask whether we understand an infused or an acquired virtue.

We answer that the discussion here concerns an acquired virtue, whose acts, nevertheless, will be performed in one manner by a believer and in another by an unbeliever. For the believer, if he is in the state of grace, will perform deliberate acts while stirred and aided by the actual and supernatural grace of God. Moreover, through an act of charity he has ordered himself toward God as toward his supernatural end, which, illumined by divine faith, he apprehends and believes: this ordering morally perseveres in the habit of charity; and, certainly for the most part, not to say always, when he acts deliberately, besides apprehending the immediate moral goodness of the present order, he will confusedly apprehend and intend the supernatural goodness with which, instructed by faith, he knows the act to be endowed. In other words, an act of justice, when it is performed by a Christian who is a friend of God, will either be referred, together with the acting person himself, to the supernatural end, or will even ultimately be resolved into the motive of faith, insofar as it will be performed—at least if you seek its ultimate rationale—as acceptable to God, the author of the supernatural order, and as pertaining to that supernatural justice which could be participated in only by God’s beneficence and which was instituted by the positive and gratuitous will of God. (Cf., in the preceding volume, the thesis concerning merit.)