Title I: Notions and Divisions

Usefulness. By accurate notions the distinct knowledge of things is prepared for the intellect. Especially to be attended to are the notions of the commanded act and the elicited act, and of moral liberty.

The notion of a human act. An act is called human insofar as it is voluntary, that is, insofar as it proceeds from the will, with advertence of reason, toward human finality.

For it belongs to the specific dignity of the rational animal that he act by conscious reason and will. The acts by which we seem to operate in a way similar to the other living beings have customarily been called acts of man. Cf. St. Thomas, 1, 2, q. 1, art. 1.

Therefore a fully human act is a fully voluntary act.

In our present life, an act is at the same time human and free. For in heaven the most fully voluntary act of adhering to God, our beatific end, cannot be psychologically free.

For we know from philosophy that a psychologically free agent is one who, all things required for acting being posited, can do or omit the action (liberty of contradiction), and can choose this action or a different one (liberty of specification).

Whether an act can be free without some attention to finality, or to the order of reason; or whether, when only temporal utilities are adverted to, then we necessarily embrace the greater utility: this is disputed. Those who think that this attention is not required admit human acts which are not moral. We, as is evident from our very definition of a human act, rather hold the contrary side with St. Thomas, l.c.; cf. Suarez, De bonitate et malitia humanorum actuum, d. 1, s. 1, n. 9, 10.

¹ Recently Victor Frins, S.J., treats the matter fully and learnedly in De actibus humanis, 3 vols., Freiburg im Breisgau, 1897-1904.

The notion of a moral act. An act is called moral insofar as it pertains to morals, or to the manner and custom of human life. Therefore acts are formally moral insofar as they give quality and value to life in rational estimation ¹.

According to St. Thomas, the genus of morals begins where dominion of the will is first found. Wherefore all human acts are at the same time moral. Cf. 1, 2, q. 18, art. 5, 9; and q. 19, art. 1, ad 3.

Therefore there will also be a twofold division of human acts: one psychological, by which they are considered in their physical constitution, or as acts; the other moral, by which they are considered in their rational estimation, or as human. A third division, from efficacy, is not common to all acts.

¹ In explaining the notion of morality, theologians labor rather considerably. Cf. Lehmkuhl, I, 93.

I. Psychological division of human acts. 1. Human acts are internal or external. The former are completed by internal powers, and do not appear outwardly in any way: to think, to imagine. The latter either are manifested by some sensible sign, or proceed to external powers: words by which interior affections are expressed; genuflection for adoring.

Strictly speaking, the act which is called external ought to be called mixed: for unless the will had a part in it, it would not be human.

2. Acts are natural or supernatural. The former are done by the natural powers alone, with the ordinary concurrence of the First Cause; supernatural acts are done with the aid of grace transferring the act to the supernatural order.

Moreover, graces are granted which are called medicinal, insofar as they confer strength for avoiding sins. Yet are they purely medicinal, so that, when they are given to unbelievers, acts consonant with these graces do not transcend the natural order? Many, perhaps most, admit such graces as purely medicinal; we rather incline to the negative side.

3. Human acts are elicited or commanded.

To command is to move someone toward doing something, by intimating or announcing (proposing) to him the thing to be done, as if you were to say: Do this. We can command ourselves and others. Yet others only if they are inferior to us; and then the external manifestation of our will is necessary.

Now acts are elicited or commanded in a twofold way.

a) With attention to their efficient causality, elicited acts are acts which, commanded by no other act, are consummated in the will itself which determined itself to acting: such can be an act of love of God. Commanded acts, on the contrary, are those which, from the command of the will, are effected by other powers, whether internal or external, indeed even by the will itself. Think of the various acts of divine worship which the will exercises through mind and body: prayer, psalmody, inclinations of the head.

b) With attention to final causality, or motive, acts are called elicited with respect to the proximate motive; commanded, with respect to another motive by which the agent is moved to perform the act under its proximate motive: as if from fear you were to make an act of charity.

Since the question concerns final causality, not efficient causality, a nobler action can be commanded by an inferior one. But it is clear that, for the command to be efficacious, the powers for making the nobler act must be at hand, or, in the example alleged, grace for making an act of charity.

An act can be done under its own proper motive, and also simply under a nobler motive. Thus, a poor man asks alms of me. I can bestow alms upon him from mere charitable benevolence; and the same charity can command in me an affection of mercy or compassion, under which, with charity commanding, I bestow the alms. In the latter case the act is strictly commanded; in the former, only broadly, because not mercy itself, but charity alone, is exercised in it.

Moral division. As moral, human acts can be right or depraved, according as they are done according to the order of reason, or apart from or against that order.

They are licit or illicit, according as they are consonant with a law that commands or even counsels, or are repugnant to a law that commands.

They are good or evil, with attention to the proportion which they have to the agent, to whom they can be fitting or unfitting.

We do not add indifferent acts, because, as they are received in the subject, they cannot affect him except well or badly. Yet those acts are called indifferent which, with attention to their object or genus, cannot yet be denominated good or evil.

Insofar as they are referred to another, the same acts are imputable unto praise or blame, unto reward or punishment, and consequently meritorious or demeritorious.

Moral liberty. Just as psychological liberty coheres with the psychological account of a human act, so moral liberty is connected with the moral account of the same act.

This, however, is understood in two ways.

1. In the more frequent use, moral liberty denies an obligation of the will: I have moral liberty of praying, studying, walking.

2. In the less frequent use, it denies an impediment of the will, when, as much as the will itself wishes, so much can it unfold itself. Therefore it denies those several servitudes, more or less full, of concupiscences or of bodily weight, which we have to undergo with groaning, as when we complain that the mind was lacking to us for rising at the appointed hour.

This moral liberty has been wounded by original sin, yet not destroyed. Therefore the proposition was condemned that, in the present state, man, left to himself, would have power only for sinning. Cf. propositions 25, 27 and 65 of Baius, among the propositions condemned by St. Pius V, respectively as "heretical, erroneous, suspect, rash, scandalous, and offensive to pious ears." 1 Oct. 1567. Prop. 25: "All the works of unbelievers are sins, and the virtues of philosophers are vices." Prop. 65: "Only by Pelagian error can some use of free will be admitted as good or not evil; and he who so thinks and teaches does injury to the grace of Christ." Prop. 27: "Free will, without the aid of the grace of God, has power only for sinning." (Denz., n. 1025, 1917, and 1065.)

Wherefore the love of charity, in heaven, will be at the same time psychologically necessary and morally supremely free: by loving God there, the will perfectly effects what it wills to effect.

Division of certain acts from efficacy. Not all acts, but not a few, are done less for their own sake than for a further efficacy: thus the buyer and the seller make a contract of sale in order to have the thing or the money. These acts are distinguished as valid or invalid. The former have what is essentially required for that efficacy; the latter lack an essential element. Valid acts themselves are, some, rescindable by human authority: for example, several contracts, on account of injury to the other party; others cannot be rescinded; and this either absolutely, as a consummated marriage, or less absolutely, as a ratified marriage, which, by power divinely conferred, can be destroyed by the Supreme Pontiff for a just cause.

Concerning not a few acts, questions of no small importance arise in law and in moral theology: whether they are invalid ipso facto and from the beginning, and by what law, divine or human; or whether they can be weakened only by the sentence of a judge or by the authority of a legitimate superior.

Not every valid act is licit: for instance, a marriage made against a legitimate prohibition; nor is every invalid act illicit: for instance, a testament lacking form. Yet in ecclesiastical law an invalid act must be said to be per se prohibited.

Various things to be noted. 1. The will, both by acting and by omitting an act, can observe or violate the order of reason. Wherefore, under the name of human act comes also a conscious and free omission, which can be good and meritorious, evil and deserving of punishments.

2. Although we refer human acts to the will, the intellect also has its own parts in these acts. No understanding is mere understanding, no willing mere willing; but each faculty, in various degree, conspires in every action.

3. Nor do acts exist separated as we consider them; but they are prepared in a certain continuous series of actions, and are completed by various consequences. None is without antecedent roots, none without subsequent effects. But no less than physical science, moral science must estimate continuous motion as an infinite series of disjoined or momentary motions, so that in some imperfect way it can know and explore them.

Arrangement of the treatise. The human act is essentially voluntary. In our present condition it is at the same time free, moral, and imputable. Yet per se it is not repugnant to its essence that it be psychologically necessary; and we have adduced the example of the beatific vision. Likewise the observance of precepts was psychologically necessary to Christ. For this reason liberty, morality, and imputability unto merit or punishment ought rather to be called properties of the human act as it is done by a wayfarer. Nevertheless liberty is joined more closely with voluntariety, so that a separate exposition of liberty and voluntariety would be without usefulness and not without inconvenience. Therefore this will be the arrangement of the treatise, that we treat: 1. Of the human act as voluntary and free; 2. Of the impediments of the human act; 3. Of the human act as moral; 4. Of the human act as imputable.

I. A human act, under which name also omission comes, is an act which proceeds from the will with advertence of reason. In this life this act is psychologically free; according to the estimation of reason, it qualifies our life, whence it is called moral; and, according as it is referred to another, it is meritorious or demeritorious.

II. Psychologically it is distinguished, with attention to the executing power, as internal or external; with attention to the subjective principle, as natural or supernatural. With attention to its consummation in the will or in a power moved by the will, or also with attention to the proximate or remote motive under which it is done, it is called elicited or commanded.

III. As moral, an act can be, with attention to the order of reason, right or depraved; with attention to law, licit or illicit; with attention to proportion to the agent, good or evil (in the subject, none is indifferent); with attention to relation to another, meritorious or demeritorious.

With this notion is connected liberty, which is called moral, insofar as it signifies either licitness or human possibility.

IV. With attention to further efficacy, some acts are valid, others invalid. Valid acts can be rescindable or not. An invalid act is not necessarily illicit, nor is a licit act always valid.

V. The intellect does not act without the will, and vice versa; nor do acts exist separately from the continuous actuation of human energy; and none fails to flow into the following disposition.

VI. The reason for the order to be followed is established.