Virtues in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

RECENT YEARS have seen the publication of studies advocating an orientation for Christian ethics based upon virtue. Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair Maclntyre, Paul J. Wadell, Jean Porter, Daniel Mark Nelson, and others are associated with this approach. To many who had known and experienced Roman Catholic moral theology in the decades before Vatican II, this invitation to a restoration of virtue ethics, when it first appeared, was somewhat unexpected and surprising. Some Catholic schools and religious orders had been sustaining theologies of virtues for one or more centuries, and those approaches had continued up through the 1950s. Also a few Catholic moral theologians during the middle third of the 20th century had been developing new approaches (distinct from forms of neo-Scholasticism) in which virtue had an important role and which expanded ethics* horizons through modern biblical studies, Christology, and theories of personality and social analysis. During the past years some Protestant ethicians have found an ethics of virtue attractive. Why? Perhaps because it seemed to be original and yet had a venerable pedigree; it was formal but not legalistic, human but not transcendental. An ethics of virtue, unlike approaches based on natural law, can suggest biblical words. However, in arguing for the value of virtues, often as a reaction to the recent history of secular liberal or Protestant ethics, some new advocates of an ethics of virtue have largely ignored the distinct and diverse history of Catholic