In her call for a just social order, the Church urges us to consider the ambit of justice as co-extensive with the global community of nations. In Gaudium et spes, we read:

The increasingly close interdependence which is gradually encompassing the entire world is leading to an increasing universal common good, the sum total of the conditions of social life enabling groups and individuals to realize their perfection more fully and readily, and this has implications for rights and duties affecting the whole human race.Gaudium et spes, chap. 2, no. 26.

If, as the Council further requires, “any group must take into account the needs and legitimate desires of other groups and the common good of the entire human family,” then a thorough treatment of the concrete issues involved in the virtue of justice would require much scientific investigation and analysis.Ibid.

In his Summa theologiae, Aquinas devotes sixty-six questions to this important topic of justice, and so helps us understand how best to develop and maintain human life in community.In Aquinas’s conception, justice forms part of a larger view of the moral life. Thus, his view on justice itself remains partial unless one considers such themes as natural law, the various forms of communities that can exist within the Church (see Summa theologiae IIa-IIae qq. 183-189), and the more general discussion of justice and virtue that Aquinas gives in the prima secundae. This fact alone once led the English philosopher Peter Geach to remark that “justice is an immensely problematic concept: there are, in old jargon, many parts of justice - there are many strands plaited together, and each strand carries many knotty problems.”Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge, 1977), p. 110. Since the end of the 19th century, the Church has especially articulated Christian social teaching, and so we are better able to interpret the problems of justice in the light of the gospel. In his encyclical letter that marked the centenary of Leo XIIFs Rerum novarum, Pope John Paul II again underscores the Church’s mission to address the many complicated problems that arise from a concern for justice.

The Church, in fact, has something to say about specific human situations, both individual and communal, national and international. She formulates a genuine doctrine for these situations, a corpus which enables her to analyze social realities, to make judgments about them and to indicate directions to be taken for the just resolution of the problems involved.Centesimus annus, chap. 1, no. 5.

This means that the Christian theologian and other members of the Church rightfully confront social justice issues, but always with an eye to the larger perspectives of the sacra doctrina. As Jesus himself teaches, “But strive first for the kingdom of God and its justice, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6: 33).

In a broad but radical sense, justice constitutes a true virtue because other persons exist in the world; and so every truly responsible person must take account of the neighbor. For no individual, even if he or she lives alone, can escape from being involved in some form of human relationships. Cardinal justice, as Gaudium et spes reminds us, principally concerns one of the primary givens of human experience, namely, “otherness” - the ad alterum. The Sacred Scripture continually speaks of an active commitment to the other, the neighbor, and demands that each of us share responsibility for all of humankind. The virtuously just person, then, demonstrates an active concern for bettering the reciprocal relationships that comprise the moral universe of human society.

Above all, the Christian believer should in no wise feel obligated to yield to the secularist practitioners of political science when it comes to issues of public and private justice. Justice remains a true virtue of the Christian life. However, since democratic forms of government, by distinguishing sharply between the public and private sectors, more and more repudiate the role of custodian of human morality, there exists a new urgency for promoting a fully Christian participation in the social order. Because he developed St Augustine’s doctrine of the “Two Cities,” the contribution of Aquinas to a theological analysis of justice remains especially rich. The classical principles that Christian theologians have established since the patristic era still provide an indispensable source of wisdom for public discourse about justice; indeed these principles remain relevant to an assessment of the problems and ambiguities associated with the specifically modern phenomena of the “Social Assistance State.” Today, then, the Church must render a theological service to human society “by preaching the truth about the creation of the world, which God has placed in human hands so that people may make it fruitful and more perfect through their work; and by preaching the truth about the Redemption, whereby the Son of God has saved mankind and at the same time has united all people, making them responsible for one another.”Centesimus annus, chap. 5, “State and Culture,” no. 51.

While the application of the principles of justice requires that the just man or woman take account of actual social circumstances, the success of this social analysis entails first an understanding of the nature of justice as a real virtue. For every interpersonal relationship develops from and involves an exchange among human persons, and, like any human activity, this civil conversation requires a measure of virtuous regulation. But what is more important, justice forms a truly behavioral virtue; as a habitus of character, then, justice really shapes the personal dispositions of the human subject so that he or she experiences the inclination to act justly. Pope John Paul II makes this point clearly: “The way in which man is involved in building his own future depends on the understanding he has of himself and of his own destiny. It is on this level that the Church’s specific and decisive contribution to true culture is to be found.”Ibid. In the final analysis, the transformation of the world is accomplished in the hearts of those who accept the gospel of truth.

Because it upholds the view that justice possesses a purely objective foundation, Aquinas’s notion of justice differs radically from most political theories that derive from Enlightenment thought. Indeed, for the Christian tradition as a whole, the virtue of justice rests upon what the Latin theologians called a jus. Unfortunately for realist moral theology, the English language translates jus as “right.” But, in this context, the denotation of jus does not fully coincide with what the Anglo-American tradition normally understands by “right” in a politico-juridical sense. As contrasted with “positive” right, jus signifies something essentially inherent in a subject, not posited by legislative will or customary agreement. The appeal to a pre-juridical and fundamentally creation-centered notion of right distinguishes Roman Catholic natural law morality from all forensic conceptions of justice. To speak of a natural premise for justice does not imply a crass empiricist view of human nature and the world, as if the laws of justice ultimately lay hidden in an arcane cosmology or a metaphysical biology. Rather, it simply points up that there is an objective interest in justice that lies outside of the conventions that a people or government may devise for safeguarding the well-being of a community.

Unlike the virtues of fortitude and temperance, to realize the virtuous mean of justice does not directly depend on the particular dispositions that exist in the virtuous person. In justice the mean is called a “mean of the thing” - medium rei, an impersonal measure determined by nature, law, or contract. For example, justice clearly requires that one pay a debt in full, whatever the particular feelings or attitudes the debtor may harbor toward her or his creditor. By contrast, it is impossible to conceive of a temperate action, for example, with respect to food, without knowing the particular capacities and dispositions of the abstemious person. For this reason, the Christian tradition holds that the objective interest of the virtue of justice lies in rendering voluntarily the due with an eye toward the common good. In other terms, one can make a concrete moral judgment concerning what is the just thing independently of rectified sense appetites, even if the person who lacks the other moral virtues appears as an unlikely candidate for fulfilling the requirements of this moral virtue.

Aquinas defines the justum as “that which is due another with equality.”See the discussion in Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 57, a. 1. Justice requires that in social relations whatever is done matches, or fits evenly to, or balances with the rights of others. So the proper characteristic of justice is rightly to govern the human person in his or her dealings with others, whether in dealings between persons or between persons and their community. Both “otherness,” the ad alterum that makes justice possible, and equality, the ad aequalitatem to which justice reaches out, belong by definition to an integral notion of justice. So much is this the case that relationships are not measured by justice properly speaking if a true otherness does not exist between the concerned persons, as happens, for example, in the “one flesh” relationship between husband and wife and, by extension, within the immediate family. By the same token, if there is no chance of achieving equality in rendering the debt owed, as between God and intelligent creatures, justice survives only in an analogical form. Isidore of Seville, called Hispalensis, maintains the classical distinction between fas and jus: what is jus pertains to human affairs and what is fas, following classical Latin usage, refers only to divine law.Isidore of Seville (d. 636), Etymologiarum Libri Bk 5, chap. 2 (PL 82:198).

Justice discovers its objective ground in a jus. How does the theologian identify a jus? Aquinas, and with him the main lines of the Christian tradition, acknowledges two fonts or sources for the justum, the just thing. These are natural right and positive right. Natural right, as I have said, arises from the basic goods of human flourishing such as human life, bodily integrity and human reproduction, good reputation, community life, communication in truth, and so forth. Positive rights, on the other hand, stem from convention, usually formalized in law; a worked-cut system of justice, therefore, represents a distinctive evolution of human culture and civilization. Thomas Gilby comments on the main divisions of right and law as these appear in classical theological sources:

First, natural right and positive right. Natural right is not confined to a hypothetical state of pure nature, but is present throughout the activities of human nature under the reign of grace; the natural law corresponding to it is not a code. Second, positive law is divided into divine law and human law. Divine law is here taken to refer to the legislation of the Old Testament. Human law is subdivided into civil law and canon law: ecclesiastical law occupies a territory between these two. All these divisions are of abstractions; in fact and history their respective commands may overlap and intermingle.Thomas Gilby, Justice, volume 37 of the Blackfriars translation of the Summa theologiae (2a2ae57-62),pp. 8-9.

Natural right corresponds to divine truth insofar as it is communicated through the natural law. The Christian view of justice assumes that the eternal law - that is, “how God knows the world to be” - provides the ultimate foundation and norm for human action. Indeed, every authentic instance of human virtue ultimately reflects the eternal law. But because of its correlation with the eternal law, Christian justice differs from the positive law theory of justice as developed by Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. According to their view, human reason alone undergirds and determines right order in a just society. The Church, however, must preach the truth about creation, and about the order of creation, the ordo rerum, and now this has an impact on moral truth.

Although a fully-developed theory of international law developed only in the 16th century, especially in the work of the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (c.1485 -1546), the Christian tradition from at least the seventh century recognized the existence of a jus gentium. The universality of the jus gentium rests on the view that some rights (along with the laws and conventions that guarantee them) lie so close to what the natural law requires that such agreements merit universal application. In fact, some situations such as the treatment of prisoners of war, safe conduct for diplomats, and other matters of this kind warrant such widespread agreement among civilized peoples, that their governance can claim the equivalent status of natural right. Aquinas considers that this jus or right, along with the rights that belong to the heads of households and even to those who hold positions of authority in extended domestic units, lie somewhere between pure legal convention and natural law.See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 57, a. 4 for a discussion of the jus paternum and jus dominativum. In certain ways, the recognition and development of these domestic rights approximate modern social good theories of justice, though without reducing the virtue of justice to a mere disposition of benevolence.

When Aquinas begins his treatment of justice, he starts with a definition of the virtue whose provenance derives from Roman law.In his treatise on justice, Aquinas addresses five central questions: (1) how to define justice; (2) whether justice abides in the rational appetite; (3) to what objects justice extends; (4) what is its act and (5) its place among the other virtues. For a brief treatment of Aquinas’s position, see the work by Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN, 1988), chap. 11 “Aquinas on Practical Rationality and Justice,” pp. 183-208. The Roman jurist Ulpian defined justice as the lasting and constant will of rendering to each one his right.Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 58, a. 1. Because he considers all virtue as operative habitus, Aquinas modifies this definition so that it fits his psychological theory of virtues and vices. “Justice,“he underscores, “is a habitus according to which a person is said to be active by choosing what is right.”Ibid.: “justitia est habitus secundum quern aliquis constanti et perpetua voluntate jus suum unicuique tribuit.” In presenting the virtue of justice, the Catechism for the Catholic Church adapts this definition (no. 1807). And Aquinas further observes that this formulation more closely resembles what Aristotle has to say about justice in the Ethics.Nicomachean Ethics Bk 2, chap. 4 (1105a31). Still, we should note carefully that realist philosophers and jurists are likely to define justice with diverse emphases. Since the jurist remains concerned with the external relationships that bind men and women together in community, the juridical definition of justice chiefly looks to regulation and equity. But when Aristotle defines justice, he emphasizes the traits that characterize the just person, the one who chooses rightly with respect to what is owed to another - ad alterum. And so along with the philosopher, the theologian must concentrate on what shapes the just person.

Since the justice of the New Law begins with a rectification of the human person’s own operative capacities, the philosophical emphasis better serves the purposes of theology. Aquinas analogically compares moral justice with evangelical justification that comes from belief in the gospel. “The justice that works in us by faith,” he says, “is that through which the ungodly are justified; … it lies in the due order of the parts of the soul.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 58, a. 2 ad 3. This evangelical rectitude belongs to justice in its metaphorical sense and implies a broader theological understanding of justice, such as the one that figures in Aquinas’s account of Christian satisfaction. For alongside the juridical model that emphasizes Christ’s rendering something due to God, Aquinas places an “evangelical” understanding of justice, one that he succeeds in relating to the human model with greater success than that found in St Anselm’s famous attempt in the Cur Deus homo?

Both philosophical and evangelical notions of justice share the ratio of “rectus ordo” or “rectitudo.” The latter term, however, more clearly indicates that the performance of the just deed proceeds on a prior divine initiative and that it consists formally in the subordination of the human person and his destiny to God in love. It is the restoration of this same evangelical justice that constitutes the inner motive of Christ’s satisfactory work. This salvific purpose and love of Christ determines the several ways in which satisfaction has a personal relevance to each person’s individual destiny and to the establishment and prolongation of a communal salvation-history. Because charity and justice lie so close to the heart of the Christian life, St Anselm contends that justice shapes the will. “Justice,” he says, “is rectitude of will preserved for its own sake.”St Anselm, De veritate chap. 12 (PL 158: 482): “justitia est rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata.” In sum, Christian justice is never a matter of simply knowing what is the right thing to do; the virtue also entails the steadfast accomplishment of what is right. This steadfastness develops only in one whose capacities for action have been shaped by the grace of justification.

Justice, then, principally concerns operations - it is circa operationes. Because justice involves willed activity, this virtue immediately depends on the actual rendering of what is owed to another, rather than on feelings of benevolence toward others. “Justice is not about the whole field of moral virtue,” Aquinas continues, “but only about external deeds and things, and these under a certain aspect, namely of the due co-ordination of one person with another.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 58, a. 8. Because of the unity of the human person, we should not draw too sharp a distinction between the virtues that are circa operationes and those that are circa passiones. Indeed “doing justice,” that is, the actual accomplishment of a just deed, comes easily for the person who possess a well-tempered and steady emotional life; thus, justice also relies on the virtues of personal discipline. “Accordingly,” says Aquinas, “our actions as bearing on external things are put right by justice, but as originating in our feelings they are put right by other moral virtues, which are about our emotions (circa passiones)’’Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 58, a. 9, ad 2. For further information on the distinction between virtues of operations and virtues of the emotions, see Summa theologiae Ia-IIae q. 60, a. 2.

In his De officiis, St Ambrose describes justice as “that which renders to each what is his or hers, and claims not what is another’s; justice disregards one’s own profit in order to maintain a common equity.”St Ambrose, De officiis, Bk 1, chap. 24 (PL 16:62). This means that the exercise of true justice achieves a virtuous mean in objective reality. Aquinas clearly explains in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics the important difference between the mean of justice and of the virtues of personal discipline.

Justice is not a mean in the same way as the other moral virtues. Their mean lies between two vices: liberality is a mean between parsimony and extravagance. But justice is not a mean between two vices. However, it can be called a mean by reason of its effect inasmuch as it constitutes a mean, since its act is a just operation which is a mean between doing what is unjust and bearing the unjust. The first of these, active injustice, pertains to a vice of injustice which is a habitus of extremes in as much as it takes too many goods and too few evils. But the other, i.e., the toleration of the injustice is not a vice, but a suffering.Sententia libri Ethicorum Bk 5,1. 10: C 992, trans. C.I. Litzinger, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1964), p. 430. For further information on the distinctiveness of the mean of justice, see Summa theologiae Ia-IIae q. 64, a. 2.

Because the text relates suffering to the establishment of a just order, Aquinas helps us to relate the practice of justice to distinctively Christian perspectives of human life.

In order to explain the virtue of justice, the theologian must gain a clear comprehension of how parts relate to wholes. For justice within the community depends on recognizing the distinctive relationship between an individual human person, endowed with the full dignity that belongs to one created as imago Dei, and the common good of the body politic.For an interesting catena of texts from Aquinas on the inter-relationship of parts and whole, see Marcus Lefebure, Injustice, vol 38 of the Blackfriars translation of the Summa theologiae (London/New York,1975), pp. 271 -274. The underlying basis for the uniqueness of each human person lies in the fact that individuals are distinguished materially from the species because of the particular human flesh and bone that belongs to each member of the human species. Still, the human species grounds a certain form of general friendship. Aquinas remarks that “in some general sort of way, every man is by nature a friend of every man - in the way that Ecclesiasticus talks about ‘every animal loving its own.’”Summa theologiae Ia-IIae q. 114, a. 1, ad 2.

In order adequately to examine the several relationships that exist within the human community, it is necessary to introduce the distinction between a human individual and the person. By their preoccupation with the “self as a particular center of consciousness and volition, the philosophers of the Enlightenment broke with earlier philosophical traditions and their way of accounting for the individuality of each human being within the species. Because of the theology of the incarnation, Christian thinkers had always upheld the distinction between an individual instance of human nature and the human person; for whereas Christ possesses two individual and concrete natures, in the mystery of the hypostatic union, he remains one divine Person. And so the Christian tradition developed (at least since the 5th-century Council of Chalcedon) a heightened awareness of the unique dignity that belongs to human personhood. Christian doctrine accordingly recognizes that the human person signifies more than a singular instance of the human species. In speaking about the care and responsibility that the Church takes for humankind, Pope John Paul II reflects this appreciation when he says that “we are not dealing here with man in the ‘abstract,’ but with the real, ‘concrete,’ ‘historical’ man. We are dealing with each individual, since each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption, and through this mystery Christ has united himself with each one for ever.”Centesimus annus, chap. 6, no. 53.

Scholastic theology especially developed appropriate ways to speak about created personhood as that which represents the most noble feature of all God’s creation. In an important essay on this topic, The Person and the Common Good, Jacques Maritain observes that “the human being is caught between two poles; a material pole, which, in reality, does not concern the true person but rather the shadow of personality or what, in the strict sense, is called individuality, and a spiritual pole, which does concern true personality.”Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald (New York, 1947), p. 33. Maritain holds, moreover, that while the individual qua individual can be subordinated to larger societal interests, the individual qua person enjoys an excellence that surpasses that of the whole human social order and, because of the divine design, finds rest and perfection only in union with God. Some authors have criticized Maritain’s distinction between individual and person as overly influenced by the Cartesian split between res extensa and res inextensa. But at least his argument asserts that there is a formal difference between the individual human being and the person. Apart from the metaphysical interest which such a distinction raises, the difference between person and individual also opens up issues for Christian ethics. For example, does a human being considered simply as an individual member of the species enjoy certain prerogatives, such as the freedom to marry, that even the state, for its own legitimate interests, cannot restrict? In any event, for the decisive and practical questions of moral theology, the Church affirms the unique place that the human person occupies in the community: “The origin, the subject and the purpose of all social institutions is and should be the human person, whose life of its nature absolutely needs to be lived in society.”Gaudium et spes, chap. 2, no. 26.

The important connection between the human person and the common good raises a number of important questions such as subsidiarity. The Church considers a social community as an “ordered whole” that can exist in diversely interdependent ways; at the same time, it is important to recall that subordination does not spell obliteration. The principle of subsidiarity affirms that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”Centesimus annus, chap. 5, no. 48, citing Pius XI, Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno, I. When considering the human community as a whole, the Christian theologian must take two factors into account: first, the ordering of the whole to the common good, and second, the achievement of diverse ends within the same community. Radical individualism corrodes the due ordering of human society; totalitarianism trammels on the personal dignity that each member of a community ought to enjoy. True social justice aims to establish a human community that is readied for participation in the beatific communion of the saints, one which, because of the infused virtue of justice, already appears in some ways among those who belong to Christ.

By looking at three forms of human community, we can discern the diverse relationship between justice and charity in each one. First, the natural family represents the whole that in the created order best realizes the divine design; as the domestic church, the family finds its deepest origin in the sacramental bond between wife and husband. Since it arises from natural processes, however, the unity of the family whole excludes the “otherness” that justice requires, though not the exercise of charity that, according to St Paul, Christian marriage represents in a symbolic way. Secondly, the political community constitutes a perfect expression of human society whose end is the bene vivere humanum, the good of human prosperity for the community.St Augustine’s City of God is the classic Christian text that expresses all that is implied in the bene vivere humanum and the “City” in which it transpires. “If every community is ordered to the good,” says Aquinas, “it follows that the chief community is the one that aims at the chief human good that exists.”Sententia libri Politicorum Bk 1, lect. 1. Justice is a virtue of the “City.” Of course, the achievement of a just political order lacks the ultimate perfection that consists in loving God above all things, but as an authentic secondary end, the human polis embodies its own degree of perfection that the universal call to sanctity must respect. Pope John Paul II expresses it this way: “The Church respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order and is not entitled to express preferences for this or that institutional or constitutional solution.”Centesimus annus, chap. 5, no. 47. Thirdly, the Church constitutes the “new community” of the elect that arises from the distinctive bond that charity establishes among the members of the Body of Christ. In this community that supersedes every form of human community, the new law of evangelical justice reigns, so that within the Church the end of all order is beatitudo, the blessed repose of the saints in God.

Each of these communities represent various “common goods” that provide, as it were, the arenas in which the virtues of justice and charity are to be exercised. Aquinas shares Aristotle’s optimistic view “that there is as much of a natural impetus to live in the community of the state as there is for virtue in every man or woman.”See Sententia libri Politicorum Bk. 1, lect. 1: “Now it is clear that the state includes all other communities, for the household and the township are comprised in the state, so that the political community is the chief community. Since it aims at the common good which is better and more god-like than the good of an individual, the state, as Aristotle states at the beginning of the Ethics, aims at the chief human good. And Aristotle concludes by saying that there is as much of a natural impetus to live in the community of the state as there is for virtue in every man or woman. At the same time, just as virtues are acquired by exercise, as the Second Book of the Ethics makes clear, so states have been instituted by human industry.” At the present time and in the majority of cases, the Nation-State exemplifies the political community that authors traditionally referred to as the polis or “city.” And while these realities often coincide in actual practice, the notion of a state, a country, and a government remain formally distinct ones. To cite one example of the practical importance of this distinction, the virtue of general justice governs activities within a state and government, whereas a potential part of justice, namely, the virtue of piety or patriotism, governs our respect for a native land or country (patria).

Commenting on Aristotle’s Politics, Aquinas remarks: “The end of natural things is their nature. But the state is the end of the subordinate communities which we have mentioned [i.e., household and township] and which we have shown to be natural. The State is, therefore, natural.”Sententia libri Politicorum Bk 1, lect. 1. Because it possesses a distinct formal object, namely, the human community ordered towards the common good as such, general justice represents an authentic form of justice. Just as a hand naturally defends the whole body-person, so a virtuous citizen defends and promotes the good of his or her “city,” the state. Christian social justice seeks to set forth a balanced view of the relation between the individual and the common good: “Any part naturally loves the whole more than itself. And any individual thing naturally loves the good of the species more than its own individual good.”Summa theologiae Ia q. 60, a. 5 ad 1. General justice regulates the obligations that members of the political community have towards the common good; since a political community rests on an established order (instead of the natural ties that bond the family), general justice applies particularly to the well-being of the polis. Aquinas defines the act of general justice simply as each member of the polis contributing his or her due to the common good. Because general justice lacks the specific determinations that particular things and operations provide for the various forms of particular justice, positive law or convention usually determines the ad aequalitatem that justice requires. For this reason, the tradition sometimes refers to this general form of justice as legal justice.

In a broad but certain sense, general justice embraces the whole of human life, the conversatio civilis; and so even the virtues of personal discipline such as fortitude and temperance and whatever else remains indispensable for the well-being of human life in the city pertain in some way to this kind of justice. Because the Church distinguishes between the virtuous realization of the common good and exaggerated nationalism, theologians need to bear in mind that there exists a proper order of individual members, the citizens of a modern state, to the common good that the state embodies. For the Church has uniformly and repeatedly condemned the theoretical and practical alternatives to a just social order. These take the shape either of rankly individualist political theories that minimize what the state should do for its citizens or of oppressively socialist ideologies that restrict the legitimate liberties of citizens.“Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism” (Centesimus annus, chap. 2, no. 13). As a true perfection of the human person, legal justice shapes an individual toward a virtuous respect for law, thereby removing a servile fear of authority, and at the same time guards against a dismissive attitude toward proper statutes and good laws whose neglect can only cause harm to the common good. Obviously, the definition of legal justice approaches what today the Church defines as social justice, although as a comprehensive category for all kinds of justice, a complete definition of social justice would include elements of both general and particular justice. For true Christian social justice, says Pope John Paul II, must “situate particular interests within the framework of a coherent vision of the common good.”Centesimus annus, chap. 5, no. 47.

Because the end or goal of legal justice embodies an ultimate perfection in the temporal order, there exists a certain similarity between general justice and theological charity. Indeed, Aquinas inquires whether general justice essentially represents every virtue. For charity imperates the other virtues so that they reach the properly supernatural goal of beatitudo. ’The life which men seek to live well here on earth,“ says Aquinas, “is ordered to the blessed life we hope to live in heaven as to its end.”De regimine principum Bk 1, chap. 15. However, legal justice orders all other virtuous activity toward an end or goal that is not found in any particular one of them. On account of this preeminent objective, general or legal justice, to the extent that it respects the requirements of the natural law, achieves the justification of the human city in a preeminent way. Thus the Church endorses “the principle of the ‘rule of law,’ in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals.”Centesimus annus, chap. 5, no. 44. This endorsement assumes, of course, that constitutional law and statutory enactments remain in conformity with the eternal law.

The Thomist writers on Christian virtue further speak about infused general justice, which they define as the virtue that conduces toward the material upbuilding of the Church, “the holy city, the new Jerusalem” (Rev 21: 2).In the same way, infused political prudence directs the activity of the Church as a political reality. Since Christian eschatology teaches that the “City of God” involves a true transformation of the “City of Man,” infused justice must differ not only formally but also materially from its acquired counterpart. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” Jesus tells his disciples, “and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Mt 10: 40). Infused justice works toward realizing the original unity that, by divine plan, belongs to all of creation. So although everyone is required to keep in good standing with just political authority, the Christian believer never serves just the political order. Charity and the infused virtues perfect the exercise of political responsibility. “The Christian upholds freedom and serves it, constantly offering to others the truth which he or she has known (see Jn 8: 31-32), in accordance with the missionary nature of the Christian vocation.”Centesimus annus, chap. 5, no. 46. Because this represents an authoritative teaching, Christian citizens of every state must strive to fulfill this vocation.

Like general justice, the several forms of particular justice have as their proper activity to render to each his or her own.See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 58, a. 11. “Now each person’s own,” explains Aquinas, “is that which is due to him in proportion to making things even. That is why the proper activity of justice is none other than to render to each his or her own.”Ibid. Moral theologians further divide particular justice into two specific parts: distributive and commutative justice. In brief, distributive justice regulates what an individual receives from the common good and protects the rights that a member enjoys by reason of belonging to a specific community. Commutative justice, on the other hand, regulates the exchanges that transpire between individuals or moral persons and protects the rights of one person in relationship to another. Because it involves establishing equality between one person and another, the proper act of commutative justice necessarily involves restitution.For the appropriate text, see Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 61, a. 1.

Commutative and distributive justice regulate the actions of a just person in diverse ways. The equality that commutative justice seeks is an arithmetical *ad aequalitatem* in other words, the due is established, not on the basis of some proportional equality between one person and another, but according to the res or what is objectively owed. Distributive justice, on the other hand, achieves a different kind of equality, viz, a geometrical proportionality, that is, a likeness between two or more proportions: “In so far as one person exceeds another so also what is meted out to him exceeds what is meted out to another.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 61, a. 2. Since we are dealing with a virtue, it is important to recall that the quantitative measurements that Aquinas borrows from Aristotelian categories actually represent qualitative determinations.See Nicomachean Ethics Bk 5, chap. 3,4. As a genuine habitus or quality of character, virtue represents degrees of personal excellence. The principle of equality that both distributive and commutative justice regulate and promote is easily applied when a just person deals with concrete things, such as money, artifacts, or labor; but it is more difficult to make a determination when justice concerns the human word, a gesture, or a particular operation, such as job descriptions, public recognition, and so forth. In these latter instances, the intangibility of the exchange often makes it more difficult to assess the requirements of justice; this holds especially true in cases of commutative justice.

Does distributive justice differ from commutative justice in the subject matter that it treats? By pursuing this line of investigation, moral theologians seek to emphasize that both distributive and commutative justice regulate the same kinds of things, namely and first of all, human persons themselves, but also a person’s real or intangible property as well as words and gestures. However, distributive and commutative justice engage these various realities in different ways. As the name suggests, distributive justice concerns distribution; it regulates how one in authority takes from the whole, or the common good, and gives to the parts of the whole in accord with each one’s dignity and with complete respect for the well-being of the community at large. For this reason, real discriminatory actions thwart the realization of distributive justice. Just authority should distribute goods, honors, and spiritual benefits on the basis of proportionate need and merit, and not on account of other personal qualities. Unfair discrimination, then, establishes a vicious state of affairs within any commonwealth.In Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 63, a. 1, Aquinas distinguishes between the giving that is regulated by justice and the giving that is governed by a potential part of justice, liberality, “which is a matter of freely giving to another something that is not his due.” Aquinas compares the gift of divine grace with liberality; because grace is a free gift, God is not required injustice to give it his bestowing it on humans, therefore, resembles liberality.

Commutative justice regulates exchange; it seeks to establish an objective equilibrium between individual persons or corporate entities, who enjoy a sort of equality within commutative justice; for justice requires that one consider persons impartially, that is, without regard for other conditions in an individual’s life. Moral theology views exchange in a very broad way. Indeed, some exchanges even involve dealings with an unwilling party.Aquinas considers the various examples of unjust exchanges that involve an unwilling partner in Summa theologiae IIa-IIae qq. 64-76. He says that such non-voluntary transactions occur when somebody inflicts injury on another against his or her will, and this can be done in two ways, namely by deed and by word. In short, unjust exchanges between persons include deeds that directly prejudice the good of another’s person - such as happen in voluntary homicide (the greatest injury one can do to the neighbor), abortion, bodily mutilation, beatings (that exceed the right measure of proper discipline), unlawful imprisonment - or actions taken against a person’s property such as happen in theft and robbery. By extension, justice also governs actions taken against one’s own person - such as unauthorized mutilation, suicide, and euthanasia. Likewise, unjust exchange includes those words or gestures that depreciate the good of another’s personal worth, such as unjust speech, especially those exchanges governed by judicial structures, i.e., courtroom perjury and judicial execution of the innocent, and the unjust exchange of words within a community and the larger society. The latter category includes a long list of vicious activity that constitute serious harm for the well-being of both Church and society, such as defamation (openly taking away from someone’s character), detraction (privately taking away from someone’s reputation),In Summa theologiae IIa-IIae, q. 73, a. 1, ad 3, Aquinas cites fours ways in which one can depreciate another’s reputation: (1) by attributing what is false to him, (2) by exaggerating his sins, (3) by exposing secrets, (4) and by saying that good actions have been motivated by evil intentions. whispering (to speak or converse quietly and maliciously about a person), ridicule (to heap insult publicly on another), and cursing (to utter evil against someone either by ordering it or wishing it). Because each of these actions involves an element of objective personal hurt to another person as well as to the community of persons, a simple return or reciprocation does not suffice for establishing the full measure of justice. Thus, the judgment on theft, for instance, involves not only restitution but also a penalty of some sort; “Consequently,” says Aquinas, “in exchanges the equalization of what is done and what is undergone in return requires a certain proportionate standard of measurement.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 61, a. 4.

The proper act of commutative justice is restitution. In order to restore the equality of commutative justice, restitution is required both when a person unjustly holds onto another’s property (res aliena accepta) and when a person unjustly appropriates another’s goods (injusta acceptio).See Thomas Gilby, Justice, p. 101, note b. Because injustice so widely pervades the world, the theology of restitution engages the best energies of the moral theologian and the confessor. In practice, many of the conclusions that the casuist epoch developed for dealing with the extraordinary cases involving restitution still provide helpful guidelines and insights into this highly complex issue. But even before the rise of the casuist hegemony in moral theology, theologians dealt with the practical questions of restitution - for example, its purpose, the lawful recipients of restitution, those who are bound to make restitution, and the suitable time for making it. Res clamat domino, as the Roman legal principle puts it. Thomas Gilby offers the following succinct account of the place that restitution maintains in the scheme of justice.

Restitution [involves] giving back something to its owner and/or making reparation for a loss or injury inflicted, so restoring the balance, aequalitas, of commutative justice. The putting right of other relationships, e.g., of charity, friendship, religion, or even of general justice and distributive justice is not directly a matter of restitution in the strict sense of the term, but of paying what is owed or of offering satisfaction or making a proper apology. The obligation is no less, but is not rendered in terms of commutative justice as narrowly defined.Ibid., pp. 104-105, note a.

Common usage restricts the term restitution to those cases that, as instances of non-voluntary or unwilling exchanges, entail the commission of an injustice, but strictly speaking it also applies to voluntary exchanges, v/z, fraud committed in the course of buying and selling or usurious interest on loans.

Christian theology distinguishes between restitution and satisfaction. As with justice itself, restitution principally engages an objective interest, or what is due, as when a judge orders an offender to pay a fine or to return some property to its just owner. In this circumstance, the judge is not primarily concerned with the personal attitude of the offender, for instance, whether the person expresses sorrow or not, but only that he or she make recompense. Since satisfaction includes restitution, but also compensation for the hurt that is caused, it aims to achieve a bigger goal. Restitution, then, chiefly involves restoring external goods that have been unjustly taken; it restores an equilibrium somehow disrupted, for instance, by the theft of property or assault on a person. Satisfaction does not principally concern such external goods, but seeks to redress the actual actions and attitudes that accompany an injustice. Aquinas even envisions the possibility that satisfaction can occur without restitution, as when someone who is unable to make full restitution still humbles himself before the neighbor hurt by some contumacious word or deed. We can also envision the opposite scenario when someone, for instance, who has violently robbed his neighbor makes restitution by restoring the illgotten goods, but refuses to satisfy for the personal hurt caused by the brutal act of robbery.

Because it regulates the interpersonal relationships that flourish within the human community, the cardinal virtue of justice governs significant areas of human life. It comes as no surprise, then, that Aquinas devotes more than forty questions to the virtues that are allied to justice. According to his schema, these virtues, which we will catalogue in this section, fall under two main headings: the virtues of veneration and the virtues of civility. While on the one hand, justice ordinarily aims at establishing a certain, definite equality (ad aequalitatem) between individuals of the same rank, the virtue can also extend to what transpires among non-peers. Broadly speaking then, the first group of virtues, viz, the virtues of veneration, regulates relationships between inferiors and superiors. On the other hand, justice also covers those circumstances in the human community when the requirements established by either general justice or a form of particular justice do not pertain. The second group of virtues, viz, the virtues of civility, regulate and direct interpersonal transactions of this kind among people who share life in the same society.

In scholastic terminology, both the virtues of veneration and the virtues of civility make up the different potential parts of justice.T. C. O’Brien, Virtues of Justice in the Human Community, vol. 41 of the Blackfriars translation of the Summa theologiae (London/New York, 1972), p. 328 provides the following resume of the scholastic teaching on the parts of virtue (partes virtutis): “The cardinal virtues attend to certain primary and more urgent objectives of human activity. When the act of one of these virtues is conceived of as a whole involving certain integrating steps in the attainment of its objective, St Thomas speaks of integral parts or integrating parts of the virtue, e.g., the steps needed to form the integral act of prudence. When within the objective of the cardinal virtue there are specifically diverse interests, the virtue is conceived of as a remote species, a subjective whole, and it has subjective parts, more specific virtues corresponding to the more specific objectives, e.g. as temperance includes the specific virtues of abstinence, sobriety, chastity. When there are virtuous objectives that, while not being more specific instances of the objective of a cardinal virtue, do have some resemblance of affinity to it, the cardinal virtue is considered to be a ‘potestative whole’, the virtues concerned with these related objectives, its potential parts. Thus the meaning of the cardinal virtue is verified more or less of its potential parts… The potential parts are not inferior virtues, but often, as in the case of religion, superior to the cardinal virtue.” This means that, though the virtues of veneration and civility realize the purposes of justice, they do so only after a fashion. With the virtues of veneration, the analogical character of the potential parts of justice involves the notion of equality, or the ad aequalitatem that forms an essential element of the cardinal virtue. This circumstance occurs when someone receives from a person of greater status or dignity goods or benefits that exceed the inferior’s capacity to repay. As a result, such relationships never realize the full equality that characterizes cardinal justice. In the virtues of civility, moral reasoning is at a loss to establish the debt of virtue by reference to a definite *res* for there exists no legal debt determined either by positive law or by a private contract that morally and legally binds the debtor.Aquinas devotes a single question to equity or epieikeia, the special form of justice, which, since its objective is an order of justice not fully covered by positive law, actually consists of a subjective part of general or legal justice. For more information, see Summa theologiae IIa-IIaeq. 120. Instead, in the case of these virtues, the equality of justice is determined by less exact criteria.

Since a person realizes the cardinal virtue of justice only when he or she fully renders the debt owed to another - alteri reddatur quod ei debetur secundum aequalitatem - every other circumstance that entails operations such as distributions or exchanges among persons involves one of the potential parts of justice. These allied virtues are real virtues, for they shape and regulate the actions of the just man or woman. On the basis of this analysis, the Christian tradition recognizes two categories for the potential parts of justice: (1) virtues that regulate relationships in which there is inequality of condition (deficit a ratione aequalis) and (2) virtues that govern right conduct in circumstances where there is inequality of debt (deficit a ratione debiti). In the first category, we number the virtues of religion, piety, and respect (or observance) that regulate human actions, respectively, toward God, our parents, and lawful authority. In the second category, we include first of all legal debt, which, since it concerns the relationship of parts to a whole, remains governed by the cardinal virtue itself, and secondly, the various instances where, because of a lack of a clearly definable jus or right, it is appropriate to speak about a “moral debt.”

When Christian theologians speak about a “moral debt,” they do not mean to insinuate something optional or superfluous. A “moral debt” can oblige a person to act in a certain way, e.g., in human conversation and interaction, we “owe” truthfulness to the persons with whom we are engaged. In such situations, the virtue of truth or veritas establishes a mean between indiscriminate self-revelation and projecting a false image of oneself.See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 109, a. 2. Again, “moral debt” can stipulate responsibilities toward others in circumstances that are difficult to gauge. In the latter case, if the moral debt arises in return for a benefaction, a person exercises the virtue of gratitude, but if the debt results from some evil that a person has unjustly suffered, he or she can rely on the virtue of vengeance. Still other virtues that fulfill a moral debt contribute to an ampler form of virtuous living and therefore are necessary for the bene vivere humanum of the human community. In this category, we place the virtues of liberality and friendship or affability.For Aquinas’s own presentation of the potential parts of justice, see the single article of Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 80.

The virtues of veneration share a common feature insofar as they regulate the conduct of inferiors to superiors. For there exists an inequality of condition or status between the religious, pious, and respectful person and those persons to whom he or she remains obligated. The virtues of veneration do not first of all impose a relationship that entails duty and obligation. Instead, the relationship of “veneration” requires a radical transformation on the part of the virtuous person who remains subject to another. In other words, even though they seem principally to determine certain particular acts that a person ought to perform, these virtues in fact constitute true operative habitus and, therefore, shape the moral character of those who possess them.

In the case of the virtue of religion, the grounds for the inequality lie in what distinguishes the Creator from the creature. This distinction, moreover, arises from a fundamental principle of causality, namely, the dependence that a particular effect owes to the universal principal cause of its being. God remains the source and the conservor of everything that exists and the governor of all that acts. As the first cause of all that exists and all government in creation, God alone abides as the ultimate causa causarum, the supreme cause of causes. But religion is not the only virtue of veneration. For God has not ordained that he alone exercise every authority, but that even created persons share in authority in various ways through a particular causal activity. Those who bring forth new human life and those who execute governance in the civil order stand in a special position with respect to those whom they beget and those whom they govern. Because parents procreate children, mothers and fathers enjoy a special bond with their offspring, and because legitimate superiors can lawfully direct others in specific areas of life, civil administrators hold a place of distinction within the human community. Specific virtues of veneration regulate these important relationships.

Like every virtue, the virtues of religion, filial piety, and respect enable the person who possesses the good habitus to exercise joyfully, promptly, and easily certain defined activities. And since the virtues of veneration develop psychological dispositions that suit a particular person’s station in life, these virtues also regulate our bearings in other important areas of the Christian life. For instance, they facilitate the development of traits such as reverence, humility, submission, reverential fear, and thankfulness. As a general trait of character, reverence holds a special place in the dispositions that characterize a virtuous Christian life, for it disposes a person to practice the theological virtue of hope. Reverence, we know, even forms the psychological analog for the gift of Fear of the Lord.

The Christian tradition teaches that all of these virtuous attitudes are included in the single virtue of honor or dulia. This virtue readies a person to be conformed to a superior precisely as a source of good for the individual and, as a result, inclines a virtuous person to heed the will of the superior, instead of preferring his or her own will. Like all true virtue, dulia or honor aims to embody some particular good that belongs to the perfection of the human person. In the same way, the virtue of obedience governs the actions of the pious person, who obeys God, the author of divine precepts, fathers and mothers, who command through parental directives, and superiors, who may issue orders appropriate to their office. This virtue of obedience holds a place within the larger virtuous formation that cardinal justice develops; however, it does not account, as casuist and deontological models suppose, for the effective principle of the whole moral life.

Aquinas expresses the spirit of the virtues of veneration when he remarks about the character of those who bear authority in the world: “Now a person who has some authority stands as a source of guidance in regard to some special endeavor… and all such people can be called fathers because of a resemblance in the way they care for us.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 102, a. 1. While such a view about the importance of paternity in human life nowadays may give some moment for pause, Aquinas, it should be noted, establishes a structure for the virtues of veneration with the view in mind that all authority originates in the supreme goodness of the heavenly Father. In other words, Aquinas’s suppositions are theological more than anthropological; they represent his prayerful reflection on St Paul more than his cultural circumstances. Because Jesus reveals a heavenly Father who knows only how to treat his children well, the Christian dispensation casts a new and transforming light on all social conventions. And so St Paul warns, “Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven” (Col 4: 1). Just as religion concerns ordering the creature’s relationship with God, so the other virtues of veneration develop a religious sense in every person who is subject to authority in the world.

The second division of the potential parts of cardinal justice includes the virtues that regulate and ensure a courteous life in the well-ordered human community. These virtues moderate the actions of persons who share the same status and condition - in other words, who are peers within the larger social grouping. Aquinas, however, does not draw a sharp distinction between the virtues of veneration and the virtues of civility. Indeed, the religious man or woman, one who respects authority, is best prepared to manifest a civil spirit toward others.

The virtues of civility themselves form two classes. First, there are virtues that remain indispensable for common life because they regulate those exchanges that make up authentic human communicatio. Secondly, there are virtues that contribute to living a happier experience of everyday life, or that simply develop more pleasant living. The first group includes the virtues of truth, gratitude, and vengeance, whereas the second group includes the virtues of liberality and friendship or affability. This first group of virtues - again, truth, gratitude, and vengeance - more fully realizes the essential component of justice, that is, they regulate activities that one can recognize as legitimately due to other people. The other virtues of civility include the virtue of thankfulness or gratitude, which governs how to acknowledge a benefaction; the virtue of vengeance, which controls the forms of retribution for harm done by another either to oneself or to a friend; a habitus of true friendliness, instead of a quarrelsome or meretricious spirit, that makes life within the human community more pleasant and joyful; and finally, liberality, instead of an avaricious or prodigal spirit, which measures the proper way that a person should acquit himself of debts that form no part of strict justice.

As an example of the dynamics of virtuous civility, we will consider the virtue of truth. In the strict meaning of the action, as when drawing up a contract or commenting about another’s character, the obligation to speak the truth flows from and is governed by commutative justice. But there also exists a broader conception of representing the truth that constitutes a potential part of the virtue of justice. Aquinas names this virtue veritas, the simple virtue of truth. As with the virtue of religion, veritas likewise holds a greater eminence in the moral life than does the cardinal virtue of justice itself. For the virtue of veritas embodies a more profound and extensive meaning of virtue than what either the general or particular forms of justice can realize. When he addresses the Pharisee Nicodemus, Jesus points out the authoritative place that the virtue of veritas holds in the Christian life: “But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God” (Jn 3: 21). Within a realist epistemology, truthfulness denotes a kind of fidelity that occurs when there is an adequation between a mental concept or spoken word and what these signs represent in reality. When this notion is applied to the moral virtue of truth, the fidelity applies not only in the cognitive order, but in the personal order as well. In other words, there exists a basic personal honesty or straightforwardness that characterizes the person who lives in the truth about his or her own worth. Aquinas puts it this way: “Like everything else, one’s life is called true on the basis of its reaching its rule and norm, namely divine law; by measuring up to this, a life has uprightness. This is the kind of truth, i.e., uprightness, common to every virtue.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 109, a. 2, ad 3. The person whose life reflects this truthfulness will, among other honorable actions, “speak the truth about himself or herself, sticking to the middle ground between one who speaks boastingly of self and one who speaks slightingly.”Ibid.

As an infused virtue, the virtue of truth represents a particularly apt expression of Gospel values. Recall the distinction that St Paul makes between the old self and the new self, or the unspiritual self and the spiritual self (Rom 7:22- 23). Again, the Second Vatican Council describes the Church as at once on its pilgrim way and as the spotless bride of Christ. Because the Church “is at one and the same time holy and always in need of purification,” the member of Christ’s Body must move to the fullness of the heavenly banquet only with true simplicity of heart.See Lumen gentium, chap. 1, nos 7-8. Aquinas holds that “simplicity takes its name in opposition to the duplicity by which a person holds one thing inwardly and outwardly expresses something else.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 109, a. 2, ad 4. The moral virtue of truth abides no such duplicity, even though it frankly acknowledges the tug and pull of the believer’s fleshly nature against the resolve to live a holy and truthful life. In this circumstance, St Paul recalls his own experience: “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me” (2 Cor 12: 8-9).

As the first of the virtues of veneration, the Christian tradition essentially defines religion as rendering to God the whole honor that is his due.See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 81, a. 1. A complete discussion of the virtue of religion involves treatment of its definition, its proper actions, and the vices contrary to the practice of true religion. So among the potential parts of the virtue of justice, the virtues associated with religion and worship form one of the most significant treatises in the theological disciplines. Moreover, since the New Testament presents Christ as the genuinely and supremely religious man, the virtue of religion provides important background for other theological topics such as the priesthood of Christ, the sacraments of the new law, and the efficacy of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.For an interesting study on the relationship of priestly spirituality to the virtue of religion, see Eugene A. Walsh, The Priesthood in the Writings of the French School: Berulle, De Condren, Olier (Washington, DC, 1949).

The virtue of religion consists in that habitus of the will that shapes a person to render carefully and permanently to God the supreme honor that is his due. Etymologically “whether [the term] religion is derived from frequent re-reading [relectio], from a repeated seeking of something lost through negligence [reeligere], or from the fact that it constitutes a bond [religare], religion,” says Aquinas, “implies a relationship to God.”See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 81, a. 1. As a quality of character, religion concerns the interior and external worship that humankind offers to God as the creator and governor of the universe. But while religion elicits its own proper acts such as adoration and sacrifice, it can also command the actions of other virtues. In this way, the virtue of religion potentially relates to every good deed that a person might perform.

Religious worship represents an expression of reverence for God’s majesty and pays a debt of honor to God. However, because religion turns us toward the divine majesty under a specific formal object, viz, as creator and governor, the habitus constitutes a special virtue. On this account, the virtue of religion can serve as a unifying principle for the various practices that embody true religion. As the source and support of all that exists, God possesses an unparalleled excellence, whereas the creature enjoys only contingent status. The ground for the debt that the creature owes to God lies in the very actus essendi, viz, the act of existence itself. This ontological debt results in a form of justice that exceeds what exists between natural parents and their child, for the disparity between parent and child does not approach that between creator and creature. Moreover, if one abstracts from the universal call to salvation that is realized in divine charity, the relationship between God and the creature does not imply a kind of friendship. Rather it is a relationship of the contingent to the necessary. This explains why religion continues to bind even a person who is brought into the communicatio benevolentiae divinae, that is, elevated to supernatural charity. Even the personal friendship between God and the creature that we call created grace does not alter the structure of religion, so that the favor of divine friendship never excuses one from rendering to God what is his due. In sum, the virtue of religion, as an allied part of justice, maintains a certain distinctness and possesses a special and unparalleled excellence even within the framework of the Christian life of grace.

It is important to comprehend why the Thomist tradition steadfastly distinguishes the moral virtue of religion from the theological virtues. In the technical sense of the term, a theological virtue establishes the human person in a direct and personal relationship with God; faith unites us with God as highest Truth, whereas hope and charity unite us to God as supreme Goodness. On account of this extraordinary bestowal of divine grace, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity together effectively constitute the human person as a true knower and real lover of God. But the virtue of religion establishes no such personal relationship between God and the creature; rather, as a moral virtue, religion regulates human conduct. As a potential part of justice, religion guides the worship and praise that the human person and community offer to God. Religion treats human obligation; charity signifies the free bestowal of divine love.

Like all created goods, the specific acts of the virtue of religion remain means to an end, not the end itself. Still, among the moral virtues, religion holds a special place of eminence and primacy, for this habitus is able to command a whole range of virtuous actions in the name of divine worship. For this reason, some commentators suggest a helpful comparison of religion with the virtue of legal or general justice, which, in a certain sense, governs all the activities of the moral life. John of St Thomas, for instance, favorably compares the just person and the religious person on the grounds that the latter demonstrates the principal Christian qualities of mercy, humility, penitence, and obedience. From this point of view, Christian authors often legitimately consider the virtue of religion as representing a certain summit of the moral life.

Like every moral virtue that shapes some aspect of human conduct, the virtue of religion profoundly affects the interior life. “Because he possesses perfect glory to which creatures can add nothing,” writes Aquinas, “we do not give honor and reverence to God for his own sake, but rather for our own sake, because when we do so our mind is subjected to him and in this our perfection consists.”See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 81, a. 7 (emphasis added). And Cardinal Cajetan further explains that we should interpret the words “for our own sake” as the terminum utilitatis, that is, the practical result of the virtue, not its formal object. The formal object or the good to which religion “is directed is giving honor to God.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 81, u. 4. But even if its exercise fulfills a debt of honor and reverence toward God, the virtue of religion contributes to our personal sanctification. In a book about St Francis de Sales subtitled “The education of the will,” a French spiritual author, Fran?ois Vincent, summarizes the two poles of Christian spirituality with respect to their attitude concerning the virtue of religion: “The Benedictine [monastic] soul sanctifies itself for the sake of prayer, while the Salesian soul prays in order to achieve personal sanctification.”Francois Vincent, 5. Frangois de Sales, directeur d’dmes. L’education de la volonte (Paris, 1932): “L’ame benedictine se sanctifie pour prier; 1’ame salesienne pour se sanctifier.” Within the Church, these two spirits complement one another.

The classical spiritual writers stress the bodiliness of religion and the importance that rightly ordered external comportment plays in establishing a religious spirit. In one especially important passage from his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, Aquinas summarizes the essentials of what the Christian tradition holds on faith, religion, and bodily worship.

Religion consists in an operation by which the human person honors God by submitting to him; and this operation ought to be in harmony with him who is honored and with the one offering homage. Now since he who is reverenced is a spirit, he cannot be approached by the body, but only by the mind; and so worship of him consists chiefly in acts of the mind by which the mind itself is ordained to God. These acts are principally those of the theological virtues; and in accordance with this, Augustine says that God is worshiped by faith, hope, and charity, to which are added also the acts of the gifts ordained toward God, such as those of wisdom and of fear. But because we who honor God are also possessed of bodies and receive our knowledge through bodily senses, there is the necessity that certain physical actions accompany the worship of God, not only that we may render service to God with our whole being, but also by these bodily actions we may arouse in ourselves and in others acts of the mind ordained to God. Wherefore Augustine says in his book, De cura pro mortuis habenda: “Those who pray make the members of their bodies conform to their acts of supplication when they genuflect, extend their hands, or prostate themselves upon the ground, or perform any other visible action; and although it is their invisible will and the intention of the heart that is known to God, it is not unseemly that the human soul should so express itself, but rather by so doing the human person stirs himself or herself to pray and to lament his sins the more humbly and fervently.”See In Boethii De trinitate q. 3, a. 2.

Cajetan, nonetheless, speaks a perennial and sober truth when he says that while all the saints are religious people, not all those who practice the virtue of religion are holy. Why? One can call religious whosoever occupies himself with ceremonies, sacrifices, and things of this sort; but the saints, Cajetan insists, are those who devote their whole being to God.See Cajetan’s In secundam secundae, q. 81, a. 7: “Ex hac differentia patet quod multi sunt religiosi qui non sunt sancti, omnes autem sancti sunt religiosi. Qui enim caeremoniis, sarificiis, et huiusmodi vacant, religiosi vocari possunt; sancti autem nequaquam, nisi semetipsos intrinsecus per hanc Deo applicant.” This sample of 16th-century spiritual direction has not lost its original power to challenge consecrated persons to maintain an authentic life.

When treating the acts of the virtue of religion, we customarily distinguish between internal acts of religion, such as devotion and prayer, and the external or public acts of religion. This second category includes those actions whereby the human person offers or renders something to God, such as a sacrifice, oblations, or tithes, as well as those whereby a person promises something to God, for example, through pronouncing a vow.

According to Aquinas, to offer sacrifice reflects the natural law. In other words, this obligation rests on a jus or right that stems from the very order of creation, especially the natural finality that directs creation toward a particular end. However, the scholastics taught that because sacrifice does not belong to the primary ends or inclinations of the natural law, which concern the preservation of human life, proper comportment in sexual activity, and the communication of human truth, not every person would recognize immediately the place that sacrifice has in human life. Only the inescapable human experiences of dependency and contingency gently lead the human person to recognize the need that everyone has to offer special service to God. For the Christian believer, sacrifice consists principally in the internal action of the creature who inclines toward God as “the principle of its creation and the goal of its happiness.” If indeed some internal action did not specify the act of sacrifice, every slaughterhouse would become a temple. So every act of true sacrifice must be ordered to a common objective or end. Aquinas describes this end as toward the divine reverence - in divinam reverentiam, and it is this attention to the divine reverence that distinguishes generic acts of sacrifice from those that truly belong to the virtue of religion.

Properly speaking, sacrifice requires that “something is done to the thing offered to God.”See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 85, a. 3, ad 3. C. E. O’Neill, O.P., Sacramental Realism (Wilmington, DE, 1981), pp. 111-112 points out the significance of this precision for the doctrine of the Eucharist. The general notion that sacrifice involves reverencing God allows the theologian to call any virtuous action a sacrifice provided that it fulfills this condition. Because of the dignity of the person who is both victim and priest, the sacrifice of Christ possesses the fullness of divine meaning. Thus, Cajetan argues the point that while the virtue of religion binds everyone both to offer general sacrifices and to direct his or her heart toward God, only the priests of the new law, who are specially configured to Christ by the sacrament of holy Order, can offer the perfect sacrifice that occurs in every Mass.In secundam secundae, q. 84, a. 4: “In art. IVo, habes quod duo genera sacrificii sunt omnibus communia: scilicet interioris mentis oblatio per devotionem et orationem, et oblatio actuum aliarum virtutum. Tertia autem sacrificii genus est proprium sacerdotibus et ministris Ecclesiae…” But the notion of sacrifice is analogical, for it can be used to describe the sacrifices that form part of the everyday life of the Christian as well as the eucharistic mystery of the new law. The Irish theologian Colman O’Neill makes the following comment concerning the place that sacrifice holds in the Christian life.

Redemption is a work of divine love, calling up sacrifice in the person of Christ only in order that it might be created as well in the hearts of all who accept this mystery. When sacrifice, understood as human response to God’s creative act of mercy, is made the central category of thinking about the Christian mystery, other, more restricted categories adopted by the Christian tradition can be given their due importance.C. E. O’Neill, “The Fullness of Christ’s Sacrifice,” Word & Spirit 5 (1984): 44-60 makes this important qualification concerning the place of sacrifice in Christian practice.

St Augustine’s De civitate Dei provides the patristic inspiration for incorporating the religious notion of sacrifice into a general theological conception of the Christian life.See Bk 10, chap. 6.

Because a vow by definition promises some future good to God, vows are to be distinguished from the acts of religion that offer something here and now to God, such as sacrifice, oblations, the first fruits of the harvest, and tithes. A vow represents a deliberate and free promise made to God concerning a possible and better good.See Codex Iuris Canonici, can. 1191.1. As an act of the virtue of religion, the obligation of keeping a vow rests on the excellence of the divine majesty, and so vows can form an important element in the life of one set upon the pursuit of moral truth and goodness. Aquinas’s understanding of the importance of the vows of religion reflects some of the concerns of the anti-mendicant controversy that bedeviled the development of religious life at Paris during the course of the 13th century. However, as acts of the virtue of religion, a person may vow an extensive range of promised goods other than “the evangelical counsels of chastity consecrated to God, poverty and obedience.”Lumen gentium chap. 6, no. 43. So even though the vows of religion hold a central place in the life of the Church, every Christian can consecrate something to God by means of a vow.See CYC, can. 1191, no. 2 and chapter 6 of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, “On Religious.”

Because a vow implies a promise to do something or to omit doing something, it presupposes that one making a vow observe the ordinary prudence that guides any authentic moral action. Thus, according to the tradition, three things are required for a vow: “First, deliberation, second, a resolution of the will, and third, the promise, which completes its character.”See Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 88, a. 1. Deliberation forms an important part of the resolve to promise something by vow; in fact, St Jerome chides the Old Testament saint Jephthah for lack of discretion when the latter vowed, if victorious, to sacrifice the first living thing he encountered upon return from his battle with the Ammonites.The incident is recorded in Judges 11: 30. See Peter Comestor, Historia Scholast. 12 (PL 198: 1284): “In vowing he was foolish because he did not use discretion, and in keeping the vow he was impious.” However in Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 88, a. 2, ad 2, Aquinas discovers a reason for the tradition of numbering him among the saints of the old dispensation, and maintains that even the evil act of killing his own daughter, for which Jephthah duly repented, holds a figurative meaning of something good. In any event, the resolve and promise to accomplish a greater good constitute the distinctive notes of a vow. Because vows concern the promise of a greater good, neither the impossible nor the inevitable can properly fall under a vow.

While suitable detachment and reasonable poverty, the conduct of a chaste life, and a right sense of obedience belong to the very nature of Christian life, a person may still bind himself by vow to promise these goods in a determined way, viz, in a greater fashion. Aquinas especially grasps the special meaning and utility of a vow when he declares that one who makes a vow “immovably dedicates his will to good.”Summa theologiae IIa-IIae q. 88, a. 4. Thus, to renounce the radical possession or even the free use of material goods, to renounce the right to married love, and to choose to bind oneself to the lawful determinations of a religious superior form a specific way of promising the greater good. As a properly religious act, every vow serves the pursuit of a person’s ultimate perfection and happiness; St Augustine clearly makes the theological point when he says that “what is given to God is added to the giver.”St Augustine, Epistola 127 (PL 33: 486).

The virtue of religion also regulates those circumstances in which a creature uses something that belongs properly to God - for instance, when a person invokes God’s name, as happens when taking oaths, swearing, and in the use of invocations. An oath serves to confirm one’s own statement or affirmation about a given matter of testimony. Swearing or adjuration employs the holy name as an instrument to induce others to do something. Invocation denotes a prayer or hymn of praise that includes reference to the Godhead.

The possession and exercise of the infused virtue of religion specifically implies our involvement in the economy of salvation. Within the logic of the incarnation, God commits to the human person the use of created realities as instruments of divinity. Therefore, the Christian religion especially involves the sacramental system of the new law. In structuring the Summa theologiae, Aquinas places his treatment of the sacraments after that of the incarnation itself. Still, the relationship of infused religion to the cardinal virtue of justice implies that divine justification analogously includes some reference to a right ordering or balance of the imago Dei. By contrast, superstition, idolatry, and divination (the wrongful foretelling of future events) represent radical departures from the worship of the true God. Aquinas associates these practices largely with those who lived during the period of the old law, when knowledge of true religion was confined by the limits of images and foreshadowing. But the temptation to subvert the purposes of true religion by the use of artful simulations of religious practices remains even today a challenge to Christian believers. In addition, tempting God, perjury, and sacrilege represent vices against the virtue of religion, for in these cases a person wrongfully employs holy things. Endeavoring to traffic in the very gifts that the Holy Spirit gives to the Church after Christ’s resurrection, simony represents a special affront to the divine majesty. Significantly, the New Testament marks this irreligious act out for special reprehension (see Acts 5: 1-11).

Because the life of divine charity raises up the human person beyond the limitations of mere human ingenuity, each one of the moral virtues enjoys the special aid of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These gifts are rightly referred to as instinctus, for they operate in us not after the manner of deductive reasoning, but after the fashion of an inborn touch or genius. Since the gifts work only in the believer, religion - outside of the realm of the Christian gospel - is a movement toward God that is entirely constrained within the limits of creaturely ways. But Jesus reveals that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is his Father, so that all who share in the grace of Christ participate in his sonship as either sons or daughters.

The gift of Piety helps to make us effective children of the heavenly Father. Cajetan explains its special significance when he observes that this gift illumines the just believer to embrace every person, and indeed everything, as a child or possession of the heavenly Father - “ut filios et res Patris.” This gift accordingly brings to an evangelical perfection whatever remains of the juridical and limited in the exercise of justice, thereby transforming in a mysterious way this heaven and this earth into the new heavens and the new earth (Rev 21: 1).

And because haughty people use other persons and things according to their selfish designs, the Christian tradition associates with the gift of Piety, the second Beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Mt 5: 5). Meekness marks the Christian character with strength, not servitude. Nietzsche’s deranged prophecies about the modern era, unfortunately confirmed in much that the 20th century witnessed, illustrate the end to which a world of egoists tends. But the gift of Piety represents a strong spirit, and those who enjoy its grace and power are readied for creating a just order and measure in the world. In medieval art, justice is frequently represented with a balance and scroll; for example, at the cathedral of Hildesheim, the scroll bears the words from the book of Wisdom, “Omnia in mensura et pondere pono” (Wis 11:21). Divine wisdom has arranged all things by measure and weight, and the virtue of justice makes it possible for the Christian believer to recognize and achieve the proper balance in everything that concerns the coming of God’s reign.