This chapter explores medieval Christian conceptions of good judgment as they compare to Aristotelian phronesis. The objective here is to show how prudence becomes delinked from practical decision making and in turn is weakened in its role of limiting the influence of technical knowledge. Rather than a “bottom-up” virtue founded upon experiences of bodily pleasure, family, and community interaction, judgment is reconceived as a “top-down” virtue intended to order the soul, life in the city, and our relationship with the natural world.
While Aristotle tells us that phronesis is an intellectual virtue, it is most notable for its practical character. It allows us to properly navigate the myriad difficult choices we face every day. Rather than simply an obscure concept hidden in the pages of a philosophical text, phronesis is on clear display in the successful lives of friends, neighbours, and colleagues. People with this virtue are not simply lucky or blessed to live a good life, but have deliberately, knowingly, and meritoriously chosen a path that leads them to happiness. They are not simply clever, able to fool people into believing they are upstanding citizens. Instead, they are motivated to act and live in a virtuous manner. They can do this because they have a general understanding of what is good and can apply that understanding to the complex and particular conditions of everyday life. So, phronesis requires at least some access to or ability to grasp a universal concept of “the good.”
While surprisingly difficult to explain in philosophical terms, in practical terms “the good” is a straightforward thing. Anything that results in happiness, flourishing, prosperity, pleasure, in other words what amounts to living “the good life,” can be understood as a realization of “the good” in this world. So, when it comes to Aristotle’s description of phronesis, we can put aside the modern criticism of the classical philosophical tradition mentioned in chapter 1 that suggested the classical concept of “the good” is indemonstrable, a purely abstract notion with no tangible qualities to evaluate or agree upon. Far from it, the good is obvious in the lives lived by our most virtuous citizens.
For Aristotle, being virtuous was not simply about possessing a certain set of personality traits but was something that was done or acted upon. It was by definition excellent action for all to see. A soldier was courageous because of his actions on the battlefield. A citizen was generous because of the amount of money he donated to festivals and civic works. And a politician had good judgment because of the effectiveness of his legislation. By this notion, there was no such thing as “inner beauty” for the Greeks. Beauty was something out in the open. From here, we can see why Aristotle thought that the best social norms, ethics, and laws of the polis must be drawn from the experience of living together and deciding together about what was good and what made citizens happy. This simple idea of virtue as something that appears to or is recognized by fellow citizens will come up later in chapter 7 in relation to the possibility of teaching and learning virtue today.
Of course, just because Aristotle understood virtue to be something seen does not mean that there was to be easy agreement on what any of these virtues actually were. In fact, it was the very difficulty of deciding what was virtuous or what counted as an ethical action that explains why he thought that the practice of politics was so critical for the Greeks. Politics was not something that occurred distantly in the legislature or during periodic elections, but was deeply interwoven into daily life. Politics was the way to come to an agreement on what was virtuous and how to create laws, institutions, and educational curricula to help support the practice of these virtues in the community. This is why, for example, he viewed tyrannies as deviant or unnatural political regimes. Without a forum for public discussion and judgment, without politics, there was simply no way for individual citizens to contribute to an understanding of the common good. Necessarily, the practice of the virtues endorsed by the tyrant would be unlikely to satisfy the desires and aspirations of the citizenry. And phronesis is the key to all of this. It is the capacity to re-evaluate ideas agreed upon previously about virtue and adapt them to changing circumstances on the ground, compelling the community to modify their norms, institutions, and laws accordingly. For Aristotle, a polis paralysed by convention and tradition would inevitably fall short of the good life and make its citizens unhappy.1
But, we may ask, what if there can be no good life after all? What if we have no access to the good and thus have no capacity to apply it to our everyday lives? Looking at the misery, poverty, violence, war, and death that plague the world, it might seem that the good is an illusion or, at the very least, an otherworldly concept. With this in mind, many people might feel that the whole idea of phronesis represents a kind of overconfidence, arrogance, or dangerous elitism – the notion that someone can so successfully determine the course of their own lives while being both decent and happy is hard to believe. We are simply too selfish, greedy, and unethical at heart to allow for anything like the virtuous and incorruptible phronimos to exist in our society. Too often we learn that those that we thought were the greatest and most noble among us, the seemingly magnanimous, turn out to be just as disappointingly fallible, weak, and fickle as everyone else. It may in fact be that the phronimos of old is merely a creature of philosophical imagination after all, rather than someone who actually walks among us.
While we may lament this pessimism and distrust of human goodness, we can at least take some solace that it is not simply a function of our cynical contemporary society. In fact, the degradation of practical reason has quite a long history. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, the other great pillar of Western civilization that stands beside the ancient Greek, never shared Aristotle’s high regard for human decision making. This is not to say that the monotheistic religions of the Old and New Testaments have no concept of the good life, only that humans in this world could never wholly achieve it in the here and now. Early Christian thinkers, for example, articulate a profound lack of confidence in the ability of human beings to by themselves judge and act towards what is good and right. Alternatively, they describe good action as accepting God’s grace or selecting a pre-existing set of divine instructions imprinted on all of us.
This dismissal of our practical capacity for good decision making was one of the ideas put forward by the great scholar and Christian philosopher St Augustine (AD 354–430). His less-than-enthusiastic view of human accomplishments was somewhat understandable considering that he lived through the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. The realization that the “Eternal City,” supposedly the very manifestation of heaven on earth, could be overrun and looted by barbarians shook the Roman Empire to its very foundations. Augustine, however, took this event as a good reminder of the true nature of Christianity and spent the rest of his life attempting to reassure his fellow Christians that the political and material success of Rome was not at all the point of their religion, that they should go on believing even though their livelihoods and possessions had been destroyed and stolen. If anything, he thought that everyone should thank the pagan plunderers because the corporeal delights so easily acquired in a cosmopolitan city were a distraction from living a proper life in line with Christian values.
In truth, Augustine had himself come to this conclusion well before the sacking of Rome. He recounted in his Confessions, which is thought to be one of the first autobiographies written in the West, that as a child his soul was in “ruins” and as a youth his body was wracked by “carnal corruptions” that led him to crime and to lust. He goes on to say that, in 387, at the age of thirty-three, he renounced the pleasures of the flesh that surrounded him everywhere, was baptized by his mentor Ambrose of Milan, and finally left the sex and material gratification of his younger years behind him. Augustine realized that his worldly ambitions, whether for career success, beautiful women, or material things, would never provide him with true happiness; and that the restlessness of his life and the disorder he felt in his soul could only be remedied by turning away from the earthly things so valued by Roman society. Describing the moment when he is tempted one final time by possessions, vanities, and his old mistresses, he asked himself, “Do you think you can live without them?”2 With his answer of “yes” he pushed aside the whole concept of virtue as it was practised by the Greeks and adopted by the Romans, making room for a new way of living that would dominate the Western world for centuries to come.
Following Augustine’s lead, Christians utterly reject the idea of “the good” as it was expressed by the Greeks. Both theologically and practically, they argued that the world they lived in was far too wicked to deliver anything like the good life. The fall of a hedonistic, debauched, and violent Rome was a great illustration of this fact. Of course, with this rejection the Christians also rejected the old pagan idea of phronesis. In a world thought to be full of overwhelming corruption and temptation, it is no longer thought possible for an individual to be so capable of judging the right thing to do. For Augustine, we are faced with only one critical and constant decision. Every day we must decide whether to choose the ephemeral satisfaction afforded by pleasure and sin or to accept God’s grace into our lives in pursuit of a deeper happiness. In other words, rather than the easy choice to satisfy our bodies, we must instead make the much harder choice to gratify our souls.
To emphasize this important distinction between bodily and spiritual satisfaction, Augustine argued that there are two distinct and opposing kinds of judgment. In his most important work, City of God, he describes the difference between “prudence of the flesh” and “prudence of the spirit.” As its name implies, the first prudence lets us satisfy our carnal wants and desires, leading us down the path of sin. The second prudence allows us to live a proper, religious life in harmony with God. All told, Augustine reminded his readers that the tremendous inventiveness and considerable effort that goes into rewarding the flesh was a distraction and should be redirected towards the ascetic pursuit of living a spiritual life. Perhaps he explained this most succinctly in a frank letter he writes to the archbishop of Arles, Honoratus, in 412:
There is a certain life of man involved in the carnal senses, given up to carnal joys, avoiding carnal hurt, seeking carnal pleasure. The happiness of this life is temporal: to begin with this life is a matter of necessity; to continue in it a matter of choice. Doubtless the infant issues forth into this life from the womb of its mother; as far as it can it avoids the hurts and seeks the pleasures of this life; nothing else counts. But after it reaches the age at which the use of reason awakens and its will is divinely aided, it can choose another life whose joy is in the mind, whose happiness is interior and eternal. Truly there is in man a rational soul, but it makes a difference which way he turns the use of reason by his will: whether to the goods of his external and lower nature, or to the goods of his interior and higher nature; that is, whether his enjoyment is corporeal and temporal, or divine and eternal. This soul is placed in a middle state, having below it the physical creation and above it the Creator of itself and its body.3
So, instead of lower goods that provide outward carnal pleasure, the purposeful turning of the will to goods of a spiritual nature will instead deliver us an “interior and eternal” happiness. Needless to say, the identification of these two separate and opposing choices or “prudences” stands in stark contrast to the relationship Aristotle describes between making decisions about satisfying the lower appetites and making more important ethical choices later in life. Rather than putting us off or distracting us from a pursuit of higher things, Aristotle thought that learning how to properly satiate our bodily needs, learning moderation, for example, laid the groundwork for a life filled with good decisions. But for Augustine, rather than directing or guiding lower prudence to decisions about higher things, adherence to prudence of the spirit instead attempts to free us from the immature, irrational, and distracting influence of the prudence of the flesh. The passions, appetites, and emotions that Aristotle thought served as a foundation for later good decision making are now considered conduits to dangerous temptation and transgression. Now, the pleasures we derive from sex and food are no longer an indication that we are living a good life but the very opposite: a life of sin.
Prudence of the spirit allows us to direct our actions away from the evil in the world and within us towards that which is good. Where Aristotle believed human fulfilment came from navigating the complexities of everyday life towards virtue and happiness, the early Christian thought of Augustine presented excellent action and corresponding human goods embodied in a life of spiritual harmony with the Christian God. Ultimately, it is God’s love, grace, or divine intervention that guides us to choose the right way and avoid that which leads us astray to the things of the flesh. As Augustine says, it is from Christ that we learn what we are to love and how much we are to love it and that God is our highest good.4 For him, wise choices are no longer a matter of finding the right way to handle the complications of one’s particular circumstances, but instead making the choice to embrace a predetermined, divinely written course of action. Consequently, the unique position of practical judgment as a bridge between lower goods and the higher goods is broken. Yes, Augustine was not so miserable as to say that we must or even should avoid all bodily pleasure lest we suffer eternal damnation. The point, however, is that this pleasure does not inform or assist us in choosing the way to God. He is asking us to turn away from the petty and practical things of the material world towards the more truly satisfying life of the spirit.
Critically, this splitting of prudence also opens up a big divide between our external life in the city and the “interior happiness” Augustine writes of in his letter to Honoratus. Instead of seeking fulfilment in the here and now, we are asked to look upward with a faith that there is a perfect “City of God” waiting for us once we pass from the misery of this profane and corrupt “City of Man.” Augustine is often described as a Neoplatonist because, similarly to Plato’s discussion of the metaphysical good, he posits the existence of a perfect supranatural standard or prototype for a perfect world. However, there seems that there is nothing we can do – no deeds, no politics, and no philosophy – that will help make our corrupt world any more like that perfect world.
The division between worldly actions and Christian morality leaves ethical and political education in a tough spot. Unlike the phronimos, who is perceptibly rewarded for wise ethical and political choices, the good Christian may have quite a different lifestyle: a poor and dreary existence, subordinating physical desires to the noble and intellectual pursuit of knowledge of God. And, while Christians may be profoundly happy in this effort, there also may not be much in the way of public evidence for their happiness. While Aristotle’s phronimos would necessarily have the respect and admiration of his colleagues and neighbours, Augustine’s good Christian might just as likely live a lonely existence with no material prosperity or other bodily satisfactions. Where the phronimos is an ethical exemplar and a political leader whose actions and choices are to be imitated by young citizens, the model provided by the good Christian may be harder to follow. Because there is no obvious or outward display to imitate, and because there is no worldly reward for ethical decisions, the student of Christianity can only come to the choice to follow God by faith.
Tellingly, just before his decision to convert, Augustine drew great inspiration from his readings about the life of one of the very first monks, Anthony of the Desert, who lived alone in the wastelands of western Egypt around the turn of the third century AD. The central idea behind the monasticism of Anthony was to remove oneself from the temptations of society and worldly affairs to focus solely on spiritual pursuits. For many Christians, Augustine among them, the ascetic and lonely existence of the monk was what replaced the pleasure-seeking and public life of the phronimos as the ideal to which all humans should aspire. What a difference a few centuries make.
The celebrated life of St Paul the Hermit (died c. 341), who died a few years before St Augustine was born, is another example of the Christian rejection of the old ideal of the good life. His story is recounted in St Jerome’s Vitae Patrum or Lives of the Fathers. By way of introduction to the life of Paul, St Jerome describes a time when Christians were being cruelly persecuted at the hands of the pre-Christian Roman Empire. The Romans, seeking complete loyalty to the emperor, went to great efforts to break the spirit of the growing members of this defiant religious sect. Here, St Jerome describes one outrageously brutal attempt:
There was one particular martyr who persevered victoriously in the faith through tortures by racks and hot metal plates, so they ordered him to be smeared all over with honey and laid him out in the heat of the sun with his hands tied behind his back, hoping that even though he had survived the hot frying pan he might succumb to the burning pain of the insect bites.5
Taking a different tack, the Romans tied another unlucky fellow to a bed and tempted him with a prostitute. But he refused to give in to sinful pleasure and, according to St Jerome, instead “inspired by heaven, he bit off his tongue and spat it in her face as she tried to kiss him … So the immense pain which followed was stronger than the feeling of lust.”6 In either case, the Romans were frustrated in their efforts because both of these men were able to muster the strength to turn away from the corrupting things of the flesh and become impervious to the physical torturing of their bodies, whether via intense pain or pleasure. As a young man, Paul himself sought to escape similar persecution and fled to a cave in the mountains, where he lived a more or less solitary existence of a hermit for the next ninety years, eating nothing more than bread and drinking nothing more than water, dying at the ripe old age of one hundred and thirteen.
For Jerome, the point of these stories is that the lives of these men, especially that of the monastic Paul, are examples of Christian ethics in practice, demonstrating that the good life is not based on worldly standards but rather on a life of sacrifice and meditation. Where it may seem to the non-believer that Paul was living anything but the good life, alone and in extreme poverty, he is nonetheless taken to be a religious exemplar for all Christians. If nothing else, Jerome’s great praise for the life of Paul again highlights the considerable difference between the ancient Greek and Christian traditions. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it in After Virtue, “For the New Testament not only praises virtues of which Aristotle knows nothing – faith, hope and love – and says nothing about virtues such as phronesis … it praises at least one quality of virtue which Aristotle seems to count as one of the vices relative to magnanimity, namely humility.”7 That is to say, whereas the Greeks praised the generosity of the wealthy,8 the early Christians see “the rich destined for the pains of Hell.” The point is not so much that wealth and prosperity are sins, but rather that they are manifestations of a life spent focused on worldly or material possessions as opposed to meditating on God.9
For these Christians, ethics are not derived from a life lived in a community or city, but rather from individual meditation on theological principles. But because almost no one has the advantage of decades of solitary reflection, it is nearly impossible to follow the extreme example of Paul. Instead, they have to deal with their families, neighbours, and colleagues. Here, we are left with an outstanding question similar to one asked by the Greeks. How can we agree on a common expression of virtues when virtue is itself based on a tremendously demanding and profoundly individualistic faith in an inscrutable God? Because early Christian interpretations fail to understand good judgment as public action, and instead contain it within the realm of individual spirituality, the ethical actions of citizens in the city are separated from their theoretical understanding of what is good and what truly makes them happy. In turn, politics can no longer be an institution that directs citizens towards the good life. At its best, politics should facilitate the journey of each individual towards choosing happiness with God or, at the very least, get out of the way.
At this point we might again be reminded of the modern criticism of religion: the supranatural or external standard of God is indemonstrable and thus cannot serve as a reliable or common foundation for ethics, law, or politics. Because early Christians seem to dismiss any and all corporeal manifestations of the “good life,” there may be no way to verify or agree upon its quality or content. The best we can do is to believe that we are living a good life rather than proving it; the truth of one’s goodness will only be revealed in the next world. (In fact, Augustine even warns against taking motivation from the promise of heavenly reward, arguing it is selfish and prideful to assume to understand God’s will!) For Augustine, ascetic prudence of the spirit is the only allowable route to the good life, a single choice between eternal salvation and avoiding eternal damnation. In turn, all the contrivances of the material world, including family, community, and politics, are to be put aside, ultimately to be sacrificed for this highest of ends. Only by fully accepting God’s unrequited love can one travel on the path to the good life.10
So, even though there is a host of broad Christian values derived from sacred doctrine that are suppose to help individuals make good decisions in their daily lives, there may be little in the way of specific instructions on how to apply those values to one’s own particular life and community. Even today church leaders and politicians endlessly debate how to properly apply religious values as a way to validate or condemn certain lifestyles and laws.
Centuries after Augustine, medieval Christian thinkers were still trying to solve the dilemma of how to live a moral life in conformity with theology. The leading philosopher of the day, St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was fortunate enough to be able to turn to the work of Aristotle, which had recently been rediscovered in the West and translated into Latin. In fact, the dominant theological school of the time, scholasticism, was almost entirely focused on reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. With Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics firmly in hand, Aquinas might have concluded that the source of the problem lay in Augustine’s splitting up of good judgment into two separate realms that left our decisions about how to satisfy our worldly appetites disconnected from decisions about how to live a good and ethical life. The solution then might be found in its reunification. Yet, rather than reunifying, reviving, or repairing the fractured Aristotelian virtue of phronesis, Aquinas sees an answer in two new virtues: prudentia and synderesis.
Most often, the Greek word phronesis is translated as prudence, itself taken from the Latin word prudentia. However, there is an important difference between the Greek term used by Aristotle and the Latin term used by Aquinas. As one scholar reviewing medieval conceptions of prudence notes, “Prudence, as distinct from phronesis, becomes a virtue of the inferior part of the soul, whose main function is the habituation of the rational faculties in the governance of the passions.”11 Rather than describing the ability to render a general understanding of the good into a specific practice, as is the case with Aristotelian phronesis, Aquinian prudence is about good habits. Broadly taken, we are prudent when we exercise good habits in the satisfaction of the appetites, in the management of our households, and in the practice of politics. We learn how to do these things from trial and error and the lessons of our parents, teachers, and political leaders. This prudence allows us to do simple things like choose a healthy side salad over French fries, or exercise over the couch, or fidelity over infidelity, and so on. Interestingly, according to Aquinas we do not make these choices for any direct personal, familial, or communal reward but simply because we reason that they are the right thing to do. In other words, these choices do not have to result in pleasure of any kind, and in some cases may deliver quite the opposite: pain and discomfort.
Problematically, though, no matter how many good habits we think we might have, it may be hard to actually know if one is in fact doing the right thing. What if our reasoning is without any merit? Or deviant? Or the product of some delusion? What if we had bad parents who taught us bad habits? What if our understanding of something like bodily health is based on faulty information (think of all the conflicting evidence about what constitutes a healthy diet!)? Indeed, even a serial killer may truly think that what he is doing is the right thing to do. Again, because there is no definite or expected outward reward for “good” habits, no necessary sensual pleasure or payment, we cannot actually know for sure that we have made truly good decisions.
In an effort to address this difficulty, Aquinas explains that we possess a higher faculty by which we can be reassured that this “governance of the passions” is in fact directed towards something good: synderesis. While medieval scholars explain it in various ways, typically synderesis suggests something like a “spark of conscience” that tells us whether our actions are good or evil. Aquinas himself describes it as the imprint of God on every human soul, explaining that our “reason is instructed by the Holy Ghost about what we have to do.”12
Therefore, while individuals can still act in an imprudent manner, choosing through their free will to turn away from what they know is right, they can never simply dismiss synderesis – like an angel sitting on their shoulder, the spark of conscience is always with them whether or not they choose to ignore it. So, even though the French fries may make us feel good at the time, we all the while know that despite our great pleasure we will still feel guilty for having eaten them, all thanks to synderesis. The point here is not that we should deny ourselves all pleasures, but that we should subordinate our desire for things like tasty and fatty foods to the more important desire of maintaining good health. This divine imprint on our souls informs our conscience and compels us to act in a prudent manner. As Aquinas writes, “Synderesis moves prudentia.”13 So, where phronesis might be called a “bottom-up” virtue acquired through experience, Aquinian prudence is a “top-down” virtue taking its cues from the superior synderesis.14 While we can still learn particular habits from our friends, parents, and teachers, we only know they are good habits because of our conscience. And, if we do choose to ignore our conscience and give priority to bad habits and sensual pleasure, then we are sinful, exercising a deviant “prudentia of the flesh” that is free of the guiding influence of synderesis.
This might give the impression that this distinctively Christian virtue is like a direct line to the voice of God giving us instructions on how to behave. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near that simple. Aquinas explains that the proper ordering of the desires as well as the general principles of a moral life are informed by “natural laws” permeating all of God’s creation. Natural law was itself not a new idea. The ancient Greeks distinguished between the laws of nature (physis) and the laws of men (nomos). Similarly, the Romans adopted a concept of natural law (jus natural) that was shared by all living creatures distinct from the “law of nations” (jus gentium) of states.15 In both of these earlier conceptions, there is an effort to work out which parts of human behaviour belong to one realm or the other. Aquinas’s discussion of natural law, by contrast, is part of his larger description of the grand design of a universe ordered in a great chain of Being. In surprising detail, he attempts to explain how everything and everyone falls somewhere in this hierarchy, with the higher positions having a natural authority over the lower. It was not only an attempt to explain why humans have dominion over animals, but also a justification for the Church’s power over the masses and monarchs’ divine right to rule over their subjects. In Aristotelian-like terms, Aquinas concludes that when our lives and communities are properly ordered, when everyone finds their proper place within this hierarchy, humanity will be living in accordance to God’s plan and in harmony with natural law.
Unfortunately again, medieval theologians also concede that the exact content of these laws remains a mystery. Unlike animals that can instinctively find their position within the natural order, humans are left to figure it out for themselves, employing our unique capacity for reason to discover our proper place in creation.16 For Aquinas in particular, the path of reason sets our minds and our souls away from the corrupting influences of bodily pleasure and towards acquiring this most precious and sought-after piece of knowledge. In fact, this quest for knowledge undergirds almost all of the intellectual enterprises of the period. As a result, in medieval universities across Europe, theology students begin to comb through scripture for secrets buried within its passages. By pulling out these hidden meanings, it was thought that they could actually come to understand existence.
Furthermore, because the whole idea of natural law implies that God’s plan is written everywhere and into everything, there are also efforts to discover it in the very make-up of the physical world. So, astronomers probe the skies intently to find any sign of a divine design in the arrangement of the stars. Alchemists begin experimenting on various substances with the hope that they could release hidden truths locked within matter. The Dutch alchemist Johannes Isaac Hollandus explained the purpose of his experiments in his study Opera vegetabilia (ca. fifteenth century): “Now I will teach and describe the secret of the arts, which secret is at the heart of all secrets hidden in the art of alchemy; since one will here understand the wonderful works that God has accomplished in all things he has made.”
All told, the spiritual mission to know God also ends up spurring a tremendous effort to uncover the mysterious laws of nature. While more of a religious quest than a consequence of intellectual inquiry, medieval science sets out to find the true order of the physical world and prove that there is a supreme intelligence behind it all.
Critically, this same idea also led to an effort to try to find the natural laws that govern human beings. Along with seeking out the reasons behind our most basic instincts such as the innate desire for self-preservation and the need of men and women to have and raise children, there was a concerted effort to explain how humans are supposed to live and interact in society. It was thought that this discovery could inform the making of “positive” laws and institutions that would help human beings better conform to the natural order. Aquinas, for one, explains that this conformity requires the coercive power of government because, in their state of original sin, human beings have lost their instinct to obey authority.
Finally, natural law also provides a rather precise model for individuals to follow. It is here that the virtue of synderesis really comes into play. It is what enables us to recognize and understand practical moral principles. It is what allows us to know that acts of charity, love, and courage are good when we see or experience them. Again, putting this understanding into action does not come easily. Our tendency to sin, the endless opportunities for corruption, and our fallen nature make living a moral life a tremendously difficult task. And so we need the secondary virtue of prudentia to figure out how to articulate these discovered principles in the changing and particular circumstances of our everyday lives, all the while keeping our wickedness in check. Importantly, the goal is not individual self-expression, but instead a conformity to an already existent template of the good life. In the Summa, Aquinas writes: “The right ends of human life are fixed;”17 that prudence has its source in an understanding of those ends;18 and that “prudence, which denotes rectitude of reason, is chiefly perfected and helped through being ruled and moved by the Holy Ghost.”19 What Aquinas is really describing then is the existence of a divine blueprint for the perfect life composed of fixed and universal standards for living.
All told, Aquinas sets up three interrelated projects. First, we embark on a new project of natural science to discover the hidden properties of the physical world. Second, we begin the project of a new political science to find the proper way to govern. Third, we engage in a project of moral science to correct our own sinfulness. A certain antagonism is brought to all three projects because in each case the world as it is given seems to be working against us, keeping something from us, and trying to distract us from truth and happiness. This antagonism is perhaps the most critical difference between Aquinas and Aristotle and more generally the Christians and the Greeks. Whereas Aristotle thought that the laws that govern nature and man could be understood through observation, discussion, and contemplation, Aquinas asks us to dig for the truth buried and hidden somewhere deep within creation.
In all of this, we see the beginnings of an effort to quantify and control the world and ourselves. By studying and manipulating external and internal nature as they are given, we attempt to overcome their corrupting influence and change the composition of nature to better conform it to the divine blueprint. The human capacity to change the material, political, and moral conditions under which we live also shifts human judgment onto new ground. Judgment as prudentia becomes the handmaiden of an already existent but hidden set of fixed laws. Now, the goal of judgment seems to be to bring these hidden laws out into the open, to change the fallen world of men to conform to their higher standards.
And yet we can only take this idea so far. For Aquinas, we cannot actually create the conditions of “the good life” in this world. True fulfilment is found elsewhere. Rather than being found in wealth, sex, power, honour, or fame,20 Aquinas claims that perfect happiness resides in “the vision of the Divine Essence”21 seen only after we die. Where Aristotle writes of eudaimonia, a life of well-being through the practice of human goods, Aquinas describes the ultimate end of humans as beatitudo, blessedness or union with God. Where in the Greek conception the good life is on clear display in this world, the medieval Christian conception saves it for the next. And, while Aquinas concedes that a certain imperfect happiness can be had in the here and now through study and work, ultimately “perfect and true Happiness cannot be had in this life.”22 In a similar way to Aristotle, who describes the experience of happiness in relation to the fulfilment of our telos, Aquinas sees a semblance of happiness resulting from our moving closer to God through good acts and thoughts aided by the virtue of prudence. But, prudentia will always fall short in some way, never really being able to fully articulate into action the plan God has imprinted on our souls. There is no equivalent to eudaimonia in Aquinas, because no matter how good we try to be we simply cannot exclude every evil or temptation from our daily lives.
As it turns out, prudentia in service to synderesis ends up working in a rather negative way. Unlike phronesis, it has more to do with clearing our souls of the infinite temptations and vices that obstruct or hinder our route to happiness, or as Aquinas says, “the removal of obstacles to the movement of love towards God.”23 It calls our attention away from the things of the body, the family, friends, and the city itself, clearing a path to the ultimate good found in a beatific vision of the divine. So, what was supposed to be a practical virtue that helps us navigate everyday experiences instead sets us on a rather impractical if not impossible course.
It is with this in mind that Aquinas decides that “prudence of the flesh … is a sin, because it involves a disorder in man with respect to his last end, which does not consist in the goods of the body”;24 that “without the body the soul can be happy”;25 and even that “the fellowship of friends is not essential to Happiness.”26 Necessarily, the responsibilities of not just friends but also of parents, neighbours, teachers, community, and political leaders in the proper upbringing of young citizens are downgraded, subordinated to the invisible but ever-present instruction of the Holy Ghost. While we may not like the idea of a reduced role for families and communities in the development of good people, the flipside of this emphasis on our individual relationship with God is that a source for ethical behaviour will remain available to everyone even in the worst of conditions. Even if a person has rotten parents or is stuck in a corrupt community, he or she can still choose to accept God’s love into their lives. We might relate this to a similar idea at work in contemporary discussions of human rights. Regardless of the regime or custom under which a person lives, everyone is morally entitled to certain freedoms of action and thought. For the most part, this opportunity to escape or overcome the circumstances of one’s birth and upbringing is not available in Aristotle. For him, a deviant and unhappy polis will necessarily result in a deviant and unhappy citizenry.
Now the path to good decisions has become a little less complicated. The human capacity to make ethical choices is no longer a “bottom-up” exercise dependent on the particularities of our bodies, families, and friends, or the tremendous variety of experiences of life in the city, but instead depends on the singular “top-down” virtue of synderesis. With no necessary fundamental ethical connection between the individual and her community, the “good life” is something we can all strive for (and nonetheless fall short of), regardless of circumstances on the ground. The fixed point in the heavens by which we can gauge our ethical compasses is uniformly available to all humans regardless of where, how, or with whom they live.
This said, it should come as no surprise that, despite his general agreement with Aristotle that a man living outside of the polis will lack the proper means for living, Aquinas does not actually believe that politics is an absolute requirement for human goodness. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Aquinas returns to the familiar figure of the friendless monk as the best example for humanity, calling St Anthony the Hermit a superior sort of human being because he had self-sufficiency “without human company.”27 But if Anthony, like Paul, is truly our exemplar, then prudentia has more to do with clearing our souls of the infinite temptations and vices that obstruct or hinder the route to goodness than with making good decisions about the city or its citizens. Like Augustine before him, Aquinas sees the unencumbered Hermit, without desire and alone, as the most prudent man. But, because the rest of us do not have the fortitude to live like this, we are left to contend with life in the city, doing our best to govern our passions, relate to our neighbours, and heed the demands of our political leaders. Again, in these dealings prudentia seems to help us only in a negative sense, removing obstacles rather than allowing us to see “what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general,” as is the role of phronesis. Where Aristotle sees the satisfaction of the appetites, time spent with friends, and the practice of politics as good ends in themselves as well as foundations for the teaching of ethics to the next generation of citizens, Aquinas sees them as subordinate to theology. At best they facilitate the journey to God and at worst they are great distractions. So, while still an important virtue for everyday living, prudence has substantially declined in stature.