Living Without Why

Living without Why
Living without Why
Meister Eckhart’s Critique of the
Medieval Concept of Will
J O H N M . CO N N O L LY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Connolly, John M.
Living without why : Meister Eckhart’s critique of the medieval concept of will / John M.
Connolly.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–935978–3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Eckhart, Meister, –1327.
2. Wil —History—To 1500. I. Title.
B765.E34C67 2014
233’.7—dc23
2013043048
135798642
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Dedicated
to
four great teachers of history and philosophy
who opened the minds of many
to the beauty,
the excitement,
and the lasting importance
of medieval thought:
W. Norris Clarke, S.J.
Robert J. O’Connell, S.J.
Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan
Ernst Konrad Specht
Hæte der mensche niht mȇ ze tuonne mit gote, dan

daz er dankbære ist, ez wære genuoc.
—Meister Eckhart, Pr. 34
CO N T E N T S
Preface ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Will as “Rational Appetite” 5
2. Aristotle’s Teleological Eudaimonism 17
3. Augustine’s Christian Conception of Wil 42
4. Aquinas on Happiness and the Wil 86
5. Meister Eckhart, Living on Two Levels 129
6. Meister Eckhart, Living without Wil 168
7. Living without Why, Conclusion 206
Bibliography 219
Index 225
vii
P R E FA C E
These are heady days for scholars and lay readers interested in the thought of Meister Eckhart.
Since the 700th anniversary of his birth in 1960 there has been an upswell of interest in his
writings, and these have become ever more available through the efforts of (mainly German)
scholars and able translators. But during my years of university study in the 1960s, Eckhart was
still a decidedly marginal and esoteric figure, even (perhaps especially) in Catholic circles. Ewert
Cousins, who taught me theology at Fordham University, mentioned him with some admiration,
but we were never introduced to his writings.
For me that introduction had to wait until around 1980, when I was living in Germany with my
family. My wife, herself German and an interfaith minister, gave me a copy of Josef Quint’s very
useful one-volume edition of Eckhart’s German sermons and treatises. But my initial attempts to
befriend these writings hit a road block on the very first page, where the early Talks of
Instruction begin with high praise of obedience: “Oh no,” I thought, “another Catholic
disciplinar-ian!” A colossal misunderstanding on my part, no doubt, but the book went promptly
onto the shelf.
Fortunately it did not stay there too long. By the later 1980s I was reading the German sermons
with great interest. Ironically, the most fascinating idea for me—Eckhart’s advice to “live
without why (or wil )”—is itself intimately connected to his decidedly original notion of
obedience. Indeed, the second paragraph of the Talks links the two in these words: “Whenever a
man in obedience goes out of his own and gives up what is his, in the same moment God must go
in there, for when a man wants nothing for himself, God must want it equally as if for himself.”
(The translation is Walshe’s, emphasis added—see Abbreviations section for details.) Eckhart’s
use of this notion from his earliest writings onward struck a deep chord within me. It resonated
with a favorite theme of another of my Fordham professors, the philosopher and Augustine
scholar Robert J.
O’Connel , S.J., who pointed out to us a tension between Greek eudaimonist ix
xpreface
conceptions of the good life and certain Christian ideals of selflessness and service. Was this
clash what Eckhart was talking about?
Other themes in Eckhart’s work fascinated me too. One, of course, was detachment (
abegescheidenheit), which in the Eckhart lexicon is a synonym for obedience. I had become
interested in Buddhism in the 1980s and was intrigued to learn that Japanese Buddhist
philosophers such as Keiji Nishitani found deep affinities to Buddhism in Eckhart’s thought. On
a practical level, as wel , Eckhartian detachment became important to me as spiritual sustenance
during the challenging decade I spent during the 1990s in the administration at Smith College.
My personal admiration for the fourteenth-century philosopher, theologian, and administrator of

his Dominican order grew during this period, as did my interest in his striking hermeneutical
methods in his sermons. This led to a first publication on Eckhart as a biblical interpreter.
When I returned to the Smith philosophy faculty in 2002, I was determined to devote my
research efforts to the Meister’s work, and at the top of the agenda would be an investigation of
his admonition to live without why. But I was by then advanced in my career, very late for an
entrant into the complex and dynamic field of medieval philosophy and theology. My earlier
work had been devoted to contemporary issues: the philosophy of human action, philosophical
hermeneutics, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nonetheless I was greatly aided by two
fortunate circumstances: first, that my targeted aspect of Eckhart’s thought—his ideas on how we
should live—dovetailed nicely with my previous philosophical research; and second, that I found
a number of colleagues in the profession who greatly aided my fledgling attempts to build on
what I had learned earlier of medieval thought. Tobias Hoffmann of the Catholic University was
an enormous aid along these lines, and through him I became acquainted with a number of other
helpful colleagues, including Theo Kobusch at the University of Bonn and other German
members of the crucially important Meister-Eckhart-Gesel schaft (the British Meister Eckhart
Society has also been a bless-ing). But I owe a still greater debt to the dean of American Eckhart
scholars, Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago. His advice, friendship, and
encouragement have played a major role in my ability to produce this book.
Closer to home, many of my Smith and Five College colleagues have also assisted my efforts.
Chief among these have been my polymath Smith colleague Jay Garfield, Jonathan Westphal of
Hampshire College, Lynne Rudder Baker and the late Gareth Matthews of the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst, my colleagues in the Five College Propositional Attitudes Task Force
(especially its co-founder, Murray Kiteley, and its current convener, Ernie Alleva), and Lara
Denis of Agnes Scott College. Closest to home, my wife, Marianna Kaul Connolly, not only
provided my first copy of Eckhart’s writings, she has also been my constant and indispensable
companion in exploring many of the themes treated
p r e f a c e xi
in this book. In addition, she has helped me revise the manuscript. To her I owe the greatest debt.
Smith College, a truly nurturing institution of learning, was extraordi-narily generous in

providing research support for this project. Many former students helped me at various points to
clarify my thinking and proof my texts. These include Claire Serafin, Lilith Dornhuber
deBellesiles, Rosemary Gerstner, Maria-Fátima Santos, Caitlin Liss, Erin Caitlin Desetti, and
especially Sofia Walker. Finally I am in debt to the anonymous reviewers for Oxford University
Press and for the journal Faith and Philosophy for helpful criticisms of my work on the topics
dealt with here.
If this book can in any way contribute to the recent renaissance of interest in Eckhart’s thought,
my efforts will have been richly rewarded. But then again, as Eckhart taught, work properly
undertaken—i.e., without why—is its own reward.
John M. Connolly
September 27, 2013
A B B R E V I AT I O N S
Eckhart’s works were long scattered, surviving piecemeal in various archives, and some in one
collection from the early fourteenth century, the Paradisus anime in-telligentis (which also
contained works by other contemporaries). Eckhart’s surviving writings are available in a variety
of forms today. For scholarly purposes, such as in this book, the standard (“critical”) edition is
that produced since 1936
under the aegis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und
lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1936–).
Ten (of the eleven foreseen) volumes have been published, five each for the Latin (LW) and the
Middle High German (DW) writings. Texts are cited here by volume, section number (where
applicable), page number, and line number; so, for instance, In Ioh. n.226, LW 3:189, 8–12,
refers to the Commentary on John, section 226, in volume 3 of the Latin writings, page 189, lines
8 to 12.
Eckhart’s various treatises and sermons have also been numbered by the editors, and also have
numbered paragraphs. Following this convention, the Latin sermons ( Sermones, all in LW 4)
will be given as, e.g., ‘ S. XXV’, and the paragraphs or sections will be indicated by ‘n.’ or ‘nn.’,
thus: “S. XXV, n.264, LW
4:230, 3–4” for Sermo XXV, section number 264, in volume 4 of the Latin works, page 230,
lines 3 and 4. The Middle High German sermons ( Predigten) are rendered thus: Pr. 6 (DW
1:102, 4–5) stands for German sermon 6, in volume 1 of the German works, page 102, lines 4
and 5. Similar conventions are used for Eckhart’s Latin and German treatises, which are cited
according to the following abbreviations:
xiii
xiv a b b r e v i a t i o n s
Latin Works
In Eccli.
Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici ch. 24:23–31 (LW
2:229–300), Sermons and Lectures on Ecclesiasticus ch. 24: 23–31
In Ex.
Expositio Libri Exodi (LW 2:1–227) , Commentary on the Book of Exodus
In Gen.I
Expositio Libri Genesis (LW 1:185–444) , Commentary on the Book of Genesis
In Gen.II
Liber Parabolarum Genesis (LW 1:447–702) , Book of the Parables of Genesis
In Ioh.
Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem (LW 3) , Commentary on John
In Sap.
Expositio Libri Sapientiae (LW 2:303–643) , Commentary on the Book of Wisdom
Prol.gen.
Prologus generalis in Opus tripartitum (LW 1:129–65) , General Prologue to the Tripartite
Work
Prol.op.expos. Prologus in Opus expositionum (LW 1:183–84) , Prologue to the Work of

Commentaries
Prol. op. prop. Prologus in Opus propositionum (LW 1:166–82) , Prologue to the Work of
Propositions
Qu. Par.
Quaetiones Parisienses (LW 1/2:37–83) , Parisian Questions Sermo die
Sermo die beati Augustini Parisius habitus (LW 5:89–99) , Parisian Sermon on the Feast of St.
Augustine
German Works
BgT Daz buoch der goetlichen troestunge (DW 5:1–105), Book of Divine Consolation
RdU Die rede der underscheidunge (DW 5:137–376), Talks of Instruction
Vab Von abegescheidenheit (DW 5:400–434) , On Detachment VeM Von dem edeln menschen
(DW 5:106–36) , On the Noble Person
a b b r e v i a t i o n s xv
Translations
Many of the Latin translations in this volume are mine. However, where a published English
version is available, I have generally used it. Most of Eckhart’s Middle High German works have
been translated into English by M. O’C.
Walshe on the basis of the critical edition, and I have generally used the Walshe translations.
Originally in three volumes, these are now happily collected into a single version, which is the
one cited in this book. But those with access only to the three-volume version can find the
sermons I have cited (using their numbers from the official, German critical edition, which
Walshe calls “Quint” or “Q”) by consulting the concordance in his third volume.
Essential
Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, tr. and introd.
by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981)
Teacher
Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn with the col aboration of Frank
Tobin and Elvira Borgstadt (New York: Paulist Press, 1986)
Largier
Meister Eckhart Werke, 2 vols., ed. and comm. Niklaus Largier (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag 1993)
Lectura
LECTURA ECKHARDI: Predigten Meister Eckharts von Fachgelehrten gelesen und gedeutet,
ed. Georg Steer and Loris Sturlese, 3 vols. (Berlin/Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1998, 2003,
2009) Parisian
Parisian Questions and Prologues, ed. and trans. Armand Maurer, C.S.B. (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974
Walshe
The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, tr. and ed. Mau-rice O’C. Walshe, rev.
Bernard McGinn (New York: Crossroad Publ. Co., 2009)
Other Works cited
Aristotle
The Greek texts of Aristotle used in this book are from the online Perseus Digital Library.
The English versions are all taken from The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed.
Jonathan Barnes, two vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, 1994).
CAT
Categories
DA
De Anima, On the Soul
EE
Eudemian Ethics
xvi a b b r e v i a t i o n s
Met.
Metaphysics
NE
Nicomachean Ethics
Augustine
The Latin texts of Augustine used in this volume are, unless otherwise noted, from the online S.
Aurelii Augustini opera omnia. A number of the translations, as noted below, are from Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 4, ed.
Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publ. Co., 1887), hereafter Nicene. Revised and
edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.
newadvent.org/fathers/1401.htm.
Ad Simp.
De diversis questionibus ad Simplicianum, To Simplician—On Various Questions. Translation,

John H. S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings, Volume VI of the Library of Christian Classics
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953)
Contra duas Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians.
Translation, Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, revised by Benjamin B. Warfield. In
Nicene.
Conf.
Confessiones, Confessions. Translation, Maria Boulding, O.S.B., Saint Augustine: The

Confessions (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997)
DCD
De civitate Dei, City of God. Translation, Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950)
DDC
De doctrina christiana, On Christian Doctrine. Translation, James Shaw, Dover Philosophical

Classics (Mineola NY: Dover Publishing, 2009)
DLA
De libero arbitrio, On Free Choice of the Will. Translation, Thomas Wil iams, Augustine: On
Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publ. Co., 1993)
De mor.
De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus manichaeorum, On the Life-Style of the Catholic

Church. Translation, Richard Stothert. In Nicene.
De Spir.
De spiritu et litera, On the Spirit and the Letter. Translation, Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest
Wallis. In Nicene.
De Trin.
De Trinitate, On the Holy Trinity. Translation, Arthur West Haddan. In Nicene.
Gen. litt.
De Genesi ad litteram, Literal Meaning of Genesis. Translation, John Hammond Taylor (New
York: Newman Press, 1982)
QQ 83
De diversis quaestionibus 83, Eighty-Three Different Questions.
abbreviations
xvii
Translation, D. L. Mosher (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,

1982/2002).
Retr.
Retractationes, Reconsiderations
Church Fathers
PG
Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, 161 vols.
(Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857–66)
Thomas Aquinas
The Latin texts of St. Thomas used in this volume are from the online Corpus Thomisticum.
Some of the translations are my own.
DVir.
Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus, On the Virtues
DVer.
Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, On Truth
DReg.
De Regimine Principorum, On the Government of Rulers. Translation, James M. Blythe

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
QDA
Quaestiones disputatae de anima, Disputed Questions on the Soul SCG
Summa contra gentiles, Contra Gentiles, Translation, Vernon Bourke (New York: Hanover
House, 1955–57, online edition
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm)
SENT
Scriptum super Sententiis, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
SLE
Sententia libri ethicorum, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Translation, C.J.

Litzinger, O.P. (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993.)
STh
Summa theologiae, in 4 parts, called “prima” (Ia), “prima secundae”
(IaIIae), “secunda secundae” (IIaIIae), and “tertia” (III). Translated by Fathers of the English
Dominican Province, online edition Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Knight
Introduction
In the spring of 1329 Pope John XXII, the second (and longest reigning: 1316–1334) of the
Avignon popes, issued a bull condemning twenty-eight propositions attributed to the German
Dominican philosopher and theologian Meister Eckhart von Hochheim. Among the censured
propositions were a substantial number expressing Eckhart’s views on how we should live,
including this one based on one of his German sermons:
The eighth article [of the bull]. Those who seek nothing, neither honor nor profit nor inwardness
nor holiness nor reward nor heaven, but who have renounced all, including what is their own—in
such persons is God honored.1
The pope’s point of view might well seem justified: did Eckhart really want to imply in this
passage that God is not honored by those who seek “holiness,”
“reward,” or “heaven”? Was he, in a back-handed way, condemning those who failed to
renounce “all, including what is their own,” a point of special sensitiv-ity at the splendid papal
court?2 What we certainly have in this eighth article is the Pope’s emphatic rejection of a
teaching found in many of Eckhart’s works, 1 Octavus articulus. Qui non intendunt res nec
honores nec utilitarem nec devotionem internam nec sanctitatem nec premium nec regnum
celorum, sed omnibus hiis renuntiaverunt, etiam quod suum est, in illis hominibus honoratur
Deus. (Emphasis in the translation added. In agro dominico, LW V:596–600, here 598). The
Latin text of In agro dominico is also available at this web address: http://www.eckhart.de/
(under Texte). An English version is in Edmund Colledge, O.S.A, and Bernard McGinn, Meister
Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1981).
2 This particular condemned phrase perhaps suggested the highly charged position on “Apostolic
poverty” of the “spiritual Franciscans”—a position supported by Wil iam of Ockham, and one
that Pope John XXII himself had condemned. But Eckhart had in fact nothing directly to say
about this dispute.
livingwithoutwhy
i.e., that we should “live without why” (or “without wil ”).3 The suggestion of goallessness as an
ideal seems at first glance bewildering, the more so in that Eckhart was himself a highly
motivated and successful academic and administrator.
Furthermore, he was working in a tradition of Christian ethics and spirituality that, as we will
see, was premised on a pervasive teleology, the very opposite of goallessness. In the context of
late medieval ethics “why” implies a specific kind of teleological or goal-oriented approach4
inherited from classical moral philosophy and bril iantly welded—by Thomas Aquinas and
others in the thirteenth century—into a monumental edifice that located ethics within a structure
of theology, metaphysics, psychology, and political theory.
What may have made Eckhart seem the more dangerous was that he was not some wild-eyed
outsider, nor was he basing his views on unheard-of teachings from alien or long-rejected
traditions. Instead he was himself a learned scholar, deeply acquainted with Aristotle, the most
teleological of thinkers, and a close reader of Augustine and Aquinas; he was commenting on the
same Christian scriptures as they, all the while citing them as authorities. The perceived danger
may have been that these central sources of Christian doctrine—the scriptures, Augustine,
Thomas, and among the philosophers Aristotle and the Neoplatonists—could be interpreted to
yield conclusions so uncongenial to the worried church authorities. Indeed, the fact that Eckhart
came to what are at first glance such radical and unusual conclusions should spark the curiosity
not only of those interested in the history of Western moral philosophy, but also of anyone who
thinks that an ethic that has detachment as its central concept cannot have been conceived in
Christian medieval Europe.
The papal bull was meant to put an end not only to the influence of Eckhart, but in particular to a
trial against him, begun in Cologne in 1326 by the local and powerful archbishop, that had
dragged on for three years. The bull’s focus was primarily theological (though questions of
ecclesiastical and political power were certainly also involved), but it is interesting to find among
the indicted teachings several propositions attributed to Eckhart that continue to be debated in
ethics and the philosophy of human action today:
The sixteenth article. God does not properly command an exterior act.
The seventeenth article. The exterior act is not properly good or divine, and God does not
produce it or give birth to it in the proper sense.
3 E.g., “Now whoever dwel s in the goodness of his nature, dwel s in God’s love; but love is
without why.” [ Wer nu� wonet in der güete sîner natu�re, der wonet in gotes minne, und diu
minne enhȃt kein warumbe] ( Pr. 28, DW 2:59, 6–7; Walshe, 129).
4 In particular, a teleological eudaimonism, an ethic whose point is so to live as to secure one’s

eudaimonia (happiness, wel -being, in Greek).
Introduction
The eighteenth article. Let us bring forth the fruit not of exterior acts, which do not make us
good, but of interior acts, which the Father who abides in us makes and produces.
The nineteenth article. God loves souls, not the exterior work.5
Eckhart was not denying the goodness of external acts altogether, but he stressed instead the
importance of the attitude or motivation of the agent. Here he was following Aristotle (and
anticipating Kant), and his teaching—which obviously aroused the Inquisitors’ ire—is, as we
will see, closely connected to his counsel to “live without why (or wil ).” It represents a
particular position in the age-old controversy over the role of “works” in our quest to live the
good life (or find salvation), which came to be one of the principal points of contention in the
Reformation, and which echoes still in the disputes between Kantians and consequentialists.
As central as these last—and similar—condemned articles are for this study, Eckhart’s
continuing notoriety (and in some quarters, popularity) rests more on the immediately
succeeding one:
The twentieth article. That the good man is the Only-Begotten Son of God.6
This seemingly audacious claim, like most others made by Eckhart (including those concerning
the wil ), is not really understandable outside the context of what one modern philosopher has
called his “extraordinary metaphysic.”7 Given its peculiarity and difficulty, it is not surprising
that Eckhart has been either 5 Sextusdecimus articulus. Deus proprie non precipit actum
exteriorem. Decimusseptimus articulus.
Actus exterior non est proprie bonus nec divinus, nec operatur ipsum Deus proprie nec parit.
Decimusocta-vus articulus. Afferamus fructum actuum non exteriorum, qui nos bonos non
faciunt, sed actuum interiorum, quos pater in nobis manens facit et operatur. Decimusnonus
articulus. Deus animas amat, non opus extra. (LW 5:598–99)
6 Vicesimus articulus. Quod bonus homo est unigenitus filius Dei (LW 5: 599). In what is most
likely the source of this article Eckhart actually wrote: “Thus in very truth, for the son of God, a
good man insofar as he is God’s son, suffering for God’s sake, working for God is his being, his
life, his work, his felicity.” [ Alsȏ wærliche: dem gotes sune, einem guoten menschen, sȏ vil er
gotes sun ist, durch got lȋden, durch got würken ist sȋn wesen, sȋn leben, sȋn würken, sȋn
sælicheit] (In BgT, DW 5:44, 16–19; Walshe, 543). It is noteworthy that the bull omits the
crucial phrase, “insofar as he is God’s son,” a sign that the inquisitors did not understand, or
chose to ignore, the complexity of Eckhart’s teaching.
7 Jan Aertsen, “Meister Eckhart: Eine ausserordentliche Metaphysik,” Recherches de Théologie
et Philosophie Médiévales 66: 1 (1999): 1–20. See also the detailed discussion of Eckhart’s
overall philosophical approach in Kurt Flasch, Meister Eckhart: Philosoph des Christentums
(Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2010).
livingwithoutwhy
misunderstood or else ignored by friends as well as enemies. But it is only from the standpoint of
that metaphysic that one can grasp what Eckhart was trying to say with claims such as this last
one, or for that matter see how it is related to his teaching on the wil .
In this book I try to decipher the meaning of Eckhart’s “live without why” by placing the claim
in its historical and metaphysical context. Given that context, what does it mean, and—equally
important, perhaps—not mean? How did it arise in a very “why”-oriented tradition of Western
philosophy and theology? In particular, how could it flow from the pen of a Dominican confrère
of Thomas Aquinas, whose own teachings were initially controversial (for their reliance on
Aristotle), but whose reputation had subsequently been so successfully restored by the efforts of
the Dominican order that the same Pope John XXII who condemned Eckhart in 1329 had
canonized Thomas in 1323? And what are the consequences of Eckhart’s teaching for other
notions involving the concept of wil , such as motivation or intention? Perhaps most importantly,
how does one actually live a “life without wil ”? Is it possible outside a hermit’s cel ? This last
question brings us face to face with the question of happiness or human fulfil -
ment, in which the role of will has—from its vague beginnings in Aristotle—
been prominent. This classical place of origin is where our own investigation has its roots.
But we begin much closer to Eckhart’s own time, noting a few of the main points of Aquinas’s
influential teaching on the will (chapter 1). That will lead us back to the principal sources of that
teaching: the competing teleological eudaimonisms of Aristotle (chapter 2) and St. Augustine
(chapter 3). We will then be in a position to explore the role—a problematic one, I will suggest
—that the will plays, according to Thomas, in the Christian’s path to happiness (chapter 4).
Eckhart’s dramatically different approach is presented against its metaphysical backdrop in

chapters 5 and 6. There we will find, I contend, that “living without why” is not an outlandish
doctrine. True, it is anchored in a metaphysical worldview that has grown unfamiliar to modern
readers; nonetheless, it still deserves our attention.
The Will as “Rational Appetite”
Composed at the summit of his career in the years around 1270, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa
Theologiae, epic in scope and epoch-making in its effects, begins with a discussion of its central
topic, “sacred doctrine.” Although Thomas defends the view that this field of study “is
speculative rather than practical because it is more concerned with divine things than with human
acts,” he immediately adds that “it does treat even of these latter, inasmuch as man is ordained by
them to the perfect knowledge of God in which consists eternal bliss.”1 In other words, inquiry
into the nature of God leads one to seek “the perfect knowledge of God,”
but this can only be attained in the afterlife (“eternal bliss”), the path to which consists in the
performance of the right sort of “human acts.” In the introduction to the second main part of the
work, Thomas wrote:
Since, as Damascene states (John of Damascus, De Fide Orthod. i . 12), man is said to be made
to God’s image, in so far as the image implies an
intel igent being endowed with free-choice and self-movement: now that we have treated [in part
one of the Summa] of the exemplar, i.e., God, and of those things which came forth from the
power of God in accordance with His wil ; it remains for us to treat of His image, i.e., man,
inasmuch as he too is the principle of his actions, as having free choice and control of his
actions.2
( STh IaIIae, Prologue, emphasis added)
1 Sacra autem doctrina est principaliter de Deo, cuius magis homines sunt opera. Non ergo est
scientia practica, sed magis speculativa . . . de quibus agit secundum quod per eos ordinatur
homo ad perfectam Dei cognitionem, in qua aeterna beatitudo consistit. The Summa Theologiae
( STh) will be cited, hereafter in the text, in the standard fashion, i.e., by part, question, article,
and section of article. Here Ia,1,4,s.c. I generally use the translation of the Fathers of the English
Dominican Province (2nd and rev. ed., 1920), which is available in several online formats, e.g.,
at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.html.
2 Quia, sicut Damascenus dicit, homo factus ad imaginem Dei dicitur, secundum quod per
imaginem significatur intellectuale et arbitrio liberum et per se potestativum; postquam
praedictum est de exemplari, scilicet de Deo, et de his quae processerunt ex divina potestate
secundum eius voluntatem; restat ut consider-emus de eius imagine, idest de homine, secundum
quod et ipse est suorum operum principium, quasi liberum 5
livingwithoutwhy
Thomas signals here the general framework within which he will go on to consider questions of
the greatest concern to human beings, “the ultimate end of human life and . . . the means by
which human beings can reach this end, or deviate from it”3 ( STh IaIIae, 1, preface). The trope
of humans as the “image of God,”
or “made to the image of God” (Genesis 1:26) was a commonplace among Christian thinkers,
and it will occupy an important place in this study (even in Aristotle there is something similar).
As we will see, the notion of “image” can be understood in several ways. For Thomas, in this
context—where the focus is on how we humans must live if we are to reach happiness, i.e., the
ultimate fulfillment possible to us—the crucial elements of the comparison between the divine
and the human are intellect, power, and wil . Just as God created the entire world, the
macrocosm, through the divine intellect and wil , so we humans must fashion our lives, the
microcosm, through the use of our human intellect and wil . The path to the happiness (
beatitudo) appropriate to beings
“made to God’s image” is principally through right action, the key to which is having the right
wil .
A bit further along in the Summa, at the start of the Treatise on Human Acts (IaIIae, 6–21),
Thomas claims:
Since therefore Happiness is to be gained by means of certain acts, we must in due sequence
consider human acts, in order to know by what acts we may obtain happiness, and by what acts
we are prevented from obtaining it . . . And since those acts are properly called human which are
voluntary, because the will is the rational appetite, which is proper to man; we must consider
acts in so far as they are voluntary.4
(IaIIae, 6, Prologue, emphases added)
By taking this approach Thomas is not only focusing on a concept much attended to by Christian
thinkers since the time of Augustine, but he takes himself to be also emulating Aristotle, “the
Philosopher,” whose major works had become newly available in Latin translation by the mid-
thirteenth century.
arbitrium habens et suorum operum potestatem. I deviate from a common translation of “liberum
arbitrium” as “free wil ” for reasons that I will explain below, in chapter 3. By “principle”
Thomas means
“source.” Further references to this work will generally be given in parentheses in the text.
3 Ubi primo considerandum occurrit de ultimo fine humanae vitae; et deinde de his per quae
homo ad hunc finem pervenire potest, vel ab eo deviare . . .
4 Quia igitur ad beatitudinem per actus aliquos necesse est pervenire, oportet consequenter de
humanis actibus considerare, ut sciamus quibus actibus perveniatur ad beatitudinem, vel
impediatur beatitudinis via . . . Cum autem actus humani proprie dicantur qui sunt voluntarii, eo
quod voluntas est rationalis appetitus, qui est proprius hominis; oportet considerare de actibus
inquantum sunt voluntarii.
Their arrival on the university scene was a sensation, and they provoked something of a crisis in
the intellectual circles of Western Christendom. Traditional-ists, generally Augustinian in
orientation, were skeptical about their use; the most extreme wanted them banned altogether.
Their hand was strengthened by the strong and heterodox enthusiasm shown for Aristotle by
some thirteenth-century philosophers, largely in the arts faculty at the University of Paris. But a
different party of philosophically oriented theologians—to which Thomas and his teacher, Albert
the Great, belonged—soberly embraced Aristotle’s works and wanted to show their compatibility
with the Christian faith. One place where this challenge was considerable was the attempt to
harmonize Aristotle’s this-worldly, pagan ethic with a decidedly other-worldly Christian Welt-
anschauung.5 The form in which Thomas carried out this effort confirmed the central position of
the wil —understood in a certain way—in Christian moral thought, a position it had earlier
attained in the work of St. Augustine, as I wil attempt to show.
The central question in this book concerns why Meister Eckhart, himself a student of Aristotle
and a successor to Thomas on the Dominican chair of theology in Paris, claimed we should “live
without why” (or “wil ” in a certain sense of the term). What could such a claim mean? How
could it arise in the broadly Christian/Aristotelian, wil -centered tradition in which Eckhart was
schooled? And what would it mean for Christian ethics to be based not on the wil , but on
detachment from it? Our path to addressing these questions wil begin at a principal source,
Aristotle’s main treatise of moral philosophy, the Nicomachean Ethics, by asking what role the
notion of will played in Aristotle’s construction of the good life. Then we will look at how a
fuller, Christianized conception of will arose in the life and writings of St. Augustine (354–430),
before returning to Aquinas for a more detailed examination of his teachings on the role of the
will in the Christian path to salvation. Only then will we have the materials needed for
understanding Eckhart’s distinctly different approach to the trope of the likeness between God
and humans, as in this citation from his Commentary on Exodus (where “why” is closely
connected to will in the traditional sense):
It is proper to God that he has no “why” outside or beyond himself.
Therefore, every work that has a “why” as such is not a divine work or done for God. “He works
all things for his own sake” (Prov. 16:4).
There will be no divine work if a person does something that is not for 5 This task was the more
difficult because of St. Augustine’s harsh critique of pagan ethics. Cf.
chapter 3, below, e.g., p. 78.
livingwithoutwhy
God’s sake, because it will have a “why,” something that is foreign to God and far from God. It
is not God or godly.6
( In Ex., n.247, LW 2:201,7–11, emphasis added)
This is a radical claim. “Divine” or “godly,” i.e., truly virtuous, works play a central role in the
human quest for happiness or beatitude, for Augustine and Aquinas of course, but also—mutatis
mutandis—for Aristotle. Although there are major differences among the ethical theories of these
three thinkers, each assigns a central place to the virtues;7 and, as we will see, central to the
virtues is the wil , and hence a “why.” This is the natural and appealing idea that only through
the regular practice of voluntary actions aimed at what we most naturally and deeply want can
we reach our fulfillment. Thus, to say, as Eckhart did, that “every work that has a ‘why’ as such
is not a divine work” seems to imply either that will plays no part in the virtues, or else that
virtue is not central to the attainment of beatitude. One can understand the Pope’s shock.
The virtue ethics of Aristotle and Thomas are of course related, Aquinas having incorporated
into his moral theology substantial elements of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Their roles in
our lively contemporary discussion show that both of these related ethical systems continue to
inspire philosophers, and to exercise, in Thomas’s case, truly substantial influence beyond the
academy, since much Christian (especially Catholic) moral teaching and preaching is based on
his writings (and hence, if indirectly, on Aristotle’s).8 Aquinas was also deeply influenced by
Augustine, who in turn was also an important inspiration for some of the Protestant Reformers.
Obviously, many today—Catholics, Protestants, and others—continue to feel the attraction of the
idea that at the heart of ethics is a deep connection between the quality of the life we lead, as
measured by our virtues and vices, and the fulfillment or happiness that each of us can attain.
6 [p]roprium est deo, ut non habeat quare extra se aut praeter se. Igitur omne opus habent
quare ipsum ut sic non est divinum nec fit deo. Ipse enim ‘universa propter semet ipsum
operatur’, Prov. 16. Qui ergo operatur quippiam non propter deum, non erit opus divinum,
utpote habens quare, quod alienum est deo et a deo, non deus nec divinum.
7 Indeed, recent interest among both philosophers and the wider public in the tradition of virtue
ethics often takes its inspiration from one or more of these thinkers. Virtue ethics has been a very
active field in moral philosophy in recent decades, while Wil iam Bennett’s Book of the Virtues
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) was a top bestseller in the United States during the
1990s. Cf. Rosalind Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). But see also the
caution in Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” Journal of Ethics 3: 3
(1999): 163–201.
8 Recent Catholic reliance on Thomas is sketched in Anthony Kenny’s “The Thomism of John
Paul II,” (1999), reprinted in his Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000). The lasting influence of Augustine’s thought in both Catholic and Protestant circles
is also beyond question.
Even Kant, apparently the most antiteleological of moral philosophers, felt that the moral life
would be crippled without the belief in a link between virtue and divine reward.
But nowhere do Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, and Eckhart differ more strikingly than over the
nature of this fulfillment. Aristotle’s eudaimonism is the view that our happiness or perfection,
that is, the objectively most desirable form of life, consists in the active practice of the virtues,
especially the intellectual virtues.9 While large stretches of Thomas’s writings on ethics (e.g., his
analysis of human action) are plainly Aristotelian, other and non-Aristotelian elements—
many derived from St. Augustine (and even Plato10)—dominate at times. Augustine’s influence
is seen, among other places, where core Christian notions (grace, salvation, charity, etc., but also
the wil ) replace Aristotle’s pagan this-worldliness. The result is a hybrid that on crucial points
concerning the nature of both the virtues and happiness is thoroughly un-Aristotelian. That two
thinkers from such different religious milieus should diverge on the content of happiness is not
surprising. One consequence of that difference, I will contend, is Aquinas’s tendency toward a
moral instrumentalism—the view that moral behavior is primarily a means to a more highly
valued end—that is alien in spirit to Aristotle’s ethics. Furthermore, I will suggest that this
tendency may be rooted in a deeper incoherence in Augustine’s and Thomas’s respective
attempts to construct a moral theology within the teleological framework inherited from classical
ethics that is also faithful to the Christian gospel: that particular marriage may in fact not work.
In the generation following St. Thomas, some thinkers, including John Duns Scotus, took issue
with eudaimonism altogether, arguing that our deepest ethical impulse, the inclination to justice,
calls on us to do what is right for its own sake, regardless of its impact on our happiness. At first
glance, Eckhart, who was Scotus’s contemporary, seems to be echoing this view when he advises
his audience to “live without why,” i.e., without a will or goal. But I will argue that Eckhart is
actually a kind of eudaimonist. While no less rooted in Christian thought than his fellow
Dominican Thomas, his ethical views owe much more to Neoplatonism than do Thomas’s; but
paradoxically they are in a way more faithful than Aquinas’s to the spirit of Aristotle.
It will be helpful to have at the start a characterization of wil , and I will use that of Aquinas,
widely recognized for its comprehensive and definitive character. As we saw, Thomas says in the
Summa Theologiae that will is the “rational 9 More fully: the active practice of those virtues in a
life not unduly beset with maladies, catastrophes, hunger, and the like. In insisting on a modicum
of amenities and good fortune Aristotle was less radical than other ancient champions of the
virtues such as Socrates and the Stoics.
10 As I will suggest in chapter 4, p. 90–91.
10
livingwithoutwhy
appetite, which is proper to man” (IaIIae, 6, Prologue), and that “the object of the will is the end
and the good” (IaIae, 1, 1, c.).11 He adds in the Prologue: First, then, we must consider the
voluntary and involuntary in general; secondly, those acts which are voluntary, as being elicited
by the wil , and as issuing from the will immediately; thirdly, those acts which are voluntary, as
being commanded by the wil , which issue from the will through the medium of the other
powers.12
Still later, when discussing the notion of the voluntary he says, The fact that man is master [
dominus] of his actions, is due to his being able to deliberate about them: for since the
deliberating reason is indifferently disposed to opposite things, the will can be inclined to
either.13
(IaIIae, 6, 2, ad 2)
Finally, he tel s us that “the act of will is simply a kind of inclination proceeding from the
interior knowing principle”14 (IaIIae, 6, 4, c.). As vague as these statements may seem, they
bring out a number of essential features of the wil , in Thomas’s understanding of it:
• First, as “rational appetite” ( rationalis appetitus) the will always aims at what the intellect
discerns as good, and thus will combines both cognitive and conative elements. It is not merely
one or the other, not simply a kind of desire, nor an opinion of any ordinary sort. Aquinas takes
himself to be following 11 Obiectum autem voluntatis est finis et bonum. David Gallagher gives
a useful anatomy of Thomas’s various ways of marking the will off from other forms of appetite,
particularly sense appetite, in
“Thomas Aquinas on Will as Rational Appetite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29:4
(October 1991): 559–84. These include the distinctions between sense knowledge and
intellectual knowledge, as well as in terms of the object desired; the agent’s control over the
deed; and his or her capacity for reflection. Summarizing, Gallagher notes that “almost
invariably the distinction between the two levels of appetite turns on the notion of control.” Such
control is rooted in the human capacity for deliberation: “Thomas’s understanding of the will
never strays from Aristotle’s fundamental conception of choice as ‘deliberative desire’” (583–
84).
12 Primo ergo considerandum est de voluntario et involuntario in communi; secundo, de actibus

qui sunt voluntarii quasi ab ipsa voluntate eliciti, ut immediate ipsius voluntatis existentes;
tertio, de actibus qui sunt voluntarii quasi a voluntate imperati, qui sunt ipsius voluntatis
mediantibus aliis potentiis. Thomas assumes that actions are called “voluntary” ( voluntarius)
because of the presence in them of will ( voluntas). As we will see, this is a prime example of an
accidental etymology having a substantive philosophical consequence. Cf. STh, IaIae, 6, 2, 1 and
ad 1.
13 Ex hoc contingit quod homo est dominus sui actus, quod habet deliberationem de suis actibus,
ex hoc enim quod ratio deliberans se habet ad opposita, voluntas in utrumque potest.
14 Actus voluntatis nihil est aliud quam inclinatio quaedam procedens ab interiori principio
cognoscente.
11
Aristotle on this, for whom will (or wish, boulêsis) was, in J. O. Urmson’s words, the “desire for
what on the basis of rational calculation is seen to serve one’s best interest in the long run.”15 In
this way will is a kind of compass that keeps one on the path that, by one’s own lights, leads to
what one wants most of all, i.e., happiness. Further, when Thomas calls the will “rational
appetite,”
he means—in at least one central usage—more than a desire the agent judges to be sensible or in
line with her long-term goals; he also means it is what the agent resolves to pursue.16 He says,
“It is from wil ing the end, that man is moved to take counsel in regard to the means”17 (IaIae,
14, 1, ad 1);
• Second, Thomas connects the will ( voluntas) to actions that are voluntary ( voluntarie), an
association that seems obvious, since it is manifest in the very Latin terms (though not in
Aristotle’s Greek, where the parallel terms were etymologically unrelated to each other18).
Further, by speaking in the plural of “act s which are voluntary, as being elicited by the wil , and
as issuing from the will immediately”—he is referring here to intention, choice, consent, etc.,
each of which he goes on to discuss separately—Thomas alludes to the fact that the concept of
will covers a variety of what one could call “action-oriented psychological (or propositional)
attitudes.” Like “mind,” it is a concept standing for a genus, and indeed a genus much wider than
what Aristotle had in mind;
• Third, Thomas ties will closely to the capacity to deliberate—an act of practical reason—about
what we should do in a given situation. In whatever ways our desires may be disposed, the will
of a free agent—i.e., of one who is neither coerced nor addicted—is by definition “indifferently
disposed to opposite things;” it exercises a kind of judicial function. Terence Irwin calls it
“rational choice;” Davidson identifies it with the agent’s “better judgment;”19
15 J. O. Urmson, Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwel , 1988), 40.
16 “Resolves” is not quite right, since in many “willed” actions the agent simply acts, with no
separate step of forming a resolution. Her behavior, one might say, expresses the categorical or
unconditional judgment, “This action is desirable” tout court, as Donald Davidson put it.
Interestingly, Davidson was initially a skeptic about the wil , thinking that human action could be
analyzed solely in terms of ordinary desires, beliefs and (event-) causation. His change of mind
is described in the Introduction and Essays 2 and 5 of Essays on Actions & Events (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980).
He credits Aquinas on pp. 33 and 36. The quoted phrase is on p. 98.
17 [H]omo vult finem, movetur ad consiliandum de his quae sunt ad finem.
18 Thomas says: “A thing is called ‘voluntary’ from ‘ voluntas’ (wil )” [ Voluntarium enim a
voluntate dicitur] (IaIIae, 6, 2, obj. 1; cf. also ibid ., ad 1). Since for Aristotle the acts of animals
and children, who lack will or wish ( boulêsis), can be voluntary ( hekousion), not every
voluntary action involves wil .
It is an etymological accident that Latin writers came to render hekousion with voluntarius, thus
laying the basis for the opposed view, i.e., that every voluntary action is willed.
19 Cf. Terence Irwin, “Who Discovered the Wil ?” in Philosophical Perspectives 6: Ethics, ed.
James Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992), 467; Donald Davidson, “How is
Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Actions, 21–42, at 36.
12
livingwithoutwhy
• Fourth, Thomas associates will with an “interior knowing principle.” Here he plainly seems to
have in mind Aristotle’s placement of boulêsis “in the rational part” of the soul ( DA, III, 9, 432b
3), as proceeding from—or perhaps constituting—the mind’s assessment about how best to
live.20 But Thomas may also well have in mind here the role of will in practical knowledge, i.e.,
the knowledge that brings about a certain particular result; it is “the cause of things thought
of.”21 (IaIIae, 3, 5, obj. 1) He does not think of the wil —
whether in its boulêsis-function of identifying the right way to live, or in its specific
manifestation as choice, the selection among alternatives of the right action to perform here and
now—as entirely autonomous (as did, say, Scotus and other “voluntarists”), but as dependent on
practical reason: “The wil tends to its object, according to the order of reason, since the
apprehensive power presents the object to the appetite”22 (IaIIae, 13, 1, c.). In adopting an
intention or making a choice of some means to an end we have selected, we come to know
through practical reason what we will do (or make—the builder knows the house in her mind
before her designs and deeds bring it about in fact);23 and
• Fifth, Thomas includes among “acts of wil ” those “acts which are voluntary, as being
commanded by the wil , which issue from the will through the medium of the other powers.”
These would include ordinary human actions involving bodily movements, such as speaking,
walking, typing, cooking, etc., and more complex activities such as raising children, embarking
on a career, caring for a disabled loved one, and the like. In other words, voluntary actions are
themselves “acts of wil .”
Looking at these principal features of the will as Thomas identified them, we can see at once
how well they fit the ethical approach of teleological eudaimonism: the will (as rational desire or
boulêsis) identifies or determines the goal or telos, that state or condition in which our happiness
consists. Notwithstand-ing their differences, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas agree that
happiness can only be attained if we become human agents of a certain kind, i.e., people who
live the life of the virtues. Virtuous living requires that we deliberate about what 20 ἔν τε τῷ
λογιστικῷ γὰρ ἡ βούλησις γίνεται.
21 causa rerum intellectarum.
22 [V]oluntas in suum obiectum tendit secundum ordinem rationis, eo quod vis apprehensiva
appetitivae suum obiectum repraesentat.
23 Or so argued G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwel , 1957). E.g.: “[I]t is the
agent’s (practical) knowledge of what he is doing that gives the descriptions under which what is
going on is the execution of an intention,” 87. Donald Davidson countered that the notion of
knowledge is not the right one for the analysis of intention (cf. “Intending,” Actions, 91–96). Be
that as it may, Anscombe seems to have been reporting Aquinas’s view accurately.
13
actions to perform in the various circumstances of life, choosing the ones that will lead to our
goal, and then performing them voluntarily and indeed intentionally. Will and eudaimonism, at
least of the teleological variety, seem made for each other.
Let me now illustrate the features of will we have seen thus far, showing in an example how they
are manifested in a relatively simple case of moral conflict.
Louise is a successful executive, having risen from modest circumstances to the post of vice
president of her firm. No puritan, she has always enjoyed a glass of wine or beer with her meals.
Recently the stresses of her job and her ever more complicated personal finances have led her to
look for ways to keep calm and focused. Her older brother, a freelance entrepreneur,
recommended she take a drink of aquavit when she feels the pressure mounting: “That’s what I
do,” he told her. “You toss down a delicious, ice-cold shot and it works great.” But despite her
affection for him—and her liking for aquavit—her own sense of how she wants to live (“a life of
sobriety and integrity,” is how she formulates it) and the counsel of her best friend have
persuaded her to avoid the alcohol, and instead practice yoga-stretching or Daoist breathing. So
when, one Tuesday just before a meeting at which she will have to give a particularly gloomy
sales report for the preceding quarter, she feels the pressure mounting, she decides it is time to
regain her composure. Dismissing the thought of having a drink, she turns off her computer, and
decid-ing against yoga so as to remain seated, she closes her eyes, and starts to breathe deeply;
soon she begins to feel a loosening of the tension . . .
As described here, Louise’s behavior illustrates a version of what Aristotle called the virtue of
temperance ( sôphrosunê), the habit of moderation in the fulfillment of bodily needs and desires.
What makes this a virtue, for Aristotle, is that it is a character trait guided by reason that governs
desires, a trait that expresses a mean—not too much, not too little—and one that Louise has
developed out of her sense (a correct one, he would say) of how one should live. It is in actions
such as these that one attains an important kind of human happiness.24
An alternative narrative, one in which Louise weakens under temptation and gives in to the
desire for a drink of aquavit, would illustrate another important 24 As we will see, the precise
weighting in Aristotle of the roles played by the virtues of the intellect and those of character in
the attainment of happiness is complex and disputed. But on one reading of his views, if Louise
were to supplement the breathing practice with a regular and systematic study of metaphysics—
and especially of the divine order of the cosmos—she would attain an even higher level of
happiness.
14
livingwithoutwhy
feature of wil , the character flaw Aristotle labeled akrasia (incontinence, ungovernedness, often
called weakness of wil ).
Our modern concept of will has many faces, which are everywhere in our narratives of Louise.
Take the action of her beginning Daoist breathing. The notion of will is involved in this deed in a
number of ways:
1. Since her action is self-initiated, Louise acted voluntarily: she knew what she was doing, was
not coerced, did not mistake Daoist breathing for kundalini yoga, etc.
2. She did it intentional y, i.e., she acted on the basis of her reason for the deed, here: she wants
to settle her nerves and relax by means of using this breathing technique.
3. She is exercising choice, e.g., to resort to the breathing exercise (rather than alcohol), and to
Daoist breathing (rather than yoga).
4. The root cause (or “principle”) of her action is her goal or rational desire to lead a certain kind
of life. For Louise, undertaking this exercise expresses what Aristotle called her boulêsis (wish,
wil ) and Thomas her voluntas (wil ), i.e., her “rational desire for the good” or her conception of
how best to live: avoiding alcohol during work, and particularly when under stress, is part of her
conception of the good life.
5. The various manifestations of will here are linked in what has been called a
“practical syllogism,” i.e., a form of reasoning that connects some goal (often the agent’s
boulêsis) to something she decides or chooses to do voluntarily here and now.
6. Louise is here reacting to unpleasant sensations and the need for relaxation, but she reacts
rationally, i.e., after deliberating about what is the best way to deal with it.
7. Louise enjoys the Daoist breathing, both in the medieval sense of attaining and resting in the
object of her wil , and in the modern sense of experienc-ing the pleasant effects.
8. Louise’s action, some would say, shows free will, i.e., is self-determined, and thus she is
responsible for her deeds (for Aristotle and Aquinas, she is
“master” of them).
9. In the first tale Louise exhibits will power: she knows what she should do to conform to her
own conception of how to live, and manages to ignore or overcome any temptation. If she
experiences no temptation, Aristotle would say she is (thus far) temperate, i.e., virtuous; if she
feels tempted but resists, he would call her behavior “continent.”
10. Were she to give in to the temptation, Aristotle would say she is akratic.
According to Augustine, Aquinas, and other Christian thinkers, she would be committing a sin,
intentionally acting contrary to her insight into how
15
she should act; so her action would be an expression of a perverted (or disordered) will (which,
as we shall see, is claimed by these thinkers to be a universal condition among humankind in the
absence of grace).
11. For John Duns Scotus there would be “nothing contradictory” in her akratic behavior. She
would not thereby commit a logical blunder.
12. In Meister Eckhart’s view, such a misstep would be the result of “creaturely”
worry, and thus expresses a sense of possessiveness ( eigenschaft) toward her finite, material
constitution; as such it would be a sign of her ignorance of her true nature, i.e., of who and what
she really is.25
13. The advice of Louise’s friend is an example of good will or benevolence (one of the earliest
senses of the Latin term for wil , voluntas); its contrary is ill will or malevolence.
14. Actions that are performed freely though to some extent reluctantly are sometimes called
“unwil ing.” Some have proposed that akratic deeds are of this type.
15. But there is an important complexity here in Aristotle’s conception of actions. As we shall
see, he distinguished between two aspects of action, praxis and poiêsis, roughly doing and
making or producing. The same deed typically has both aspects. In our example, Louise’s efforts
to calm her nerves are a form of poiêsis: the criterion of success lies beyond the deed itself in its
effects. Aristotle would regard Louise’s deed as praxis only if it (a) results from deliberation
about what her boulêsis demands of her, and (b) is done
“for its own sake.” This latter requirement may seem to conflict with the purposive, means-end
character of the act as poiêsis, but what it shows is that there are two separate “why?” questions
about the same deed: first, “Why, i.e., what result is she aiming at?” (“She wants to calm
herself”), and second,
“Why, i.e., in what way does she think this act contributes to or constitutes her happiness?”
(“She regards this act as temperate, and her rational desire is to live a temperate/virtuous life”).
In praxis, goal and doing are identical: performing the breathing technique (rather than taking a
drink) constitutes (a part of) living temperately; and thus, as a case of what Louise regards as
living wel , the doing is for its own sake, i.e., it is itself living well or virtuously. I will argue that
Meister Eckhart’s controversial advice to live without why concerns this second (or praxis) sense
of why.26
25 Eckhart’s view relies on something like the Stoic conception of oikeiôsis, a kind of self-
possession in which we either instinctively or by choice possess and “hold together” those
characteristics that distinguish us from others make us what we are.
26 There are other senses of what has been called “wil ” not shown in these particular cases, for
example will as command (e.g., “It is my will that I not be kept on life support”); or of course the
simple future tense (e.g., “I am sure he will remember to be here by 5:00 p.m.”).
16
livingwithoutwhy
16. Aquinas would discern additional “acts of wil ” in her behavior: in addition to the simple act
of wil ing the end (happiness as Louise conceives it) and intending the end through an acceptable
means in the circumstances (e.g., Daoist breathing), as well as to her choice of that means,
Thomas points out her consent (in principle) to several means (yoga as well as Daoism), and her
use of the bodily means to carry out the decision.27
I suggest, following Aquinas and such modern writers as Kahn, Sorabji, and Irwin, that “our”
notion of will includes all these (and perhaps other) elements, which are related in intricate and
unpredictable ways.28 The terms “free wil ,”
“good wil ,” and “will power,” for example, draw on the notion of will in similar yet distinct
ways. The first, for instance, connotes autonomy in acting, the second fondness and concern in
dealing with someone or something, and the third a capacity to stick to one’s resolve in spite of
obstacles. There is a palpable relatedness here in the connection of all three to action, but these
notions could clearly have been expressed by distinct words with no verbal or etymological
similarity (as they were in classical Greek). So the family of terms seems to be held together
principally by the links of its members to voluntary human action, without any systematic
ordering. One upshot is this: in trying to say what Meister Eckhart meant by “living without
‘why” (or wil ),” we must be very careful to determine just which of the manifold senses of “wil
” is/are in question. To live
“without wil ” may not—indeed, does not—mean one should dispense with good wil , or
intentions, and so on. With that caveat in mind we turn now to a brief account of Aristotle’s
views on the will and happiness.
27 These facets of an intentional action are discussed by Thomas in STh, IaIae 8–17. They are
interwoven in his analysis with parallel acts of (practical) intellect, e.g., deliberation and
judgment.
A discussion and a useful chart of these acts of intellect and will are given by Denis Bradley,
Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
1997), 341.
A more critical take is offered by Alan Donagan, “Thomas Aquinas on Human Action,” in The
Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. N. Kretzman, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg, with
E. Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 642–54.
28 Charles Kahn, “Discovering the Will from Aristotle to Augustine,” in The Question of
‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, eds. John M. Dillon and A. A. Long
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 234–59; Richard Sorabji, “The Concept of the
Will from Plato to Maximus the Confessor,” in The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to
the Present Day, eds. Thomas Pink and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2004), 6–28; and
Irwin, “Who Discovered the Wil ?”
Aristotle’s Teleological
Eudaimonism
Aristotle is a resolutely teleological thinker, in physics and biology, in metaphysics, in ethics,

and in politics. For him the basic physical elements themselves—air, water, etc.—and all
substances have built-in goals that are a function of their respective natures. Air seeks to rise
above earth and water because that is where its natural place is. An oak tree strives to grow and
produce acorns, not apples, because that is its nature, it is what the oak is for, its “why” in the
sense of its “final” (goal, telos) cause. The natural is also normative, most clearly in the domain
of ethics and politics: what we humans are by nature determines what our natural fulfillment or
end—our good—is, and hence specifies the sort of life we should lead. At the beginning of his
epoch-making Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes:
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some
good . . . If then there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake
(everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the
sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire
would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the
knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark
to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should?1
( NE I.1, 1094a1–2; I.2, a18–24)
1 πᾶσα τέχνη καὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πρᾶξίς τε καὶ προαίρεσις, ἀγαθοῦ τινὸς ἐφίεσθαι
δοκεῖ . . . εἰ
δή τι τέλος ἐστὶ τῶν πρακτῶν ὃ δι᾽ αὑτὸ βουλόμεθα, τἆλλα δὲ διὰ τοῦτο, καὶ μὴ πάντα δι᾽ ἕτερον
αἱρούμεθα
(προέίσί γὰρ οὕτω γ᾽ εἰς ἄπειρον, ὥστ᾽ εἶναι κενὴν καὶ ματαίαν τὴν ὄρεξιν), δῆλον ὡς τοῦτ᾽ ἂν
εἴη τἀγαθὸν
καὶ τὸ ἄριστον. ἆρ᾽ οὖν καὶ πρὸς τὸν βίον ἡ γνῶσις αὐτοῦ μεγάλην ἔχει ῥοπήν, καὶ καθάπερ
τοξόται
σκοπὸν ἔχοντες μᾶλλον ἂν τυγχάνοίμέν τοῦ δέοντος ( Complete Works Vol. 2, 1729). Further
references 17
18
livingwithoutwhy
Aristotle goes on to spell out in greater detail what is implicit in these lines: if there is an ultimate
end, of the sort described, for human undertakings, gaining it will be the “chief good” of human
beings, our eudaimonia (happiness, flourishing, fulfillment); and it will clearly be something to
be attained teleologically, i.e., by our own efforts (and not, say, as a gift of the gods, a grace).
Aristotle thinks our efforts to attain eudaimonia will be successful only if they are guided by a
correct notion of what it consists in, and this must be a function of our nature.2 But what is our
nature? What sort of life does it prescribe for us?
Aristotle answers these questions with his “function argument” in book I, chapter 7. He suggests
that just as craftspeople and bodily organs have functions, so too do human beings qua human:
What can this (function) be? Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is
peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a
life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal.
There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part
has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing
one and exercising thought. And, as ‘ life of the rational element’ also has two meanings, we
must state that life in the sense of activity (as opposed to a mere capacity) is what we mean; for
this seems to be the more proper sense of the term.3
( NE I.7, 1097b33-1098a7, emphasis added)
will be given in the text. Some have found this argument for a supreme goal in our actions to be
fallacious, e.g., Anscombe, Intention, § 21. Aristotle’s view, at least in the form given it by
Thomas Aquinas, is defended by Scott MacDonald, “Ultimate Ends in Practical Reasoning:
Aquinas’s Aristotelian Moral Psychology and Anscombe’s Fallacy,” Philosophical Review 100:
1 (1991): 31–66.
2 A word of caution is called for here. Since for Aristotle ethics is a practical science, i.e., one
that deals with how we should act, and thus with particulars (i.e., situations, persons, etc.) rather
than universals, it cannot be in his sense deductive. So although Aristotle himself alludes to facts
about human nature to establish his ethical theories, those theories cannot be deduced from such
facts. That they are at least based on Aristotle’s conception of human nature, and that this
approach anticipates those of Augustine and Aquinas, cf. C. J. de Vogel, “On the Character of
Aristotle’s Ethics,”
in Schriften zur aristotelischen Ethik, ed. Chr. Mueller-Goldingen (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag,
1988), 273–82. Some have urged that the facts Aristotle adduces are part of a “dialectical”
argument about the first truths of ethics. Cf. the overview in Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold,
233–36.
3 τί οὖν δὴ τοῦτ᾽ ἂν εἴη ποτέ; τὸ μὲν γὰρ ζῆν κοινὸν εἶναι φαίνεται καὶ τοῖς φυτοῖς, ζητεῖται δὲ τὸ
ἴδιον.
ἀφοριστέον ἄρα τήν τε θρεπτικὴν καὶ τὴν αὐξητικὴν ζωήν. ἑπομένη δὲ αἰσθητική τις ἂν εἴη,
φαίνεται δὲ
καὶ αὐτὴ κοινὴ καὶ ἵππῳ καὶ βοῒ καὶ παντὶ ζῴῳ. λείπεται δὴ πρακτική τις τοῦ λόγον ἔχοντος:
τούτου δὲ
τὸ μὲν ὡς ἐπιπειθὲς λόγῳ, τὸ δ᾽ ὡς ἔχον καὶ διανοούμενον. διττῶς δὲ καὶ ταύτης λεγομένης τὴν
κατ᾽
ἐνέργειαν θετέον: κυριώτερον γὰρ αὕτη δοκεῖ λέγεσθαι.
Aristotle’s Teleological Eudaimonism
19
The distinctively human soul has two parts or aspects: one is rooted in our emotions and desires,
but unlike the vegetative and sensate souls is capable of obey-ing reason; the other is directly
rational: its work is to think.
Aristotle immediately draws an important conclusion:
If the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if
we say “a so-and-so” and “a good so-and-so”
have a function which is the same in kind, e.g., a lyre-player and a good lyre-player, and so
without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of excellence being added to the name of
the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is
to do so wel ): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and
this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a
good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed
when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human
good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with excellence, and if there are more than
one excellence, in accordance with the best and most complete.4
( NE I.7, 1098a7–17)
The human function is to live rationally; a person who does so actively and wel , i.e., in
accordance with excellence or virtue, fulfil s that function and thereby, according to Aristotle,
deserves to be called “happy.”
The very end of the last quoted passage says that if there are several kinds of excellences of
thinking, the human good will be “in accordance with the best and most complete.” That seems
to mean, on a natural reading, that there is just one kind of thinking activity that constitutes
human happiness: call this view
“exclusivism” (or “monism”). But it seems at odds with a passage immediately preceding the
function argument in book I.7:
[A]nd further we think (happiness) most desirable of all things, without being counted as one
good thing among others—if it were so 4 εἰ δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἔργον ἀνθρώπου ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια κατὰ λόγον
ἢ μὴ ἄνευ λόγου, τὸ δ᾽ αὐτό φαμεν ἔργον
εἶναι τῷ γένει τοῦδε καὶ τοῦδε σπουδαίου, ὥσπερ κιθαριστοῦ καὶ σπουδαίου κιθαριστοῦ, καὶ
ἁπλῶς δὴ
τοῦτ᾽ ἐπὶ πάντων, προστιθεμένης τῆς κατὰ τὴν ἀρετὴν ὑπεροχῆς πρὸς τὸ ἔργον: κιθαριστοῦ μὲν
γὰρ
κιθαρίζειν, σπουδαίου δὲ τὸ εὖ: εἰ δ᾽ οὕτως, ἀνθρώπου δὲ τίθεμεν ἔργον ζωήν τινα, ταύτην δὲ
ψυχῆς
ἐνέργειαν καὶ πράξεις μετὰ λόγου, σπουδαίου δ᾽ ἀνδρὸς εὖ ταῦτα καὶ καλῶς, ἕκαστον δ᾽ εὖ κατὰ
τὴν
οἰκείαν ἀρετὴν ἀποτελεῖται: εἰ δ᾽ οὕτω, τὸ ἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθὸν ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια γίνεται κατ᾽
ἀρετήν, εἰ δὲ
πλείους αἱ ἀρεταί, κατὰ τὴν ἀρίστην καὶ τελειοτάτην.
20
livingwithoutwhy
counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of goods; for
that which is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more
desirable. Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.5
( NE I.7, 1097b16–20)
Here Aristotle seems to be saying that if there are several kinds of rational activities that
constitute the human function, then even if one is better than the other(s), happiness will be a
combination of excellent activity in the several forms, not just the one: call this “inclusivism.” A
great deal of critical ink has been spilled in defense of one or the other of these doctrines, or even
of some third hybrid, as we will see below.
But before we look at this dispute, let us first say more about Aristotle’s notion of the two kinds
of rational lives in question, asking also what role, if any, there is for the concept of will in each.
To begin with the part of the soul that has a rational principle “in the sense of being obedient to
one,” what is at issue is a life of morally virtuous activity: acting in accord with justice, courage,
temperance, generosity, truthfulness, and the like. The best such life will also include friendships
built on virtue, as well as a healthy version of self-love, since virtuous people wish genuine good
to themselves, as they do to others (cf. NE IX.4). All of these virtues are concerned with the
regulation of our emotions and desires: justice is concerned with, among other things, our
acquisitiveness; courage with our fear, etc. The virtues are states, Aristotle says, habits that we
acquire by repeated practice ( NE II.1–2). Further, they not only deal with activities that are
pleasurable or painful, virtuous behavior itself is a source of pleasure for the virtuous person, and
the absence of pleasure in the performance of virtuous deeds is a sign that the agent is not (yet) a
virtuous person, i.e., one who performs such deeds in the way a virtuous person does:
The [virtuous] agent . . . must be in a certain condition when he does
[virtuous deeds]; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts,
and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and
unchangeable character.6
( NE II.4, 1105a30–33)
5 ἔτι δὲ πάντων αἱρετωτάτην μὴ συναριθμουμένην—συναριθμουμένην δὲ δῆλον ὡς αἱρετωτέραν
μετὰ τοῦ ἐλαχίστου τῶν ἀγαθῶν: ὑπεροχὴ γὰρ ἀγαθῶν γίνεται τὸ προστιθέμενον, ἀγαθῶν δὲ τὸ
μεῖζον
αἱρετώτερον ἀεί.
6 ἢ σωφρόνως πράττεται, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐὰν ὁ πράττων πῶς ἔχων πράττῃ, πρῶτον μὲν ἐὰν εἰδώς,
ἔπειτ᾽
ἐὰν προαιρούμενος, καὶ προαιρούμενος δι᾽ αὐτά, τὸ δὲ τρίτον ἐὰν καὶ βεβαίως καὶ ἀμετακινήτως
ἔχων
πράττῃ.
21
These are the marks of a morally excellent person, who has knowledge (of the mean—cf. below),
makes a deliberated choice (of the act identified by this knowledge, and for its own sake), and is
guided by a firm virtuous character that determines the choice.
As indicated at the end of the previous chapter, Aristotle designates actions in their moral
dimensions “praxis,” distinguishing them from what he calls
“poiêsis” (production or making). As we just saw, Aristotle makes it a condition of virtuous

action that the agent “choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes.” In book VI he tel s
us “action [ praxis] cannot [have an end other than itself]; for good action itself is its end”7
(1140b6–7). But in production or making we act precisely for the sake of the result: “making has
an end other than itself”8 (1140b6). Although Aristotle gives us no textual guidance here, we
must assume that these terms must apply, in at least some cases, to the same deeds, as when
politicians make decisions about war and peace. It seems he means the terms to apply to different
aspects of the action. Political leaders hoping for a military victory must choose means that
effectively bring about the desired outcome, but a wise and virtuous one will make sure that in
doing so she acts justly, where this trait is not measured by the results of the battle, but by the
demands of justice, as well as the character and decision-making process of the leaders
themselves. As I noted in the previous chapter, different why-questions will be relevant to these
two aspects of acting: in the case of poiêsis the question will be asking for the agent’s intention
or hoped-for outcome—for example, one might ask, “Why did they order an attack on the
enemy’s left flank?” and the answer might be, “In order to capitalize on the enemy’s
overstretched supply lines.” But with praxis the focus is on the action itself and its role in the
agents’ conception of living well ( eupraxia) or eudaimonia; for instance, the question might be
“Why did they not burn down the enemy city they had captured?” to which one might answer,
“Because they felt that would be unjust and disgraceful.”
With his typical respect for received opinions, especially those of the wise, Aristotle finds that
eupraxia has to do with determining a mean between excess and deficiency:
[M]oral excellence . . . is concerned with passions and actions, and in these there is excess,
defect, and the intermediate. For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and
pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases 7
[τὸ τέλος] τῆς δὲ πράξεως οὐκ ἂν εἴη: ἔστι γὰρ αὐτὴ ἡ εὐπραξία τέλος.
8 τῆς μὲν γὰρ ποιήσεως ἕτερον τὸ τέλος.

22
livingwithoutwhy
not wel ; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right
people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this
is characteristic of excellence. Similarly with regard to actions [ praxeis] also there is excess,
defect, and the intermediate. Now excellence is concerned with passions and actions, in which
excess is a form of failure, and so is defect, while the intermediate is praised and is a form of
success; and being praised and being successful are both characteristics of excellence.
Therefore excellence is a kind of mean, since, as we have seen, it aims at what is intermediate.9
( NE II.6, 1106b16–28)
Summing up, then, his exploration of moral excellence or virtue, Aristotle writes:
Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us,
this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical
wisdom [ ho phronimos] would determine it.10
( NE II.7, 1106b36–1107a1)
Strikingly enough, there seems at first glance to be no reference at all to the will in this
characterization of moral virtue. But appearances are decep-tive here. In this definition Aristotle
is concentrating on the role of practical wisdom (or prudence, phronêsis) in determining which
action among the available alternatives exemplifies the moral mean. Whatever else it might do,
such wisdom, a virtue of the mind, produces good choices on the basis of deliberation about the
options (III.2). Good choices, repeated often enough, give rise to a virtuous character, hence
Aristotle’s focus. But correct choice and practical wisdom presuppose a correct “wish” (
boulêsis), which, Aristotle says, is “for the end,” while “choice relates to what contributes to the
end” (loosely, the 9 λέγω δὲ τὴν ἠθικήν: αὕτη γάρ ἐστι περὶ πάθη καὶ πράξεις, ἐν δὲ τούτοις
ἔστιν ὑπερβολὴ καὶ ἔλλειψις
καὶ τὸ μέσον. οἷον καὶ φοβηθῆναι καὶ θαρρῆσαι καὶ ἐπιθυμῆσαι καὶ ὀργισθῆναι καὶ ἐλεῆσαι καὶ
ὅλως
ἡσθῆναι καὶ λυπηθῆναι ἔστι καὶ μᾶλλον καὶ ἧττον, καὶ ἀμφότερα οὐκ εὖ: τὸ δ᾽ ὅτε δεῖ καὶ ἐφ᾽
οἷς καὶ πρὸς
οὓς καὶ οὗ ἕνεκα καὶ ὡς δεῖ, μέσον τε καὶ ἄριστον, ὅπερ ἐστὶ τῆς ἀρετῆς. ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ περὶ τὰς
πράξεις
ἔστιν ὑπερβολὴ καὶ ἔλλειψις καὶ τὸ μέσον. ἡ δ᾽ ἀρετὴ περὶ πάθη καὶ πράξεις ἐστίν, ἐν οἷς ἡ μὲν
ὑπερβολὴ
ἁμαρτάνεται καὶ ἡ ἔλλειψις ψέγεται, τὸ δὲ μέσον ἐπαινεῖται καὶ κατορθοῦται: ταῦτα δ᾽ ἄμφω τῆς
ἀρετῆς.
μεσότης τις ἄρα ἐστὶν ἡ ἀρετή, στοχαστική γε οὖσα τοῦ μέσου.
10 ἔστιν ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ὡρισμένῃ λόγῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν
ὁ
φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν.
23
means)11 (III.4, 1113a15; and III.2, 1111b26). Hence without the right wish or wil , there cannot
be right choice or virtue. So this notion, to the examination of which he devotes a scant thirty or
so lines, nonetheless carries an important burden for Aristotle’s ethics.12
With respect to what exactly it is that we should want for our lives, Aristotle relies on the crucial
notion of the spoudaios, the excellent person who serves as the standard of right conduct:
That which is in truth an object of wish is an object of wish to the good man ( spoudaiô), while
any chance thing may be so to the bad man, as in the case of bodies also the things that are in
truth wholesome are wholesome for bodies which are in good condition, while for those that are
diseased other things are wholesome—or bitter or sweet or hot or heavy, and so on; since the
good man judges each class of things rightly, and in each the truth appears to him . . . For each
state of character has its own ideas of the noble and the pleasant, and perhaps the good man
differs from others most by seeing the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and
measure of them.13
( NE III.4, 1113a24–33, translation slightly amended) 11 ἡ δὲ βούλησις ὅτι μὲν τοῦ τέλους ἐστὶν
. . . ἡ δὲ προαίρεσις τῶν πρὸς τὸ τέλος. Ross, Complete Works of Aristotle, and Terence Irwin,
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publ. Co., 1999), translate
boulêsis and its cognates (e.g., the verb form boulometha) as “wish.” In other Greek authors “wil
” is the preferred English equivalent (the online Liddell & Scott lexicon gives, among other
meanings, “wil ing; will or testament; purpose” for the term). The wider notion of wish is
appropriate for Aristotle because he expressly wants boulêsis also to cover the desire for things
recognized as impossible (III.2). But this does not negate the fact that in the context of praxis he
also employs boulêsis in a sense similar to the English “wil ” or “rationally wil ,” instead of
“wish.” In spite of his own occasional usage where boulêsis does have the sense of “wish,”
Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics often has in mind a special sense for these terms, i.e., the
rational desire for an object as an end in itself, and this is quite different from the normal
meaning of the English “wish.” As we saw, J. O.
Urmson says of boulêsis in Aristotle, it “means something like desire for what on the basis of
rational calculation is seen to serve one’s best interest in the long run” (Urmson, Aristotle’s
Ethics, 40). With these caveats I will follow the tradition in using “wish.”
12 We shall consider below whether the Aristotelian version of a “rational desire” captures
enough of the Aquinas version (which we provisionally adopted in the previous chapter) to be
called, in any sense, “wil .”
13 κατ᾽ ἀλήθειαν βουλητὸν εἶναι τἀγαθόν, ἑκάστῳ δὲ τὸ φαινόμενον; τῷ μὲν οὖν σπουδαίῳ τὸ
κατ᾽
ἀλήθειαν εἶναι, τῷ δὲ φαύλῳ τὸ τυχόν, ὥσπερ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν σωμάτων τοῖς μὲν εὖ διακειμένοις
ὑγιεινά ἐστι τὰ
κατ᾽ ἀλήθειαν τοιαῦτα ὄντα, τοῖς δ᾽ ἐπινόσοις ἕτερα, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ πικρὰ καὶ γλυκέα καὶ θερμὰ
καὶ βαρέα
καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἕκαστα: ὁ σπουδαῖος γὰρ ἕκαστα κρίνει ὀρθῶς, καὶ ἐν ἑκάστοις τἀληθὲς αὐτῷ
φαίνεται.
καθ᾽ ἑκάστην γὰρ ἕξιν ἴδιά ἐστι καλὰ καὶ ἡδέα, καὶ διαφέρει πλεῖστον ἴσως ὁ σπουδαῖος τῷ
τἀληθὲς ἐν
ἑκάστοις ὁρᾶν, ὥσπερ κανὼν καὶ μέτρον αὐτῶν ὤν.
24
livingwithoutwhy
The virtuous person, the spoudaios, has the right wish or correct orientation in life; uses practical
wisdom ( phronêsis) to deliberate wel ; and on this basis makes correct choices.
Note that this way of putting things itself suggests that in matters of moral action ( praxis) the
thinking involved follows a distinctive course of reasoning, which Aristotle himself calls
“syllogism.” In book VI Aristotle makes the point explicit, speaking of phronêsis:
And this eye of the soul acquires its formed state not without the aid of excellence [virtue], as
has been said and is plain; for inferences [ syllogis-moi] which deal with acts to be done are
things which involve a starting-point, viz. “since the end, i.e., what is best, is of such and such a
nature,”
whatever it may be (let it for the sake of argument be what we please); and this is not evident
except to the good man.14
( NE VI.12, 1144a30–34)
Presumably the spoudaios might reason the way Louise did in the example given in chapter 1,
where her wish ( boulêsis) is expressed in the first premise: “I want to live a sober, upright life
(or: Let me live a sober, upright life); if I imbibe strong alcoholic drink on the job, I will not lead
such a life; so let me not do so in these circumstances.”
What makes the conviction of the spoudaios about the proper goal of life correct? This too is a
question that has elicited strikingly different answers from the commentators, including Aquinas.
Buttressed by apparently clear assertions from Aristotle himself, some have argued that
correctness about the goal of life is a matter of the right habits, and that these are anchored in our
desires 14 ὄμματι τούτῳ γίνεται τῆς ψυχῆς οὐκ ἄνευ ἀρετῆς, ὡς εἴρηταί τε καὶ ἔστι δῆλον: οἱ γὰρ
συλλογισμοὶ
τῶν πρακτῶν ἀρχὴν ἔχοντές εἰσιν, ἐπειδὴ τοιόνδε τὸ τέλος καὶ τὸ ἄριστον, ὁτιδήποτε ὄν (ἔστω
γὰρ λόγου
χάριν τὸ τυχόν): τοῦτο δ᾽ εἰ μὴ τῷ ἀγαθῷ, οὐ φαίνεται. Compare the formulation in VII.3,

1147a25–31:
“The one opinion (i.e., premise) is universal, the other is concerned with the particular facts, and
here we come to something within the sphere of perception; when a single opinion results from
the two, the soul must in one type of case affirm the conclusion, while in the case of opinions
concerned with production it must immediately act (e.g., if ‘everything sweet ought to be tasted,’
and ‘this is sweet,’ in the sense of being one of the particular sweet things, the man who can act
and is not prevented must at the same time actually act accordingly).” [ἣ μὲν γὰρ καθόλου δόξα,
ἡ δ᾽ ἑτέρα περὶ τῶν
καθ᾽ ἕκαστά ἐστιν, ὧν αἴσθησις ἤδη κυρία: ὅταν δὲ μία γένηται ἐξ αὐτῶν, ἀνάγκη τὸ
συμπερανθὲν ἔνθα
μὲν φάναι τὴν ψυχήν, ἐν δὲ ταῖς ποιητικαῖς πράττειν εὐθύς: οἷον, εἰ παντὸς γλυκέος γεύεσθαι δεῖ,
τουτὶ
δὲ γλυκὺ ὡς ἕν τι τῶν καθ᾽ ἕκαστον, ἀνάγκη τὸν δυνάμενον καὶ μὴ κωλυόμενον ἅμα τοῦτο καὶ
πράττειν.]
Aristotle also uses this notion of the practical syllogism elsewhere in his writings, e.g., in On the
Movement of Animals VII.
25
(principally boulêsis).15 Aristotle plainly thinks that habituation in the performance of virtuous
acts is a necessary precursor to becoming virtuous, and indeed more important than our natural
inclinations and the instruction we receive16:
[W]e become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave
acts . . . states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must
be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between
these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from
our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.17
( NE 1103b1–2; b21–25)
“All the difference:” in texts such as these, particularly in book II, Aristotle’s view seems very
like that of Hume, according to whom the sole role of reason is to serve our desires.18
However, Aristotle explicitly places boulêsis in the rational part of the soul: “[F]or wish is found
in the calculative part ( en te tô logistikô) and desire and passion in the irrational.”19 And surely,
for Aristotle, it is an objective, rationally decidable matter what the human end is. Admittedly,
“the end, i.e., what is best, . . . is not evident except to the good man”20 ( NE VI.12, 15 So, for
instance, Aristotle says that “wish ( boulêsis) relates rather to the end, choice [and thus
phronêsis, practical wisdom] to what contributes to the end; for instance, we wish to be healthy,
but we choose the acts which will make us healthy.” [ἔτι δ᾽ ἡ μὲν βούλησις τοῦ τέλους ἐστὶ
μᾶλλον, ἡ δὲ
προαίρεσις τῶν πρὸς τὸ τέλος, οἷον ὑγιαίνειν βουλόμεθα, προαιρούμεθα δὲ δι᾽ ὧν ὑγιανοῦμεν]
(III.2, 1111b26–28). Among those who argue for the “narrow view,” i.e., that Aristotle restricts
the role of (practical) reason in the moral life to determining “what contributes to the end (pre-
selected by habituated desire),” is Wil iam Fortenbaugh, “Aristotle: Emotion and Moral Virtue,”
Arethusa 2 (1969): 163–85. See the discussion in Richard Sorabji, “Aristotle on the Role of
Intellect in Virtue,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), 201–19, at 210 ff.
16 All three are mentioned at the start of book II. Habituation is strongly emphasized over the
other two.
17 δίκαια πράττοντες δίκαιοι γινόμεθα, τὰ δὲ σώφρονα σώφρονες, τὰ δ᾽ ἀνδρεῖα ἀνδρεῖοι καὶ ἑνὶ
δὴ λόγῳ ἐκ τῶν ὁμοίων ἐνεργειῶν αἱ ἕξεις γίνονται. διὸ δεῖ τὰς ἐνεργείας ποιὰς ἀποδιδόναι: κατὰ
γὰρ
τὰς τούτων διαφορὰς ἀκολουθοῦσιν αἱ ἕξεις. οὐ μικρὸν οὖν διαφέρει τὸ οὕτως ἢ οὕτως εὐθὺς ἐκ
νέων
ἐθίζεσθαι, ἀλλὰ πάμπολυ, μᾶλλον δὲ τὸ πᾶν.
18 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), II,i i,3.
19 ἔν τε τῷ λογιστικῷ γὰρ ἡ βούλησις γίνεται, καὶ ἐν τῷ ἀλόγῳ ἡ ἐπιθυμία καὶ ὁ θυμός ( DA

III.9, 432b4–5). For a brief anatomy of Aristotle’s varieties of desire, cf. Irwin, Aristotle, 323–
24.
20 τὸ τέλος καὶ τὸ ἄριστον, . . . τοῦτο δ᾽ εἰ μὴ τῷ ἀγαθῷ, οὐ φαίνεται.
26
livingwithoutwhy
1144a33–35), but habituation by itself cannot account for the unmistakably cognitive aspects of
the definition Aristotle winds up giving for virtue of character:
Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being
determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine
it.21
( NE II.6, 1106b36–1107a1, emphases added)
Discernment of the mean, e.g., that this act of donation to victims of a recent local disaster is
neither prodigal nor stingy and therefore “fine” ( kalos) or praiseworthy, is determined by
phronêsis, and not by mere habituation, which by itself could never prepare one for the
enormous variability of practical cases.
Further, as Terence Irwin has stressed, the process of such discernment about
“what contributes to the end” inevitably helps specify the end: “As a result of deliberating about
what promotes happiness, we discover its constituents, and so we have a more precise conception
of happiness.”22 One could thus think of deliberation as a continuation of the processes of
instruction and induction from cases—both involving the intellect—which enable us to acquire
and apply practical wisdom (and hence virtue) in the first place. But for Aristotle it is equally
true that such wisdom—since it is a true conception of the mean between virtue and vice—is
impossible without the correct boulêsis, i.e., without the moral agent’s desire to live the virtuous
life. Without that desire, habituated through training and guided by phronêsis, we would become
a different—and worse—sort of person.
Hence, although it can appear that Aristotle makes virtuous character—or indeed any character—
the determiner of the end, while practical wisdom is limited to determining the proper means to
the end, there is much to recommend the “expanded view” on this issue: the spoudaios is in
principle capable of the kind of dialectical reasoning—in gist, if not in scope—that Aristotle
himself undertakes in his ethical treatises in order to answer precisely this question: What is the
proper end of human life? How ought we to live? As Aristotle says, his own goal is practical:
The present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring
not in order to know what virtue is, but 21 ἔστιν ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα
τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ὡρισμένῃ λόγῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν ὁ
22 Irwin, Aristotle, 249.

27
in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use) . . .23
( NE II.2, 1103b26–28, emphasis added)
But although the goal of the book is right action, the approach is rational. Unlike the works of
Homer or the playwrights, the Nicomachean Ethics is not designed to appeal to the emotions, but
rather to the intellect. It aims to give us, as Richard Sorabji says, “a fuller and clearer conception
of the good life, and this conception will be grounded in a discussion of human nature.”24 In
other words, it aims to convince us to live virtuously, “to become (or remain) good,” and is thus
both cognitive and practical: for Aristotle there is no clash between the two.
It must then be possible for the Nicomachean Ethics to persuade its readers to continue their lives
devoted to virtue, and thus would be especially useful for a young person of good upbringing.
But can it also persuade a morally corrupt person, an akolastos, to abandon a life devoted to the
pursuit of pleasure and reset his priorities? Here Aristotle is very pessimistic. Such a person, he
says, “is bound to have no regrets, and so is incurable, since someone without regrets is
incurable”25 ( NE VII.7, 1150a21–22).
To modern readers familiar with conversion narratives this may be puzzling.
But we can agree this far with Aristotle, that if such conversion can take place, the cause of such
change will be neither habituation nor practical reason alone, but a combination of the two, and
perhaps other factors.26 We would say today that persons who make such a change have chosen
a new path of life, perhaps even that they have undergone a “radical” change or a
“conversion.”27 But Aristotle does not say this, at least not of the kind of choice that is front and
center in the Nicomachean Ethics, i.e., prohairesis. It is very largely his apparent refusal to
extend the notion of prohairesis to choice of the end that gives the narrow view of reason in his
ethics the appeal that it has.
23 ἐπεὶ οὖν ἡ παροῦσα πραγματεία οὐ θεωρίας ἕνεκά ἐστιν ὥσπερ αἱ ἄλλαι (οὐ γὰρ ἵνα εἰδῶμεν
τί ἐστιν
ἡ ἀρετὴ σκεπτόμεθα, ἀλλ᾽ ἵν᾽ ἀγαθοὶ γενώμεθα, ἐπεὶ οὐδὲν ἂν ἦν ὄφελος αὐτῆς.
24 Sorabji, “Aristotle on the Role of Intellect,” 217. Similarly, Bradley, though wil ing to
concede that the “narrow view” of phronêsis captures the situation of the “ordinary moral agent,”
thinks a rational grounding of ethics is possible (and necessary) in Aristotle’s view: “the
demonstration (of the truth or goodness of the agent’s ends) could be and needs to be supplied by
the moral philosopher who seeks scientific knowledge of the universal” ( Aquinas on the
Twofold, 198). This is of course a practical science, one not involving strict necessity and logical
deductions (hence not demonstrative, unlike metaphysics or mathematics).
25 ἀνάγκη γὰρ τοῦτον μὴ εἶναι μεταμελητικόν, ὥστ᾽ ἀνίατος: ὁ γὰρ ἀμεταμέλητος ἀνίατος.
26 St. Augustine famously gave all the credit to divine grace for his change of heart; so also did
John Newton, the former slave-ship sailor, later clergyman, and author of the stirring “Amazing
Grace.”
27 I will have more to say on this topic when discussing St. Augustine. Cf. chapter 3, 67.
28
livingwithoutwhy
How are we to understand Aristotle’s reluctance here? One possibility lies in the fact that he has
defined prohairesis, choice, in a peculiar way, to do a very special task, and this renders it unable
to participate in such radical change.
When he comes in book III to discuss the principal concepts of his moral psychology, he first
deals with voluntariness ( to hekousion), and then turns immediately to choice, which he
proceeds over several pages to characterize largely by contrast: first with the voluntary (choice is
voluntary, but not everything voluntary is chosen), with appetite, with temper ( thumos) and
belief, and—more pertinently—with deliberation and with wish ( boulêsis). The latter expresses
the agent’s goal in life, say, to have as much pleasure as possible. But such a goal is of course
still too general and needs to be tailored to the specific circumstances that agents find themselves
in. This is the job of deliberation: We deliberate about things that are in our power and can be
done . . .
(and) we deliberate not about ends but about what contributes to ends . . . Having set the end
(we) consider how and by what means it is to be attained.28
( NE III.3, 1112a30–31; 1112b11–12; 1112b15)
So, wish being “for the end” (III.4, 1113a15), deliberation enables us to determine what we
should do to attain it. The result of this process is choice, which is deliberate desire of things in
our own power; for when we have decided as a result of deliberation, we desire in accordance
with our deliberation.29
( NE III.3, 1113a10–12)
In the case of the spoudaios, his practical reason guides his deliberation to the correct choice of
“what contributes to the end.”
So defined, choice presupposes a fixed end, as well as deliberation about achiev-ing it. Hence,
when Aristotle remarks that “wish relates rather to the end, choice to what contributes to the end”
(III.2, 1111b26), he is saying something that is true by his own definition: an agent cannot
“choose” (in Aristotle’s technical sense of prohairesis) his or her goal in life, hence she cannot
choose a new goal.
But if this consideration really means that Aristotle has a narrow view of choice and practical
reason, what is then the point of the Nicomachean Ethics itself? It 28 βουλευόμεθα δὲ περὶ τῶν
ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν καὶ πρακτῶν . . . βουλευόμεθα δ᾽ οὐ περὶ τῶν τελῶν ἀλλὰ περὶ
τῶν πρὸς τὰ τέλη . . . ἀλλὰ θέμενοι τὸ τέλος τὸ πῶς καὶ διὰ τίνων ἔσται σκοποῦσι.
29 ἡ προαίρεσις ἂν εἴη βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις τῶν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν: ἐκ τοῦ βουλεύσασθαι γὰρ κρίναντες
ὀρεγόμεθα
κατὰ τὴν βούλευσιν.
29
seems that for Aristotle we are all held captive by the early training and habituation we receive in
our upbringing, and no amount of rational persuasion could change that. Perhaps, however, the
situation is not so one-sided. In book I, in answer to the question, What is the supreme good?
Aristotle had declared: Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men
and people of superior refinement say that [the highest of all goods achievable by action] is
happiness, and identify living well and doing well with being happy; but with regard to what
happiness is they differ.30
( NE I.4, 1095a17–20)
The fact that I want above all to be happy does not tell me what to do in any situation
whatsoever, because eudaimonia is, thus far, perfectly general;31 it must be made more specific
before it can guide one on any life path. Normally such specification is the product of education
and habituation. But in a broad sense of choice, it could be said to be the product of a (virtual)
choice, one that is in principle correctible, analogously to the way that one’s prohairesis is
correctible when one sees one has made an error in deliberation. Aristotle himself makes use of
such a broad sense at I.5, 1095b19–20, using the very verb form connected with prohairesis:
“Now the mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring ( proairoumenoi)
a life suitable to beasts.”32 This kind of preference or choice clearly applies to ends, and not to
means only. In other words, the wish, say, to lead a life of pleasure is, in this broad sense, chosen
in the mistaken belief that such a life constitutes happiness, and it is this latter, completely
general goal that we all really want. The tacit premise of the Nicomachean Ethics, then, could be
said to be that we ought to recognize what happiness truly consists in, and organize our lives
accordingly. But it is hard to find a truly convincing argument within this text for the pessimistic
view that the morally corrupt are literally incurable.33
30 ὀνόματι μὲν οὖν σχεδὸν ὑπὸ τῶν πλείστων ὁμολογεῖται: τὴν γὰρ εὐδαιμονίαν καὶ οἱ πολλοὶ
καὶ οἱ
χαρίεντες λέγουσιν, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ ζῆν καὶ τὸ εὖ πράττειν ταὐτὸν ὑπολαμβάνουσι τῷ εὐδαιμονεῖν: περὶ

δὲ τῆς
εὐδαιμονίας, τί ἐστιν, ἀμφισβητοῦσι.
31 Happiness is a more general goal than, say, the goal of living a life of pleasure. The latter
already rules out certain sorts of acts, e.g., preferring self-sacrifice to one’s pleasures of the
moment, whereas the goal of happiness does not (or not yet). Whether or not self-sacrifice can be
part of a happy life depends on how happiness is specified.
32 οἱ μὲν οὖν πολλοὶ παντελῶς ἀνδραποδώδεις φαίνονται βοσκημάτων βίον προαιρούμενοι.
33 Though, as we just saw, Aristotle (at 1150a22) does call the intemperate person [ akolastos]
“incurable” ( aniatos) since she has “no regrets” about her behavior. But this is more a matter of
definition, and not an explanation. Experience indicates that sinners do repent, but Aristotle is for
some reason unpersuaded.
30
livingwithoutwhy
As already mentioned, Aristotle has little to say explicitly about what he calls wish, boulêsis.
However, a careful reader of books I–V, as well as VII–
IX and part of X, would have ample reason to think that willing plays a key, though implicit, role
in Aristotle’s ethical thought. For it is involved, through its role in the practical syllogism, in
every morally virtuous act,34 and the great bulk of the Nicomachean Ethics appears implicitly to
identify the life of morally virtuous activity as happiness. But before we can turn to what
Aristotle actually concludes about what happiness is, we must look at the virtue(s) of the other
distinctive part of the human soul, the one that is rational “in the sense of possessing (a rational
principle) and exercising thought”35 ( NE I.7, 1098a4–5).
Excellence in this realm “in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which
reason it requires experience and time)”36 (II.1, 1103a15–16). Excellence of character, by
contrast, “comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name [ êthikê] is one that is formed by
a slight varia-tion from the word ethos [habit]”37 (Ibid. 16–18). The idea is presumably this:
mere teaching about justice is, in the absence of habituation in the performance of just deeds, of
no use; conversely, habituation plays little or no role in the case of the intellectual excellences—
principally phronêsis and sophia—while teaching by learned elders is crucial.
After these preliminary remarks Aristotle devotes himself to the moral virtues in Books II–V,
returning in Book VI to the promised discussion of the virtues of thought:
We said before that there are two parts of the soul—that which grasps a rule or rational principle,
and the irrational; let us now draw a similar distinction within the part which grasps a rational
principle. And let it be assumed that there are two parts which grasp a rational principle—
one by which we contemplate the kind of things whose originative causes are invariable, and one
by which we contemplate variable things; for where objects differ in kind the part of the soul
answering to each of the two is different in kind, since it is in virtue of a certain likeness and
kinship with their objects that they have the knowledge 34 This is of course not to claim that
agents actually go through a process of practical reasoning each time they act, only that we could
reconstruct some such rationale implicit in all voluntary behavior, enabling us to understand
what the agent is doing and why.
35 τὸ δ᾽ ὡς ἔχον καὶ διανοούμενον.
36 ἡ μὲν διανοητικὴ τὸ πλεῖον ἐκ διδασκαλίας ἔχει καὶ τὴν γένεσιν καὶ τὴν αὔξησιν, διόπερ
ἐμπειρίας
δεῖται καὶ χρόνου.
37 ἡδ᾽ ἠθικὴ ἐξ ἔθους περιγίνεται, ὅθεν καὶ τοὔνομα ἔσχηκε μικρὸν παρεκκλῖνον ἀπὸ τοῦ ἔθους.
31
they have. Let one of these parts be called the scientific and the other the calculative.38
( NE VI.1, 1139a2–12)
Prudence or practical wisdom is of course included among these latter calculative virtues, and so
are the various arts or crafts, which aim at a product distinct from the activity itself. The
“scientific” excellences, those concerned with “invariable things” (the objects of mathematics,
metaphysics, and theology), include demonstrative science, understanding, and wisdom. The first
of these proceeds from confidently held principles via deduction or demonstration (VI.3). But the
principles presupposed by every such science cannot themselves be demonstrated. So the state of
mind by which they are grasped must be different, and Aristotle designates this cognitive grasp
as nous (understanding or comprehen-sion) (VI.6). Wisdom ( sophia), finally, is a combination
of the nous and deductive knowledge:
Therefore wisdom must plainly be the most finished of the forms of knowledge. It follows that
the wise man must not only know what follows from the first principles, but must also possess
truth about the first principles. Thus wisdom must be intuitive reason combined with scientific
knowledge—scientific knowledge of the highest objects which has received as it were its proper
completion.39
( NE VI.7, 1141a16–19)
Aristotle immediately moves to make clear what was already implicit: in his view wisdom (
sophia) is simply the highest of the virtues, given the lofty nature of its objects:
For it would be strange to think that the art of politics, or practical wisdom, is the best
knowledge, since man [the object of those disciplines] is not the best thing in the world.40
( NE VI.6, 1141a20–21)
38 περὶ ψυχῆς πρῶτον εἰπόντες, λέγωμεν οὕτως. πρότερον μὲν οὖν ἐλέχθη δύ᾽ εἶναι μέρη τῆς
ψυχῆς, τό τε λόγον ἔχον καὶ τὸ ἄλογον: νῦν δὲ περὶ τοῦ λόγον ἔχοντος τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον
διαιρετέον. καὶ
ὑποκείσθω δύο τὰ λόγον ἔχοντα, ἓν μὲν ᾧ θεωροῦμεν τὰ τοιαῦτα τῶν ὄντων ὅσων αἱ ἀρχαὶ μὴ
ἐνδέχονται
ἄλλως ἔχειν, ἓν δὲ ᾧ τὰ ἐνδεχόμενα: πρὸς γὰρ τὰ τῷ γένει ἕτερα καὶ τῶν τῆς ψυχῆς μορίων
ἕτερον τῷ γένει
τὸ πρὸς ἑκάτερον πεφυκός, εἴπερ καθ᾽ ὁμοιότητά τινα καὶ οἰκειότητα ἡ γνῶσις ὑπάρχει αὐτοῖς.
λεγέσθω
δὲ τούτων τὸ μὲν ἐπιστημονικὸν τὸ δὲ λογιστικόν.
39 δεῖ ἄρα τὸν σοφὸν μὴ μόνον τὰ ἐκ τῶν ἀρχῶν εἰδέναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ περὶ τὰς ἀρχὰς ἀληθεύειν.
ὥστ᾽ εἴη
ἂν ἡ σοφία νοῦς καὶ ἐπιστήμη, ὥσπερ κεφαλὴν ἔχουσα ἐπιστήμη τῶν τιμιωτάτων.
40 ἄτοπον γὰρ εἴ τις τὴν πολιτικὴν ἢ τὴν φρόνησιν σπουδαιοτάτην οἴεται εἶναι, εἰ μὴ τὸ ἄριστον
τῶν
ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν.
32
livingwithoutwhy
Curiously, Aristotle does not go on to provide any information at all about how one acquires this,
the arguably most valuable of the virtues. The contrast with Plato’s lengthy discussion of
education in the Republic could hardly be stronger.41 But he does tell us that the aspirant to this
(theoretical) wisdom must have knowledge of the sciences (including metaphysics and theology),
and this in turn requires substantial leisure. Further—although it would be easy in reading the
Nicomachean Ethics to miss the point—we must assume that since the active practice of sophia
in theoretical work is itself a form of praxis in the broad sense,42 i.e., activity valued for its own
sake, the undertaking of it, but not the principles involved in its actual practice, is guided by
phronêsis:
But again it ( phronêsis) is not supreme ( kuria) over philosophic wisdom, i.e., over the superior
part of us, any more than the art of medicine is over health; for it does not use it but provides for
its coming into being; it issues orders, then, for its sake, but not to it.43
( NE VI.13, 1145a6–9)
But if phronêsis is necessary for the “coming into being” of sophia, so too is wish, boulêsis.
Aspiring, as well as practicing, philosophers must recognize the value of—and therefore want—
sophia and its corresponding activity, theôrein, for themselves, and then deliberate about how to
make them achievable. The acquisition of sophia is hard work. So is the activity in which it is
realized, the practice of philosophy. Presumably what motivates that work, in Aristotle’s view, is
the realization that it is the highest, most valuable activity of which at least some of us are
capable. But whether he thinks that it alone can make one happy has been hotly debated.
Though Aristotle heaps high praise on sophia already in book VI, many readers have been
(understandably) surprised (and some disappointed) by Aristotle’s intellectualist conclusions
about happiness in book X. There he 41 Sarah Broadie comments that book VI is “mainly about
(practical) wisdom ( phronêsis),” and that Aristotle explains its nature by “showing what it is
not.” If so, his neglect of sophia here may be more understandable, but the stress he lays in book
X upon contemplation or study—the central activity of sophia—makes the overall ignoring of
the topic mysterious. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Christopher Rowe, introd. and
commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 357.
42 In the Politics (VII.3, 1325b14–21) contemplation ( theôria) is expressly counted as part of

the active life ( bios praktikos), which is the best life.
43 ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδὲ κυρία γ᾽ ἐστὶ τῆς σοφίας οὐδὲ τοῦ βελτίονος μορίου, ὥσπερ οὐδὲ τῆς ὑγιείας ἡ
ἰατρική: οὐ γὰρ χρῆται αὐτῇ, ἀλλ᾽ ὁρᾷ ὅπως γένηται: ἐκείνης οὖν ἕνεκα ἐπιτάττει, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ
ἐκείνῃ.
33
claims that it is the activity of contemplation, and not morally virtuous activity, that constitutes
teleia eudaimonia (either “complete” or “perfect” happiness). The appropriate rendering of teleia
at 1177a16 is one of the bones of contention in a debate that has had a long run among
commentators: does Aristotle identify happiness exclusively with a life of contemplation, or does
he think it consists in a life of all the virtues, both theoretical and practical?
In response to John Ackrill’s skillful presentation of grounds for the latter,
“inclusivist,” view in his 1974 British Academy lecture, a chorus of eminent Aristotle scholars
rose up to defend the “exclusivist” or “monistic” conception.44 They pointed, among other
things, to the natural, exclusive sense of Aristotle’s phrase in book I, “the best and most
complete virtue”; and to the support offered to their reading by what Aristotle says about the
“finality” of the highest good, that it alone is always sought for its own sake and never for the
sake of something else. In both cases he seems to be talking of a single, best virtue.45
In favor of the exclusivist/intellectualist reading there is this striking claim in X.7:
But such a life (of contemplation) would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man
that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is
superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other
kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine
in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think
of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves
immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be
small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. This would seem, too,
to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him.
It would be strange then, if he were to choose not the life of his self but that of something else.
And what we said before will apply now; that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and
most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to intellect ( nous) 44 The
Ackrill lecture is reprinted in Rorty, Essays, 15–34.
45 One round of the dispute between the exclusivist and the inclusivist views (from roughly the
1960s into the mid-1980s) is extensively summarized by Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold, ch.
VIII, 3–6. A more recent phase, beginning with Ackril , is outlined by Stephen Bush, “Divine
and Human Happiness in Nicomachean Ethics,” Philosophical Review 117, no. 1 (2008): 49–75.
34
livingwithoutwhy
is best and pleasantest, since intellect more than anything else is man.
This life therefore is also the happiest.46
( NE 1177b26–1178a8)
But in spite of this strong textual and philological evidence in its favor, the recent exclusivist tide
did not long remain unchallenged. For one thing, when Aristotle says, at the end of the claim just
quoted, that “intellect more than anything else is man,” the phrase “more than anything else” (
malista) would seem to imply “but not exclusively,” as a number of commentators have pointed
out.47 Indeed, Aristotle immediately follows this claim by adding, at the start of X.8:
But in a secondary degree the life in accordance with the other kind of excellence [i.e., moral] is
happy; for the activities in accordance with this befit our human estate.48
( NE 1178a5–6)
Stephen Bush takes this statement as one basis for a “dualist” reading of Aristotle: human
happiness consists in the practice of the moral virtues; divine happiness in contemplation. To the
extent that humans can participate in this latter activity, they are divine and can share in the
happiness of the gods. This approach also makes straightforward sense of some of Aristotle’s
most striking claims in X.7, such as “If intellect is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life
according to it is divine in comparison with human life”49 ( NE 1177b30–31).
46 ὁ δὲ τοιοῦτος ἂν εἴη βίος κρείττων ἢ κατ᾽ ἄνθρωπον: οὐ γὰρ ᾗ ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν οὕτω
βιώσεται, ἀλλ᾽
ᾗ θεῖόν τι ἐν αὐτῷ ὑπάρχει: ὅσον δὲ διαφέρει τοῦτο τοῦ συνθέτου, τοσοῦτον καὶ ἡ ἐνέργεια τῆς
κατὰ τὴν
ἄλλην ἀρετήν. εἰ δὴ θεῖον ὁ νοῦς πρὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον, καὶ ὁ κατὰ τοῦτον βίος θεῖος πρὸς τὸν
ἀνθρώπινον
βίον. οὐ χρὴ δὲ κατὰ τοὺς παραινοῦντας ἀνθρώπινα φρονεῖν ἄνθρωπον ὄντα οὐδὲ θνητὰ τὸν
θνητόν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατίζειν καὶ πάντα ποιεῖν πρὸς τὸ ζῆν κατὰ τὸ κράτιστον
τῶν ἐν αὑτῷ: εἰ
γὰρ καὶ τῷ ὄγκῳ μικρόν ἐστι, δυνάμει καὶ τιμιότητι πολὺ μᾶλλον πάντων ὑπερέχει. δόξειε δ᾽ ἂν
καὶ εἶναι
ἕκαστος τοῦτο, εἴπερ τὸ κύριον καὶ ἄμεινον. ἄτοπον οὖν γίνοιτ᾽ ἄν, εἰ μὴ τὸν αὑτοῦ βίον αἱροῖτο
ἀλλά
τινος ἄλλου. τὸ λεχθέν τε πρότερον ἁρμόσει καὶ νῦν: τὸ γὰρ οἰκεῖον ἑκάστῳ τῇ φύσει κράτιστον
καὶ
ἥδιστόν ἐστιν ἑκάστῳ: καὶ τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ δὴ ὁ κατὰ τὸν νοῦν βίος, εἴπερ τοῦτο μάλιστα
ἄνθρωπος. οὗτος
ἄρα καὶ εὐδαιμονέστατος. It is particularly the claim that “intellect more than anything else is
man”
that led John Cooper to argue that Aristotle’s intellectualism in book X rules out a morally
virtuous life for the philosopher. Hence exclusivism in the Nicomachean Ethics has disastrous
moral consequences. Cf. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1975), 163–65.
47 Bush, “Divine and Human Happiness,” 61; and also Dominic Scott, “Primary and Secondary
Eudaimonia,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. 73 (1999): 225–42, at 232–33.
48 δευτέρως δ᾽ ὁ κατὰ τὴν ἄλλην ἀρετήν: αἱ γὰρ κατὰ ταύτην ἐνέργειαι ἀνθρωπικαί.
49 εἰ δὴ θεῖον ὁ νοῦς πρὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον, καὶ ὁ κατὰ τοῦτον βίος θεῖος πρὸς τὸν ἀνθρώπινον
βίον.
35
As Bush formulates the challenge, can exclusivists consistently allow that for Aristotle there are
two kinds of happy life, even if one is superior to the other?
He thinks not: “What [exclusivists] have still not accomplished is an explanation of how
Aristotle can regard the life of morally virtuous activity as happy,”
as he clearly does in X.8; Bush continues, “If only the activity of contemplation is happiness,
how could a life devoid of contemplation . . . be considered happy, even in a secondary, deficient
sense?” (“Divine,” 53). In addition to these points one can indeed ask, if exclusivism is right and
human happiness—the focus, after all, of the Nicomachean Ethics— is contemplation alone, why
does Aristotle spend the great majority of the book discussing the bios politikos? In addition, his
altogether cursory attention to sophia, not to mention his silence on how it is gained, is hard to
fathom if its acquisition alone constitutes happiness. By contrast, if (a) sophia constitutes “only”
perfect, and not complete, happiness; while (b) happiness “in a secondary sense” can be attained
through morally virtuous activity; and (c) the latter is a form of life de facto available to vastly
more people than the life of philosophy, then the lopsided focus of the Nicomachean Ethics on
the moral virtues would make better sense.50 By reading teleia eudaimonia in X.7 as perfect
(and not as complete) happiness, the inclusivist can take Aristotle as claiming that
contemplation, qua divine, is the best, but not the only, component of a happy life; the life of
practical virtue is a necessary component of happiness, and for many it must suffice, though for a
small number an even happier existence is possible, namely the life of study (or
contemplation).51
Further, as we saw, Aristotle in several places suggests that practical wisdom (prudence)
functions for the sake of theoretical wisdom. In this vein he writes at the very end of Eudemian
Ethics:
But since man is by nature composed of a ruling and a subject part, each of us should live
according to the governing element within himself—but this is ambiguous, for medical science
governs in one sense, health in another, the former existing for the latter. And so it is with 50
Also, if the bulk of Aristotle’s pupils in the Lyceum were destined for a political life, would
Aristotle have been likely to teach them that such a life could not be happy in any way? Or that
the philosophical life, the flourishing of which clearly presupposes at least the tolerance of the
rulers, is inconsistent with the values of the political life? Cf. Bradley, Aquinas and the Twofold,
224–25.
51 While I think Bush—as well as Dominic Scott, “Primary,” and David Keyt, “Intellectualism
in Aristotle,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, ed. John Anton and Anthony Preus, Vol. 2
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 364–87—makes a convincing case against
exclusivism with respect to eudaimonia, I do not take any position in the further dispute between
inclusivism and Bush’s dualism.
36
livingwithoutwhy
the theoretic faculty; for god is not an imperative ruler, but is the end with a view to which
(practical) wisdom ( phronêsis) issues its commands.52
( EE, VII.15, 1249b9–15)
Thus, theoretical wisdom “rules” us as the telos, the goal-toward-which we should strive, the
final cause of our efforts—Aristotle’s god does not command our contemplative attention, but
rather attracts it; while practical wisdom rules as an efficient cause, in the sense of prescribing
the path.
It is of considerable interest for this study that in the Nicomachean Ethics, at least, Aristotle sees
a divine calling for human beings that is rooted in our intellectual capacity, and says of this
capacity that it “would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better
part of him”53 (X.7, 1178a1–2, emphasis added). We have a divine calling in virtue of the
intellect ( nous), the active part of which he described in De Anima as “separable, impassable,
unmixed” and therefore “immortal and eternal”54 ( DA III.5, 430a16; 20–21). This divine, or
quasidivine, portion of the soul is what abstracts the immaterial forms from the data of
perception, and its exercise is most sublime in thought or contemplation about the highest,
indeed immaterial, substances. It is in that exercise that it, and thus the human being, most
resembles the divinities:
The act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good
state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder.55
( Met. XII.7, 1072b24–25)
Though Aristotle does not posit a personal immortality, he says we “must, so far as we can, make
ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us”56 ( NE
1177b32–33).
But this achievement remains private, curiously so for such a political thinker as Aristotle. For
him, unlike Plato, theory is theory, while the realm of practice remains independent. The perfect
practice of the moral virtues is not, as Plato thought, the result of attaining the highest form of
theoretical insight. Instead, the causation runs in the opposite direction: the moral virtues seem to
play for 52 ἐπεὶ δὲ καὶ ἄνθρωπος φύσει συνέστηκεν ἐξ ἄρχοντος καὶ ἀρχομένου, καὶ ἕκαστον ἂν
δέοι πρὸς τὴν
ἑαυτῶν ἀρχὴν ζῆν (αὕτη δὲ διττή: ἄλλως γὰρ ἡ ἰατρικὴ ἀρχὴ καὶ ἄλλως ἡ ὑγίεια: ταύτης δὲ
ἕνεκα ἐκείνη: οὕτω δ᾽ ἔχει κατὰ τὸ θεωρητικόν. οὐ γὰρ ἐπιτακτικῶς ἄρχων ὁ θεός, ἀλλ᾽ οὗ ἕνεκα
ἡ φρόνησις ἐπιτάττει.
53 δόξειε δ᾽ ἂν καὶ εἶναι ἕκαστος τοῦτο, εἴπερ τὸ κύριον καὶ ἄμεινον.
54 χωριστὸς καὶ ἀπαθὴς καὶ ἀμιγής . . . ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον.
55 καὶ ἡ θεωρία τὸ ἥδιστον καὶ ἄριστον. εἰ οὖν οὕτως εὖ ἔχει, ὡς ἡμεῖς ποτέ, ὁ θεὸς ἀεί,
θαυμαστόν.
56 ἀλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατίζειν καὶ πάντα ποιεῖν πρὸς τὸ ζῆν κατὰ τὸ κράτιστον τῶν ἐν
αὑτῷ.
37
Aristotle the role of making possible, for at least a select few, the attainment of this highest of
human achievements, contemplation: phronêsis “provides for (the) coming into being (of
sophia); it issues orders, then, for its sake, but not to it”57
( NE, VI.13, 1145a8–9). Like Aristotle’s God, the Philosopher does not “command” the polis;
though if the polis is fulfil ing its calling, it is making possible the existence of philosophy in the
state, a crowning (if detached) achievement.58
That only a few are de facto able to follow the potential of human intellect to its summit seems
not to have worried Aristotle. This is odd. If the capacity for this—the greatest happiness
possible to humans—is rooted in our common human nature, is it not then something that
everyone, ideally, is capable of, and indeed ought to have some share in? But of course no
society could consist solely of philosophers! How then should those who get to practice this
profession be chosen? It seems likely that having access to the wealth needed for the required
leisure would be one de facto qualification; and another—decisive in most cases—would be the
intellectual ability to learn the highly abstract and challenging sciences of mathematics,
metaphysics, and theology. The inherent unfairness of this is mitigated somewhat by the
availability of the “other,” secondary kind of happiness, which requires less by way of
intellectual abilities.
But in Aristotle’s construction of the life of moral virtue, it too demands both leisure and means,
the former for involvement in political activities, the latter for the practice of the virtue of
liberality, among other things. The eudaimonic aspirations of the remaining populace,
presumably a vast majority, seem not to have been worth much notice, in Aristotle’s view.
From this very brief overview of Aristotle’s ethical views I want to highlight a number of points
that will be central to this investigation: First, Aristotle is a eudaimonist, i.e., he believes that the
human good consists in attaining happiness, conceived as the fulfillment of our distinctive
natural capacities. These are those elements in the human soul that involve reason, both in being
susceptible to its control (in the case of our irrational impulses) and in thinking itself, both
practically and theoretically;
Second, Aristotle’s eudaimonism is strongly teleological: the fulfillment or perfection of our

nature involves a future-oriented process consisting—to varying extents in various endeavors—
of practice, habituation, experience, and learning, 57 ἀλλ᾽ ὁρᾷ ὅπως γένηται: ἐκείνης οὖν ἕνεκα
ἐπιτάττει, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐκείνῃ.
58 Aristotle presumably had in mind here the “sin against philosophy” of the Athenian state in
the condemnation and execution of Socrates. One also wonders whether Aristotle’s views might
have in a sense anticipated those of Kant (in his Conflict of the Faculties, 1797), where reason, as
exercised in the philosophical (i.e., liberal arts) faculty of the university, has a kind of duty to
subject all views to scrutiny, without the fear of state censorship, but with no power to issue
commands to either church or state.
38
livingwithoutwhy
all with an eye to the goal of happiness. He suggests that this process may never be entirely
complete, and it requires in any case a normal lifespan ( NE I.9–11); Third, both forms of
happiness that Aristotle discusses in the Nicomachean Ethics are built on intellectual virtues,
phronêsis and sophia. The latter involves the highest human capacity, nous or intellect, and
accordingly the highest happiness possible to humans is that achieved in the practice
characteristic of sophia, contemplation or theoretical (and theological) study. Phronêsis, on the
other hand, is the excellence of the calculating mind applied to matters of praxis. Its exercise
encompasses both private and public affairs;
Fourth, in spite of its denial of an afterlife, Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia, at least in the
Nicomachean Ethics, has a theological orientation that gave it a basis for acceptance by (some)
Christian thinkers.59 True, apart from a single, vague hint, he nowhere considers the idea that
the perfection we are able to achieve depends in any way on divine grace, and thus his system is
a prime target for St.
Augustine’s charge that classical ethics were so many versions of pride.60 But like Augustine
and the other Christian authors we will consider in this book, he does see a divine element in the
human soul, and he identifies this with the intellect.
The best life, he insists, is the most godlike, which consists in the most godlike use of the
intellect. Though the terminology of “image” and “likeness” is Platonic, rather than Aristotelian,
it would not be a distortion to say that in book X
Aristotle presents the intellect as an image of the divine (or as “akin” to it); Fifth, Aristotle’s
ethical teleology does not imply an instrumental construction of virtuous activity. Though he
sometimes speaks of acting virtuously in order to be happy (cf., e.g., NE I.7, 1097b1–5), and
generally understands human action in means-end terms, this is to be understood in the sense that
virtuous actions constitute happiness: in performing them (over a suitably long period) we
achieve eudaimonia; and he clearly makes it a requirement of such behavior that it be undertaken
for its own sake (cf., e.g., NE II.4, 1105a30–33). As we will 59 In calling the orientation
“theological” I risk a misunderstanding here. For medieval thinkers theology is part of a
religious way of living, involving the interpretation of scriptures, preaching, cultic practices,
communal worship, and the like. None of these features apply to Aristotle’s “study of the
divine.” Indeed, his “theology” in the Metaphysics is, as my colleague Susan Levin pointed out
to me (in a personal communication), a matter of astronomy or cosmology rather than religion,
since Aristotle’s God is above all the “Prime Mover,” i.e., the ultimate explanation (as final
cause) for the endless motion of the heavenly spheres.
60 The “vague hint” occurs in book I, in a discussion of how happiness is achieved: “Now if
there is any gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most
surely god-given of all human things inasmuch as it is the best. But this question would perhaps
be more appropriate to another inquiry.” [εἰ μὲν οὖν καὶ ἄλλο τί ἐστι θεῶν δώρημα ἀνθρώποις,
εὔλογον καὶ τὴν
εὐδαιμονίαν θεόσδοτον εἶναι, καὶ μάλιστα τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων ὅσῳ βέλτιστον. ἀλλὰ τοῦτο μὲν ἴσως
ἄλλης ἂν
εἴη σκέψεως οἰκειότερον] (I.9, 1099b11–14). We are left guessing what that “other inquiry”
might be.
39
see, most clearly in Thomas Aquinas, some Christian attempts to adopt the
teleological/eudaimonist framework of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers have difficulty
avoiding the quandary of instrumentalizing virtuous activity.61
And sixth, to anyone familiar with Aquinas’s or Augustine’s treatments of voluntas— not to
mention those of Duns Scotus, Descartes, Kant, or Schopenhauer—Aristotle may well seem to
lack a concept of will altogether.62 But, as we saw, he does devote a small section (roughly
thirty lines) in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics to boulêsis, rational wish, and the term he
uses is the etymological root of the Latin voluntas. More importantly, his notion of boulêsis as
rational wish is one (quite central) element in Aquinas’s notion of voluntas, which undoubtedly
means “wil ” in a strong sense. Further, we saw that Aristotle has much more to say about
prohairesis, choice, and a great deal more about phronêsis, both of them important aspects of the
broader notion of will that is later developed in Christian thought; and he links all three of these
notions closely together. Even in his account of sophia we found reason to posit a role for
boulêsis.
Whether or not this is enough to say Aristotle “discovered the wil ,”63 in the sense of the term
identified in chapter 1, i.e., as “rational desire” or “one’s better practical judgment,” in my view
he certainly has the beginnings of such a concept, and it is central to his ethics. For in boulêsis,
prohairesis, and phronêsis, Aristotle has the ingredients necessary to delineate a conception of
rational choice. Whether or not he succeeds in putting them together in a satisfactory way is a
different question. One problem is that, unlike Aquinas (and philosophers in general) he restricts
by definition the roles of boulêsis and prohairesis to cases where the agent acts to attain what she
regards as the goal of life, hence they play no role in casual (goal-less) acts, nor—more
consequentially—in akratic behavior, where 61 Of course Aristotle does not suppose that people
simply set out to perform just or temperate actions; they perform them in the course of living
their lives. For example, Louise wants to calm herself before an important meeting, and knows
she could do so with Daoist breathing or a stiff drink; she chooses the former, a purposive bit of
self-engineering ( poiêsis in Aristotle’s terms); her action is temperate in that it expresses her
correct settled disposition to be moderate with respect to her bodily appetites (here, in a situation
where she might, inappropriately, be drawn to consuming alcohol).
Thus her action has both a productive and a moral dimension: in the former way its success is
judged by the outcome; in the latter success is a matter of the character of the action itself and of
Louise in performing it. Cf. NE VI.4–5.
62 This “absence” view has been propounded by Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of
Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990): “Aristotle, like every
other ancient pre-Christian author, had no concept of the wil ” (111). The same thesis is central
to Albrecht Dihle’s The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982).
63 As Terence Irwin argued, in “Who Discovered the Wil ?” An even broader survey of which
philosophers contributed to what became, in Christian times, the mature concept of wil , is given
by Sorabji, “Concept of the Wil .” My thinking about whether Aristotle had a concept of will
owes much to the (contrary) views of my colleague, Jay Garfield.
40
livingwithoutwhy
the agent acts intentionally but contrary to her conception of how best to live.
The akratic person has, and initially makes use of, all of what Aristotle regards as the necessary
conditions for virtuous action, yet fails in the end to carry out the action. It was the struggle to
understand a problem very similar to this that led St. Augustine to the first full-blown notion of
will in the Western tradition.64
On balance, I think it is right to say that in boulêsis Aristotle has some, but not all, of what
subsequent philosophy in the West has understood by “wil .”
His is not a “faculty psychology” of wil , if by the latter we mean “a theory that the mind is
divided into separate powers or faculties,” one of which is wil .65 But for this study, in which we
are attempting to understand what Meister Eckhart meant by “living without why/wil ,” it turns
out to be precisely Aristotle’s sense of boulêsis, as expanded and developed in Christian thought,
that is at stake: the rational desire for the goal of life.
In the chapters that follow I will be comparing Augustine, Aquinas, and Eckhart with Aristotle
on these elements: the goal of life, the structure of human action (with a special focus on wil ),
the virtues, and the role of transcendence—
“the divine”—in the human quest for happiness. In this process we should bear in mind
correspondingly different senses in which we might speak of teleology, of the role that goal
orientation might play, in ethics:
(a) first, an ethic might be concerned with moral development in that it conceives as the (or a)
central task of ethics to lead one from an unsatisfactory initial state of character to a perfected
state (the telos or goal: eudaimonia, maturity, etc.) in which one is a fully developed moral agent:
call this a “teleological view of human life,” and it is typical of, though not exclusive to, virtue
ethics. All the authors examined in this study are teleologists in this first (weak) sense; (b)
further, an ethic might allot a central role to the means-end aspect of action, and thus to the wil ,
in moral conduct. The end could be intrinsic, i.e., locate the criterion of moral rightness in
virtuous, goal-directed action itself, but could in another version find it in something extrinsic to
the action, e.g., the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Kant’s ethic is famously nonte-
leological in this latter sense, since its central focus is the agent’s motive, which Kant
distinguishes from both her goal and the consequences of her conduct.
As we saw, Aristotle also distinguishes the moral dimension of action from its productive aspect
( poiêsis), but it is still the point of praxis to contribute to or 64 Aristotle seems not to have even
considered the possibility of actions in pursuit of duty that conflict with the pursuit of one’s own
perfection. For Kant it is in such actions that the role of will comes to the fore.
65 Simon Blackburn, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008). See also Oxford Reference Online. It is not that Aristotle did not believe in faculties
in this sense; he certainly did, but he did not regard boulêsis as one of them, but rather as a quite
particular kind of desire.
41
constitute eudaimonia, something that is to-be-completed by a lifetime of such action. While

“means-end” might be a misleading term for the relation of praxis to eudaimonia, it is accurate to
use Aristotle’s own phrase: praxis is “toward the goal” ( pros to telos) of eudaimonia, so in this
sense Aristotle is a teleologist about action and the wil . Action is for happiness, and the latter
depends on getting the former right. The same will apply to Augustine and Aquinas, but not to
Eckhart;
(c) with respect to the virtues, a teleological ethic might see virtuous action as itself a means to a
further end. For instance, courage might be conceived as a good thing primarily as being in a
further way meritorious, where earning this further merit from another (or others) is the real goal
of life. For example, it is sometimes said that in the “Homeric ethic” the honor or esteem of
one’s peers is the principal good. When the rightness of actions is derived from their serving
some such external goal, the resulting ethic is a form of consequentialism. As noted, the danger
here is an undermining of the virtues.
Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethic is teleological in the first way; and while he thinks of virtuous
action as contributing to happiness, the connection of such action ( praxis) to happiness is
internal and constitutive. I shall argue that Augustine and Aquinas are stronger teleologists than
Aristotle. For them the connection of virtuous action to what Aquinas calls “perfect happiness” is
external and by way of (divine) merit. Eckhart, though he has a partially teleological account of
our lives (in the first sense above), differs importantly from Augustine and Aquinas with respect
to each of these senses of ethics and teleology, and—
crucially—is a nonteleologist, of a sort, about action and the virtues. We begin our exploration of
these Christian writers with Augustine.
Augustine’s Christian Conception
of Wil
Any account of the will in medieval Christian philosophy in Western Europe must reckon with
the foundational contributions of Augustine of Hippo (354–430). It has even been claimed, as we
saw, that Augustine invented the concept of the wil .1 More modestly, others have seen in his
work both a crucial
“pulling together” of elements identified by Aristotle, the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and earlier
Christian authors and the contribution of novel ideas of his own to produce something very like
the notions of will we find in medieval and modern philosophy.2
In this chapter we will explore in outline the main features of Augustine’s treatment of will and
ask how the concept became central to his view of the human drama of salvation. For Augustine
it is what we will or want, more even than what we do or what we think, that expresses what we
are and determines the moral value of our lives. In his view, although everyone deep down wants
the happy life, many have no idea what real happiness is. Further, and paradoxically (as well as
of more interest to Augustine), even those who have come to know what happiness consists in
can find themselves unable to want it in the right way, or to want it enough. Elements of this
quandary were of course familiar to the ancients (e.g., Aristotle on akrasia). But Augustine is
writing in a new era, tailoring received philosophical reflections to the Christian framework with
its notions of an omnipotent and benevolent creator deity, a fallen humanity, and a Savior-God-
made-man. In pursuit of this epoch-making project of (re-)construction and with considerable
subtlety he dissects what we could call the “psychological paradox of happiness,” our difficult
and uncertain struggle to attain what we most ardently desire. To this problem he offers a
controversial and 1 Not entirely on his own, of course. Cf. Dihle, Theory of Will, and MacIntyre,
Three Rival Versions.
2 Cf. Sorabji, “Concept of the Wil ,” and Kahn, “Discovering the Wil .”
42
Augustine’s Christian Conception of Will
43
unsettling conclusion that is largely couched in terms of the wil . Later Christian thinkers in the
medieval West build on this foundation, for the most part agreeing with its major features.
Meister Eckhart was one of very few who, while preserving many features of the structure,
denied its central tenet, i.e., that our happiness depends on our having and deploying the right
kind of wil .
Our attention in what follows will be largely (though not exclusively) on two works, Confessions
and On Free Choice of the Will ( De libero arbitrio[ DLA]), the latter a book in three parts
composed over a seminal, roughly seven-year period ending in ca. 395. Thus it was begun
shortly after Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, and finished just before he was consecrated
bishop of Hippo Regius. Although Augustine continued to talk about will to the very end of his
long career, he did not deviate in most respects from the conclusions reached by 395. In addition
we will look at two further works that bring important elements into the picture: the Letter to
Simplician ( Ad Simplicianum) of 396, in which a genuinely new notion, the “will of grace,”
emerges clearly (section III); and—
more briefly—the treatise On the Trinity, where Augustine addresses in what sense human
beings are the “image and likeness” of God (section IV). For if the will is to lead us to beatitude,
and if this consists—as Christians must hold—in communion with God, then somehow the will
must contribute to our becoming
“like God.” In section I we begin by looking at Augustine’s initial approaches to wil , focusing
on his adaptation of classical virtue-eudaimonism. In section II we discuss his doctrine of the
will itself in more detail.
I
The will initially finds its way into Augustine’s thought as part of his long struggle with
theodicy. In the context of this struggle to work out a satisfying answer to the question about the
source of evil in a world created by a supremely good and powerful God, Augustine came early
in his career to locate evil’s origin in the human wil , and thus was drawn to develop his
influential doctrine, which he would steadfastly defend even as he developed it in what were
(even to him) unexpected directions. Not surprisingly, given his liberal arts education and the
strong and lasting influence on him of both Stoicism and Neoplatonism (and thus, indirectly, of
Aristotle as well as Plato), his teaching on the will is embed-ded in a largely classical,
eudaimonist framework. We first look briefly at his understanding of that framework, then—in
somewhat more detail—at his teaching.
There is much that is classical in Augustine’s moral views. Professionally
immersed in Latin literature as a teacher of rhetoric, and originally inspired by Cicero’s praise of
the philosophic life, he was later drawn to Academic skepticism
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and then, as he tel s in Confessions VII, to the “books of the [Neo-]Platonists,”
which played a key role in his conversion to Christianity. In particular, these writings helped
wean him from materialism, and convinced him that the Supreme Reality is entirely spiritual,
thus laying to rest a major stumbling block in Augustine’s spiritual development:
But in those days, after reading the books of the Platonists and following their advice to seek for
truth beyond corporeal forms, I turned my gaze toward your [i.e., God’s] invisible reality, trying
to understand it through created things . . . I was certain that you exist, that you are infinite but
not spread out through space either finite or infinite, and that you exist in the fullest sense
because you have always been the same . . . On these points I was quite certain, but I was far too
weak to enjoy you.3
( Conf. VII,20,26)
Very importantly, the “Platonists” also gave Augustine a new way to understand evil: not as
some rarified stuff that infects things, even less as a monstrous being (or beings) of some sort,
but as a deficiency, the privation of some perfection that should be present in a substance,
institution, or activity. Both the materialism and the substantialist view of evil were remnants of
Augustine’s youthful (though lengthy) association with Manichaeism. He had turned to this sect
in his student days after finding the Bible difficult and unsatisfying, its Latin prose in the
available translation “unworthy” ( indigna—Conf. III,5,9) to his rhetorical taste, in contrast to
Cicero’s elegance. The first of various troubling questions that the Manichees posed to him, as
Augustine mentions in Confessions, concerned
“the origin of evil . . . Ignorant in such matters, I was disturbed by these questions.”4 ( Conf.
3,7,12) The sect had an appealing answer: the evil in the world derives from a malevolent deity,
who is engaged in an ongoing cosmic battle with the good deity, both of whom are material
entities. For orthodox Christians this solution was, of course, unacceptable. But then if the One
God is the supreme creator, how can He escape responsibility for the evil in the world? We will
come back to this theme in section II.
From the time he converted to Christianity in 387 (indeed, probably as early as 373) and for the
remainder of his life, Augustine was a eudaimonist, i.e., he 3 Sed tunc lectis Platonicorum illis
libris posteaquam inde admonitus quaerere incorpoream ueritatem invisibilia tua per ea quae
facta sunt intellecta . . . certus esse te et infinitum esse nec tamen per locos finitos infinitosve
diffundi et vere te esse, qui semper idem ipse esses . . . certus quidem in istis eram, nim is tamen
infirmus ad fruendum te.
4 [U]nde malum . . . [Q]uibus rerum ignarus perturbabar.
45
held that the purpose of life and principal human good is to be happy, which is what everyone
wants. The key to attaining happiness, and thus living wel , is first to identify what this consists
in, and then to find the right path to it.5 In the early De beata vita he wrote, apparently quoting
Cicero: “We want to be happy.” And he added:
What? Is everyone happy who has what he wants? . . . If what he seeks, wants, and has are good
things, then he is happy; if, however, what he wants is bad, then whatever he has, he is
unhappy.6
(2, 10)
In the second book of DLA, composed some years later, he says: The happy life, that is, the
disposition of a soul that clings to the
unchangeable good, is the proper and principal good of a human being.7
( DLA,II,19,52)
That the will is central to this “clinging” is made clear in the following paragraph from the same
work:
Therefore when the will cleaves to the common and unchangeable good, it attains the great and
foremost goods for human beings, even though the will itself is only an intermediate good. But
when the will turns away from the unchangeable and common good toward its own private good,
or toward external or inferior things, it sins.8
(Ibid., II,19,53)
In his middle period, in Confessions, this same view is found repeatedly. For instance in book X
(20,29) he asks, “What is a life of happiness? Surely what 5 Cf. Robert J. O’Connel , S.J.,
“Action and Contemplation,” in Augustine: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 39–40 & passim; J. M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient
Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1994, 48–54; and Oliver
O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1980 ), 168.
6 Beatos esse nos volumus . . . Quid? omnis qui quod vult habet, beatus est? . . . Si bona, inquit,
velit et habeat, beatus est; si autem mala velit, quamvis habeat, miser est. (My translation) 7
[E]aque ipsa vita beata, id est animi affectio inhaerentis incommutabili bono, proprium et
primum est hominis bonum.
8 Voluntas ergo adherens communi atque incommutabili bono impetrat prima et magna hominis
bona, cum ipsa sit medium quoddam bonum. Voluntas autem auersa ab incommutabili et
communi bono et conu-ersa ad proprium bonum aut ad exterius aut ad inferius, peccat.
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everyone wants, absolutely everyone without exception.”9 Again, in the third of his sermons on
Psalm 32 he writes, once more connecting happiness to living wel , “Everyone loves happiness,
and therefore those people are perverse who want to be wicked without being unhappy.”10 (
Ennar. , XXXII,3) Confessions itself, at least in its narrative parts, is largely a story of
Augustine’s own struggle to understand the true nature of happiness and reform his life so as to
achieve it. And in the great work of his later years, City of God, one of his principle criticisms of
paganism is precisely that it was unable to provide a satisfying path to what we all seek. Here is
the start of book X:
It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy. But who are
happy, or how they become so, these are questions about which the weakness of human
understanding stirs endless and angry controversies, in which philosophers have wasted their
strength and expended their leisure.11
(X,1)
It is equally clear from the texts just cited that Augustine’s eudaimonism is of the teleological
variety, i.e., (a) like Aristotle and many others, he is concerned to discover, describe, and
advocate a process of human development toward the goal of life; and (b) in that process the wil
, and with it the performance of the right sorts of actions, plays a crucial—either causative or
constitutive—role in the attainment of happiness. The teleological note is omnipresent, often
taking the familiar metaphorical form of “following the path ( via, iter).” For instance: (I)nsofar
as all human beings seek a happy life, they are not in error; but to the extent that someone strays
from the path that leads to happiness—all the while insisting that his only goal is to be happy—
to that extent he is in error, for “error” simply means following something that does not take us
where we want to go.12
( DLA II,9,26)
9 Nonne ipsa est beata vita, quam omnes volunt et omnino qui nolit nemo est?
10 Amant enim omnes beatitudinem: et ideo perversi sunt homines quia mali volunt esse, miseri
nolunt.
11 Omnium certa sententia est, qui ratione quoquo modo uti possunt, beatos esse omnes homines
velle.
Qui autem sint vel unde fiant dum mortalium quaerit infirmitas, multae magnaeque
controversiae concitatae sunt, in quibus philosophi sua studia et otia contriverunt. Tr. Marcus
Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950). Is there, in the final phrase, a note of envy in the voice
of the harried episcopal administrator, who once avidly sought the philosophical life but now had
precious little otia for such pursuits?) 12 In quantum igitur omnes homines appetunt vitam
beatam, non errant. In quantum autem quisque non eam tenet vitae viam quae ducit ad
beatitudinem, cum se fateatur et profiteatur nolle nisi ad beatitudinem pervenire, in tantum errat.
Error est enim cum sequitur aliquid quod non ad id ducit quo volumus pervenire.
47
Or again, later in the same work (and somewhat less optimistically): While we are striving thus
[i.e., diligently trying to be wise]—as long as we do so whole-heartedly—we are on our way. We
have been allowed to rejoice in these true and certain goods, even though for now they are like
lightning flashes on this dark road.13
(II,16,41)
The same theme of travel, indeed of our yearning to return to the Source, is sounded in the
famous opening paragraph of Confessions: “[Y]ou have made us and drawn us to yourself, and
our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”14 ( Conf.
I,1) This point also turns up in the earlier Morals of the Catholic Church: “The striving after God
is, therefore, the desire of beatitude, the attainment of God is beatitude itself.”15 ( De Mor.
I,11,18)
A teleological approach to eudaimonism more or less implies a teleological view of action, but
one searches in vain through DLA and other writings for anything like a systematic discussion of
human action (such as Aristotle gives in book III, 1–5 of NE, or Aquinas in Questions 6–17 of
STh IaIIae). Yet in reading books I and II of DLA, a modern philosopher of human action feels as
much at home with Augustine as with Aristotle or Aquinas. Familiar themes about voluntariness
and responsibility dominate the scene, and, if anything, Augustine’s treatment of will is more
“modern” (and far more prominent) than Aristotle’s.
As we now follow Augustine through his discussions of virtue, vice, love, and wil , we will see
that his implicit view of human action is very much teleological: actions (as well emotions,
thoughts, etc.) are expressions of the agent’s basic
“love” or wil , a striving toward one or the other of two fundamental and conflicting human
goals: God or self.
The virtues seem at first sight to play for Augustine their classical, constitutive part in the
journey toward the goal of happiness. For example, in book II of DLA he follows up the passage
quoted above from II,19,52 this way: The happy life, that is, the disposition of a soul that clings
to the unchangeable good, is the proper and principal good of a human being.
It contains all the virtues . . . No one becomes happy by someone else’s happiness . . . No one
becomes prudent by someone else’s prudence, or resolute by someone else’s fortitude, or
temperate by someone else’s 13 Quod dum agimus, donec peragamus, in via sumus. Et quod istis
veris et certis bonis, quamvis adhuc in hoc tenebroso itinere coruscantibus, gaudere concessum
est.
14 [F]ecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
15 Secutio igitur Dei, beatitatis appetitus est, assecutio autem ipsa beatitas.
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temperance, or just by someone else’s justice. Instead, you regulate your soul by those
unchangeable rules and lights of the virtues that dwell incorruptibly in the common truth and
wisdom . . .16
Augustine and his dialogue partner Evodius agree throughout book II of DLA that “justice, and
indeed all the virtues of the soul, are counted among the highest goods that are in human beings,
because they constitute an upright and worthy life”17 (II,18,50). This kind of thing could easily
have been written by a Neoplatonist or an Aristotelian. Indeed, the idea that the virtues
“constitute [ constat] an upright and worthy life” is in one sense Aristotle’s own view.
Hence we might expect Augustine to focus his investigation, as Aristotle (and Aquinas) do, on
the nature of the various virtues, how they are acquired, what threats there are to their
development, etc. But this is not the approach Augustine takes.
For one thing, his inspiration is not directly Aristotelian.18 He was not very conversant with the
work of Aristotle, nor was he particularly sympathetic to what he knew of it.19 Philosophically
his ideas were more directly formed by 16 [E]aque ipsa vita beata, id est animi affectio
inhaerentis incommutabili bono, proprium et primum est hominis bonum. In eo sunt etiam
virtutes omnes . . . Beatitudine autem alterius hominis non fit alter beatus . . . Neque prudentia
cuiusquam fit prudens alius, aut fortis fortitudine, aut temperans temperantia, aut iustus iustitia
hominis alterius quisquam efficitur; sed coaptando animum illis incommutabilibus regulis
luminibusque virtutum, quae incorruptibiliter vivunt in ipsa veritate sapientiaque communi . . .
17 Intueris enim iustitiam . . . Haec inter summa bona quae in ipso sunt homine numeratur,
omnesque virtutes animi quibus ipsa recta vita et honesta constat (emphasis added.) 18 In this
present study Aristotle serves as the principal representative of classical ethics, for a number of
reasons: as presented in the Nicomachean Ethics, his is a wel -crafted and systematic moral
philosophy; further, his focus on the role of the virtues largely created one of the main and
enduring approaches to ethics; and—not least—his impact, both within Western philosophy and
in society more generally has been immense and continuing, in part mediated (with amendments
of course) by the transmission of his approach through Thomas Aquinas and other thinkers—
Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—in the High Middle Ages. Finally, his similarities to Augustine
are significant enough to make a comparison between the two not misleading. Cf. Timothy
Chappel , Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom (Houndmil s and London: Macmil an, 1995),
passim.
19 Augustine tel s us in Confessions IV, 16,28–29 that he read Aristotle’s Categories in his
student days, and was not impressed. There is no evidence he read any of Aristotle’s ethical
works. It is likely that his principal access to Plato and Aristotle was second hand, through
Cicero and Varro. Aristotle was familiar to medieval school children through his logical works
(translated into Latin by Boethius in the sixth century), but—leaving aside Muslim Spain—his
serious philosophical influence in Western Europe would for the most part be revived only with
the reemergence of his major works in the thirteenth century. For our purposes we must not
overlook the fact that during the roughly 800-year period when Aristotle’s works were largely
unavailable, it was Augustine’s ethical thought that was dominant in the Latin West. When
Aristotle did return to the scholarly scene, his champions had to figure out how to combine his
views with those of Augustine, or at least how to avoid (open) conflict between the two.
49
Stoicism and Neoplatonism.20 His evaluation of pagan thought in general went from generally
favorable to largely unfavorable over his career, but certain basics remained constant in his
thinking, in particular the Platonic emphasis accorded to the role of love ( erôs, amor) in our
lives. Though Plato is (correctly) thought of as a rationalist, eros is one of the central concepts in
some of his most important dialogues, most notably the Symposium. As Stanley Rosen puts it,
“Eros is a striving for wholeness or perfection, a combination of poverty and contrivance, of
need mitigated by a presentiment of completeness. This presentiment cannot be fulfilled, but its
goal is knowledge of the Ideas, and thus an adequate vision of the Good.”21 Such vision is
supreme, both as object of knowledge and goal of action for Plato, and the eros that strives for it
inspires our metaphysical and our practical longings. Thus the notion has similarities to
Aristotle’s boulêsis, the rational desire of the good.22
Early and late, Augustine highlights the decisive role of love in the life of the Christian, perhaps
finding a consonance between Platonism and St. Paul’s letter to Corinthians on the priority of
love.23 In the climactic passage of The Happy Life (4.35) he speaks of the “burning love” (
caritas flagrans) that motivates the seeker of true happiness. In the equally early De moribus he
strikingly links love and virtue:
As to virtue leading us to a happy life, I hold virtue to be nothing else than perfect love of God.
For the fourfold division of virtue I regard as taken from four forms of love. For these four
virtues (would that all felt their influence in their minds as they have their names in their
mouths!), I should have no hesitation in defining them: that temperance is love giving itself
entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved
object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence 20
Gerd Van Riel, however, finds a number of important similarities between Augustine’s and
Aristotle’s ethical views, and has a theory of how to account for them, in “Augustine’s Wil : an
Aristotelian Notion? On the Antecedents of Augustine’s Doctrine of the Wil ,” Augustinian
Studies 38: 1 (2007): 255–79. And Terence Irwin notes that “Augustine’s conception of the will
is derived from Aristotle’s conception of boulêsis, taken over by the Stoics.” See Irwin, The
Development of Ethics, Vol. 1: From Socrates to the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 400.
21 Stanley Rosen, “The Role of Erôs in Plato’s Republic,” Review of Metaphysics, 18:3 (March
1965): 452–75, at 453.
22 The practical good is of course not the object of metaphysics for Aristotle; but—as we saw in
chapter 2—the life of metaphysical study is the supreme (or at least “perfect,” teleia) good of
human life, and hence should be the principal object of boulêsis.
23 Aquinas follows Augustine’s lead in treating love as first among the passions because of its
orientation to the good, and thus as—in its intellectual form—equivalent to wil . Cf. STh IaIIae,
26,1
and 27,1.
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is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it.24
( De Mor. , I,15,25, emphasis added)
A bit later in his career, in book 2 of DLA (II,14,37) he talks of those who seek truth and wisdom
as its “lovers” ( amatores), a phrase reminiscent of the Symposium. Later stil , in On Christian
Doctrine, he writes: Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced esti-mate
of things, and also keeps his loves well ordered, so that he neither loves what he ought not to
love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less,
nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more
which ought to be loved equally.25
( DDC XV,25)
Clearly, for Augustine the life of virtue is a life of the proper sort of love, the love of God above
all else, and the love of creatures—including other people—
“in God.”26 The equation of virtue with “the perfect love of God” reaches perhaps 24 Quod si
virtus ad beatam vitam nos ducit, nihil omnino esse virtutem affirmaverim nisi summum amorem
Dei. Namque illud quod quadripartita dicitur virtus, ex ipsius amoris vario quodam affectu,
quantum intelligo, dicitur. Itaque illas quattuor virtutes, quarum utinam ita in mentibus vis ut
nomina in ore sunt omnium, sic etiam definire non dubitem, ut temperantia sit amor integrum se
praebens ei quod amatur, fortitudo amor facile tolerans omnia propter quod amatur, iustitia
amor soli amato servi-ens et propterea recte dominans, prudentia amor ea quibus adiuvatur ab
eis quibus impeditur sagaciter seligens.
25 Ille autem iuste et sancte vivit, qui rerum integer aestimator est. Ipse est autem qui ordinatam
habet dilectionem, ne aut diligat quod non est diligendum, aut non diligat quod diligendum est,
aut amplius diligat quod minus diligendum est, aut aeque diligat quod vel minus vel amplius
diligendum est. He uses “affections” for dilectionem, but “loves” is more common.
26 O’Donovan, Problem of Self-Love, passim, and Rist, Augustine, 162–68, have much to say
about Augustine’s notion of love, and the difficulties he had in specifying the kind of love that is
appropriate for us to have toward creatures, especially other human beings. O’Donovan (29–32)
points out the significance the mature Augustine came to find in the idea of well-ordered love,
repeatedly citing Song of Songs 2:4, “He ordered love ( caritatem) within me” (Vulgate version).
Rist stresses that Augustine was trying to avoid the notion that human beings are ‘goods-in-
themselves,’ which are the only kinds of goods that should be enjoyed—other goods are to be
used for the sake of the goods that are to be enjoyed. But this sounds as if other humans are to be
treated as mere tools on one’s road to salvation, which according to Rist is not Augustine’s view.
He simply wishes to avoid the idolatry that would be implicit in treating humans (or any other
finite good) as goods in themselves. Hence he comes around to speaking of loving one’s
neighbor “in God” or “because of God.” On Augustine’s struggles to interpret the commandment
to love one’s neighbor “as oneself,” see O’Donovan, Problem of Self-Love, 112–17.
51
its most memorable expression in the core metaphor behind City of God, i.e., that
“two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt
of God; the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self”27 ( DCD XIV,28).
Sainthood, salvation, blessedness, happiness: these are all names for the same lasting state of
such perfect love.
Two questions present themselves: even granting the influence of Platonism, how did Augustine
come to equate virtue with love of God? And what is the upshot of this identification for the
present study? One clue to answering the latter question is given in this famous statement near
the end of Confessions, “My weight is my love, and wherever I am carried, it is this weight that
carries me”28
( Conf. XIII,9,10). In the same vein and somewhat later, Augustine writes (in the Literal
Commentary on Genesis):
[W]eight applies to will and love, when it becomes evident how much and what weight is to be
given to feelings of desire or dislike, or of preference or rejection.29
( Gen. litt. IV,3,7)
“Weight” for Augustine means, as it can in English, the relative importance we assign to a set of
desires and motivations that characterize a way of living. Thus these texts suggest that Augustine
had come to identify love with a certain sense of wil , as we shall see: a “good will (or weight)”
is the right sort of love; a “bad wil ” the wrong sort.
This connection in turn helps us answer the first question in the previous paragraph: how did
Augustine come to equate virtue with love of God? In classical, e.g., Aristotelian, ethics
happiness simply is virtuous living, and essential to virtue is the right boulêsis, wanting the right
goal in life. Virtue is, in a sense, effectively wanting that goal, and Augustine identifies the goal
with God. Since he also equates love with will (in one sense of the term), virtue and love of God
are for him the same. So it should not be surprising that in Augustine’s writings talk of the
virtues is largely swallowed up by talk of love/will: if one has the right love, i.e., will, then the
virtues follow automatically. For example, in book I of DLA Augustine embeds his discussion of
the four cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice)—to which he initially
gives 27 Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad
contemptum Dei, caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui.
28 Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror.
29 [E]t est pondus voluntatis et amoris, ubi apparet quanti quidque in appetendo, fugiendo,
praepo-nendo, postponendoque pendatur.
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typically classical definitions—within a larger context that focuses on the will.
A bit later he claims that to have a good will is eo ipso to have these virtues. For example:
consider whether we can deny temperance [to those who have a good wil ], which is the virtue
which restrains inordinate desires. For what is more harmful to a good will than inordinate
desire? So you may conclude that those who love their own good will resist and oppose
inordinate desires in every way they can, and so they are rightly called temperate.30
( DLA I,13,27)
In the remainder of DLA, and indeed typically in his later writings, Augustine has more (and
more interesting) things to say about the will than about the virtues, though he clearly regards the
topics as closely related. So we might say that he reverses the relative importance that Aristotle
assigned to the topics in the NE, where boulêsis (wish, broadly, but primarily as a crucial aspect
of what would become wil , the rational desire or wish for the goal of life), is briefly introduced
in book III, only to be overshadowed by Aristotle’s lengthier discussions of choice, various
virtues, akrasia, friendship, pleasure, and other topics.
By contrast, even early Augustine places will on center stage (where neither Aristotle nor any
other of the ancients put it). As early as 388 he says, as often,
“We have found that it is by the will that human beings deserve, and therefore receive, either a
happy or an unhappy life”31 ( DLA I,14,30). An important question for the present study, to
which we now turn, is: how did this reversal of focus from virtue to will within the teleological
eudaimonist framework come about?
And what is its significance?
II
Let us now attempt to answer these questions through a direct consideration of Augustine’s
doctrine of will, beginning with the query from Augustine’s interlocutor Evodius, “Isn’t God the
cause of evil?” It opens book I of DLA 30 Vide iam nunc utrum ab eo temperantiam alienare
possimus, cum ea sit virtus quae libidines cohibet.
Quid autem tam inimicum bonae voluntati est quam libido? Ex quo profecto intellegis istum
bonae voluntatis suae amatorem resistere omni modo, atque adversari libidinibus, et ideo iure
temperantem vocari.
31 Dixeramus enim atque convenerat inter nos, voluntate illam mereri homines, voluntate etiam
miseram, et sic mereri ut accipiant.
53
(I,1,1).32 This treatise is particularly important for the present study, since in it Augustine
worked out at considerable length—and over a crucial span of seven years in his midlife—the
central core of his doctrine of will. It would be at most a modest exaggeration to say that the
modern conception of a substantial faculty of will takes its inspiration from this book—i.e., the
idea of a mental capacity connected to, but separate from, the intellect and the emotions, by use
of which we are responsible for the voluntariness of our deeds; while also constitutive of our
motives, other conative states (such as wish, intention, choice, decision, etc.) and our moral
strength and weakness. We speak naturally of “will” in all these senses, but prior to Augustine no
single term covered such a variety of phenomena. Hence it is crucial to see just how this
conception was at its birth shaped by what was for him, as a newly baptized Christian, a burning
theological question: “Isn’t God the cause of evil?”
Taken together, this question and the book’s title, On Free Choice of the Will, suggest the
approach Augustine is going to take in dealing with a problem that he says, “worried me greatly
when I was still young, . . . wore me out, drove me into the company of heretics [the Manichees],
and knocked me flat on my face”33
( DLA, I,2,4). Having finally rejected the Manichaean dualism of ultimate principles, Augustine
must now make clear that, and why, he does not regard the One God as the source of the world’s
evil. He begins by distinguishing the evils one causes by one’s sins from those one might suffer
in just retribution for those sins: Therefore, if no one is punished [by God] unjustly—and we
must believe this, since we believe that this universe is governed by divine providence—it
follows that God is a cause of the second kind of evil
[the suffering justly imposed on sinners], but in no way causes the first kind [the sins we
commit].34
(I,1,1)
32 Dic mihi, quaeso te, utrum Deus non sit auctor mali? Often called On Free Choice of the
Will, it is called by Rist On Human Responsibility, in Augustine, xv and passim. While Rist’s
translation does pick out the topic of the work, there has been discussion recently on what the
literal meaning of the Latin title itself is meant to be, particularly the phrase “of the wil :” is
Augustine saying that the will ( qua motivation) is chosen by the agent (objective genitive), as I
think; or does it (as a ‘faculty’) do the free choosing (subjective genitive)? It is, I think, not
crystal clear whether Augustine thinks of the will as a faculty. He comes closest to doing so in
DLA, but the evidence is mixed. More on this below, footnote 66, p. 61, and footnote 69, p. 62.
33 Eam quaestionem moves, quae me admodum adolescentem vehementer exercuit, et fatigatum

in hae-reticos impulit, atque deiecit.
34 Quamobrem si nemo iniuste poenas luit, quod necesse est credamus, quandoquidem divina
providentia hoc universum regi credimus, illius primi generis malorum nullo modo, huius autem
secundi auctor est Deus.
54
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Augustine’s world, unlike Aristotle’s, is one in which a providential Creator-Deity rewards and
punishes, and since He does so justly, He must be keeping track of our voluntary conformity to
some sort of law(s).
For the “first kind of evil,” the kind we commit, “there is no single cause; rather everyone who
does evil is the cause of his own evildoing”35 (ibid.). How can we be sure of this? Augustine has
a ready reply: “Evil deeds are punished by the justice of God. They would not be punished justly
if they had not been performed voluntarily [ voluntate]”36 (ibid.). The last word in this citation,
“voluntarily,” is the crucial one: to do something voluntarily is to become responsible for it.
Augustine’s strategy is thus clear from the very start: the “unjust” or avoidable evil in the world
can be traced back in every case to the voluntates, the wil s or wil ings of sinners, and no further.
He spends most of the subsequent 100+
pages—as well as parts of many subsequent writings—explaining this idea. For it can seem a
mere dodge, as he is aware:
We believe everything that exists comes from the one God, and yet we believe that God is not
the cause of sins. What is troubling is that if you admit that sins come from the souls that God
created, and those souls come from God, pretty soon you’ll be tracing those sins back to God.37
( DLA, I,2,4)
Prophetic words indeed, since Augustine himself never found a completely satisfying answer to
the intertwined problems of evil, will, election, predestination, etc.
It is significant that what is probably the most influential work on the will in the Latin West
begins, not with speculation about the nature of, and search for, happiness (as in Aristotle and
Aquinas), but with an inquiry into the metaphysical problem of evil. Augustine certainly also
deals with the wil ’s pivotal role in the human quest to be happy, a classical theme with which he
was thoroughly familiar. But the speculations that pushed him to explore the idea of will more
deeply than did any of the ancient thinkers were largely spurred by his 35 [N]on enim unus
aliquis est, sed quisque malus sui malefacti auctor est.
36 [M]alefacta iustitia Dei vindicari. Non enim iuste vindicarentur, nisi fierent voluntate. Note
that Aristotle would have used the Greek term hekousion to express voluntariness, a term with no
etymological link to boulêsis. The use of voluntate (or sometimes voluntarie) in Augustine’s
Latin thus marks one important kind of extension of Aristotle’s (modest and proto-) notion of wil
: the concept is now expanded to include voluntariness. For Aristotle, but not Augustine, there
are voluntary, unwilled actions (e.g., the akratic ones).
37 Credimus autem ex uno Deo omnia esse quae sunt; et tamen non esse peccatorum auctorem
Deum.
Movet autem animum, si peccata ex his animabus sunt quas Deus creavit, illae autem animae ex
Deo, quomodo non parvo intervallo peccata referantur in Deum.
55
own personal struggles to come to grips with the conundrum of evil. Where an ancient such as
Epicurus could view the existence of evil as proof that God or the gods take no interest in human
affairs, Christians (and Jews and Muslims) could not. In their scriptures God has from the start
been intimately involved in human life, from the creation of Adam and Eve to the covenant with
Abraham to the delivery of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, to the Prophets, and beyond. In
Augustine’s hands the concept of will comes to function as the key to the solution of the
dilemma about evil. Evil stems not from God; its entry into our world is the result of the sin of
human beings, i.e., the voluntary falling away from the Perfect Good.38
What Augustine means by “sin” or “wrong-doing” is a matter of disorder, i.e., disorderly desire (
libido, cupiditas), an affliction of wil . “For it is clear now that inordinate desire is what drives
every kind of evildoing”39 (I,3,8). In line with his Christian/Neoplatonic insight that all things
are good in themselves, Augustine sees nothing intrinsically wrong in, for example, food, drink,
or sex. But adultery is not simply sex, nor gluttony simply eating or drinking: they involve
desires and acts that overstep the bounds of order. That is, they cannot be brought into line with
the “eternal law that is stamped upon our minds, the law according to which it is just that all
things be perfectly ordered”40 (I,6,15). A lengthy (and classically familiar) argument then
establishes that “when reason, mind or spirit controls the irrational impulses of the soul, a human
being is ruled by the very thing that ought to rule according to the law that we have found to be
eternal”41
(I,8,18). At this early stage in his career Augustine may still have included the classical thinkers
(he would later change his mind) when he added, “I reserve the term ‘wise’ for those whom the
truth demands should be called wise, those who have achieved peace by placing all inordinate
desire under the control of the mind”42 (I,9,19).
One who places “all inordinate desire under the control of the mind” has by definition a good
will, i.e., “a will by which we desire to live honorable and upright lives and to attain the highest
wisdom”43 (I,12,25). Furthermore, 38 Augustine, of course, also believed that humans were
tempted by Satan into committing the primal sin; humans were not the first sinners, though they
sinned freely.
39 Clarum est enim iam nihil aliud quam libidinem in toto malefaciendi genere dominari.
40 aeternae legis notionem, quae impressa nobis est, quantum valeo verbis explicem, ea est qua
iustum est ut omnia sint ordinatissima. This notion of the imprinted eternal law was Stoic in
origin, but it adapted well to Christianity and the Ten Commandments.
41 Ratio ista ergo, vel mens, vel spiritus cum irrationales animi motus regit, id scilicet
dominatur in homine, cui dominatio lege debetur ea quam aeternam esse comperimus.
42 Eos enim sapientes voco, quos veritas vocari iubet, id est, qui regno mentis omni libidinis
subiugatione pacati sunt.
43 Voluntas qua appetimus recte honesteque vivere, et ad summam sapientiam pervenire.
56
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Augustine claims “it is up to our will whether we enjoy or lack such a great and true good”44
(I,12,26). (This is a major claim, and one of several whose wording Augustine would come to
regret when they were later hurled back at him by his Pelagian opponents as essentially
containing their own view of the will’s (active) role in the economy of salvation, i.e., that we
have de facto the power to establish—or begin to establish—in ourselves a good will, or as
Aristotle might have put it, to become virtuous. We will go into this matter in greater detail in
section III of this chapter, below.) But what, more specifically, is the content of a good will, what
does it want, what is the substance of
“rightly ordered” desire? It consists, we are told, “precisely in the enjoyment of true and
unshakeable goods”45 (I,13,29). By contrast, those who wind up with unhappy lives have let
their wills aim at “things like wealth, honors, pleasures, physical beauty, and everything else that
one cannot get or keep simply by wil ing”46 (I,15,31, emphasis added). Like the Stoics,
Augustine here seems to be picking out the rational objects of desire by the criterion of what can
and cannot be taken from one by force.47 But he comes to suggest two additional criteria for the
good will—it aims at eternal (not temporal) and common (rather than private) goods—that have
a rather more Christian aspect that will make them features of Augustine’s teaching from this
time forward. Both have to do with the distinction of time and eternity: “[T]he eternal law
demands that we purify our love by turning it away from temporal things and toward what is
eternal”48 (I,15,32). Among the temporalia are the body, our freedom, family and friends, the
polity itself, and property (I,15,32). All of these are good, if incomplete, in themselves: one uses
them badly who “clings to them and becomes entangled with them,” while another uses them
well who
“does not become attached to them. They don’t become limbs of his soul, as it were (which is
what happens when one loves them), so that when these things begin to be amputated he is not
disfigured by any pain or decay”49 (I,15,33). A version of this notion of detachment plays a
central role in Meister Eckhart’s ethics, as we shall see.
44 [I]n voluntate nostra esse constitutum, ut hoc vel fruamur vel careamus tanto et tam vero
bono.
45 nisi tu putas aliud esse beate vivere, quam veris bonis certisque gaudere.
46 divitias, honores, voluptates, et pulchritudinem corporis, caeteraque omnia quae possunt et

volentes non adipisci, et amittere invite.
47 Cf. for instance Epictetus, Discourses, I,1,23–24: “You may fetter my leg, but my will not
even Zeus himself can overpower” (τὸ σκέλος μου δήσεις, τὴν προαίρεσιν δὲ οὐδ᾽ ὁ Ζεὺς νι
κῆσαι δύναται.
Greek text and translation by T. W. Higginson from the online Perseus Project.) 48 Iubet igitur
aeterna lex avertere amorem a temporalibus, et eum mundatum convertere ad aeterna.
49 is quidem qui male, amore his inhaereat atque implicetur . . . et ideo non eis amore
agglutinetur, neque velut membra sui animi faciat, quod fit amando, ne cum resecari coeperint,
eum cruciatu ac tabe foedent.
57
These criteria imply a certain conception of sin, which Evodius expresses thus:
[A]ll sins come about when someone turns away from divine things that truly persist and turns
toward changeable and uncertain things.
These things do have their proper place, and they have a certain beauty of their own; but when a
perverse and disordered soul pursues them it becomes enslaved to the very things that divine
order and law command it to rule over.”50
(I,16,35)
Sin—evil—consists in this very disorder, the turning from divine toward the temporal whereby
we seek, love, and attempt to enjoy temporal and private things that we can lose involuntarily;
hence the source of sin is not in God. For it has already been established (in I,12,26, quoted
above) that “it is up to our wil ” what it seeks, and thus the will itself determines whether or not
it is good.
Hence it follows, as Evodius puts it, “that we do evil by the free choice of the will”51 (I,16,35).
We should note here how the classical notion of boulêsis, rational desire—
standardly rendered by Augustine as voluntas, wil —has been connected with the notion of “free
choice.” The things we rationally desire are freely chosen by us, i.e., no one forces us to want
them above all else. And Augustine depicts our ordinary sinful state as one in which we have
turned away from the divine toward the temporal, though it will turn out that this is not a
historical process in the life of the individual. For this would imply that we each were at birth
without sin (or sinful inclination), a view Augustine rejects. What role then does the “turning”
play in the life of the individual? We will come back to this question shortly.
The third criterion of the rational objects of desire—the notion of the common (as opposed to
private) good—receives special attention in book II of DLA. That book is an extended
conversation on the question raised at its start by Evodius,
“Why God gave human beings free choice of the wil , since if we had not received it, we would
not have been able to sin”52 (II,1,1). He contrasts this freedom with the virtues, by means of
which no one can do evil. It is agreed that the virtues, by which we live rightly, are great goods;
whereas material and bodily objects, 50 [O]mnia peccata hoc uno genere contineri, cum quisque
avertitur a divinis vereque manentibus, et ad mutabilia atque incerta convertitur. Quae
quamquam in ordine suo recte locata sint, et suam quamdam pulchritudinem peragant; perversi
tamen animi est et inordinati, eis sequendis subici, quibus ad nutum suum ducendis potius divino
ordine ac iure praelatus est.
51 [M]ale facimus ex libero voluntatis arbitrio. Note the ambiguity: does the will choose? Or do
we (freely) choose to pursue a good or bad will (desire)? The former would suggest a faculty of
wil , the latter not.
52 [Q]uare dederit Deus homini liberum voluntatis arbitrium: quod utique si non accepisset,
peccare non posset.
58
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however good they may be, are such that one can live rightly without them, and hence they count
as goods, but of the lowest kind. The will is one of those powers of the soul “without which one
cannot live rightly” but which can also be abused; it thus is an example of “intermediate goods (
media bona)” (II,19,50).
In the course of his argument about “free choice of the wil ,” Augustine undertakes what may be
the first attempt in Christian thought at a philosophical proof of God’s existence. It seeks to
establish first, that in our lives there are standards both of knowledge (i.e., truth) and of conduct
(i.e., wisdom), which we must acknowledge as superior to, and normative for, our minds; and
then, that Truth and Wisdom, both of which are higher than our minds and available to all, are
identical with God (“This is our freedom, when we are subject to the truth, and the truth is God
himself”53 [II,13,37]). It is characteristic of this truth that commands our assent that anyone
might acquire it, but it does not thereby become inaccessible to others: “No part of it ever
becomes the private property of any one person; it is always wholly present to everyone.”54
(II,14,37) For Augustine the good will is thus one that cleaves to the inalienable, immu-table,
eternal, and common good, which all can enjoy equally at the same time (while the sinful will
prefers alienable, mutable, temporal, and private goods): Therefore when the will cleaves to the
common and unchangeable good, it attains the great and foremost goods for human beings, even
though the will itself is only an intermediate good. But when the will turns away from the
unchangeable and common toward its own private good, or toward external and inferior things, it
sins. It turns toward its own private good when it wants to be under its own control; it turns
toward external things when it is keen on things that belong to others or have nothing to do with
itself; it turns toward inferior things when it takes delight in physical pleasure. In this way one
becomes proud, meddlesome and lustful; one is caught up in a life that, by comparison with the
higher life, is death . . . 55
(II,19,53)
53 Haec est libertas nostra, cum isti subdimur veritati: et ipse est Deus noster. Compare Conf.
X,23,33:
“The happy life is joy in the truth, and that means joy in you, who are the Truth, O God” ( Hoc
est enim gaudium de te, qui Veritas es, Deus).
54 [N]on enim aliquid eius aliquando fit cuiusquam unius aut quorumdam proprium, sed simul
omnibus tota est communis.
55 Voluntas ergo adhaerens communi atque incommutabili bono, impetrat prima et magna
hominis bona, cum ipsa sit medium quoddam bonum. Voluntas autem aversa ab incommutabili et
communi bono, et conversa ad proprium bonum, aut ad exterius, aut ad inferius, peccat. Ad
proprium convertitur, cum suae potestatis vult esse; ad exterius, cum aliorum propria, vel
quaecumque ad se non pertinent, cognoscere studet; ad inferius, cum voluptatem corporis
diligit: atque ita homo superbus, et curiosus, et lascivus effectus, excipitur ab alia vita, quae in
comparatione superioris vitae mors est.
59
That we, who are from the start weak and beset with temptations, de facto commit sin requires,
in Augustine’s view, no special explanation. But one sin did strike him as inexplicable, though
undeniable: the “primal sin” of Adam and Eve.56 They, unlike us, were created with the ability
to avoid sin: they had what Augustine calls “freedom of the will” ( libertas voluntatis), a freedom
that was lost with the Fall. Had they not had that freedom, had they been created like us—weak
and with a proclivity toward greed and egotism—then God, not they, would be to blame for their
sin. This meant, for Augustine, that Adam and Eve were not afflicted by concupiscence: their
faculties were in proper order, with the sensate subordinated to the rational. Yet, well made as
they were, they fel , however inexplicably. Since God punishes no one unjustly, they sinned “of
their free will.”57 Augustine is convinced of this, though he admits he cannot explain how
primal sin could have happened. Stil , the concept of wil —now in the sense of a human capacity
to choose and to act voluntarily that is distinct from desire and belief, though involving both—
makes the notion of primal sin intel igible (even if only barely).58 For the will is, as we have
seen, more intimately connected with the person in a juridical sense than one’s desires are.59 As
was Augustine, Donald Davidson was persuaded that the concept of will is indispensable to
make sense of voluntary wrong-doing. Noting, for example, the temptation to depict weakness of
will (he calls it “incontinence”) as a struggle between “two actors,” reason and passion, he
pointed out the weakness in this approach: On [this] story, not only can we not account for
incontinence; it is not clear how we can ever blame the agent for what he does: his action merely
reflects the outcome of a struggle within him. What could he do about it? And more important,
the . . . image [of two competing 56 Here I follow the suggestion of Scott MacDonald and others
to label this first of all human sins
“primal,” instead of the more familiar “original,” since the latter shifts the focus to the effects on
the descendants of Adam and Eve’s fall. Cf. MacDonald, “Primal Sin,” in The Augustinian
Tradition, ed.
Gareth Matthews, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
57 We, by contrast, sin “voluntarily,” or by “free choice,” but not “by free wil ;” i.e., nothing
outside of us compels us to choose to follow our self-love, but nonetheless we are not free—in
the absence of grace—to follow the love of God. As Augustine says in City of God (XIV,11,1):
“The (choice of the) will . . .is then truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins. Such was
it given us by God; and this being lost by its own fault, can only be restored by Him who was
able at first to give it.” [ Arbitrium igitur voluntatis tunc est vere liberum, cum vitiis peccatisque
non servit. Tale datum est a Deo; quod amis-sum proprio vitio, nisi a quo dari potuit, reddi non
potest. ]
58 This is the thesis of Robert F. Brown, “The First Evil Will Must Be Incomprehensible: A
Critique of Augustine,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 46: 3 (1978): 315–29. T.
D. J.
Chappell takes Augustine’s side in his “Explaining the Inexplicable: Augustine on the Fall,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 62:3 (1994): 869–84.
59 Cf. chapter 1, pp. 10–11.
60
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actors] does not allow us to make sense of a conflict in one person’s soul, for it leaves no room
for the all-important process of weighing considerations.60
As seen in chapter 1, Thomas Aquinas stressed as key to the notion of voluntary action the
capacity to “weigh considerations”—it makes us “masters” of our actions:
The fact that humans are masters of their actions, is due to being able to deliberate about them:
for since the deliberating reason is indifferently disposed to opposite things, the will can be
inclined to either.61
( STh IaIIae, 6, 2, ad 2)
Davidson explicitly credits Aquinas in amending the “two actor” image—Reason vs. Passion—
and adding a crucial third agent:
In the second image, the agent’s representative, The Wil , can judge the strength of the
arguments on both sides, can execute the decision, and take the rap.
(36)
If Davidson was following Aquinas, Thomas was surely following Augustine.
Augustine’s struggle with the concept of primal sin led him to a conception of the will not only
as rational desire, but also as a hinge (Latin: cardo) by which one inclines—“turns”—either to
the side of “the common and unchangeable good” or to that of “private” and “inferior” goods62 (
DLA III,1,3). If one chooses the former, then one’s will is indistinguishable from correct, rational
desire. Our capacity to do either, however—as illustrated in Augustine’s version of the Genesis
story—shows that we need to distinguish from either desire “a crucial third agent,” the ability to
choose between them. This ability is the wil , which represents the self in its autonomy, and
which thus “can take the rap.”63
60 “Weakness,” in Essays on Actions, 35–36. Davidson describes his own change of mind about
the will in the Introduction to that volume, especially pp. xi–xi i.
61 [Q]uod homo est dominus sui actus, quod habet deliberationem de suis actibus, ex hoc enim
quod ratio deliberans se habet ad opposita, voluntas in utrumque potest.
62 Evodius speaks of a person choosing, “as if swinging on the hinge of the wil ” ( detorquet
quasi quemdam cardinem voluntatis).
63 Though the contrary is often assumed, Augustine seems to follow the Stoics and Peripatetics
in the eudaimonistic assumption that we always act in pursuit of our judgment about what will
lead to our happiness. Hence sin represents an error—even more, perhaps, a lie ( mendacium;
one thinks of the serpent in Eden)—about what true happiness consists in. DCD, XIV,4.
61
For Augustine—and here is the payoff—the crucially important “rap” is the biggest one of all:
the responsibility for the presence of evil in the world. Since it manifestly belongs to the notion
of the wil , from Aristotle’s hekousion onward, that it cannot be compelled without destroying it,
and that as a result the agent alone is “master” ( kurios, dominus) of her acts, it follows that the
First Sin was solely Adam’s and Eve’s responsibility. They were rightly punished: God is exon-
erated, and we their descendants justly bear the penalty for their sin. We too sin
“freely,” in a sense, i.e., we do so “by free choice,” uncoerced, doing what we want; but we sin
not “by free wil ,” i.e., we are unable without the help of grace to reject our sinful inclination to
self-love and choose selflessness. We can do what we want, but we cannot choose the desires we
find ourselves with. This, however, is not God’s fault, but an inherited penalty from the sin of
Adam and Eve.64
The will is thus the key explanatory notion for sin and the presence of evil in the world, and it
has now become—much more so than in Aristotle—a complex notion. From the start Augustine
is cognizant of various, though related, meanings of “wil ” ( voluntas). He initiates his exchange
with Evodius about the virtues in book I of DLA, with the query, “Do we have a wil ?”65
(I,12,25). Evodius says he is not sure, so Augustine reminds him of a number of things he wants:
he wants, first, an answer to this very question; second, to thereby attain wisdom; third, that
things go well for his friend Augustine; and finally, he wants to be happy. Thus Augustine’s
initial argument for the existence of will is simply that we want things, that is, we have various
kinds of desires, short- and long-term, benevolent and self-centered, eudaimonic, etc.66
Augustine, as we have 64 Cf. DLA III,18. The topic of Augustine and freedom of will is too
complex and too periph-eral to my main concern for me to pursue it further here. Cf. the
discussion in Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), chs. 5
and 6. When some of his views are taken out of context, Augustine is sometimes thought a
libertarian, but this is mistaken. Cf. Lynne R.
Baker, “Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians: An Augustinian Challenge,” Faith and
Philosophy, 20 (2003): 460–78. Eleonore Stump surveys the issue of freedom for Augustine in
“Augustine on Free Wil ,” in Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. E. Stump and N.
Kretzman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
65 Sitne aliqua nobis voluntas? This question, and the ensuing discussion, is the central focus of
Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into The Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance
of De libero arbitrio (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
66 Here I take exception to what seems to be T. D. J. Chappel ’s proposal that “Augustine’s talk
about the voluntas be understood simply as his way of talking about the voluntary—whether that
means voluntary action, or choice, or both.” Cf. Chappel , Aristotle and Augustine, 127. The
passage just cited shows that in addition Augustine often uses voluntas to mean desire, especially
the set of desires that mark one’s dominant character (one’s “love”). However, I do not deny that
Augustine also uses voluntas to mark the voluntary, as Chappell suggests, and I am also inclined
to agree with his thrust when he continues the quoted passage: “—and not, as it has often been,
as talk about a reified faculty of will constituting a substantial presence in the theater of the
psyche” and able to act independently of the intellect. But cf. the partially contrary view of Scott
MacDonald, note 68. Irwin apparently sides with Chappel ’s rejection of the notion that
Augustine is a (the first?) voluntarist:
62
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seen, argues that it is “up to our wil ” whether or not it is good.67 And he adds,
“(F)or what is so much in the power of the will as the will itself?”68 ( DLA I,12,26). This
reference to our capacity to choose has suggested to some that he thinks of the will itself as a
“power” or “faculty” of the soul. Granted that he does stress this capacity, one can still ask if a
faculty is what he means here. Since we judge people morally on the basis of whether or not they
manifest what Augustine called a “desire to live an upright and honorable life,” it would be
strange to claim that one is not responsible for having—or not having—such a desire: who or
what else could be responsible? When Augustine asks, “What is so much in the power of the will
as the will itself?” he might mean simply our ability to perform voluntary actions “at wil ”—
Aristotle’s hekousion—i.e., the idea of noncompulsion; or he could be alluding to the rather
similar Stoic notion of assent ( sunkatathesis); or he could mean merely that no one can force us
to prefer one thing to another. It is in any case not clear that Augustine is—at this early point,
that is—embracing the notion of the will as a power or faculty of the soul, as some have
claimed.69 What is clear, as we shall see, is that Augustine was soon to abandon the apparently
commonsensical (and certainly classical) view that nothing “is so much in the power of the will
as the will itself,” in one straightforward sense of this phrase.
Here is a further Augustinian twist to the classical approach to virtue, wil , and love: the very
Neoplatonic first book of DLA was written not long after Augustine’s conversion. But by the
time he finished book II, several years later,
“(Augustine) does not claim that the will moves us independently of the greater apparent good.
He accepts Stoic intellectualism and avoids voluntarism,” Development of Ethics, 412.
67 In posing the matter in these terms, Augustine breaks from the Stoic and (Neo-)Platonist
approach, according to which boulêsis or voluntas as rational desire is always good. In this
respect his view more resembles that of Aristotle (cf. Van Riel, “Augustine’s Wil ”), though here
too he innovates by highlighting a sense of will that seems distinct from any desire: the will as
“hinge,” as noted above, p. 60. This, I think, is the closest he comes to a faculty view.
68 Quid enim tam in voluntate, quam ipsa voluntas sita est?
69 Scott MacDonald finds four different senses of voluntas in Augustine: “(1) a faculty or power
of the soul—the wil , (2) a particular act of that power such as a voluntary choice or volition, (3)
any kind of passing or enduring state or disposition of that power such as an intention, attitude,
want, or desire, and (4) a person’s overarching or dominant bent, directedness, or volitional
commitment,” “Primal Sin,” 117. This multiplicity of related, but distinct, senses of the one term
is an indication of Augustine’s unsystematic approach to the topic. He was not a scholastic
thinker. By contrast to MacDonald, Sarah Byers has argued that for Augustine, voluntas
typically, even always, denotes the Stoic hormē, or impulse (either occurrent or dispositional)
toward action, i.e., motivation. “The Meaning of Voluntas in Augustine,” Augustinian Studies,
37: 2 (2006): 171–189. Cf. also Van Riel, who in “Augustine’s Wil ”
argues for an eclectic use of sources, including Aristotle, by Augustine for the concept of wil .
However, this connection must remain moot, based as it on the presumed similarity of Aristotle’s
Protrepti-cus and Cicero’s Hortensius. The latter, which we know Augustine read with ardor in
his youth, was said to be based on the former, but both works are known today only through
fragments.
63
he had been ordained and become more deeply immersed in the Christian scriptures and
theology. The change shows itself in a number of ways, including the definition of virtue, which
is now no longer simply “perfect love of God.” Summing up, in the thirteenth century,
Augustine’s more mature view, Thomas Aquinas put the matter this way:
[T]he definition, usually given of virtue [is this]: Virtue is a good quality of the mind, by which
we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us. . .
[For this] we have the authority of Augustine, from whose words this definition is gathered, and
principally in de Libero Arbitrio II,19.70
( STh IaIIae,55, 4,1 and sed contra, emphasis added) The striking new note here is the idea that it
is God who “works” virtue in us, and does so “without us.” With this Augustine has stepped
well away from the Neoplatonists and other classical authors, though, as is clear from works as
late as City of God, he does so without abandoning the framework of teleological eudaimonism.
We will have more to say below about the divine role in creating the will or love that constitutes
human virtue.
When Augustine refers to the contrast between “common” goods, shared by all (such as truth
and wisdom), and “private” ones (such as material possessions), he is also expressing his
growing hostility toward what he regarded as the elitist character of classical ethics, its explicit
restriction of the best life to the intel igentsia. This development, too, was part of his deeper
immersion in the Christian scriptures and tradition. Granted, for Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics
there was nothing intrinsically private about the timeless truths or objects that they prized; still
these were de facto accessible only to a relative handful, the leisured wise. By contrast, the
mission of Jesus was to all, and especially to humble and ordinary people, such as fishermen,
tax-collectors, women and children, slave and free, and this very fact was a stumbling block for
the Christian message among the learned in the Greek-speaking world.71
Later Augustine would say he had gained nothing from studying that “proud 70 [D]efinitio
virtutis quae solet assignari, scilicet, virtus est bona qualitas mentis, qua recte vivitur, qua nullus
male utitur, quam Deus in nobis sine nobis operatur . . . est auctoritas Augustini, ex cuius verbis
praedicta definitio colligitur, et praecipue in II de libero arbitrio. Harrison, Augustine’s Way,
contends that DLA, despite its composition over a seven-year period, constitutes a substantial
unity. He may have a point, but the three books do show some marked differences, e.g., in
frequency of scriptural citation (almost none in book I, more in book II, frequent in book III).
71 Cf. the story of St. Paul’s reception among the philosophers in Athens, Acts of Apostles 17:
16–34.
64
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mouthful,” i.e., the list of categories given in Aristotle’s famous logical work of that name72 (
Conf. , IV,16,28). By contrast, “what disadvantage was it to your little ones that they were much
more slow-minded than I? They did not forsake you, but stayed safely in the nest of your church
to grow their plumage and strengthen the wings of their charity on the wholesome nourishment
of the faith”73 ( Conf. , IV,16,31).
If being a “slow-minded little one” is no hindrance to the attainment of
“wisdom and truth”—and hence the happy life—clearly Augustine’s conception of eudaimonism
has been greatly broadened from the classical one he still adhered to right after his conversion.
Now in principle all can walk the path, regardless of intellectual capacity or way of life, and it is
“charity,” a good wil , that makes this possible. Indeed, from Confessions onward, intellect—
prone to pride—is cast as a potential impediment to moral progress. Augustine continued to
accept the view that our supreme happiness lies in some sort of joining with, or “cleaving to,” the
immaterial Divine, but as he confides in Confessions VII, his own attempts at a Neoplatonic
mystical union with God were a disappointment to him. He was bent on finding the needed
strength, he remarks, but he was not yet “humble enough to grasp the humble Jesus as my God,
nor did I know what his weakness had to teach”74 ( Conf. VII,18,24).
The seeming paradox that the sought-for strength lies in humility is deliberate. The dynamic of
Augustine’s conversion story begins with his intellectual insight into the spiritual nature of God,
but this cognitive step, while necessary, was not sufficient.75 His will also needed to be remade,
and he feels humiliated that he cannot achieve this on his own. In Confessions VII his path of
learning led him first to the libri Platonicorum, which removed the stumbling blocks of
materialism and the nature of evil, mentioned above. But this path toward salvation could lead no
further; indeed it threatened to imprison Augustine in a trap of its own, the fatal flaw of pride in
the seeker:
72 . . . buccis typho crepantibus . . .
73 [Q]uid tantum oberat parvulis tuis longe tardius ingenium, cum a te longe non recederent, ut
in nido ecclesiae tuae tuti plumescerent et alas caritatis alimento sanae fidei nutrirent?
74 Non enim tenebam Deum meum Iesum humilis humilem nec cuius rei magistra esset eius
infirmitas noveram.
75 In calling it necessary I am agreeing with Chappel , Aristotle and Augustine, 153, that
Augustine is not a “voluntarist,” if we take that to imply a belief in the wil ’s capacity to act
independently of reason.
The conversion narrative clearly puts intellectual insight first, though by itself insight is not
enough to bring one safely onto the path of salvation. A similar framework is at work in DLA III
(see below).
Indeed, Augustine explicitly says there: “It often happens that right opinion corrects perverted
habits and that perverted opinion distorts an upright nature, so great is the power of the dominion
and rule of reason.” DLA III,8,23, emphasis added. [ Solet autem et recta opinio pravam
corrigere consuetudinem, et prava opinio rectam depravare naturam: tanta vis est in dominatu
et principatu rationis.]
65
I had already begun to covet a reputation for wisdom, and though fully punished I shed no tears
of compunction; rather I was complacently puffed up with knowledge. Where was that charity
which builds on the foundation of humility that is Christ Jesus? And when would those books [of
the Platonists] have taught it to me? I believe that you [God]
willed me to stumble upon them before I gave my mind to your scriptures, so that the memory of
how I had been affected by them might be impressed upon me when later I had been brought to a
new gentle-ness through the study of your books, and your fingers were tending my wounds;
thus insight would be mine to recognize the difference between presumption and confession,
between those who see the goal but not the way to it and the Way to our beatific homeland, a
Homeland to be not merely descried but lived in.76
( Conf. VII,20,26)
The most profound of the classical pagan thinkers, the Neoplatonists, “see the goal but not the
way to it,” a Way whose humility could only strike such authors as paradoxical.
In his recognition of the limitations of Neoplatonism Augustine turned again to the letters of St.
Paul, and found that his earlier problems with the apostle had
“melted away”:
I discovered that every truth I had read in those other books [of the philosophers] was taught here
also, but now inseparably from your gift of grace, so that no one who sees can boast as though
what he sees and the very power to see it were not from you—for who has anything that he has
not received? So totally is it a matter of grace that the searcher is not only invited to see you,
who are ever the same, but healed as wel , so that he can possess you.77
( Conf. VII,21,27, emphasis added)
76 Iam enim coeperam velle videri sapiens plenus poena mea et non flebam, insuper et inflabar
scientia.
Ubi enim erat illa aedificans caritas a fundamento humilitatis, quod est Christus Iesus? Aut
quando illi libri me docerent eam? In quos me propterea, priusquam Scripturas tuas
considerarem, credo voluisti incurrere, ut imprimeretur memoriae meae, quomodo ex eis
affectus essem et, cum postea in libris tuis mansuefactus essem et curantibus digitis tuis
contrectarentur vulnera mea, discernerem atque distinguerem, quid interesset inter
praesumptionem et confessionem, inter videntes, quo eumdum sit, nec videntes, qua, et viam
ducentem ad beatificam patriam non tantum cernendam sed et habitandam.
77 Et coepi et inveni, quidquid illac verum legeram, hac cum commendatione gratiae tuae dici,
ut qui videt non sic glorietur, quasi non acceperit non solum id quod videt, sed etiam ut videat
(quid enim habet quod non accepit?), et ut te, qui es semper idem, non solum admoneatur ut
videat, sed etiam sanetur ut teneat.
66
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In this (almost offhand) manner Augustine announces an epochal shift that on the decisive issue
will take him out of the orbit of classical ethics altogether and into that of Pauline Christianity:
the path to salvation depends not on our efforts, but fundamentally, perhaps entirely, on God’s
grace. We will have more to say about this shortly, but for now we note that Augustine was not
alone in his renewed interest in Paul. As Peter Brown says, “The last decades of the fourth
century in the Latin church, could well be called ‘the generation of S. Paul’: a common interest
in S. Paul drew together widely differing thinkers, and made them closer to each other than to
their predecessors.”78 In Augustine’s case, this interest was destined to have the most profound
consequences, both for him personally and for the Latin Church. At this point in the Confessions
narrative, the reengagement with Paul is presented—briefly and simply—as the final step in
Augustine’s intellectual acceptance of the Christian religion.
But the new level of understanding—however indispensable—does not complete Augustine’s

conversion. In the dramatic retel ing in Confessions VIII of the decisive phase, the final step
must be taken by the wil . What held him back, he says, “was no iron chain imposed by anyone
else, but the iron of my own will”79 ( Conf. VIII,5,10). He continues:
The enemy had my power of wil ing in his clutches, and from it had formed a chain to bind me.
The truth is that disordered lust springs from a perverted wil ; when lust is pandered to, a habit is
formed; when habit is not checked, it hardens into compulsion . . . A new will had begun to
emerge in me, the will to worship you disinterestedly and enjoy you, O
God, our only sure felicity; but it was not yet capable of surmounting that earlier will
strengthened by inveterate custom. And so the two wil s fought it out—the old and the new, the
one carnal, the other spiritual—
and in their struggle tore my soul apart.80
(Ibid.)
78 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1967/2000), 144.
79 Cui rei ego suspirabam ligatus non ferro alieno, sed mea ferrea voluntate. The metaphor of
binding reminds of the saying of Epictetus, quoted in note 47.
80 Velle meum tenebat inimicus et inde mihi catenam fecerat et constrinxerat me. Quippe ex
voluntate perversa facta est libido, et dum servitur libidini, facta est consuetudo, et dum
consuetudini non resistitur, facta est necessitas. Quibus quasi ansulis sibimet innexis (unde
catenam appellavi) tenebat me obstrictum dura servitus. Voluntas autem nova, quae mihi esse
coeperat, ut te gratis colerem fruique te vellem, Deus, sola certa iucunditas, nondum erat idonea
ad superandam priorem vetustate roboratam. Ita duae voluntates meae, una vetus, alia nova, illa
carnalis, illa spiritalis, confligebant inter se atque discordando dissipabant animam meam.
67
This remarkable passage and the lengthy ones that follow recounting the stormy scene in the
garden in Milan are among the most famous in Western literature, and have received extensive
commentary. For our purposes the following points are most salient:
First, the “two wil s” ( voluntates) to which Augustine refers are clearly sets or patterns of
habitual desires, and not faculties of the soul; otherwise he would be endorsing a “two-soul”
theory like that of the Manichees which he explicitly rejects a few pages later: “When therefore
the Manichees observe two conflict-ing impulses [ voluntates] within one person, let them stop
saying that two hostile minds [ mentes] are at war,” since the same line of reasoning could be
extended absurdly to imply three or four (or more) such souls81 (VIII,10,24); Second, the “new
will” has as its object God, the summum bonum itself, and Augustine is now certain of this; but
strangely and disconcertingly he does not yet want the Supreme Good sufficiently to turn his
back on “that earlier will,” his desires for “carnal” enjoyment. He regards conversion as the right
course for him, he “commands” ( imperat) himself to want it (VIII,9,21), “yet it [the mind] does
not do what it commands,” i.e., to will his conversion82
(VIII,9,21). How can this be? Augustine’s own explanation is that he was still conflicted, and
hence his willing was only partial, incomplete: “Evidently, then, it does not want this thing with
the whole of itself, and therefore the command does not proceed from an undivided mind”83
(ibid.). At first glance this explanation seems not to make much sense, for as Augustine is well
aware, we regularly choose, even if reluctantly, among competing desires, and such choices can
be praiseworthy. But I suggest what he means is that this case is not about selecting among run-
of-the-mill wants (“chocolate versus vanilla,” so to speak), rather it is about a choice of that
fundamental motivational orientation of the self, a combination of Aristotle’s boulêsis (what we
rationally desire, the thing we regard as the proper goal of our lives) and an avid and effective
desire for that goal (roughly the habituation that Aristotle saw as the foundation of character). If
so, Augustine is here discussing a situation about which Aristotle was largely silent and that he
seems to have regarded as psychologically improbable, if not impossible, i.e., fundamental
conversion of the heart.84
81 Iam ergo non dicant, cum duas voluntates in homine uno adversari sibi sentiunt, duas
contrarias mentes de duabus contrariis substantiis et de duobus contrariis principiis contendere.
82 [E]t non fit quod imperat.
83 Sed non ex toto vult: non ergo ex toto imperat.
84 There is disagreement over whether Aristotle believed that a vicious person could reform his
character. As we saw, he discusses the issue briefly (and ambiguously) in NE III.5, 1114a 12–21;
later, at NE VII.7, in his comparison of incontinence and intemperance, he seems to hold out
little hope for such radical reform. What is clear, however, is that he devotes very little space to
an issue that is central to Confessions. Cf. Gianluca Di Muzio, “Aristotle on Improving One’s
Character,” Phronesis 45:3 (2000): 205–19.
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Thus, pace some commentators,85 the situation Augustine describes in Confessions VIII is not
that of the Aristotelian akratic person, who is sure of what the proper goal in life is, yet acts
contrary to it in a specific case; but rather that of a repentant akolastos, a vicious person or
inveterate sinner who is now trying to reform. Here then would be a central case of voluntas as
not merely a desire per se, but as the cardinal rational desire in one’s life, the pillar notion of
eudaimonism, enhanced by the requirement that this desire be motivationally effective;
Third, the new and better will is characterized by “disinterested” ( gratis) desire (or love). This
term expands on the theme, noted above, of what marks the well-ordered soul: it wants what it
cannot lose against its will; it wants the eternal in preference to the temporal and also the
common as opposed to the private. With respect to this last contrast, Augustine, as we saw in
book II of DLA, chiefly has in mind Truth and Wisdom, identified with God. If the object of my
desire is “above me,” and is furthermore such that it plainly can be shared by all equally, then
Augustine seems to think my desire for it will be disinterested, rather than selfish, and marked by
admiration for the object itself, as opposed to what it can do for me.86 Early and late, this is one
of the principal themes of Augustine’s work: the contrast of the two kinds of will, the “two
loves,” each of which is the basis of a “city” or metaphorical commonwealth:
These are the two loves: the first is holy, the second foul; the first is social, the second selfish;
the first consults the common welfare for the sake of a celestial society, the second grasps at a
selfish control of social affairs for the sake of arrogant domination; the first is submis-sive to
God, the second tries to rival God; the first is quiet, the second restless . . . the first desires for its
neighbor what it wishes for itself, the second desires to subjugate its neighbor; the first rules its
neighbor for the good of the neighbor, the second for its own advantage . . . and
[the two loves] also separate the two cities founded among the race of 85 Risto Saarinen, for
instance, says, in his ground-breaking Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From
Augustine to Buridan (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 44, Leiden: Bril ,
1994, 35): “This description [in Conf. VIII,5,11] resembles Aristotle’s presentation of akratic
behavior” —resemblance perhaps, but Augustine is not discussing akrasia in Aristotle’s sense,
though one could describe Augustine’s bête noir as “weakness of wil ,” in one sense (cf. also
Saarinen’s more cautious provisos on pp. 36–37); Rist makes claims similar to those of Saarinen
in Ancient Thought, 130, 137, and 184–85.
86 For a skeptical take on Augustine’s success in accounting for our experience of disinterested
love and obligation in these terms, see O’Connel , “Action.”

69
men . . . the first city is that of the just, the second is that of the wicked.
Although they are now, during the course of time, intermingled, they shall be divided at the last
judgment . . .87
( Gen. litt., II,15,20)
Fourth, Augustine says his “perverted wil ” is the origin of his final resistance to conversion. As
we have seen, such a will “turns away from the unchangeable and common good toward its own
private good, or toward external or inferior things. It turns toward its own private good when it
wants to be under its own control” ( DLA, II,19,53). In this theme there are echoes of both Paul
and Plotinus. In a passage Augustine seems to have known, Plotinus asks: What can it be that has
brought the souls to forget the Father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of
that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in
self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire
for self-ownership ( Enneads, V,1,1, emphases added).88
The Greek term here translated as “self-wil ” is tolma, more often rendered as boldness (Latin
audacia) or pride ( superbia).89 Augustine has much to say against both audacia and superbia,
often quoting the words of Jesus Sirach 10.15: “The beginning of all sin is pride.”90 But recall
too that in the passage about St. Paul’s writings, quoted above, Augustine had said the truths he
encountered there were presented “inseparably from your gift of grace, so that no one who sees
can boast 87 Hi duo amores, quorum alter sanctus est, alter immundus; alter socialis, alter
privatus; alter communi utilitati consulens propter supernam societatem, alter etiam rem
communem in potestatem propriam redigens propter arrogantem dominationem; alter subditus,
alter aemulus Deo; alter tranquillus, alter turbulentus . . . alter hoc volens proximo quod sibi,
alter subicere proximum sibi; alter propter proximi utilitatem regens proximum, alter propter
suam . . . et distinxerunt conditas in genere humano civitates duas, sub admirabili et ineffabili
providentia Dei, cuncta, quae creat, administrantis et ordinantis, alteram iustorum, alteram
iniquorum. Quarum etiam quadam temporali commixtione peragitur saeculum, donec ultimo
iudicio separentur. The Essential Augustine, trans. V. Bourke, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publ. Co.,1974), 201. Cf. also City of God, XIV, 28.
88 Enneads V,1,1: Τί ποτε ἄρα ἐστὶ τὸ πεποιηκὸς τὰς ψυχὰς πατρὸς θεοῦ ἐπιλαθέσθαι, καὶ
μοίρας
ἐκεῖθεν οὔσας καὶ ὅλως ἐκεί νου ἀγνοῆσαι καὶ ἑαυτὰς καὶ ἐκεῖνον; Ἀρχὴ μὲν οὖν αὐταῖς τοῦ
κακοῦ ἡ τόλμα
καὶ ἡ γένεσις καὶ ἡ πρώτη ἑτερότης καὶ τὸ βουληθῆναι δὲ ἑαυτῶν εἶναι. Plotinus, The Enneads,
trans.
Stephan MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1992), 423.
89 The latter translation is standard in Rist, Ancient Thought.

90 E.g., in City of God, XIV,13,1.
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as though what he sees and the very power to see it were not from you—for who has anything
that he has not received?”91 ( Conf. VII,21,27, emphasis added).
We have been tracing the reasons why Augustine depicted the good or bad condition of the wil
—and not, say, the intellect—as the central determinant of our success or failure in life. His need
to overcome his early Manichaeism led him to assign the responsibility for the presence of evil in
the world to voluntary human wrong-doing: God created human beings with a free wil , but is
not to blame for our misuse and subsequent loss of it.92 If we did not have this gift, we could not
perform good deeds, either.93 In his most optimistic postconversion phase Augustine sounds like
a classical moralist, when for instance in DLA I he writes: (Al ) who will to live upright and
honorable lives, if they will this more than they will transitory goods, attain such a great good so
easily that they have it by the very act of wil ing to have it.94
(I,13,29)
Contrast the hopeful suggestion here that the “upright and honorable” life is “so easily” attained
with the agony of the divided will depicted in Confessions VIII a decade later.95 It seems
Augustine had become by then a “sadder and a wiser man.” Some of the reasons underlying this
change of mind are in part laid out in DLA III (and others in the Ad Simplicianum, discussed
below). In a sustained and bril iant presentation near the end of DLA (III,17,48 ff.), Augustine
explains his view that “a perverse will is (itself) the cause of all evils.” I recount here some of his
central points:
91 Lloyd Gerson notes that the theme of pride or self-assertion as the source of evil is common
to Plato and Aquinas. In Laws 731e Plato says that “the cause of each and every crime we
commit is precisely this excessive love of ourselves,” while Thomas claims ( STh
IIaIIae,162,7,c.) that pride, the act of which is “the contempt of God,” “is ‘the beginning of all
sins’” [ aversio a Deo . . . principium omnium peccatorum]. Lloyd P. Gerson, “Plato, Aquinas
and the Universal Good,” The New Scholasticism 58:2
(1984): 131–44. But surprisingly, Gerson fails to note that this theme is central in Augustine,
e.g., at DLA II,19,53: the will sins “when it wants to be under its own control . . . and one
becomes proud, meddlesome and lustful” [ cum suae potestatis vult esse . . . atque ita homo
superbus,et curiosus, et lascivus effectus].
92 To simplify matters I am ignoring the sin of Lucifer and the fallen angels.
93 This is the so-called “Free Will Defense” for the existence of evil: “If human beings are good
things, and they cannot do right unless they so wil , then they ought to have a free wil , without
which they cannot do right,” DLA II,1,3 [ Si enim homo aliquod bonum est, et non posset, nisi
cum vellet, recte facere, debuit habere liberam voluntatem, sine qua recte facere non posset. ]
94 [Q]uisquis recte honesteque vult vivere, si id se velle prae fugacibus bonis velit, assequatur
tantam rem tanta facilitate, ut nihil aliud ei quam ipsum velle sit habere quod voluit.
95 Doubly odd is the fact that the events in the garden in Milan in 386 (reported in Confessions)
must have been fresh in Augustine’s memory when he wrote of the tanta facilitate (“so easily”) a
year or so later in DLA I.
71
First, we seek in vain for any external cause of a perverse wil , for if there were one (if, e.g., we
had been created perverse, or were to be perverted against our will by another), there would be
no sin;
Second, our de facto sinfulness stems from our condition of “ignorance and difficulty,” i.e., our
inability to understand the truth and, even when we do understand it, the trouble we have to act
accordingly; but Third, this condition is not our original nature; it is itself a “penalty,” the result
of sins, those that we ourselves commit as well as the sinfulness we inherit as part of our flawed
human nature. Because of our ignorance “we lack the free choice of the will to choose to act
rightly.” Further, “even when we do see what is right and will to do it, we cannot because of the
resistance of carnal habits, which develops almost naturally because of the unruliness of our
mortal inheritance”96
(III,18,52, emphasis added). By “our mortal inheritance” Augustine of course means the effect of
original sin:
When someone acts wrongly out of ignorance, or cannot do what he rightly wil s to do, his
actions are called sins because they have their origin in that first sin [of Adam and Eve], which
was committed by free wil .97
(III,19,54)
One might naturally wonder how we descendants of Adam and Eve can justly be penalized for
their sin. Augustine has little patience with this complaint: Let [those who want to blame Adam
and Eve instead of themselves] be silent and stop murmuring against God. Perhaps their
complaint would be justified if there were no Victor over error and inordinate desire . . .
You are not blamed for your unwil ing ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do
not know. You are not blamed because you do not bind up your own wounds, but because you
spurn the one who wants to heal you. These are your own sins.98
(III,19,53)
96 Nec mirandum est quod vel ignorando non habet arbitrium liberum voluntatis ad eligendum
quid recte faciat: vel resistente carnali consuetudine, quae violentia mortalis successionis
quodammodo naturaliter inolevit.
97 Nam illud quod ignorans quisque non recte facit, et quod recte volens facere non potest, ideo
dicuntur peccata, quia de peccato illo liberae voluntatis originem ducunt.
98 [Q]uiescant, et adversus Deum murmurare desistant. Recte enim fortasse quererentur, si

erroris et libidinis nullus hominum victor existeret . . . non tibi deputatur ad culpam quod invitus
ignoras, sed quod negligis quaerere quod ignoras; neque illud quod vulnerata membra non
colligis, sed quod volentem sanare contemnis: ista tua propria peccata sunt.
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“Failing to ask,” a sin of omission, can plausibly be called voluntary and hence culpable on our
part. So too can “spurning” an offer of help and healing. True, because of original sin we start
out in life on the wrong foot, but Augustine is here concerned to assure us that, though we cannot
amend our lives by our own efforts alone, divine help is ours for the asking. Thus in this
extended section we find on one hand a fascinating blend of optimism (“if the will cannot resist
it, there is no sin,” “you are not blamed . . . ,” “the soul has the power . . .”), and pessimism on
the other (“we lack the free choice of the wil ,” “we cannot do it,” “these are your own sins”). In
each case the focus is on the wil . The passage begins with the hopeful affirmation of the
classical insight that external compulsion destroys responsibility.99 Implicit in what follows is
the fact that we are not, indeed cannot be, forced to our sinful behavior by anyone: to be guilty,
we must (and do) freely choose it. Yet, “because of our ignorance we lack the free choice of the
will to choose to act rightly.” Does this not contradict the libertarian-sounding idea that
compulsion destroys responsibility? Despite appearances, it does not.
Our “ignorance and difficulty” are not external sources of compulsion. They are in us, in a sense
they are us. But then, since we did not make ourselves, can we be held responsible? Here
Augustine seems to recognize that he is on the brink of making the Creator responsible for our
sinfulness. So he hastens to add that these (sinful traits) do not belong to the nature that human
beings were created with; they are the penalty of a condemned prisoner. But when we speak of
the free will to act rightly, we mean the will with which human beings were created.100
(III,18,52)
Because of their Fall Adam and Eve lost their birthright, including “the free will to act rightly,”
and we have all somehow inherited the resultant sorry condition. But in spite of their disastrous
impact on us, it is wrong for us human beings to blame Adam and Eve for our continuing woes.
For there is a “Victor over error and inordinate desire,” namely, Christ who has made “God’s
help” (i.e., grace) available to us. As a result the soul “has the power to reform itself with God’s
help, and by pious labors to acquire all of the virtues by which it is freed from the torture of
difficulty and the blindness of ignorance”101 (III,20,56). Such is 99 Cf. for instance Aristotle,
NE III.1, 1109b33–1110a1: “Those things, then, are thought involuntary, which take place under
compulsion . . .; and that is compulsory of which the moving principle is outside.” [δοκεῖ δὴ
ἀκούσια εἶναι τὰ βίᾳ . . . γινόμενα: βίαιον δὲ οὗ ἡ ἀρχὴ ἔξωθεν.]
100 [N]on est natura instituti hominis, sed poena damnati. Cum autem de libera voluntate recte
faciendi loquimur, de illa scilicet in qua homo factus est loquimur.
101 [E]tiam quod facultatem habet, ut adiuvante Creatore seipsam excolat, et pio studio possit
omnes acquirere et capere virtutes, per quas et a difficultate cruciante, et ab ignorantia caecante
liberetur.

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the still modestly optimistic conclusion of book 3 of DLA, a conclusion that—
leaving aside the necessity of asking for divine help—is recognizably a continuation of the
classical tradition. Augustine has worked hard and apparently successfully to overlay on that
tradition the central elements of Christianity: the Creator Deity, original sin, redemption, grace,
etc. To become a Christian, an Aristotelian would certainly need to amend her view of the moral
life, but principally by incorporating the need for divine assistance in acquiring the virtues that
lead us to a happiness in principle open to all. But if such assistance is made available to us
through preaching and teaching, the stretch for an Aristotelian would not seem overly great.
Before we move on, it is important to note again Augustine’s distinction between free choice (
liberum arbitrium) and free will ( libera voluntas). The former we have retained in our fallen
state (without it we could not sin). Augustine often identifies it with consent:
[J]ust as no one sins unwil ingly [ invitus] by his own thought, so no one yields to the evil
prompting of another unless his own will consents
[ consentit].102
(III,10,29)
True, “the free will to act rightly” has been justly taken from human nature, though it can be
restored to us by God’s grace. Augustine does not tell us much about this sense of will in DLA,
but he does explain it more fully in later writings, as we shall see. In any case, if we do not avail
ourselves of the divine offer of grace, then we are properly blamed: “these are [our] own sins.”
In spite of its gloomier assessment of the human condition than was evident in his earlier
writings, book III of DLA winds up not far from this hopeful position adopted some years earlier
in the conclusion of II:
What greater security could there be than to have a life in which nothing can happen to you that
you do not wil ? But since we cannot pick ourselves up voluntarily as we fell voluntarily, let us
hold with confident faith the right hand of God—that is, our Lord Jesus Christ—which has been
held out to us from on high.103
(II,20,54)
102 Nam sicut propria cogitatione non peccat invitus, ita dum consentit male suadenti, non
utique nisi voluntate consentit. Note that the translation makes it sound as if it is the will that
consents; but a more literal rendering would be: “unless he consents voluntarily.”
103 Quid ergo securius quam esse in ea vita, ubi non possit tibi evenire quod non vis? Sed
quoniam non sicut homo sponte cecidit, ita etiam sponte surgere potest; porrectam nobis
desuper dexteram Dei, id est Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, fide firma teneamus.
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However, this relatively optimistic mood did not last long. We turn now to a new, surprising
development in Augustine’s teaching about the wil .
III
In 396, roughly one year after finishing book III of DLA, Augustine had occasion to write a
lengthy letter to his former mentor in Milan, Simplician, who had asked Augustine for help in
understanding St. Paul’s exegesis (in Romans 9:10–29) of the biblical story of Esau and Jacob.
Before the twin boys were even born, God chose to elevate Jacob over his brother, who was to be
first-born, saying, according to the prophet Malachi, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated”
(Malachi 1:2–3). But what could be the reason for this preference, since while still in the womb
neither could have done anything to merit God’s favor or disfavor? Following Paul, Augustine
feels himself forced to conclude that grace, including the grace of faith, is a free gift that God, for
entirely inscrutable reasons, gives to His elect and withholds from all others:
No one believes who is not called. God calls in His mercy, and not as rewarding the merits of
faith. The merits of faith follow his calling rather than precede it . . . So grace comes before all
merits.104
( Ad Simp. I,2,7, emphasis added)
But what of the equally scriptural notion that “many are called though few are chosen” (Matthew
22:14)? Augustine has a somewhat tortured answer: If God wil s to have mercy on men, he can
call them in a way that is suited to them, so that they will be moved to understand and to follow.
It is true, therefore, that many are called but few chosen. Those are chosen who are effectually
called. Those who are not effectually called and do not obey their calling are not chosen, for
although they were called they did not follow . . . [A]lthough He calls many, it is on those whom
he calls in a way suited to them so that they may follow that he has mercy.105
(I,2,13, emphasis added)
104 Nemo enim credit qui non vocatur. Misericors autem Deus vocat nullis hoc vel fidei meritis
largiens, quia merita fidei sequuntur vocationem potius quam praecedunt.
105 [S]i vellet etiam ipsorum misereri, posset ita vocare, quomodo illis aptum esset, ut et
moverentur et in-tellegerent et sequerentur. Verum est ergo: Multi vocati, pauci electi. Illi enim
electi qui congruenter vocati, illi autem qui non congruebant neque contemperabantur vocationi
non electi, quia non secuti quamvis vocati . . .
etiamsi multos vocet, eorum tamen miseretur quos ita vocat, quomodo eis vocari aptum est ut
sequantur.
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Presumably he means something like this: if I cordially invite some friends to a great feast, and
do so in a compel ing manner, surely they will come; but if to others I issue the invitation in a
language I know they will not understand, or in a style they are sure to find repugnant, then they
will pay no heed. The logic of this idea is impeccable. But applying it to the Creator, one has to
wonder about the justice of it.
Here, with one decisive (some would say horrifying106) stroke, Augustine not only signals his
complete rejection of the perfectionism of the classical tradition (though the formal framework of
teleological eudaimonism awkwardly remains, a hollowed-out shel ), but he also introduces an
apparently arbitrary element into the quest for beatitude: to those whom God has, for hidden
reasons, predestined for happiness He gives the grace to believe and to develop the virtues by
which they will “merit” eternal life. Augustine makes no pretense of understanding how such an
arrangement can be called just. He can only plead for Simplician to “believe that this belongs to
a certain hidden equity that cannot be searched out by any human standard of measurement”107
(I,2,16). That he himself saw the significance of his shift in Ad Simplicianum is shown in his
remark, more than thirty years later in Retractationes, the final review of his life’s work, that
“in answering this question [about our role in our own salvation] I tried hard to maintain the free
choice of the human wil , but the grace of God prevailed”108
( Retr. II,1,1). This shift to the supremacy of grace over free will in the human search for
beatitude is, in Peter Brown’s phrase, “one of the most important symptoms of that profound
change that we call ‘The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages.’”109
For our purposes what is most important is the reflection on the will that is implied in
Augustine’s embrace of the doctrine of predestination, and in 106 For example Kurt Flasch in his
introduction to Logik des Schreckens: Augustinus von Hippo, die Gnadenlehre von 397 (Mainz:
Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1990).
107 credatur . . . esse alicuius occultae atque ab humano modulo investigabilis aequitatis . . .
108 In cuius quaestionis solutione laboratum est quidem pro libero arbitrio voluntatis humanae,
sed vicit Dei gratia. Augustine apparently means that, once he had carefully considered Romans
9, he could no longer maintain the position he had taken in DLA that nothing “is so much in the
power of the will as the will itself.” The will is not in its own power, and can choose the true
good only through the aid of grace, which it cannot command or even truly request. Peculiarly,
although Augustine himself pointed out this enormous shift in his thinking, the significance of
the shift that began with ad Simplicianum—on which he himself insisted—is often ignored. The
letter is, for example, not mentioned in Scott MacDonald’s comprehensive article on Augustine
in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, eds. J. J. C. Gracia and T. B. Noone (Oxford:
Blackwel , 2003), 154–71; nor in Irwin’s even more extensive treatment of Augustine’s doctrine
of will in Development. Christopher Kirwan mentions the letter, but not its importance for the
wil , in his Augustine. By contrast, the text is extensively discussed by James Wetzel, Augustine
and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and its significance is
also apparent in Stump, “Augustine on Free Wil .”
109 Brown, Hippo, 369–70.

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particular an important distinction that Augustine made repeatedly to ward off the claim that his
notion of grace abolished human freedom. Here is one expression of it:
God gives us two different things: that we wil , and what we wil . That we will He has willed to
be both his and ours, His because He calls us, ours because we follow when called. But what we
will He alone gives, that is, to be able to act well and live happily forever.110
( Ad Simp. I,2,10, emphasis added)
“That we wil ” (or the power to wil ) must, in this context, mean what he calls elsewhere “free
choice (or consent)”; this is still ours in spite of the Fall. But
“what we wil ” is different: “He alone gives” us that. And, as Augustine makes clear, this is what
we could call our “primary motivation.” It includes, but goes beyond, Aristotle’s boulêsis, our
rational desire for the good as we conceive it.
Augustine’s “what we wil ” is first and foremost shown in what we in fact most want in life, and
not merely in what we rationally think is most desirable. No one has been clearer than Augustine
in insisting on the distinction between these two. “What we most want” he frequently describes
in terms of the agent’s “love,”
her basic structure of desires. In our fallen condition, marked by both “ignorance and difficulty,”
this love is self-oriented concupiscence. But God can give us—
and did give him, Augustine believes—a new and selfless love of God in grace (or at least the
beginnings of such). Over the ages this love is fashioning the City of God, that community of
believers across time and space who through grace are able to love God for His own sake and
whose performance of good deeds, again through grace, destines them for eternal happiness.111
Whether Augustine was truly forced to this somber, indeed shocking, view by St. Paul’s teaching
in Romans is a disputed theological point that goes beyond the bounds of this study.112 But his
implicit view of the will is highly interesting in itself. Consider this astute claim in Ad
Simplicianum: Who has it in his power to have present to his mind a motive such that his will
shall be influenced to believe? Who can welcome in his mind 110 Aliter enim Deus praestat ut
velimus, aliter praestat quod voluerimus. Ut velimus enim et suum esse voluit et nostrum, suum
vocando nostrum sequendo. Quod autem voluerimus solus praestat, id est posse bene agere et
semper beate vivere.
111 The fate Augustine foresees for those who constitute the opposed City of Man is terrible
indeed.
112 For some reflections on Augustine’s views and their subsequent influence see Galen
Johnson,
“The Protestant Reformers’ Readings of Romans 9–11, with Modern Critical Response”
Quodlibet Journal, 6:1 (2004).
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something which does not give him delight? But who has it in his power to ensure that
something that will delight him will turn up, or that he will take delight in what turns up? If those
things delight us which serve our advancement towards God, that is due not to our own whim or
industry or meritorious works, but to the inspiration of God and to the grace which he bestows.
He freely bestows upon us voluntary assent, earnest effort, and the power to perform works of
fervent charity.113
(I,2,21)
What Augustine addresses here is what we might call the mystery of human motivation, which
crucially involves the element of “delight” ( delectatio). He regarded delight as an essential
moment in the genesis of sin, which typically progresses from suggestion to delight to
consent,114 but the text just quoted shows that the point holds for action more generally. The
“suggestions” to act are all around us, but they affect people differently. Why, for instance, is
one sibling indifferent to the blandishments of, say, alcohol or sex, taking little or no delight in
them, while the other, with the same upbringing, responds to them strongly? This kind of
question puzzled those ancients who asked, as in the Meno, whether virtue can be taught at
all.115 Everything depends on the pupil acquiring the proper motivation, i.e., taking delight in
the right sorts of things; but wel -known examples suggest that teaching, training, and the general
influence of a good family can go only so far in bringing about such a desirable state of
character. Something else, something unfathomable and mysterious seems also to be at work. For
Augustine it is the presence or absence of God’s grace.
Augustine thinks the doctrine of divine election formally solves this problem, though admittedly
at the price of substituting an even deeper mystery, i.e., why God elects some and not others.116
From our point of view the solution is especially important, since it identifies the human wil —in
the sense of one’s central 113 Quis habet in potestate tali viso attingi mentem suam, quo eius
voluntas moveatur ad fidem? Quis autem animo amplectitur aliquid quod eum non delectat? Aut
quis habet in potestate, ut vel occurrat quod eum delectare possit, vel delectet cum occurrerit?
Cum ergo nos ea delectant quibus proficiamus ad Deum, inspiratur hoc et praebetur gratia Dei,
non nutu nostro et industria aut operum meritis comparatur, quia ut sit nutus voluntatis, ut sit
industria studii, ut sint opera caritate ferventia, ille tribuit, ille largitur.
114 Cf., e.g., De Trinitate 12.12 and De sermone Domini in monte 12.34–35.
115 Augustine visited similar mysterious issues in his early dialogue, De Magistro.
116 In “Augustine on Free Wil ” (139–41) Eleonore Stump makes an interesting case that
Augustine could have avoided this unattractive form of determinism if he had recognized, as
Aquinas would do eight centuries later, a third possibility for the wil : to accept God’s grace, to
reject it, but also: to do neither, thus leaving room both for God to be the sole determiner of
salvation and for the soul to cooperate with God by not rejecting grace. A rather similar dialectic
seems to have been at work in Wittgenstein’s ruminations on activity and passivity in the process
of working toward his own redemption. Cf. Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New
York: The Free Press, 1990), 408–13.
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motivation—as the sine qua non of salvation, and simultaneously strips it of power to effect that
salvation. In speaking of why “harlots and actors” can suddenly be converted and saved while
sober citizens are apparently passed over, Augustine remarks:
The only possible conclusion is that it is wills that are elected [by God].
But the will itself cannot in any way be moved unless something presents itself to delight and stir
the mind. That this should happen is not in any man’s power.117
(I,2,22, emphases added)
The wil , both in its guise of primary motivational complex,118 and also as our capacity to
choose, is clearly the central player in Augustine’s drama of salvation.
As Charles Kahn puts it, “the will of man is the stage on which the drama of God’s grace is to be
acted out.”119 We should note just how this differs from Aristotle. For him, too, the right wil ,
boulêsis, is essential to the practice of virtue and thus to the achievement of happiness. But
Aristotle apparently thinks that a stable boulêsis of this sort is attainable by habituation, the
repeated performance of virtuous actions.
Indeed, for Aristotle, the virtuous person finds the highest forms of delight principally (if not
exclusively) in the performance of virtuous actions for their own sake, an achievement that
Augustine seems to regard as (normally) unattainable in this life, even with the help of divine
grace. Perhaps unaided humans can achieve something like Aristotelian virtue, but unguided by
divine grace such “virtue” constitutes only a form of pride or self-glorification, i.e., because of its
self-reliance (instead of reliance on God) it is not true virtue at all.120 What we have here is a
117 Restat ergo ut voluntates eligantur. Sed voluntas ipsa, nisi aliquid occurrerit quod delectet
atque invitet animum, moveri nullo modo potest. Hoc autem ut occurrat, non est in hominis
potestate.
118 Here I agree substantially with Nico W. den Bok, “Freedom of the Wil : a Systematic and
Biographical Sounding of Augustine’s Thoughts on Human Wil ,” Augustiniana 44 (1994): 237–
70.
119 Cf. Kahn, “Discovering the Wil ,” 258. Cf. also Gerd Van Riel, who when speaking of
Augustine’s view of the will from Book III of DLA onward, says: “The will becomes the center
of a person’s morality, and many different aspects that played a role in earlier works are now
subsumed under the wil ” (“Augustine’s Wil ,” 277).
120 Cf. City of God, XIX, 25. Stil , we would undoubtedly rather have such people as our
companions and fellow citizens than the vicious. Augustine might agree, but these “companions”
are not the best, however valued they might be for earthly peace. Be that as it may, if virtues are
habits that produce virtuous actions, Augustine may seem now to have abandoned the point of
view so prominent in book II of DLA that “no one uses the virtues wrongly” ( virtutibus nemo
male utitur) (II,19,50), since sincere pagans apparently perform such actions, but with the wrong
goal in mind: they seek not God through grace, but the perfection of self through their own
efforts. The good or bad use of virtuous behavior depends on the will—and in particular its
direction toward God or self—of the one who uses them. Cf. Van Riel, “Augustine’s Wil ,” 277.
Irwin has a nuanced discussion of Augustine on pagan virtue, in Development, §§226–34.
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new notion of wil : the “will of grace,” and with it a new notion of virtue—worked by God—and
thus of human perfection, one with a more pronounced supernal orientation. In this new notion
concepts alien to classical ethics—e.g., human humility, unworthiness, and powerlessness—play
an important role.
From the composition of the first two books of DLA in the 380s right to the dramatic end of his
long life in 430, the complex notion of will remains at the focus of the drama that is Augustine’s
soteriology, but its dependence on grace has some peculiar consequences, as became clearer in
his controversy with the Pelagians. In denying, or restricting the influence of, original sin, they
had made each individual largely, if not entirely, responsible for her own salvation. Pelagius, in
his letter to the Roman noblewoman Demetrias in 413, noted that this responsibility is in the first
instance our own:
Whenever I give moral instruction, I first try to demonstrate the inherent power and quality of
human nature. I try to show the wonderful virtues which all human beings can acquire. Most
people look at the virtues in others, and imagine that such virtues are far beyond their reach. Yet
God has implanted in every person the capacity to attain the very highest level of virtue.121
( PL 30,17B, emphasis added)
In Pelagius’s hands this notion led to a strong rigorism and a stress on obedience to every single
commandment of God. This was not at all to Augustine’s liking.
In contrast to such rigorist ideals, and drawing on the doctrine of the supremacy of grace, he was
apt to reply by contrasting with an austere and saintly person the more common kind of
Christian. Perhaps surprisingly, he viewed the latter more leniently:
But another, who has good works from a right faith which works by love, maintains his
continence in the honesty of wedlock, although he does not, like the other, well refrain altogether
[from sexual intercourse], but pays and repays the debt of carnal connection, and has intercourse
not only for the sake of offspring, but also for the sake of pleasure, although only with his wife,
which the apostle allows to those that are married as pardonable;—does not receive injuries with
so much patience, but is raised into anger with the desire of vengeance, although, in order 121
Quoties mihi de institutione morum et sanctae vitae conversatione dicendum est, soleo prius
humane naturae vim qualitatemque monstrare, et quid efficere possit, ostendere ac jam inde
audientis animum ad species incitare virtutum. From The Letters of Pelagius, ed. Robert Van de
Weyer (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 1997).
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that he may say, “As we also forgive our debtors,” forgives when he is asked . . . [O]n account of
the right faith which he has in God, by which he lives, and according to which in all his wrong-
doings he accuses himself, and in all his good works praises God, giving to himself the shame, to
God the glory, and receiving from Him both forgiveness of sins and love of right deeds—[he]
shall be delivered from this life, and depart to be received into the company of those who shall
reign with Christ.
Why, if not on account of faith?122
( Contra duas, III,5,14)
The faithful, imperfect, even sinful Christian, conscious of his own weakness, is able—by
relying on God’s constant help—to ask forgiveness for his sins, perform good works (the “pious
labors” of DLA III,20,56) in this life, and thus
“depart to be received into the company of those who shall reign with Christ.” By contrast, the
Pelagian, trusting in his own efforts, is in mortal peril. Such is the will of grace. Why it is
provided to some and not others is a profound mystery.
Such mysteries, according to Augustine, we do well not to question. We turn now, finally, to the
ultimate fulfillment of this wil .
IV
We saw (in chapter 2) that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics advocates a decidedly
contemplative, indeed theological, version of happiness as the most desirable life for human
beings. In connection with that view I noted (ch. 2, p. 38) that “though the terminology of
‘image’ and ‘likeness’ is Platonic, rather than Aristotelian, it would not be a distortion to say that
in book X Aristotle presents the intellect as an image of the divine (or as ‘akin’ to it).”
Importantly for Augustine and other Christian thinkers, the notions of image and likeness have
not 122 Alius autem, habens quidem opera bona ex fide recta, quae per dilectionem operatur,
non tamen ita ut ille bene moratus, incontinentiam suam sustentat honestate nuptiarum, coniugii
carnale debitum et reddit et repetit, nec sola propagationis causa, verum etiam voluptatis,
quamvis cum sola uxore concumbit, quod coniugatis secundum veniam concedit Apostolus,
iniurias non tam patienter accipit, sed ulciscendi cupiditate fertur iratus, quamvis, ut possit
dicere: Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris, rogatus, ig-noscat, possidet rem familiarem,
faciens inde quidem eleemosynas, non tamen quam ille tam largus, non aufert aliena, sed
quamvis ecclesiastico iudicio, non forensi tamen repetit sua; nempe iste qui moribus illo
videturinferiori, propter rectam fidem quae illi est in Deum, ex qua vivit, et secundum quam in
omnibus delictis suis se accusati, in omnibus bonis operibus Deum laudat sibi tribuens
ignominiam, illi gloriam atque ab ipso sumens et indulgentiam peccatorum et dilectionem recte
factorum, de hac vita liberandus et in con-sortium cum Christo regnaturorum recipiendus
emigrat. Quare, nisi propter fidem? Translation of de hac vita corrected.
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only a Platonic, but above all a biblical root, in particular Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, Let us
make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”123 This inspired much speculation among early
Christian thinkers, particularly those with (Neo-)Platonic leanings, and especially among Eastern
Orthodox writers who took it to imply that divinization is the human destiny, either in the sense
of becoming “like to God,” or—more radically—“becoming God.”124 In the period of
Augustine’s conversion, he heard such ideas presented in the sermons of Bishop Ambrose in
Milan.125
Condensing a large topic to brief compass: this theme was a challenge for Augustine. On the one
hand, the idea has a scriptural basis (in addition to Genesis 1:26, it is found principally in Psalm
82:6, 2 Peter 1:4, John 1:12, and various places in Paul’s letters, e.g., Romans 8:29—where it is
explicitly connected to predestination—and 2 Corinthians 3:18), and was supported by an
impressive list of patristic thinkers (the most influential of whom was Origen). On the other
hand, Augustine had a deep and abiding sense of the tremendous gulf separating the Creator
from creatures, and especially us fallen ones. Part of his approach to the issue, for example in the
mature work De Trinitate, is to give the notion of divinization a particular interpretation: in this
life the human soul is an image and likeness, in the sense of an analog, of the Trinity;126
however, for the chosen, divinization—i.e., for Augustine, heavenly immortality127— becomes
a full reality in the vision of God after death:
And when the last day of life shall have found any one holding fast faith in the Mediator, . . . he
will be welcomed by the holy angels, to be led to God, whom he has worshipped, and to be made
perfect by Him; . . . For 123 New International Version, 1984.
124 The locus classicus for the general idea is found in Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373): The
Word was made man so that “we might be made God’’ (θεοποιηθῶμεν—from de Incarnatione
verbi Dei 54.3; PG 25: 192B). Many others echoed the same theme. The prospect of fulfil ing
“the highest of all desires,” i.e., “becoming God,” was held out by Basil of Caesarea, a
contemporary of both Augustine and Athanasius. Cf. his On the Holy Spirit, IX,20,23 [τὸ
ἀκρότατον τῶν ὀρεκτῶν, θεὸν
γινέσθαί]; and cf. the discussion of his views in Thomas Hopko, “The Trinity in the
Cappadocians,”
in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, eds. Bernard McGinn, John
Meyendorff, and Jean Leclerq (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1986).
125 Cf. Gerald McCool, S.J., “The Ambrosian Origin of St. Augustine’s Theology of the Image
of God in Man,” Theological Studies 20 (1959): 62–81.
126 In this analogy the human will (or love) represents the Holy Spirit. Cf. Bernard McGinn,
“The Human Person as Image of God, II: Western Christianity,” in McGinn, Meyendorff, and
Leclerq, Christian Spirituality: “Augustine insisted with Paul (1 Cor. 11:7) that the human
person can be said not only to be made ad imaginem (i.e., according to the Word) but also to be
in itself a true imago Dei (e.g., On the Trinity 7.6.12.),” 318.
127 Cf. Bernard McGinn, “Christ as Savior in the West,” in McGinn, Meyendorff, and Leclerq,
Christian Spirituality, 254.
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the likeness of God will then be perfected in this image, when the vision of God shall be
perfected.128
( On the Holy Trinity, 14,17,23)
On several occasions Augustine refers to this process as “deification.” As Gerald Bonner

remarks, he does so “in language so reminiscent of St. Athanasius as to suggest the possibility of
direct borrowing: ‘He who was God was made man to make gods those who were men’”129 (
Serm. 192, 1, 1). Bonner continues: Augustine is however clear that in deification there is no
change in the nature of man’s being: he remains a creature and is deified only by God’s grace.
Accordingly, in expounding the words of the psalmist: I said, Ye are gods ( Ps. 81,6/82,6),
Augustine declares: “It is clear that He [i.e., God] calls men gods through their being deified by
His grace and not born of His substance . . . If we are made sons of God, we are also made gods,
but this is done by the grace of adoption, and not by generation.”130
Genesis 1:26 is taken in a way that only the Son is properly an image of God; humans are
likenesses of the Image, made in His image and likeness: Nor is that a clumsy distinction
between the image and likeness of God, which is called Son, and that which is made in the image
and likeness of God, as we understand man to have been made.131
( QQ 83, 51,4, emphasis added.)
Two points: first, if it seems strange that, even with his restrictive provisos, the same Augustine
who thunders about the debility and ignorance of the human 128 In quo profectu et accessu
tenentem Mediatoris fidem cum dies vitae huius ultimus quemque compererit, perducendus ad
Deum quem coluit, et ab eo perficiendus excipietur ab Angelis sanctis, in-corruptibile corpus in
fine saeculi non ad poenam, sed ad gloriam recepturus. In hac quippe imagine tunc perfecta erit
Dei similitudo, quando Dei perfecta erit visio. Cf. the even more striking words of Sermon 166,
4: “God wants to make you God” ( Deus enim Deum te vult facere), albeit followed immediately
by a more sober “not by nature as in the case of him who gives you birth, but through gift and
adoption.”
129 Deos facturus qui homines erant, homo factus est qui deus erat. Cf. Gerald Bonner,
“Augustine’s Doctrine of Man: Image of God and Sinner,” Augustinianum 24 (1984): 495–514,
at 511.
130 Ibid., 512. The Augustine text is from Ennar. 49,2: Manifestum est ergo, quia homines dixit
deos, ex gratia sua deificatos, non de substantia sua natos . . . Si filii Dei facti sumus, et dii facti
sumus: sed hoc gratiae est adoptantis, non natura generantis. Cf. also O’Donovan, Problem of
Self-Love, 73–74, where reference is also made to a somewhat similar teaching in Plotinus.
131 Neque inscite distinguitur, quod aliud sit imago et similitudo Dei, qui etiam Filius dicitur;
aliud ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei, sicut hominem factum accipimus.
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soul could entertain any sort of “divinization,” one must note that in addition to the repeated
scriptural warrant, especially in his principal authority Paul, the idea of divinization is also
supported by classical epistemology, the principle that like is known by like.132 Only if we can
become “like God,” can we come to know God; and such knowledge is promised to the just.133
Second, it is nonetheless puzzling to say that human beings can be deified while at the same time
“there is no change in the nature of man’s being.” One wonders, for instance, what then is the
relationship between the beings we are in this life and the beings that are deified in the next? In
what sense can divinization be what we yearn for (as we saw, Basil of Caesarea, Augustine’s
older contemporary, spoke of “the highest of all desires, to become God”) if it is also beyond our
capacity or nature? This conceptual challenge reappears in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. His
approach to it, as we shall see in the following chapter, is basically in harmony with Augustine’s,
and creates the same sense of paradox.
Eckhart’s doctrine of the image proposes a way out of the paradox (and at the same time
provides the key to understanding his counsel to “live without why”).
For this study we should keep especially the following features of Augustine’s teaching in mind:
First, at no point, even under the influence of the pessimism that grew stronger in his later years,
does Augustine question the central tenet of eudaimonism, i.e., that the meaning and purpose of
human existence is the teleological one of attaining its goal or fulfillment, i.e., happiness, defined
as what everyone desires:
“What is a life of happiness? Surely what everyone wants, absolutely everyone without
exception”134 ( Conf. X,20,29). Where he parts company with Plotinus and others is in his
adherence to the view that “in the holy scriptures which the authority of the Catholic Church
guarantees, you [God] have laid down the way for human beings to reach that eternal life that
awaits us after death”135 ( Conf.
VII,7,11). The church provides the sole path to happiness, the fulfillment of which is in the next
life, and such fulfillment is possible only through grace; Second, as noted above (p. 56), in DLA
I,15, Augustine deplored our tendency to cling to “things that can be called ours only for a time”
( temporalia). For him, to treat things such as the body, freedom, our family and friends, and our
property with detachment is an essential step on the path toward salvation in the next life; this
notion will later be extended and radicalized by Eckhart; 132 Cf., for instance, Aristotle, de
Anima I,2, 404b17 (citing Plato: γινώσκεσθαι γὰρ τῷ ὁμοίῳ τὸ
ὅμοιον); and Metaphysics III.4, 1000b5: ἡ δὲ γνῶσις τοῦ ὁμοίου τῷ ὁμοίῳ.
133 Cf. McCool, “Ambrosian Origin,” 78–79.
134 Nonne ipsa est beata vita, quam omnes volunt et omnino qui nolit nemo est?
135 [I]n scripturis sanctis, quas Ecclesiae tuae catholicae commendaret auctoritas, viam te
posuisse salutis humanae ad eam vitam, quae post hanc mortem futura est.
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Third, and closely related, is the importance Augustine places on the sin of self-centeredness or
pride and its contrary virtue, humility. The former is the beginning of all sin, and is to blame for
the fall of Adam and Eve.136 Pride was the ruination of classical pagan thought. Rist has this to
say about the special place of humility in Augustine’s thought and its role in underscoring the
abyss that separates the human from the divine:
Humility is a peculiarly Christian virtue; it marks the proper human recognition that man is not
to confuse himself with God. Thus, like love, indeed as a special mode of Christian love,
humility too comes to suffuse the entire range of Christian virtues . . . If Socratic erôs is based on
a final confidence in the natural immortality of the human soul, and thus of a virtual equality
with the gods, Augustinian erôs, in its realistic (and hence humble, though far from groveling)
love for God, is able to do justice to the gulf between our fallen beauties and Beauty itself.137
Rist here applauds what he takes to be Augustine’s strong rejection of any hint that deification
could be somehow inherent in the nature of human beings. Yet if deification is nonetheless the
final destiny of the blessed, one wonders how the gulf can possibly be so great after all;
Finally, we should note that Augustine thought of humility in terms of bowing before God’s wil ,
i.e., we might say, in terms of “Thy will be done”: Your best servant is the one who is less intent
on hearing from you what accords with his own wil , and more on embracing with his will what
he has heard from you.138
( Conf. X,26,37, emphasis added)
To the very end, the will is the person for Augustine. For him, unlike Eckhart, “to live without
wil ” is a flatly self-contradictory notion.
One last aspect of Augustine’s treatment of will should be mentioned. He sometimes speaks of
the phenomenon of acting reluctantly ( invitus facere). He 136 Cf. City of God, XIV,13: “Our
first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil
act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will
but pride?” ( In occulto autem mali esse coeperunt, ut in apertam ino-boedientiam laberentur.
Non enim ad malum opus perveniretur, nisi praecessisset voluntas mala. Porro malae voluntatis
initium quae potuit esse nisi superbia? ) 137 Rist, Baptized, 158–59.
138 Optimus minister tuus est, qui non magis intuetur hoc a te audire quod ipse voluerit, sed
potius hoc velle quod a te audierit.
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means the sorts of actions Aristotle referred to as “mixed” ( NE III,1), i.e., where one feels
oneself forced by circumstances to do something voluntarily that one would rather not do (e.g.,
the ship captain who jettisons the cargo in a storm).
Not surprisingly, Augustine’s interest in such acts is theological: is there merit in doing the right
thing out of fear of divine punishment? The answer is a resounding “No!” For instance, before
the coming of divine grace into human history in the person of Jesus Christ, those who followed
the Commandments out of fear or other unworthy motives actually offended God:
[E]ven those who did as the law commanded, without the help of the Spirit of grace, did it
through fear of punishment and not from love of righteousness. Thus in God’s sight there was
not in their will that obedience which to the sight of men appeared in their work; they were rather
held guilty of that which God knew they would have chosen to commit, if it could have been
without penalty.139
( De Spir. , 8,13)
This notion of doing the right thing for an unworthy motive will come up again in our discussion
of Aquinas, and it receives a different and quite novel treatment in Meister Eckhart’s metaphor
of the “merchant mentality.” We see in Augustine’s view here perhaps a reflection of his
ruminations in Confessions VIII on his own divided wil : only a unified will can obey God fully
and correctly, and because of the penalty of original sin, only divine grace can unify the wil .
Augustine openly doubts that this unity is altogether achievable in this life even with the help of
grace, for concupiscence is inherent in the body.140 If unity were attainable, then such a will
would resemble that of Aristotle’s virtuous person in that in neither case is there even the
temptation to wander from the path. Of course if a unified will is impossible in this life (or at
least impossible without the most extraordinary grace141), the question for Augustine is idle. We
turn next to Thomas Aquinas’s full development of the various ideas about will that Aristotle and
Augustine had formulated.
139 [Q]uicumque faciebant quod lex iubebat non adiuvante spiritu gratiae, timore poenae
faciebant, non amore iustitiae. Ac per hoc coram Deo non erat in voluntate, quod coram
hominibus apparebat in opere, potiusque ex illo rei tenebantur, quod eos noverat Deus malle, si
fieri posset impune, committere.
140 Cf., for example, On Marriage and Concupiscence, I,30 (XXVII).
141 Augustine was very impressed by the fact that even St. Paul, who not only had been baptized
but was also the recipient of an extraordinary conversion experience as well as mystical visions,
was nonetheless apparently plagued by temptations: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am
unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin” (Rom. 7:14). It is tempting to see in Augustine’s decidedly
negative view of human concupiscence and its disquieting impulses a Stoic influence (perhaps
through Cicero).
Aquinas on Happiness and the Wil
“If we act on will, we form a conception of a universal good and an ultimate end, and we are
guided by it in acting as we do.” 1
Like all medieval thinkers in the Latin West, Thomas Aquinas of course knew and was heavily
influenced by the writings of Augustine, both directly and indirectly through authorities such as
Peter Lombard. Particularly in parts of his philosophical psychology and ethics—and not least in
his doctrine of wil —Thomas is indebted to the church father. In the parts of the Summa
Theologiae (STh) most pertinent to this study Augustine is cited more than any other Christian
authority, and his influence is decisive in certain key sections. Stil , the authority cited more
often by far on matters of the will was Aristotle. If Augustine “baptized ancient thought”2—
principally Stoicism and (Neo-)platonism—then one can as well say that Aquinas baptized
Aristotle. That is, he (preeminent among many others) showed one important kind of use that
could be made of “the Philosopher” in Christian thought.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was somewhat slow to engage the attention of medieval
Christian commentators (and, consequently, the ire of church authorities). By contrast, almost as
soon as Aristotle’s metaphysical and physical treatises were translated into Latin, they were
banned at the University of Paris (in 1210, a ban renewed by the papal legate in 1215). But the
few books of the Ethics then available were expressly permitted to be read, “if one so chooses,”
on the
“feast days” (of which there were approximately one hundred per year).3 It was 1 Terence Irwin,
Development of Ethics, 456, speaking of Thomas’s notion of wil .
2 To borrow from the subtitle of John Rist’s study of Augustine, cited in chapter 3.
3 Statutes for the University of Paris, 1215, text from the Internet Medieval Source Book, http://
www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/courcon1.html. As noted above, most of Aristotle’s nonlogical

writings had been lost to the Latin West for hundreds of years. Translations of small portions of
the Nicomachean Ethics first appeared in western Europe early in the thirteenth century, but
initially elicited relatively little attention.
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Aquinas on Happiness and the Will
87
only in the mid-thirteenth century, when the work as a whole was translated, that attention to the
Ethics increased. Thomas Aquinas was instrumental in making it a principal focus of philosophic
interest for the remainder of the Middle Ages and beyond, first with a careful commentary on the
Ethics, and then by incorporating significant features of it into his own influential moral
theology.4
Among the works of Aquinas addressed to moral themes are substantial parts of the Summa
Theologiae.5 In it, starting in the second main part (the prima secundae, or IaIIae), Thomas lays
out his ethic in a format structured somewhat like that in Aristotle’s NE: (a) in the “Treatise on
Happiness” (articles 1–5) he investigates the goal of life, that is, happiness or beatitude; (b) the
“treatise of human acts” (articles 6–21) is his detailed analysis of human action, including moral
action; (c) the “treatises on the passions, virtues and vices,” as well as the Gospel Beatitudes
(22–89), present his views on the role of these elements in the moral life; (d) in the “treatise on
law” (90–108) he sets out his influential view of “natural law”; while in the final six questions of
the IaIae he deals with grace.6 (The next segment of the Summa, the secunda secundae, is a
detailed theological investigation of individual virtues, wherein his treatment of the theological
virtues of faith, hope, and charity assumes the central place.) Our focus is of course more narrow.
In this chapter, as in those on Aristotle and Augustine, we begin with an initial sketch of
Aquinas’s view of the topic of happiness (blessedness, eudaimonia), then turn briefly to a recap
of what we discussed in chapter 1 of his philosophy of action and wil , and follow with an
overview of his complex doctrine of the virtues. Several unanswered questions raised by
Thomas’s treatment of the virtues will lead us back to his conception—a problematic one, I will
argue—of happiness itself, the summum bonum. At the end of the chapter we look at Thomas’s
interpretation of Genesis 1:26: human beings as image and likeness of God, and Thomas’s theory
4 The first fruits of Thomas’s study are found in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics, compiled as he was embarking on his Summa Theologiae ( Sententia Libri Ethicorum,
hereafter SLE, trans. C.J. Litzinger, O.P. [Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993]). This
commentary was made possible by Robert Grosseteste’s first full Latin translation of the NE in
the late 1240s (and especially the revised edition of 1260). Thomas’s efforts, along with two
similar works by Albert the Great, spurred a veritable explosion of commentarial interest—not
all of it favorable—in Aristotle’s ethical thought. The chronology is described by István Bejczy,
in the introduction to his edited volume, Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , 1200–1500
(Leiden-Boston: Bril , 2008).
5 Among the others are two of the Questiones Disputatae (the De Malo and the De Virtutibus),
the Summa contra Gentiles, and the Scriptum super Sententiis.
6 The formal similarity to the Nicomachean Ethics, though not complete, is substantial,
especially if one concedes parallel functions to the treatise on law and Aristotle’s Politics, which
Aristotle himself regarded as the continuation of the NE. He, of course, does not have a doctrine
of divine grace. On the structural similarities of the two works see Irwin, Development of Ethics,
439–40.
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of analogy that underlies his understanding. This will provide a bridge to the metaphysics of
Meister Eckhart in chapter 5.
Thomas begins his major presentation of ethics with the Treatise on Happiness, “the centerpiece
in the construction of the Summa Theologiae.”7 Here, he initially hews closely to Aristotle’s
argumentation in the NE: in Question 1 he establishes that “the human being’s ultimate end is his
complete good”
(1,6,ad 1), and that this is the same for all humans, i.e., happiness or beatitude (I,7).8 It follows,
he argues in Questions 2 and 3, that our happiness cannot consist in wealth, power, sensory
pleasure, etc., as none of these can fully satisfy our desire. But, pace Aristotle, neither can virtue,
nor contemplation, nor any “created good”: none of them singly, nor all together, can fully
satisfy us.9 In thus rejecting the notion that a life of the moral and/or intellectual virtues could
constitute our happiness, Aquinas steps decisively beyond the framework of Aristotle: our
longing for perfect fulfillment implies that the only thing that can satisfy us is the eternal
possession of God in the Beatific Vision of the divine essence, the vision that “makes us blessed”
or happy10 (2,8,obj. 3). The teleological drive built into our nature points inexorably (though, I
will suggest, perhaps paradoxically) to this supernatural completion. The happiness we seek can
be fully realized only in that Vision. However, such a completion is “beyond the nature not only
of humans, but of all creatures,” and thus cannot be attained except with the aid of divine
grace11 (5,5,c).
Thus, although Aquinas is often and appropriately called an “Aristotelian,”
this must not blind us to the significance of his radical departure in 2,8 from Aristotle on the
question of eudaimonia: no created or finite good can satisfy 7 Servais Pinckaers, O.P.,
“Beatitude and the Beatitudes in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae,” in The Pinckaers Reader:
Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, eds. John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 117.
8 His argument, which follows Aristotle, is the controversial one referred to earlier, in chapter 2,
note 1. The gist is that properly human action is goal oriented, that there must be a final goal for
each action, but necessarily there can be only one ultimate goal, which all agree is happiness. We
will look at it in more detail later in this chapter, when we discuss Thomas’s analysis of human
action. Cf. also MacDonald, “Ultimate Ends.”
9 As we saw in chapter 2, Aristotle’s own conception of happiness seems to vacil ate in his two
major ethical works between the “perfect” good (the best of all activities, that is, contemplation)
and the “complete” good (that is, a set of activities so satisfying that nothing could be added to it
that would make it more satisfying). Anthony Kenny claims that Aquinas, though ostensibly
following the former line in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, adopts the latter in the
Summa.
Cf. his “Aquinas on Aristotelian Happiness,” in Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of
Norman Kretzmann, eds. Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1999), 15–27. But in fact it seems that Thomas’s mature view combines both aspects:
there is a single perfect Good, possession of which is completely satisfying.
10 [E]fficitur beatus.
11 supra naturam non solum hominis, sed etiam omnis creaturae.
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human desire, and thus no such good can constitute our happiness.12 First of all, Aristotle did
not think of human happiness in terms of any object, whether created or not, but rather in terms
of excellent and sustained performance of the best activity for human beings ( NE I.7, 1098a3-4).
Second, and consequently, he saw no use in his ethics for any transcendent good. Indeed, in NE
I.6 he argues at length against his “friends,” the Platonists, that
even if there is some one good which is universally predicable of goods or is capable of separate
and independent existence, clearly it could not be achieved or attained by man, but we are now
seeking something attainable.13
(1096b32–35)
If we understand the “universal good” to be God, then Aristotle seems here to dismiss (in
advance, as it were) the Christian belief that the highest goal of life is to see God “face to face” (I
Cor. 12), which he would scarcely regard as a
“human activity.”14 In his commentary on NE Thomas ignores the clash, apparently taking
Aristotle to be referring to what we can make use of “in this life”15
( SLE,I,lect.9,n.11). Nor does he comment in the Treatise on Happiness on his own departure
from “the Philosopher” in what is an otherwise largely Aristotelian presentation. His embrace of
the Neoplatonic view is plainly mediated by Augustine, who is Thomas’s authority at just those
crucial non-Aristotelian points in the STh IaIIae. First, in 2,7, s.c., when Aquinas emphasizes the
central importance of the object in which our beatitudo consists, it is Augustine who is cited:
“That (object) which constitutes a life of happiness is to be loved for itself”16 ( DDC, I,22,20);
and in 2,8,s.c., where Thomas rejects the idea that beatitudo consists in any created good,
Augustine is again quoted, this time from City of God: “As the soul is the life of the body, so
God is man’s life of happiness”17
( DCD, XIX,26).
12 [I]mpossibile est beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo bono creato. Beatitudo enim est bonum
perfectum, quod totaliter quietat appetitum.
13 εἰ γὰρ καὶ ἔστιν ἕν τι τὸ κοινῇ κατηγορούμενον ἀγαθὸν ἢ χωριστὸν αὐτό τι καθ᾽ αὑτό, δῆλον
ὡς
οὐκ ἂν εἴη πρακτὸν οὐδὲ κτητὸν ἀνθρώπῳ: νῦν δὲ τοιοῦτόν τι ζητεῖται.

14 Contemplation of divine objects, Aristotle’s own preferred “highest form of human
happiness”
is, by contrast, a form of “study” ( theôrein), the exercise or activity of our highest human
capacity.
He might perhaps have been able to regard Thomist beatitude as a form of philia, friendship—
since friends take delight in one another’s presence, but Aristotle’s God could have no interest at
all in human beings. On the other hand, Aquinas might insist that the Beatific Vision is indeed an
activity, though it is one we can only exercise thanks to God’s grace.
15 Loquitur enim in hoc libro philosophus de felicitate, qualis in hac vita potest haberi.
16 [I]d in quo constituitur beata vita, propter se diligendum est.
17 [U]t vita carnis anima est, ita beata vita hominis Deus est.
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A key factor in Aquinas’s turn toward a Christian/Platonic notion of human happiness, i.e., the
idea that it consists in the vision of a supreme and transcendent Good, is a claim about the will in
2,8, that it is in a certain way insatiable (or nearly so), in that it is oriented by its nature to the
bonum universale, taken now as meaning not simply “good in general,” but—more strongly—the
universal source of all goodness. Here is the body of the reply: It is impossible for any created
good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite
altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired.
Now the object of the wil , i.e., of man’s appetite, is the universal good ( universale bonum); just
as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that naught can lull man’s
wil , save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because
every creature has goodness by participation. Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of
man.18
(2,8,c., emphasis added)
This conception of wil —which is problematic, as I will urge below19—does not have any
obvious parallel in Aristotle, but instead seems clearly, like the notion of the transcendent Good
as our goal, to be Platonic in origin, reminiscent of the motivational role assigned to erôs in the
Symposium.20 Kevin Staley traces 18 [I]mpossibile est beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo bono
creato. Beatitudo enim est bonum perfectum, quod totaliter quietat appetitum, alioquin non esset
ultimus finis, si adhuc restaret aliquid appe-tendum. Obiectum autem voluntatis, quae est
appetitus humanus, est universale bonum; sicut obiectum intellectus est universale verum. Ex
quo patet quod nihil potest quietare voluntatem hominis, nisi bonum universale. Quod non
invenitur in aliquo creato, sed solum in Deo, quia omnis creatura habet bonitatem participatam.
Unde solus Deus voluntatem hominis implere potest.
19 As is the argument of 2,8 itself; for if the term “universal good” simply means God, the
premise asserts the same as the conclusion, and the latter becomes true by definition. The
argument’s prima facie plausibility turns on Thomas’s earlier characterization of the object (in
the grammatical sense) of the will as “the end and the good in universal,” finis et bonum in
universali (1,2,ad 3). This is a classical notion: just as the object of intellect is not some
particular thing, but the universal (the form or essence), so the object of wil , as rational appetite,
is not any particular good, but the idea of goodness. These are statements about the rational (as
opposed to sensual) nature of intellect and wil :
“there can be no will in those things that lack reason and intellect, since they cannot apprehend
the universal” [ non potest esse voluntas in his quae carent ratione et intellectu, cum non possint
apprehendere universale] (ibid.). But in 2,8 this grammatical point becomes an existential
assertion: the universal good is God. Hence I take the argument to turn on an equivocation.
20 There Socrates reports the teaching of Diotima: “‘Now then,’ she said, ‘Can we simply say
that people love ( erôsin) the good?’ ‘Yes,’ said I. ‘But shouldn’t we add that, in loving it, they
want the good to be theirs?’ ‘We should.’ ‘And not only that,’ she said. ‘They want the good to
be theirs forever, don’t they?’ ‘We should add that too.’ ‘In a word then, love ( erôs) is wanting
to possess the good
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Thomas’s source to Augustine’s early De beata vita (386 CE).21 Be that as it may, we have in
these early sections of the Treatise on Happiness a good example (which we will see repeated
later in Thomas’s treatment of virtue) of the overlapping influences of both Aristotle and
Augustine in his work. Whether he is able to make these influences fully compatible with one
another is open to question.
Several other significant non-Aristotelian elements in the IaIIae should be mentioned briefly.
First, we noted in chapter 2 the long-standing debate about whether Aristotle accords any role to
reason in one’s coming to have the correct life-goal. He certainly stresses a developmental
process (consisting especially of habituation) as opposed to deliberation and rational choice:
“Moral excellence,”
he says, “comes about as a result of habit”22 ( NE II.1, 1103a16–17). We did find grounds for
thinking that Aristotle does not rule out a role for reason, but the issue is contested. Not so in the
case of Aquinas. Thomas argues that the moral life is rooted in innate practical principles and
that these are in part cognitive in nature, not merely the result of wel -trained emotions. He even
projects this view back into Aristotle. For example, when commenting on what the Philosopher
says in NE II.1 about the acquisition of virtue, Thomas writes: The perfection of moral virtue . . .
consists in reason’s control of the appetite. Now the first principles of reason, no less in moral
than in speculative matters, have been given us by nature.23 ( SLE II,lect.4,n.7) Aquinas is
appealing here to a Christian patristic doctrine: the human mind has the natural disposition or
habit called “synderesis,” which directly apprehends forever.’” [ἆρ’ οὖν, ἦ δ᾽ ἥ, οὕτως ἁπλοῦν
ἐστι λέγειν ὅτι οἱ ἄνθρωποι τἀγαθοῦ ἐρῶσιν; ναί, ἔφην. τί δέ; οὐ προσθετέον, ἔφη, ὅτι καὶ εἶναι
τὸ ἀγαθὸν αὑτοῖς ἐρῶσιν; προσθετέον. ἆρ’ οὖν, ἔφη, καὶ οὐ μόνον εἶναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀεὶ εἶναι; καὶ
τοῦτο προσθετέον. ἔστιν ἄρα συλλήβδην, ἔφη, ὁ ἔρως τοῦ τὸ ἀγαθὸν αὑτῷ εἶναι
ἀεί] (206a). Transl. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John
M.
Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publ. Co., 1997), 489. On Augustine’s complex relation to the
concept of erôs, cf. Rist, Augustine, ch. 5.
21 Kevin M. Staley, “Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas on the Good and the Human Good: A
Note on Summa Theologiae I-II QQ 1-3,” The Modern Schoolman, 62 (May 1995): 311–22, at
320. Staley makes a persuasive case for the non-Aristotelian character of Aquinas’s treatment of
the will and the summum bonum in IaIIae, though his claim for De beata vita limps somewhat,
since Thomas does not cite that work in IaIIae 1–3. For a more general examination of Platonic
elements in Thomas’s ethics, see Gerson, “Plato, Aquinas and the Universal Good.” Gerson finds
a marked similarity between Plato and Aquinas in their common critiques of self-love or pride
(and, as noted earlier, we can add Augustine to this list, who makes a very similar point).
22 ἡ δ᾽ [ἀρετή] ἠθικὴ ἐξ ἔθους περιγίνεται.
23 [P]erfectio virtutis moralis . . . consistit in hoc, quod appetitus reguletur secundum rationem.
Prima autem rationis principia sunt naturaliter nobis indita, ita in operativis sicut in
speculativis.
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the first principles of practical reason implanted in us by the Creator: the good is to be done and
evil avoided.24 This disposition plays an important role in Thomas’s theory of natural law.
Whether the Christian doctrine has a Stoic fore-bear or not, nothing as definite as its emphasis on
the rational apprehension of our final end is to be found in Aristotle.25 This is a clear case of
Thomas anachro-nistically “reading-in.”
In chapter 2 we also saw another debate among Aristotle scholars, this one about whether in the
NE Aristotle claims that contemplation alone constitutes human eudaimonia. The “exclusivists”
think so, while “inclusivists” argue that
“complete” happiness for Aristotle encompasses both contemplation and the moral excellences,
with the latter representing a genuine, though secondary and inferior, happiness. Although
Thomas is more wil ing than Augustine to speak of the possibility of a kind of happiness in this
earthly life (and to see “ordinary”
contemplation as constituting the highest such happiness), there is no doubt at all that for him the
best of what can be attained in via pales before the happiness of the Beatific Vision in patria, i.e.,
in the life to come: We unconditionally concede that the true beatitude of man is after this life.
We do not deny, however, that there is able to be some participation of beatitude in this life, in so
far as a man is perfect, primarily in the good of speculative reason, and, secondarily, of practical
reason.26
( SENT,IV,d.49,I,I,4c.)
24 St. Jerome initiated what became the medieval debate about synderesis, e.g., in his
commentary on the vision of Ezekiel; see Commentariorum In Hiezekielem, ed. Franciscus
Glorie, CCSL 75
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1964), 12, 217–36. Cf. the discussion of synderesis in Bradley, Aquinas on
the Twofold, 153 and 244 ff.
25 Of course Thomas well understands that a “rational apprehension” of the end proper to
humans cannot qua rational move us to act to attain it: we must also desire it. It is thus crucial
that this same end apprehended by synderesis be what we naturally desire. And this is in fact the
case, in spite of the disorder introduced into the human soul by original sin. Our will is naturally
oriented to the good, and—as rational desire—to the good in general: “Good in general [is what]
the will tends to naturally, as does each power to its object; and again it is the last end, which
stands in the same relation to things appetible, as the first principles of demonstrations to things
intel igible.” [ Hoc autem est bonum in communi, in quod voluntas naturaliter tendit, sicut etiam
quaelibet potentia in suum obiectum, et etiam ipse finis ultimus, qui hoc modo se habet in
appetibilibus, sicut prima principia demonstrationum in intel-ligibilibus.] (IaIIae, 10,1,c.). As
Bradley notes, “The natural law has an intellectual and an appetitive source” ( Aquinas on the
Twofold, 325). If the two were not in fundamental agreement, there would be an ineradicable
contradiction in human nature, a state of affairs that would be contrary to both Aristotelian
teleology and the Christian notion of a providential Creator.
26 Et ideo simpliciter concedimus veram hominis beatitudinem esse post hanc vitam. Non
negamus tamen quin aliqua beatitudinis participatio in hac vita esse possit, secundum quod
homo est perfectus in bonis rationis speculativae principaliter, et practicae secundario; et de hac
felicitate philosophus in Lib.
Ethic. determinat, aliam, quae est post hanc vitam, nec asserens nec negans. Thomas seems thus
to be both an exclusivist (about “true beatitude”) and an inclusivist (with respect to “beatitude in
this life”).
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There are difficulties about this view, as we will see, but not much room for controversy about
what Thomas’s intent is.
Finally, Aquinas’s brief but influential remarks on political theory show significant shifts from
Aristotle’s Politics (on which Thomas wrote an incomplete commentary). Among the enormous
changes in the political landscape since the death of Aristotle had been the eclipse of the Greek
city-states; the rise (and fall) of, first, the Roman Republic and then its successor empire in the
West; the emergence of the institutional Christian Church with sometimes powerful popes
leading it; the revival of the imperial ideal among the Carolingians and then the German
emperors; and the rise of national monarchies. None of these developments could well have been
foreseen by Aristotle, and perhaps most startling of all for him would have been the advent of an
influential and largely independent religious body—the Christian Church—that was destined to
clash with the political authorities for supremacy, and that furthermore would teach that human
perfection can be attained only through divine grace and in an afterlife. However much Thomas
may have learned from studying Aristotle’s Politics, the Philosopher’s theories had to be fitted to
a radically different context and combined with an evolving tradition of Christian thought about
obedience to secular authorities and the simultaneous obligation of such authorities to leave the
large and il -defined sphere of ecclesiastical matters in the hands of the church. This last issue led
to endless conflicts about the “two swords” (an issue that continues in various forms even
today27). Thomas endorses, under limited circumstances, the authority of the church to depose a
secular ruler. The underlying principle was that a valid human law must be in alignment with
natural law: As Augustine says ( DLA I,5,11,33), that which is not just seems to be no law at all.
Hence the force of a law depends on its justice. Now in human affairs a thing is said to be just
from being right, according to the rule of reason. But the first rule of reason is the law of nature .
. . Consequently, every human law has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the
law of nature. But if in any point it departs from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a
perversion of law.28
(IaIIae, 95,2,c.)
27 Consider the current dispute in the United States over whether religious organizations, qua
employers, may be compelled to pay for the health insurance of their employees if that insurance
covers contraceptive services that the employer finds contrary to the faith.
28 [S]icut Augustinus dicit, in I de Lib. Arb., non videtur esse lex, quae iusta non fuerit . Unde
inquantum habet de iustitia, intantum habet de virtute legis. In rebus autem humanis dicitur esse
aliquid iustum ex eo quod est rectum secundum regulam rationis. Rationis autem prima regula
est lex naturae . . . Unde omnis lex humanitus posita intantum habet de ratione legis, inquantum
a lege naturae derivatur. Si vero in aliquo, a lege naturali discordet, iam non erit lex sed legis
corruptio.
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In particular, Thomas teaches that a prince may be deposed if he has become an apostate or
heretic:
As soon as sentence of excommunication is passed on a man on account of apostasy from the

faith, his subjects are ipso facto absolved from his authority and from the oath of allegiance
whereby they were bound to him. 29
(IIaIIae,12,2,c.)
Like Aristotle, Thomas has a harsh opinion of tyranny, and allows that “the mul-titude” (i.e., the
populace) may “depose a king that they instituted, or bridle his power, if he should abuse the
royal power tyrannically.”30 But however much Thomas and the Philosopher agree in their
dislike of tyranny, the central concepts—of “natural law” and the “rule of reason”—on which
Thomas bases his dislike are not there in Aristotle.
To return to our main theme: having claimed in STh 2,8 that our happiness cannot consist in any
created good, Thomas goes on to argue in 3,8 that it must consist in the vision of the divine
essence (the Beatific Vision). But this claim introduces a paradoxical element—foreshadowed in
the Platonic concept of wil —into Aquinas’s doctrine of happiness, i.e., that the completion it
allegedly longs for is “beyond [our] capacity” ( supra naturam) (5,5,c.). But human nature is
equipped with “free choice [ liberum arbitrium], with which [a human being]
can turn to God, that He may make him happy”31 (ibid., ad 1).
Thomas certainly wants to be a teleological eudaimonist, every bit as much as Aristotle did. Yet,
from the point of view of virtue ethics his argument in the Treatise on Happiness leads him into a
dilemma: the most our unaided human nature is capable of is the “imperfect happiness (that) can
be acquired by man by his natural powers, in the same way as virtue, in whose operation it
consists.”32 (ibid., c.) Yet our wil —in a sense modeled ultimately, it seems, on Plato’s erôs—is
such that we long for a perfect happiness, the Beatific Vision that is beyond our means, and, in
Thomas’s view, could only be a divine gift to us as 29 [Q]uam cito aliquis per sententiam
denuntiatur excommunicatus propter apostasiam a fide, ipso facto eius subditi sunt absoluti a
dominio eius et iuramento fidelitatis quo ei tenebantur. Some have seen a line of influence here
from Aquinas to Locke to Thomas Jefferson.
30 [N]on iniuste ab eadem rex institutus potest destitui vel refrenari eius potestas, si potestate
regia tyrannice abutatur. On the Government of Rulers (De regimine principorum), I,7,7, trans.
James M.
Blythe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 76. Thomas’s authorship of this
work is disputed.
31 [Q]uo possit converti ad Deum, qui eum faceret beatum.
32 [B]eatitudo imperfecta quae in hac vita haberi potest, potest ab homine acquiri per sua
naturalia, eo modo quo et virtus, in cuius operatione consistit.
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a reward for our meritorious virtuous behavior. Two troubling questions arise.
First, can the notions of merit, an extrinsic reward, and virtue coexist in a coherent ethic?
Further, does it make sense to say that the happiness or fulfillment of creatures of a given nature
is “beyond the capacity” of that nature? Before we take up each of these questions in turn, it will
help to recall the discussion in chapter 1 of Aquinas’s teleological conception of human action
and of the wil ’s role therein.
Thomas’s analysis of human action itself is as thoroughly teleological as Aristotle’s, though far
more detailed and developed, and the space accorded to the notion of will ( voluntas) is vastly
greater.33 We saw that boulêsis (which can, contra Thomas, be at most partially identified with
wil ) receives less than a page of attention in the NE, while Thomas devotes nearly one hundred
pages to voluntas in STh, IaIIae (Questions 6 to 17) and roughly another twenty in the Treatise
on Human Nature, Ia, 82–83. The comparison by volume is somewhat unfair, however, since
Aristotle does discuss choice at length, and Thomas follows Augustine in making choice (
arbitrium, electio) part of will in its extended sense (along with intention, consent, use, and
enjoyment: none of these four latter notions receive treatment from Aristotle).34 At the same
time, and unlike Aristotle, Thomas was writing in a tradition that, since at least Augustine, had
devoted a great deal of careful attention to the analysis of sin (and, not least, original sin); hence
a thorough explication of the basis of any such analysis was of pressing concern to him.
In any event, for this study what is important to note are these three elements in Thomas’s view
of human action: that it is essentially a teleological notion; that at its core is the complex
Thomistic concept of wil , with its intrinsic orientation to the summum bonum; and that the role
of action in the human quest for beatitudo is mediated by the virtues and complicated by grace.
At the very start of the Treatise on Happiness, where Thomas speaks of “the ultimate end of
human life” ( de ultimo fine humanae vitae), he argues that it “belongs”—in a strong sense—to
human beings to act for an end:
Of actions done by a human being those alone are properly called
“human,” which are proper to the human qua human. Now the human 33 Comprehensive
discussions of his treatment of action and will are given in Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human
Action: A Theory of Practice (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1992);
Daniel Westberg, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994); and Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold; while a briefer overview is
offered by Donagan in “Thomas Aquinas on Human Action.”
34 In “Who Discovered the Wil ?” Irwin argues that Aristotle would (or at least should) have
been open to seeing choice, prohairesis, as the central notion of wil . But Aristotle’s prohairesis
is limited to a subset of actions, while from Augustine onward will is not.
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being differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master ( dominus) of his actions.
Wherefore those actions alone are properly called human, of which he is master. Now the human
being is master of his actions through his reason and wil 35 . . . Therefore those actions are
properly called human which proceed from a deliberate wil . And if any other actions are found
in a human being, they can be called actions “of a human being,” but not properly “human”
actions, since they are not proper to the human qua human. Now it is clear that whatever actions
proceed from a power, are caused by that power in accordance with the nature of its object. But
the object of the will is the end and the good.
Therefore all human actions must be for an end.36

(IaIIae,1,1,c)
“Every agent, of necessity, acts for an end”37 (1,2,c.): this is as true of animals and even
inanimate objects as it is of human beings. But among terrestrial beings only humans “move
themselves to an end, because they have dominion over their actions through their free choice”38
(ibid., emphasis added). Thus, it is a defining characteristic of human beings to act through their
own intellect and will for an end.39
In thus claiming such an expansive and defining role for teleology in human action, Thomas is
preparing the way for a further and weightier claim: that every human action has a last end, and
indeed the same end. The argument goes like this: every human action has, by definition, a final
end, something desired for its own sake and not for the sake of something further (the chain of
purposes must come to an end if action is ever to begin) (1,4). Second, each person can have 35
For Aristotle one is master ( kurios) of an action if it is performed voluntarily, which in some
sense implies reason, but does not necessarily involve what he calls wish or will ( boulêsis).
36 [A]ctionum quae ab homine aguntur, illae solae proprie dicuntur humanae, quae sunt
propriae hominis inquantum est homo. Differt autem homo ab aliis irrationalibus creaturis in
hoc, quod est suorum actuum dominus. Unde illae solae actiones vocantur proprie humanae,
quarum homo est dominus. Est autem homo dominus suorum actuum per rationem et voluntatem,
unde et liberum arbitrium esse dicitur facultas voluntatis et rationis. Illae ergo actiones proprie
humanae dicuntur, quae ex voluntate deliberata procedunt. Si quae autem aliae actiones homini
conveniant, possunt dici quidem hominis actiones; sed non proprie humanae, cum non sint
hominis inquantum est homo. Manifestum est autem quod omnes actiones quae procedunt ab
aliqua potentia, causantur ab ea secundum rationem sui obiecti. Obiectum autem voluntatis est
finis et bonum. Unde oportet quod omnes actiones humanae propter finem sint.
37 [O]mnia agentia necesse est agere propter finem.
38 [S]eipsa movent ad finem, quia habent dominium suorum actuum per liberum arbitrium.
39 Thomas does not claim that a casual gesture such as stroking the hair on one’s head need be
done for an end; but such acts, though done by a human being, are not properly “human acts”
since they “do not proceed from deliberation of [practical] reason, which is the proper principle
of human actions” (1,1,ad 3).
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only one final goal (since it is of the nature of the “perfect and crowning good” to be unique, for
if there were two essential components of that good—health and wealth, say—the conjunction of
them would necessarily be required for happiness, and thus together constitute the goal) (1,5).40
Third, he claims that this goal is necessarily the source of the motivation in every human action
an agent performs, as itself either the direct goal of that action or as that perfect good toward
which its direct goal tends ( appetatur ut tendens in bonum perfectum):
“Human beings must, of necessity, desire all, whatsoever they desire, for the last end”41 (1,6.c).
This seems to imply that if I, say, arrange to meet an acquaintance in town to chat with him over
tea, my action in doing so aims at, and perhaps achieves, a (partial) fulfillment of my ultimate
goal. In effect, Thomas is claiming that there are no independent chains of purposeful action in a
rational agent’s life; every such chain ultimately aims—either explicitly or implicitly—at the
same thing. Indeed, since we all share the same nature, this goal is the same for all: “a human
being’s last end is happiness, which all desire”42 (1,8,s.c). And this, he goes on to claim, can be
found only in the Beatific Vision (3,8).
One might say that the conclusion of this argument—that each of us desires just one ultimate end
in his or her life; indeed, we all desire the same end, which is the Beatific Vision as the goal
(implicitly) sought in every fully human action—is the very acme of “living with a why”: every
morally significant (i.e., deliberated) human action is done with a single ultimate purpose, to
attain the Beatific Vision (even if we are unaware that this is what we want). It is as if Thomas
sees no way to want any good that one can attain by acting without thereby (at least implicitly)
wanting the best of all possible goods as the final rationale for one’s deed.
At first glance this seems an extreme notion. Thomas can hardly have supposed that people
ordinarily think of their actions—e.g., meeting an acquaintance for tea—and those of others in
this way. Should I really add that part of the goal of my going for tea is also eventually to see
God? But Thomas seems not to be saying there is need for any conscious intention here, and the
idea of unconscious intention was presumably foreign to him. What then is left? The argument in
1,5,c begins this way:
It is impossible for a man’s will to be directed at the same time to diverse things, as last ends . . .
[for], since everything desires its own perfection, 40 Since Thomas wants to establish that each
of us deep down desires one specific end, i.e., the Beatific Vision, it hardly helps his argument to
claim that someone who regularly vacil ates between, say, a life of acquisition and a life of
asceticism is thereby seeking a single goal. Cf. Irwin, Development of Ethics, 453, n. 74.
41 [N]ecesse est quod omnia quae homo appetit, appetat propter ultimum finem.
42 [U]ltimus finis hominum est beatitudo; quam omnes appetunt.
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a man desires for his ultimate end that which he desires as his perfect and crowning good.43
And in 1,6,c he says:
Man must, of necessity, desire all, whatsoever he desires, for the last end.44
“Impossible,” “must of necessity”: Aquinas is plainly not making an empirical claim about what
people do, but instead a conceptual case about the relationship among the wil , its ultimate end,
and the perfect(ing) good. As Scott MacDonald has argued, Thomas is in effect analyzing the
notion of a fully rational agent as one whose will meets this criterion; otherwise his ultimate
desire (or desires, since Thomas’s claim is formally compatible with a conjunctive set of distinct
goods serving as one’s ultimate end) runs an unnecessary risk of frustration, which would be
irrational.45
Many have rejected Aquinas’s argument (and a similar one in Aristotle at the start of the NE).46
Whether ultimately defensible or not, it makes abundantly clear how goal directed Thomas’s
conception of the will and human action is.
I will not take a position on the validity of his argument. Instead, I wish to treat it as a kind of
zenith of Christian teleological eudaimonism, and point out for now several things that it
presupposes. First, human beings are finite creatures, and thus stand in need of—and have—a
goal or end that completes and perfects them. Second, it is the wil , as rational appetite, that (in
concert with the intellect) is focused on attaining the perfective good of human beings. Third, the
acts (in the Aristotelian sense of actualizations of a potency) by which the will properly tends
toward its goal are rational, intentional and virtuous human actions. And fourth, if these actions
are to be salvific, i.e., fully virtuous, they require divine grace as well as human effort. The
example in chapter 1 of Louise choosing to calm her nerves with Daoist breathing rather than
with alcohol is patterned on the Aquinas model (minus the inscrutable aspect of grace). But 43
[I]mpossibile est quod voluntas unius hominis simul se habeat ad diversa, sicut ad ultimos fines .
..
cum unumquodque appetat suam perfectionem, illud appetit aliquis ut ultimum finem, quod
appetit, ut bonum perfectum et completivum sui ipsius.
44 [N]ecesse est quod omnia quae homo appetit, appetat propter ultimum finem.
45 This is part of the argument in MacDonald, “Ultimate Ends,” cf. particularly 46–59.
46 Even as sympathetic a reader of the NE and the STh as G. E. M. Anscombe dismissed this
view.
Cf. Intention, §21. So did Anthony Kenny, “Aristotle on Happiness,” reprinted in Articles on
Aristotle, Vol. 2: Ethics and Politics, eds. J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji (London:
Duckworth, 1977).
MacDonald, in “Ultimate Ends,” has defended it against such criticisms, albeit with many
emenda-tions and caveats.
99
it is important to bear in mind that Thomas sees this pattern at work in every voluntary action.
Hence he believes someone such as Louise is (implicitly) seeking the Vision of God not only
when she is making what we would ordinarily recognize as a moral choice, but also when she
calculates the latest sales figures, decides not to add milk to her coffee during an afternoon break,
or chooses not to watch the latest televised episode of Downton Abbey. 47 We will return to this
topic in chapter 6. For now we turn to Thomas’s doctrine of the virtues.
As we saw, Aristotle defines virtue (or excellence) this way: Excellence, then, is a state
concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by
reason, and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.48
( NE, II.6, 1106b36–1107a1)
By “state” he means habit, and the form of reason that determines the mean is practical reason (
phronêsis). As for the all-important “way in which the man of practical wisdom would
determine” the mean, Aristotle had spelled that out earlier:
[I]f the acts that are in accordance with the virtues have themselves a certain character it does not
follow that they are done justly or temperately. The agent also must be in a certain condition
when he does them; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts,
and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and
unchangeable character.49 (II.4, 1105a29–32) Note: the virtuous person chooses to perform the
virtuous act for its own sake.
One might wonder why Aristotle thought this condition necessary. Why can’t we simply call
someone brave, for instance, if she or he stands firm in battle, for whatever reason? The answer
seems to be that Aristotle was above all interested in the development of good character. A
person of good character wil , for 47 Perhaps Thomas could have avoided this relentless
teleologism with a version of Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiesis. In that case her
action qua calculation of sales figures need not be seen as oriented to the final good (though,
again, it might be thus oriented qua fulfil ing a duty to her employer).
48 ἔστιν ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ὡρισμένῃ λόγῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν
ὁ
49 τὰ δὲ κατὰ τὰς ἀρετὰς γινόμενα οὐκ ἐὰν αὐτά πως ἔχῃ, δικαίως ἢ σωφρόνως πράττεται, ἀλλὰ
καὶ
ἐὰν ὁ πράττων πῶς ἔχων πράττῃ, πρῶτον μὲν ἐὰν εἰδώς, ἔπειτ᾽ ἐὰν προαιρούμενος, καὶ
προαιρούμενος
δι᾽ αὐτά, τὸ δὲ τρίτον ἐὰν καὶ βεβαίως καὶ ἀμετακινήτως ἔχων πράττῃ.
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example, do what is brave not only when it is pleasant or expedient to do so (or, as one might say
colloquially, “when it’s in her own interest”). Such actions—
done simply because they are brave—are examples of to kalon, the fine or noble or admirable:
The brave person . . . will face [dangers] as he ought and as reason directs, and he will face them
for the sake of what is noble; for this is the end of excellence.50
(III.7, 1115b10–13)
What is noble in such a deed is of course the deed itself; thus to do something for the sake of the
noble is to do it, qua virtuous deed, for its own sake. Hence motive is crucial, where motive here
means not the goal or intention of the action—to defeat the enemy, say—but rather its
psychological source in the agent. For example, three soldiers might all stand strong in battle,
one because it is kalon to do so, another because he is reckless, while the third perversely enjoys
carnage; only the first is brave in Aristotle’s sense, and the brave behavior proceeds from this
character trait, rather than from a vice (recklessness) or a base desire (bloodthirstiness).51 We
will return shortly to this question of performing virtuous deeds for their own sake in the case of
Thomas.
Measured simply by the sheer volume of the attention given to the virtues in his Summa, Thomas
is clearly a virtue ethicist. But his treatment is peculiar in a number of ways. When he gives what
one could call his own official definition of virtue,52 he quotes, as we saw, from Augustine’s
ideas in DLA II,19: “Virtue is a good quality of mind whereby we live rightly, which no one
misuses and that God works in us without us.”53 But at other times (e.g., in IaIIae 100,9)
Aquinas uses the definition of virtue given by Aristotle, though the two are very different in
spirit, as well as in various substantive points.54 Thomas was certainly not inclined to follow
orthodox Aristotelianism, which would require of him something like the fideist path of Boethius
of Dacia (to be discussed below, p. 109). But 50 ὁ δὲ ἀνδρεῖος ἀνέκπληκτος ὡς ἄνθρωπος.
φοβήσεται μὲν οὖν καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα, ὡς δεῖ δὲ καὶ ὡς ὁ
λόγος ὑπομενεῖ τοῦ καλοῦ ἕνεκα: τοῦτο γὰρ τέλος τῆς ἀρετῆς.
51 This sense of motive—as rooted in a character trait in the agent—will be important later for
our understanding of Eckhart’s “live without why.”
52 At STh IaIIae 55,4; and again at De Virtutibus I,2.
53 This particular authoritative citation is itself odd, since Augustine, whose focus in that work is
on the will and theodicy, seems not to be attempting a formal definition of virtue so much as
distinguishing it from free choice: both are goods, but the latter can, while the former cannot, be
misused.
54 Most strikingly, Augustine attributes all virtue to divine grace; while as we saw, Aristotle
stresses the virtuous agent’s choice of her deed “for its own sake.” Perhaps Thomas was trying to
downplay the differences to make his own adaptation of Aristotle more acceptable.
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he also did not want to condemn the Aristotelian approach outright. The result is a three-tiered
doctrine of virtue: “acquired”—these would be virtues in the Aristotelian mode; “theological”—
faith, hope, and charity, which are divine gifts that function as the basis for the third tier, the
“infused” virtues. These latter two levels would more readily fit the Augustinian
characterization.
As for the first tier, Thomas characterizes Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia—
living an active life of the theoretical and moral virtues—as a form of happiness, but an
imperfect one,55 for a life of the human virtues cannot by itself satisfy our deepest longing.56
Stil , Aquinas acknowledges (e.g., in IaIIae 63,2) that there are indeed such human virtues,
something that Augustine was loathe to concede.57 Further, in his treatise on the topic, Thomas
agrees with Aristotle that the virtues are habits ( DeVir. I,1) and that they “lie in a mean” ( virtus
autem moralis est in medio; ibid., I, 13) that is determined by reason (ibid.). But two prominent
features of the Aristotelian approach to virtue are largely or entirely ignored by Thomas. First,
there is Aristotle’s stress on the practically wise person ( ho spoudaios) as the standard of right
conduct. As we noted earlier in this chapter (p. 92), Thomas instead emphasizes the divine law
implanted in the soul and recognized by the natural habit of synderesis. Finally, Thomas
basically ignores Aristotle’s condition on virtuous action that the agent must “choose them for
their own sakes.” In his commentary on the NE he does correctly identify the condition ( SLE
283). And in DeVir. (I,2,obj. 17) he mentions the point that virtue is not among the greatest
goods, since the greatest is desired for its own sake, and that is not the case with virtue, which is
sought for the sake of something else, namely, happiness.58
This is a denial, or at least a distortion, of Aristotle’s view in the NE that every excellence (i.e.,
virtue) we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still
choose each of them), but 55 “The imperfect happiness that can be had in this life, can be
acquired by man by his natural powers, in the same way as virtue, in whose operation it
consists.” [ Beatitudo imperfecta quae in hac vita haberi potest, potest ab homine acquiri per sua
naturalia, eo modo quo et virtus, in cuius operatione consistit] (IaIIae,5,5,c.).
56 “It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness.” [ Impossibile est
beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo bono creato](Ibid ., 2,8,c.).
57 In City of God, XIX, 25, Augustine calls the pagan virtues “rather vices than virtues” ( vitia
sunt potius quam virtutes) since the actions they inspire are done in the wrong spirit, without
“reference to God” ( rettulerit nisi ad Deum).
58 Sed virtus non est de maximis bonis; quia maxima bona sunt quae propter se appetuntur;
quod non convenit virtutibus, cum propter aliud appetantur, quia propter felicitatem.
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we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that through them we shall be happy.59
(I,7, 1097b2–5)
Thomas simply omits the “we choose them indeed for themselves,” and—an important point, I
will urge—he makes happiness “something else” than the virtues, while Aristotle is at pains to
argue that eudaimonia (in large part, at least) consists in a life of virtuous activity.
We can, Thomas says, acquire a modicum of happiness by our human efforts, but by no means
can it finally satisfy our yearning. Are we, then, what Sartre called “a useless passion,” longing
for something we cannot attain?60 Thomas of course thinks not. The Christian promise that the
saved will see God “face to face” (I Cor. 13:12) implies, he argues, that our nature can somehow
be transformed so as to become capable of this Beatific Vision. Attaining this transformation is
made possible by the divine gift of grace in the form of supernatural (or “theological”) virtues
that enable us to act meritoriously.61 The gist of his view on grace in the Summa can be put this
way: for us to attain the completion we long for in the Beatific Vision, we require God’s
supernatural assistance in the form both of a permanent alteration or restoration of our nature
(“sanctifying grace,” gratia gratum faciens), and of ongoing assistance in the formation of the
will and the execution of meritorious actions (“actual,” or “cooperating grace,”
operantem et cooperantem). 62 The effect of all this on the soul is to transform the ordinary (or
Aristotelian) virtues, which have their original root in our human nature, into supernatural
virtues, both with respect to their goal (God, in one way or another), and their inspiration (which
comes from the “super-nature” of the theological virtues63).
59 πᾶσαν ἀρετὴν αἱρούμεθα μὲν καὶ δι᾽ αὐτά (μηθενὸς γὰρ ἀποβαίνοντος ἑλοίμεθ᾽ ἂν ἕκαστον
αὐτῶν), αἱρούμεθα δὲ καὶ τῆς εὐδαιμονίας χάριν, διὰ τούτων ὑπολαμβάνοντες εὐδαιμονήσειν.
60 The phrase appears at the very end of part 4, chapter 2, III of Being and Nothingness, transl.
Hazel Barnes, (New York: Washington Square Press,1966), 754.
61 Aquinas’s teachings on the topic of grace “are complex and difficult to follow,” and their
development over the course of his mature years reflects “his growing pessimism over
humanity’s natural faculties,” according to Alister McGrath, Justitia Dei: A History of the
Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 136.
I restrict myself to Thomas’s mature view in STh. Clearly, in this work meritorious virtuous
action presupposes grace.
62 Cf. the distinctions drawn in IaIIae,111,2.
63 Thus, for instance, the theological virtue of charity inspires “infused” courage in the Christian
to undergo martyrdom, should this become necessary: “Charity inclines one to the act of
martyrdom, as its first and chief motive cause, being the virtue commanding it, whereas courage
inclines thereto as being its proper motive cause, being the virtue that elicits it.” [ ad actum
martyrii inclinat quidem caritas sicut primum et principale motivum, per modum virtutis
imperantis, fortitudo autem sicut motivum proprium, per modum virtutis elicientis]
(IIaIIae,124,2,ad 2).
103
Faith, hope, and charity—infused in us by God—make it possible, in Aquinas’s view, for us to

live a life of the virtues that is “superior to the human level”
(to transpose a phrase that Aristotle applied to the contemplative life). They play the role in the
lives of the faithful that human nature itself plays in each human being on the Aristotelian view,
i.e., they are the basis for the infused virtues—
e.g., infused courage or justice—and the inspiration for the practice and development of those
virtues. That practice enables us to earn the eternal reward.
Thomas says, with Augustine as his authority:
Human beings, by wil , do works meritorious of everlasting life; but . . .
for this it is necessary that the human will should be prepared with grace by God.64
( STh 109,5,ad 1)
While this would be seen by some in the Reformation as granting too much power and freedom
to the human will and its works, for Aquinas himself this
“Thomist synthesis” must have seemed a neat path between the grace-only leanings of Augustine
and the virtue/action orientation of Aristotle. But it raises the two serious problems alluded to
earlier, to which we must now return.
First, there is a dilemma about virtue that looms for the Thomist variety of teleological
eudaimonism. Aquinas’s approach is threatened by a kind of instrumentalism: the goal of the
Beatific Vision is, at least in part, extrinsic to, and a reward for, the virtuous life. This is not to
say that Thomas is “an egoistic rationalist,” someone for whom the sole point of virtuous
behavior is to be rewarded for it.65 By comparison, a charge of egoism could not really touch
Aristotle, if we understand egoism to be in tension with what one standardly thinks of as virtuous
—and hence, in part, altruistic—living. For Aristotle the virtuous life is in fact the one most
suited to the real interests of the individual, so altruistic virtues such as justice or liberality
cannot truly conflict with genuine self-interest. But the plausibility of this claim is rooted in
Aristotle’s view that living virtuously is itself the perfection of our nature: here there is no toe-
hold for instrumentalism. Not entirely so for Thomas; in his view the perfection of our 64
[H]omo sua voluntate facit opera meritoria vitae aeternae, sed, sicut Augustinus in eodem libro
dicit, ad hoc exigitur quod voluntas hominis praeparetur a Deo per gratiam.
65 I borrow the phrase (and use it in a slightly altered sense) from Scott MacDonald, “Egoistic
Rationalism: Aquinas’s Basis for Christian Morality,” in Christian Theism and the Problems of
Philosophy, ed. Michael D. Beaty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990),
327–54. Put perhaps over simply, MacDonald’s view is that for Thomas human beings naturally
seek their own complete good, and they do so by means of the exercise of intellect and wil . A
critique of this kind of position can be found in chapter 3 of Thomas Osborne, Love of Self and
Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2005).
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nature is twofold. Something like Aristotle’s view may be correct at the inferior
“natural” level,66 but our inborn teleology points beyond the sphere of nature:
“Our heart is restless until it rests in You,” according to the famous prayer of Augustine ( Conf.
,1,1). Each of us wants more, infinitely more, and that can only be obtained through a divine
reward for our meritorious behavior.
Stil , it cannot be quite right to call Thomas an egoist and leave it at that. True, in his view virtue
is not (or not only) its own reward. But at the same time, the principal form grace takes in our
actions is charity, the greatest of the theological virtues. No mere disposition to alms-giving and
the like, charity for Thomas means nothing less than a form of the love with which God loves
Himself, i.e., a love of God for God’s own perfect goodness, a love beyond ordinary human
ability, and—crucially—a love that is not self-serving. As Brian Davies puts it,
“[B]y charity we share in what God is from eternity insofar as we love God in the way God loves
God . . . it is the presence (in us) of the Holy Spirit because it is caused by the Holy Spirit, who
thereby produces in us what love is in God.”67
Charity enables us to act in selfless ways that are by definition done for the love of God, not for
the sake of a reward, though such acts de facto merit the Beatific Vision. As Thomas sees it, the
Christian revelation points to an avenue that leads to a perfect beatitude undreamed of by the
ancients: God offers to make us deiform, “participants in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:3f.). As a
result those who are saved can, in Heaven, enjoy a knowledge of the divine essence, while in this
life ( in via) God’s grace blesses them with faith, hope, and charity, each of which gives a
foretaste of the joys of heaven. Indeed, as already mentioned, these three theological virtues—
unknown to the pagan thinkers—so transform the lives of the faithful that even those virtues
praised by the ancients are made new, inspiring just or courageous or generous actions that are
now performed from charity, i.e., from the love of God for God’s own sake. This, then, is the
best life possible for human beings in via, a life in which we perform virtuous and meritorious
deeds out of charity. Such a life can hardly be called egoism.
But has Thomas, then, in describing the graced lives of the truly faithful, thereby avoided ethical
instrumentalism altogether? Is his system a variant of that of Aristotle, who as we saw thought of
virtuous behavior as done for its own sake and for the sake of happiness? Can we read him as
saying that an action is meritorious (and that God rewards that action in the Beatific Vision),
while at the same time the agent does not undertake it as a means to this end? Indeed, could we
not say the action is meritorious precisely because it is not intended 66 “The happiness of human
beings is two-fold. One, which is imperfect, is found in this life. The Philosopher speaks about
this . . . ” [ duplex est felicitas hominis. Una imperfecta quae est in via, de qua loquitur
philosophus] ( Super de Trinitate, 3,6,4,ad 3).
67 Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 288–89.

105
as a means to any further end?68 Although Thomas sometimes seems to suggest such a
noninstrumental view of the theologically virtuous life, it is not his main thrust. In IaIIae, 62,3,c,
he claims the theological virtues “direct man to supernatural happiness in the same way as by the
natural inclination man is directed to his connatural end.”69 This might seem noninstrumental, as
Aristotle’s treatment of the virtues arguably is. But unlike with the Aristotelian “natural” virtues,
the practice of the supernatural variety cannot constitute supernatural happiness, and of course
Thomas thinks of such practice (and the practice of the infused virtues which they make
possible) as meriting the ultimate goal. So it is accurate to call these virtues goal oriented in a
much stronger sense than that in which it could be said of Aristotelian virtues (which do not
merit happiness, but instead in large part constitute it). In particular, Thomas says that by hope
“the will is directed to this end [the Beatific Vision] . . . as something attainable”70 (62,3,c.,
emphases added). In this life, we believe by the theological virtue of faith in the possibility of the
Beatific Vision, we are inspired by grace to hope for it; by grace we perform actions meritorious
of it (109,5,ad 1), while by charity—i.e., the divine love itself, in us through grace—we enjoy a
certain anticipation of the union we hope for in the life to come. In other words, in Thomas’s
view we are meant to aspire to the Beatific Vision, an aspiration that at the same time we must
realize can only be fulfilled as a reward for our merits. Aspiration is of course a form of desire:
we want not just the practice of the virtues, but above all we want that Vision, and it is a reward
for merit.
These points are made very explicitly by Thomas in a passage in which he discusses whether the
angels merit their beatitude (Ia,62,4). Though Thomas here primarily discusses angels, the claim
about beatitude and merit is perfectly general and meant to apply to human beings as wel . He
writes (emphases added): Perfect beatitude is natural only to God, because existence and
beatitude are one and the same thing in Him. Beatitude, however, is not of the nature of the
creature, but is its end. Now everything attains its last end by its operation. Such operation
leading to the end is either productive of the end, when such end is not beyond the power of the
agent working for the end, as the healing art is productive of health; or else it is deserving of the
end, when such end is beyond the capacity of the agent 68 I am indebted for this suggestion to an
anonymous reviewer of my article “Eudaimonism, Teleology, and the Pursuit of Happiness:
Meister Eckhart on ‘Living without a Why,’” Faith and Philosophy 26:3 (2009): 274–96, in
which I first explored this question.
69 [V]irtutes theologicae hoc modo ordinant hominem ad beatitudinem supernaturalem, sicut

per naturalem inclinationem ordinatur homo in finem sibi connaturalem.
70 [V]oluntas ordinatur in illum finem et quantum ad motum intentionis, in ipsum tendentem

sicut in id quod est possibile consequi.
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striving to attain it; wherefore it is looked for from another’s bestowing . . .
ultimate beatitude exceeds both the angelic and the human nature. It remains, then, that both man
and angel merited their beatitude. And if the angel was created in grace, without which there is
no merit, there would be no difficulty in saying that he merited beatitude: as also, if one were to
say that he had grace in any way before he had glory. But if he had no grace before entering
upon beatitude, it would then have to be said that he had beatitude without merit, even as we
have grace. This, however, is quite foreign to the idea of beatitude; which conveys the notion of
an end, and is the reward of virtue.71
(Ia,62,4,c.)
Although a reward may be bestowed on someone who was not aiming for it (and who may even
have been unaware that a reward was possible), an end for a rational agent is something that the
agent wants and at which she aims. Putting these two notions together, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that for Thomas it is from our desire for beatitude that we perform “operations”
(actions) that simultaneously are aimed at that goal and also performed selflessly (aimlessly?)
out of charity, and for which, God wil ing, we receive the heavenly reward. This is surely a form
of consequentialism.72
This same point also emerges in the way mentioned earlier, i.e., in the fact that this life of the
theological (and other) virtues is not itself our beatitudo, our happiness. Such a life is clearly the
best we can hope for while on earth, and so we must think of it as a certain level of happiness.
But surely a Thomist Christian would, and should, be disappointed if this were “all” she were to
attain. For although her life of the Christian virtues is the best one possible in via (far better,
presumably, than its Aristotelian counterpart), and is to an extent chosen for its 71 [S]oli Deo
beatitudo perfecta est naturalis quia idem est sibi esse et beatum esse. Cuiuslibet autem
creaturae esse beatum non est natura, sed ultimus finis. Quaelibet autem res ad ultimum finem
per suam op-erationem pertingit. Quae quidem operatio in finem ducens, vel est factiva finis,
quando finis non excedit virtutem eius quod operatur propter finem, sicut medicatio est factiva
sanitatis, vel est meritoria finis, quando finis excedit virtutem operantis propter finem, unde
expectatur finis ex dono alterius. Beatitudo autem ultima excedit et naturam angelicam et
humanam, ut ex dictis patet. Unde relinquitur quod tam homo quam Angelus suam beatitudinem
meruerit. Et si quidem Angelus in gratia creatus fuit, sine qua nullum est meritum, absque
difficultate dicere possumus quod suam beatitudinem meruerit. Et similiter si quis diceret quod
qualitercumque gratiam habuerit antequam gloriam. Si vero gratiam non habuit antequam esset
beatus, sic oportet dicere quod beatitudinem absque merito habuit, sicut nos gratiam. Quod
tamen est contra rationem beatitudinis, quae habet rationem finis, et est praemium virtutis.
72 It is, though, distinct from the “impartialistic” kind found in modern theories such as
utilitarianism. Cf. Don Adams, “Aquinas and Modern Consequentialism,” International Journal
of Philosophical Studies 12:4 (2004): 395–417.
107
own sake, she certainly also wants—and wants above all—the Beatific Vision: it is the object of
her deepest desire. The theological virtues, despite any talk of “for their own sake,” are
essentially aimed at attaining a Good beyond themselves, an end state that for Thomas is a
reward.73 Such an ethic, while perhaps not egoistic in any objectionable sense, is certainly
consequentialist. But this creates an unavoidable, and perhaps unsupportable, tension. The
Christian is in effect told by Thomas that, God wil ing, her deepest desire will be fulfilled, but
only if she succeeds in both letting (as faith and hope dictate), and—as charity demands— not
letting, that desire motivate her actions.
But there is another—and possibly more damaging—consequence of the Thomistic approach. If

one conceives of the human summum bonum as distinct from virtuous living and indeed as a
reward that one hopes to attain for it, then virtuous deeds become expedients, means to a more
valuable end. Whether the notion of virtue is even consistent with such a role is questionable. If
it is not consistent, then the instrumental attitude threatens to undermine one’s
“ virtues”—for one would not be acting justly or bravely for the sake of justice or courage—and
then the question presents itself, How can nonmoral conduct possibly merit salvation?
“But,” we can imagine Thomas countering,
“surely one can have both kinds of motivation, acting bravely both because it is noble
(Aristotle’s kalon) to do so and because one will be rewarded for it. Aristotle was no stranger to
the mixed motives of most human beings. Why should bravery exclude a soldier’s hope of
reward from the king? After all, Aristotle himself apparently argued that living morally is a
necessary condition if one is to enjoy the practice of the intellectual virtues, both of which we
want, so the former becomes a means for the latter. My own view is rather like that: if, with the
help of divine grace, we act in a morally commendable fashion, we will be rewarded with the
opportunity to engage in the activity—the Beatific Vision—that we most deeply desire and
which alone can still our yearning for fulfillment.”
And yet: the differences of his views from Aristotle’s are more profound than Thomas’s
imagined defense here allows for. Let us recall that in book I,6 of the 73 As Joseph Wawrykow
says, “When speaking of merit (in IaIIae, 114) Thomas repeatedly refers to the life of the
Christian as a ‘journey’ or ‘movement.’ The basic idea here is that the Christian life is a journey
in which one who is in grace moves further away from sin and draws nearer to God through the
good actions/merits one performs. Eventually the Christian will attain in this way the ultimate
destination of this journey, God Himself.” In God’s Grace and Human Action (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 267, fn. 13, emphasis added.
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NE Aristotle rejects the whole Platonic framework that posits a transcendent good as the goal of
human striving.74 His rejection is based on several reasons.
First, that sort of good—if it exists—is the wrong sort of thing for an inquiry into human
happiness:
Even if there is some one good which . . . is capable of separate and independent existence,
clearly it could not be achieved or attained by humans; but we are now [in ethics] seeking
something attainable.75
(1096b32-1097a1, translation slightly altered)
Aristotle is here anticipating the results of his “function argument” in I,7, that eudaimonia
consists in “activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in
accordance with the best and most complete”76
(1098a16-18). The virtues/excellences in question are those that pertain to the human function,
and:
we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the
soul implying a rational principle.77
(Ibid., 12–14)
The human good must consist in some excellent rational activity of the soul, and not in the
attainment of any object, however good. Except as it might figure in some such activity, a
transcendent good is of no use to the human quest for happiness, and as transcendent it is not
something humans could possess ( oude ktêton anthrôpôi). True, we can contemplate such a
good, and Aristotle does in fact think of such contemplation as sublime, the highest activity
available to humans. Stil , it is a this-worldly activity, one that makes the practitioner blessed, but
“blessed as a human being is”78 (1101a20-21).
Relatedly, we also find in Aristotle’s rejection of the Platonic variety of eudaimonism something
akin to the Kantian critique of heteronomy in ethics.
For Kant an action is heteronomous if it is determined by, e.g., inclination, i.e., by something
other than a demand (or command) of practical reason. Though the details are of course very
different, Aristotle also rejects motivations that are extrinsic to the moral sphere. That is, he
“contrasts acting for the sake of the 74 Cf. the excerpt from Symposium cited earlier, in note 20.
75 εἰ γὰρ καὶ ἔστιν ἕν τι τὸ κοινῇ κατηγορούμενον ἀγαθὸν ἢ χωριστὸν αὐτό τι καθ᾽ αὑτό, δῆλον
ὡς
οὐκ ἂν εἴη πρακτὸν οὐδὲ κτητὸν ἀνθρώπῳ: νῦν δὲ τοιοῦτόν τι πρὸς τὰ κτητὰ καὶ πρακτὰ τῶν
ἀγαθῶν.
76 ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια γίνεται κατ᾽ ἀρετήν, εἰ δὲ πλείους αἱ ἀρεταί, κατὰ τὴν ἀρίστην καὶ
τελειοτάτην.
77 ἀνθρώπου δὲ τίθεμεν ἔργον ζωήν τινα, ταύτην δὲ ψυχῆς ἐνέργειαν καὶ πράξεις μετὰ λόγου.
78 μακαρίους δ᾽ ἀνθρώπους.
109
noble ( to kalon) with acting for the sake of ends external to virtue.”79 Strange as it may seem to
Christian ears to say so, the Beatific Vision is such an extrinsic end. To act justly is not per se to
act in order to attain that vision. However, if one does have such a desire to attain something of
infinite value, surely it must swamp the desire for any finite good, such as to act justly for its
own sake. For a Thomist Christian, moral motivation—in Aristotle’s sense—must inevitably
take a back seat to a nonmoral (or supra-moral) motivation, the desire for the Beatific Vision, if
indeed the former can compete at all.
Thus it seems that if one were to follow a truly Aristotelian line on the role of virtue in human
happiness (as, e.g., Boethius of Dacia did in Thomas’s own time), one would have to separate a
philosophical or rational ethics altogether from the Christian promise of a supernatural salvation
(viewed as a matter of faith), at least if that is conceived as the reward for a virtuous life. Writing
and teaching in thirteenth-century Paris, Boethius repeatedly makes the point that rational ethics
is exclusively concerned with the good that can be achieved by human beings through their
natural powers.80 In what could be seen as a kind of fideism with respect to eternal salvation,
Boethius—as we see—urges that what corresponds to human nature as its fulfillment is a natural
goal, excellence in the moral and intellectual spheres: belief in a supernatural end must be a
matter for faith ( fides) alone. The relationship between such fulfillment and eternal salvation is
not the concern of a philosopher per se. Such a framework avoids the problem of making
Aristotle’s virtues into means to a further goal, and not ends in themselves. By contrast, when
Thomas claims that “human beings are perfected by virtue, with respect to those actions whereby
they are directed to happiness”81 (IaIIae, 62, 1, c.), he primarily means virtue and happiness that
are supernatural. Yet if our perfect happiness is both extrinsic to our activities and a divine
reward for them—the Beatific Vision—then we have what is an ethic that, for an Aristotelian, is
incoherent, if not self-contradictory.
79 Christopher Cordner, “Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations,” Philosophy 69:269 (July
1994): 291–316, at 296.
80 Cf. the opening lines of his De Summo Bono, in On the Supreme Good, On the Eternity of the
World, On Dreams, trans. J. Wippel (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987):
“Since in every kind of being there is a supreme possible good, and since man too is a certain
kind (i.e., species) of being, there must be a supreme possible good for man. I do not speak of a
good which is supreme in an absolute sense, but of one that is supreme for man; for the goods
which are accessible to man are limited and do not extend to infinity. By reason let us seek to
determine what the supreme good is which is accessible to man.” [ Cum in omni specie entis sit
aliquod summum bonum possibile, et homo quaedam est species entis, oportet quod aliquod
summum bonum sit homim possibile. Non dico summum bonum absolute, sed summum sibi, bona
enim possibila homini finem habent nec procedunt in infinitum. Quid autem sit hoc summum
bonum, quod est homini possibile, per rationem investigemus. ]
81 [P]er virtutem perficitur homo ad actus quibus in beatitudinem ordinatur.
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This point is very important for the central issue of the present study. As noted above, Thomas is
well aware of Aristotle’s inclusion in his definition of the requirement that the agent must choose
the virtuous act for its own sake. Commenting on NE 1105a31-32 he notes that
the [virtuous] action should be done by a choice that is not made for the sake of something else,
as happens when a person performs a good action for money or vainglory.82
( SLE II, lect. 4,4)
Further, in IaIae 100,9,c., when discussing whether the “mode” of acting according to virtue falls
under the precept of the law, Thomas again cites the Aristotelian condition. But when giving his
own definition of virtue in IaIIae 55,4, and in De Virtutibus I, 2,c., he instead adopts, with
several modifications, the one he attributes to Augustine, as we saw. In it there is no mention of
the requirement that virtuous behavior be performed for its own sake. Indeed, Augustine himself,
in a passage that Thomas must have known, explicitly rejected that notion: For although some
suppose that virtues which have a reference only to themselves, and are desired only on their
own account, are yet true and genuine virtues, the fact is that even then they are inflated with
pride, and are therefore to be reckoned vices rather than virtues.83
( DCD, XIX, 25)
In other words, in Augustine’s view, virtue “for its own sake alone” is actually the opposite of
genuine virtue in its hubristic reliance on one’s own power, rather than on God, a familiar theme
in Augustine.
Perhaps it is the Augustinian influence that inclines Thomas to ignore Aristotle’s “for their own
sake” requirement for virtue. In the remark just quoted from his commentary on the NE, Thomas
clouds the issue by suggesting that the alternative to performing the virtuous act for its own sake
is to do it for an indifferent or even ignoble end (“money or vainglory”). But does he think that,
for example, if someone were on a given occasion to act temperately in order to please her
parents, she would thereby be a temperate person? And if not, what about her doing it in order to
please God? Thomas leaves us in the dark on this 82 [S]ed operetur ex electione; aliud autem est
ut electio operis virtuosi non sit propter aliquid aliud, sicut cum quis operatur opus virtutis
propter lucrum, vel propter inanem gloriam.
83 Nam licet a quibusdam tunc verae atque honestae putentur esse virtutes, cum referuntur ad se
ipsas nec propter aliud expetuntur: etiam tunc inflatae ac superbae sunt, ideo non virtutes, sed
vitia iudicanda sunt.
111
crucial point. Recall, by contrast, the view attributed to Eckhart in the eighth article of
condemnation (cited on p. 1): “Those who seek nothing, neither honor nor profit nor inwardness
nor holiness nor reward nor heaven, but who have renounced all, including what is their own—in
such persons is God honored.”
Thomas apparently sees no problem in the idea of seeking heaven as a reward.
But separating happiness from virtuous action in this way surely seems—from an Aristotelian
perspective—a threat to the latter.84
Thomas is widely and correctly recognized as a teleological eudaimonist,85
but we should distinguish his eudaimonism from Aristotle’s. It is not simply a matter of
disagreement about what our eudaimonia consists in. More importantly, it concerns the
relationship between human eudaimonia and human nature. For Aristotle, the end or fulfillment
of any being is necessarily a function of its nature, and for humans it must consist in a life of
those virtues that perfect that nature, a form of life that is clearly open to us to choose (and
certainly not one that anyone else can give us). It represents the perfection of our human nature,
is thoroughly this-worldly and—from an orthodox Christian perspective—Pelagian in its
perfectionism, as well as incomplete at best, since it takes no account of the Christian revelation.
But there are a number of ways a Christian thinker influenced by Aristotle might respond. One
would be the philosophical fideism recommended by Boethius of Dacia, but his ethical views
were condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1277.86 Thomas’s way in this situation is to adopt a
Platonic conception of the wil ’s orientation: our true ultimate goal, hidden from reason but
implicit in both reason’s orientation to the true in general and the wil ’s insatiable desire for
universal good, is known only through revelation. Thus the goal cannot, according to Thomas, be
the connatural perfection of our finite, created human nature (as Aristotle thought), but rather
something “beyond the nature of any created intellect” (IaIae,5,5; cf. also Ia,12,4
and 62,1). Hence, in the Treatise on Happiness a substantial tension becomes obvious: although
Thomas adopts Aristotle’s overall teleological framework, his Platonic notion of the will implies
a profound alteration of Aristotelian eudaimonism (which indeed no Christian could embrace as
the full account of our 84 In addition to the implicit criticism in Eckhart just noted, this point
perhaps also underlies the distinctions drawn by both Anselm of Canterbury and John Duns
Scotus between two quite distinct inclinations in the wil : toward justice for its own sake, and
toward the wil ’s own happiness or perfection; the former is the primary moral motivation. Cf.
the summary discussion in Bonnie Kent, “The Moral Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 235–
37 and 239–41.
85 “Aquinas holds to an eudaimonistic ‘moral point of view’ . . . ,” Bradley, Aquinas on the

Twofold, 53. “St. Thomas adopted a similar [i.e., to Aristotle’s] eudaemonological [ sic] and
teleological standpoint . . . ,” Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. 2,
Mediaeval Philosophy, Part II (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1962), 119.
86 For a brief discussion and further references see John Wippel’s introduction to Boethius.
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destiny). But Christianity’s new and dramatically elevated notion of the content of human
fulfillment raises the question whether that fulfillment (the Beatific Vision) is proportional in any
sense to our nature. Thomas’s alterations of Aristotle’s framework, when thought through, are
such that one must ask whether his constel ation of positions—that is, a Christian teleological
ethics that locates the human telos not in the fulfillment of our nature, but in a supernatural
destiny—is fully coherent. Eckhart, I will argue, seems to think not. As we will see in coming
chapters, Eckhart’s approach represents a “third way” of dealing with Aristotle, next to those of
Thomas and Boethius.
Thomas’s puzzling doctrine of virtue is related to the second major problem confronting his
version of human eudaimonia, i.e., how the Beatific Vision is possible for “finite, created
beings.” His view is threatened by paradox. Let us look, first, at what Thomas explicitly says
about this (in 1–4 below): 1. Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the
vision of the divine Essence87 (IaIIae,3,8,c.);
for this vision alone can still all our longings. Further, he claims: 2. Happiness is the attainment
of the perfect good. Whoever, therefore, is capable of the Perfect Good can attain happiness88
(5,1,c.).
This seems unobjectionable at first glance, but there are ambiguities lurking here: for one thing,
“Perfect Good” can refer to the best of all things, by definition God, or—as Boethius held—to
the best of all things to which a given kind of creature (for example a human being) can by its
nature aspire. (As we saw, for Aristotle this consists in contemplation, a “divine” activity, but
one carried out in this life by ordinary—if gifted—mortals and without the need for any divine
grace.) Second, what is meant by “attainment of the Perfect Good”?
Aristotle thought that the happiness of the activity of contemplation is “perfect”
( teleia), but this will be a happiness “appropriate to human beings” ( makarious d’anthropous—
EN 1,11, 1101a 20), subject to all the interruptions and infirmities that beset our lives. Thomas
clearly has much more—infinitely more—in mind. But then, is he still talking of human
happiness? How can we expect—
or enjoy, for that matter—a happiness that is not apportioned to our nature?
Thomas himself seems to give this problem a clear statement in this 5,5,c.: 87 [U]ltima et
perfecta beatitudo non potest esse nisi in visione divinae essentiae.
88 [B]eatitudo nominat adeptionem perfecti boni. Quicumque ergo est capax perfecti boni,
potest ad beatitudinem pervenire.
113
3. Man’s perfect happiness, as stated above (Question 3, Article 8), consists in the [eternal]
vision of the divine Essence. Now the vision of God’s Essence surpasses the nature not only of
man, but also of every creature, as was shown in Ia,12,489 (emphasis added).
Thomas lets the apparent paradox—our human beatitude consists in the Beatific Vision, but this
Vision exceeds our nature—pass uncommented here, though he hints at what his resolution of it
will be when he modifies the last claim in this way: 4. Consequently, neither humans nor any
creature can attain final happiness by their natural powers”90 (ibid., emphasis added).
How exactly the (tacit) appeal to “more-than-natural” powers is meant to work remains to be
seen.
For the moment, however, it would seem that everyone must also agree with the following
general principle:
5. No one, not even God, can transform a creature, i.e., something created, into something
uncreated (since that would involve a contradiction).
If this is correct, it seems we can conclude from 3 and 5 (pending a further explanation of what
Thomas means by [4]) either that:
6. Perfect happiness is impossible for human beings;91
or else, since the stumbling block seems to be our finiteness as creatures, or perhaps our very
createdness, that:
7. We humans are somehow (in part) uncreated (i.e., divine) and hence thereby capable of
perfect happiness.
89 [ B]eatitudo hominis perfecta, sicut supra dictum est, consistit in visione divinae essentiae.
Videre autem Deum per essentiam est supra naturam non solum hominis, sed etiam omnis
creaturae, ut in primo ostensum est.
90 [N]ec homo, nec aliqua creatura, potest consequi beatitudinem ultimam per sua naturalia.
91 This conclusion might seem overly strong: should we not rather say, “impossible for human
beings on their own power”? Thomas might claim this, but the question is, does the final phrase
really add anything? After all, for a Thomist, human beings do not even exist “on their own
power.” So if in addition to creating us, God could have given us something further that would
make us capable of perfect happiness, then that capacity would have been part of our nature. But
“the vision of God’s Essence surpasses the nature not only of man, but also of every creature,”
which would seem to mean that we could not have been created with such a capacity. But given
that, how then could it be granted to us subsequently?
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Thomas clearly wants to reject both 6 and 7. Why? Proposition 6 would seem to say we can hope
for only im perfect or finite happiness. One way to understand this would be as a regression to
the paganism of the Greeks, and hence contrary to Christian faith. Another way to take it would
be along the lines of the fideism of Boethius of Dacia, i.e., as claiming that human reason can
discern only a limited and natural fulfillment for humans; but such a position was anathema to
church officials in the thirteenth century, and Thomas himself argued at the very start of the STh
that “sacred doctrine” is a science; thus we must base moral teaching on both reason and
revelation, not restrict it to the former.92
Thomas’s resistance to anything like proposition 7 may have been the result of its association
with a variety of views condemned by the church in the thirteenth century, some as pantheistic,
others as smacking of the “heresy of the Free Spirit.”93 Apparently according to the adherents of
this latter view, the Beatific Vision is possible, but only because the human soul is itself (in part,
at least) divine: a mere creature could never attain such a fulfillment. Among those whose views
were linked to this movement in the decades preceding Thomas were Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202;
his writings were declared heretical in 1263), and Amalric of Bena (d. ca. 1207; his teachings
were also condemned). Thomas rejected the pantheistic views of Amalric’s followers ( STh Ia,
3,8), and he rebut-ted a portion of the teaching attributed to Joachim on the coming of a “new
age”
(IaIIae, 106,4).94
Amalric may also be the target of Thomas’s concern in Ia, 12,1,c.:
[W]hat is supremely knowable in itself [i.e., God] may not be knowable to a particular intellect,
because of the excess of the intel igible object above the intellect; as, for example, the sun, which
is supremely visible, cannot be seen by the bat because of the excess of light. Therefore, some 92
This Thomist principle is the burden of the argument in Bradley’s Aquinas on the Twofold that
many Thomists have succumbed to “misconstruing the integrally theological character of
Aquinas’s rational argumentation” (xi). Further: “Underlying (Thomas’s) confident assertions of
the harmony of faith and reason is a theological notion of reason. In endowing men with reason,
God has created us in a ‘likeness of the uncreated truth’” (54).
93 A classic study of this movement (if it really was one) is Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the
Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
94 Though it really belongs to the history of theology, this conflict has some bearing on the
present study because Meister Eckhart was suspected of “Free Spirit” tendencies, though he
explicitly denied the charge. Amalric’s exposition of Aristotle at the University of Paris was a
prime reason for the ban on Aristotle imposed there in 1210. The zeal for orthodoxy swel ing in
that period was also apparent in the 1225 condemnation by Pope Honorius III of John Scotus
Eriugena’s ninth-century Neoplatonist work, Periphyseon, which apparently had influenced
Amalric.
115
who considered this held that no created intellect can see the essence of God.95 (Emphasis
added)
Although this view would seem to have solid warrant from Aristotle, for whom the human
intellect is de facto dependent on the senses for input—Amalric was admired for his knowledge
of the Philosopher—Thomas will have none of this conclusion, since, he says, the view is both
“opposed to faith” and “also against reason.” With respect to faith he remarks:
If we suppose that a created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to
beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else beside God96 (ibid.).
Thomas seems to assume that his readers will need little convincing of the heterodoxy of such a
view, since he has just quoted 1 Jn.3:2, “We shall see Him as He is.” But even if we leave aside
the creedal requirements of the Christian faith,97 Thomas contends that reason too demands we
reject the idea that “a created intellect could never see God.” How so, one might wonder, since
Thomas himself seems repeatedly to say just this (“. . . beyond the nature . . .”)? His answer
appeals to a fundamental view he inherited, and then adapted, from Aristotle:
For there resides in everyone a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees . . .
But if the intellect of the rational creature could not attain to the first cause of things [i.e., God],
the natural desire would remain vain”98 (ibid.).
95 [Q]uod est maxime cognoscibile in se, alicui intellectui cognoscibile non est, propter
excessum intelligibilis supra intellectum, sicut sol, qui est maxime visibilis, videri non potest a
vespertilione, propter excessum luminis. Hoc igitur attendentes, quidam posuerunt quod nullus
intellectus creatus essentiam Dei videre potest.
96 [S]i nunquam essentiam Dei videre potest intellectus creatus, vel nunquam beatitudinem
obtinebit, vel in alio eius beatitudo consistet quam in Deo.
97 The Beatific Vision is not mentioned in the Nicene Creed—which speaks of “the resurrection
of the dead, and the life of the world to come”—, but it was widely assumed by theologians,
none more strongly than Thomas. In a papal bull of 1336, “Benedictus Deus,” Pope Benedict XII
declared as a doctrine of faith that the saved, once their souls have been purified, “see the divine
essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face” prior to the Last Judgment.
98 Inest enim homini naturale desiderium cognoscendi causam, cum intuetur effectum . . . Si
igitur intellectus rationalis creaturae pertingere non possit ad primam causam rerum, remanebit
inane desiderium naturae.
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The tacit premise here is, “Nature makes nothing in vain” (found, e.g., in Aristotle, Politics, I, 2,
1253a9).99 This premise is a cornerstone of Aristotelian natural teleology, and Aquinas states it
explicitly elsewhere,100 applying it here to our desire for a fulfillment that is perfect in every
way. Most twenty-first-century thinkers, no longer adherents of Aristotelian science and very
familiar with unsatisfiable desires,101 might well be skeptical about the truth of this principle.
But even granting it (perhaps in the sense that such success must be at least possible if the desire
is not to be vain), its relevance is questionable, on two counts.
For one thing, how is one to reconcile it with Thomas’s proposition 3 above, the notion that this
very vision of God’s essence that we allegedly desire most of all, and whose possible attainment
Aristotle’s dictum is said to guarantee, is at the same time said to “surpass the nature of . . .
every creature”? If that fulfillment is beyond our nature, how can our nature be such as to require
it, in accord with Aristotelian teleology—and even to assure at least the possibility of our
achievement of it? 102 How can we be supposed even to desire it, given that it is so far out of
proportion with our nature?103 How can we be said to need it to achieve our—human—
perfection?
99 οὐθὲν γάρ . . . μάτην ἡ φύσις ποιεῖ.
100 In addition to its central role in Aristotelian science and metaphysics, Thomas also thinks of
it as an expression of the divine providence and power. Cf. SCG III,51,1 for a clear expression of
the metaphysical principle; he states the theological view at STh I,103,7,c.: “Therefore as God is
the first universal cause, not of one genus only, but of all being in general, it is impossible for
anything to occur outside the order of the divine government.” [ Cum igitur Deus sit prima causa
universalis non unius generis tantum, sed universaliter totius entis; impossibile est quod aliquid
contingat praeter ordinem divinae gubernationis. ] Nature does nothing in vain because it is the
product of a wise, omnipotent Creator.
101 Would a physicist not love to know in detail what, if anything, preceded the Big Bang? Or a
linguist what the first human language sounded like? And so on.
102 This problem greatly exercised a number of Thomas’s Renaissance commentators such as
Cajetan. A summary of their struggles with the teaching is given by Bradley, Aquinas on the
Twofold, 440–48. Bradley himself speaks of Aquinas’s “paradoxical ethic” (ch. 9, title), and also
of what seems to be an “antinomy” in Thomas’s conclusions. But for Bradley the antinomy is
only apparent; Thomas saves himself from contradiction by virtue of using an expanded
(“twofold”) notion of human nature, at once “natural” (in the Aristotelian sense) and
supernatural (in the sense of being made “in God’s image”). See Aquinas on the Twofold, ch. 9,
passim. But, one wonders, can Bradley’s reading be reconciled with Thomas’s repeated
emphasis on proposition 3, above? Not to mention the oddity of the claim that we have two
natures. Stil , the nub of the issue seems to be how to reconcile the Jewish and Christian notion
of human beings made “in God’s image” with Aristotelian teleology. If Bradley is right, then
Thomas’s intent may be more similar to what we will see Eckhart’s to have been than many
suppose.
103 In several places (e.g., in DeVer. 14,2,reply, and STh IaIIae114,2,c.) Thomas himself insists
on this, saying (in the former text) that the Beatific Vision is a “good which is out of all
proportion with man’s nature because his natural powers are not enough to attain to it either in
thought or desire. It is promised to man only through the divine liberality: ‘The eye hath not
seen’ (1 Cor. 2:9)” (emphasis added). [ Aliud est bonum hominis naturae humanae proportionem
excedens, quia ad ipsum obtinendum
117
A second problem with Thomas’s use of the gnomic “Nature makes nothing in vain” is how to
square it with a crucial part of the worldview of the Christian faith. According to the latter, the
Beatific Vision is a free gift of God, and not anything metaphysically necessary or to which we
can lay claim by right. Thomas himself seems to say as much: “If this [Beatific] Vision exceeds
the capacity of a created nature, as we have proved, then any created intellect may be understood
to enjoy complete existence in the species proper to its nature, without seeing the substance of
God”104 ( SCG, III,53,4). But if this is metaphysically possible, as Thomas here allows, how can
he at the same time use Aristotle’s principle to show that the Beatific Vision is the fulfillment of
a natural human desire that cannot be in vain, and the fulfillment of which is said to constitute
“the Perfect Good” for humans? It would seem that either we naturally desire that fulfil -
ment, in which case it cannot be in principle beyond our grasp (by Aristotle’s doctrine); or it is
beyond our nature, and we therefore cannot, in desiring it, be desiring our fulfillment.105 In the
view of Denis Bradley, Aquinas is trying to thread a tiny needle’s eye here:
A desire that can never be satisfied is “in vain.” Aquinas, however, does not say that the vision
of God is necessary; rather, he concludes that it is necessary to say that the vision of God is
possible.
( Aquinas on the Twofold, 436–37)
Presumably this means that natural reason (philosophy) cannot rule out the supernatural
fulfillment foreseen in the scriptures. But if this is Thomas’s vires naturales non sufficiunt, nec
etiam ad cognoscendum vel desiderandum; sed ex sola divina liberalitate homini repromittitur; I
Corinth. II, 9: oculus non vidit etc. ] The suggestion is strong here that we are able to have even
the idea of such a fulfillment solely through revelation. See also this remark: “In this work [the
NE] the Philosopher speaks about the happiness which is able to be attained in this life. For the
happiness of the other life exceeds all rational investigation” ( SLE, I, lect. 9,11). [ Loquitur enim
in hoc libro philosophus de felicitate, qualis in hac vita potest haberi. Nam felicitas alterius vitae
omnem investigationem rationis excedit. ] Yet Thomas also claims that reason demands this
fulfillment.
Perhaps he means that reason, once informed by faith, demands it.

104 Nam si talis visio facultatem naturae creatae excedit, ut probatum est, potest intelligi quivis
intellectus creatus in specie suae naturae consistere absque hoc quod Dei substantiam videat.
Tr. Vernon Bourke (New York: Hanover House, 1955–57).
105 Which is not to claim we cannot desire it at all. People do in fact desire things “beyond their
nature” (to fly like a bird, say, or to live a thousand years), but it would be bizarre to claim that
happiness—in Aristotle’s sense of eudaimonia—would be unattainable unless such a wish could
come true. In medieval terms such a fanciful desire was called a velleitas, a mere wish with no
expecta-tion of, or right to, fulfillment. Thomas defines the term in IaIIae,13,5,ad1: “The
incomplete act of the will is in respect of the impossible; and by some is called ‘velleity,’
because, to wit, one would will
[ vellet] such a thing, were it possible.” ( Voluntas incompleta est de impossibili, quae secundum
quosdam velleitas dicitur, quia scilicet aliquis vellet illud, si esset possibile.)
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conclusion, it seems too weak. For from his premises that (i) nature (or Providence) does nothing
in vain and that (i ) humans do naturally desire, even if inchoately, the Beatific Vision for their
happiness, it follows straightforwardly that it is necessary that this Vision be attainable by (at
least some) humans; but the reference to necessity makes this an unacceptable conclusion for
Thomas, first because it would deny the divine freedom, and second because such a fulfillment is
“beyond the nature etc.,” hence his preference for the weaker version identified by Bradley.106
The prima facie plausibility of Aquinas’s argument (in Bradley’s formulation) may trade on the
fact that what is necessary for a species might not, per accidens, be achieved by any given
individual, or on the fact that the conclusion in Bradley’s formulation is itself implied by the
stronger proposition that, in my view, is actually warranted by Thomas’s premises. If we can see
that the attainment of the Beatific Vision is somehow necessary for the fulfil -
ment of human beings, given our natural desire for it, then surely it follows that it is possible for
humans to attain it: “must” here implies “can.”107
But whether on Thomas’s principles the vision of God is necessary or not, a dilemma threatens.
On its face it simply will not do to argue, as Thomas does in IaIIae, 5,5,c., that God can alter our
nature supernaturally—by bestowing the so-called lumen gloriae— to make our intellect capable
of the Beatific Vision. For the reason why we cannot naturally attain it, he had earlier said (in
Ia,12,4), is not merely some temporary infirmity, but rather it is that our nature is created and
finite. But it is logically impossible for what is created and finite to be transformed into
something uncreated and infinite.
Consider: if God could “elevate the human mind so that [it] may be informed by the divine
essence”108 then God surely could have created such “elevated”
humans (or angels, for that matter) in the first place. This would, however, contradict Aquinas’s
oft-repeated claim (e.g., at IaIae, 5,5,c.) that the vision of the divine essence “surpasses the
nature not only of man, but also of every 106 It may be that Thomas would defend his approach
by saying that, in the absence of a divine revelation, the desire to see the essence of God must
seem outlandish, a mere “velleity,” and thus we would have no reason to regard it as the sort of
desire that “cannot be in vain.” However, Thomas also knew of Neoplatonism, which—on purely
rational grounds—taught that a union with the divine is not only possible, but represents the
pinnacle of human beatitude. Did he regard this as a delusion, a mere velleity?
107 One major difficulty for understanding Thomas’s teaching on this issue—and one much
commented on—is his apparent internal inconsistency. On the one hand, he sometimes speaks of
the natural desire for the Beatific Vision (e.g., in SCG III,51,1 and STh IaIIae,3,8,c.); while at the
same time (even in the same work) denying that there is any such natural desire (cf., e.g., DeVer.
22,7,c.).
Patrick Bastable points out that Thomas’s puzzling inconsistency on this matter occurs both early
and late in his career. Desire for God: Does Man Aspire Naturally to the Beatific Vision? An
Analysis of this Question and its History (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd.: 1947), ch.
2.
108 As Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold, 480, formulates the idea.
119
creature” (emphasis added). Must not especially the final clause of this claim be understood as
implying that creatureliness itself is inconsistent with the Beatific Vision?109 If metaphysically
God could not create a mind that by its nature were able to understand the divine essence, how
could He be supposed to “elevate” a created mind to that status?
We thus seem pushed, after all, either in the direction of a naturalistic Aristotelian ethic (in
which our happiness is completely proportioned to our human nature, and the question of the
afterlife is at best left as a mystery for faith—but then how to reconcile the supernatural promises
of faith and the naturalistic claims of ethics?), or else we are drawn toward something like
proposition 7, above: if our beatitude does require the Beatific Vision, we—or something in us—
must be uncreated and hence proportionate to that Vision.110 The precedent for such an idea was
there, both in classical thought (the Neoplatonic notion of intellectual ascent and Aristotle’s
reflections on nous as partaking in the divine) and in Eastern Orthodox patristic reflections on
divinization, but Thomas apparently chooses not to go down any of these paths.
As we will see in later chapters, Meister Eckhart did embrace something akin to proposition 7.
Interestingly enough, although he drew opposite conclusions from Thomas’s, he was often citing
the same authorities and texts, e.g., with respect to Aquinas’s teachings about the nature of the
soul. For any Christian thinker a crucial problem is how to square scriptural promises that the
saved wil see God111 with the manifest limitations of our cognitive powers. In the Aristotelian
tradition, the operation of our intellect is limited to what it can abstract from the deliverances of
the senses, which thus clearly excludes the Deity. But Aquinas, Eckhart, and other Christian
thinkers found a clue to the solution of 109 The only apparent alternative way of understanding
Thomas’s view here would seem to be the notion that God could have created beings naturally
capable of the Beatific Vision, but simply chose not to. But this is definitely not the tack Thomas
takes. The argument in Ia,12,4 is entirely philosophical, based on what various kinds of intellect
(human, angelic, divine) can naturally know.
Its conclusion is that “a created intellect cannot see the essence of God unless God by His grace
unites himself to the created intellect, as an object made intel igible to it” [ non igitur potest
intellectus creatus Deum per essentiam videre, nisi inquantum Deus per suam gratiam se
intellectui creato coniungit, ut intelli-gibile ab ipso]. I confess I do not see how what follows
“unless” can avoid contradicting the preceding argument.
110 Thus the Beatific Vision would be beyond us qua human, but not to the extent that we share
in the divine. There is of course an echo here of Stephen Bush’s “dualist” interpretation of
Aristotle’s puzzling claims about eudaimonia in Book X of NE. Cf. Bush, “Divine and Human
Happiness.” And is Bradley himself saying something similar when he interprets Thomas as
affirming “a supernatural end that is above not contrary to human nature” (463)?
111 In addition to the text from 1 Jn. above, there is for instance the famous passage from 1
Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to
face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (New International
Version)
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this dilemma in the claim of Avicenna that in the case of the rational soul, “the perfection proper
to it consists in its becoming an intellectual world ( saeculum intellectuale) in which there is
impressed the form of the whole.”112 He says the form of the whole, not merely of sensible
objects. Avicenna was understood to be referring to the capacity of the “passive intellect,” which
in our everyday life receives the forms, in Aristotle’s sense, abstracted by the “active (or agent)
intellect” from the deliverances of our sense organs.113 This suggests the existence of a kind of
excess capacity in the passive part of our cognitive abilities. As Aquinas put it: The agent
intellect is not sufficient of itself to actuate completely the possible intellect, because the
determinate natures of all things do not exist in it, as has been explained. Therefore, to acquire
complete perfection, the possible intellect needs to be united in a certain way to that Agent in
whom the exemplars of all things exist, namely, God.114
( QDA, 5,ad 9)
We will later see that for Eckhart this col aboration between the “Divine Agent
[intellect]” and the human passive intellect is possible in this life. Aquinas, for his part, sees in
this capacity of the human passive intellect an aspect of our similitude to the Creator, but Who,
he hastens to add, remains nonetheless infinitely above us: The Beatific Vision and knowledge
are to some extent above the nature of the rational soul, inasmuch as it cannot reach it of its own
strength; but in another way it is in accordance with its nature, inasmuch as it is 112 . . . ‫ﻟﻜﻼ‬
‫ ةروص اھﯿﻒ ﻣﺎﺳﺘﺮم اﻳﻠﻘﻊ اﻟﻤﺎع ﻳﺮﺻﺖ ﻧﺄ اھﺐ ﺻﺎﺧﻼ اھﻠﻤﺎك ةﻗﻄﺎﻧﻼ ﺳﻔﻨﻼ ﻧﺈ‬Avicenna, Metaphysics of
The Healing, IX,7,11. Avicenna goes on to say: “[The perfected rational soul] thus becomes
transformed into an intel igible world that parallels the existing world in its entirety, witnessing
that which is absolute good, absolute beneficence, (and) true absolute beauty, becoming united
with it, imprinted with its example and form, affiliated with it, and becoming of its substance.”
[،‫ھﻠﻚ دوﺟﻮﻟﻤﺎ ﻟﻤﺎﻋﻠﻞ اﻳﺰاوم‬، ‫ﻗﻠﻄﻠﻤﺎ ﻗﺤﻼ ﻟﻤﺎﺟﻼو ﻗﻠﻄﻠﻤﺎ ﻳﺮﺧﻼو ﻗﻠﻄﻠﻤﺎ ﻧﺴﺤﻼ وه اﻟﻢ ةدھﺎﺷﻢ‬
‫ﻻوﻗﻌﻢ اﻟﻤﺎع ﺑﻠﻘﻨﺘﻒ‬
.‫ھﺐ ةدﺣﺘﻤﻮ‬، ‫ھﺘﺌﯿﮫﻮ ھﻼﺛﺒﻢ ةﺷﻘﺘﻨﻤﻮ‬، ‫ھﻜﻠﺲ ﻓﻲ ةطﺮﺧﻨﻤﻮ‬، ‫] ھﺮھﻮج ﻧﻢ ةرﺋﺎﺻﻮ‬

Tr. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 350. The idea
seems to derive from
Plotinus
( Enneads, , III,4,3: έ σμεν
έκαστος κόςμος νoητός: “we are, each of, an intel igible cosmos”) via the Arabic Theology of
Aristotle.
I am indebted for the references to Jon McGinnis and Jules Janssens, and to my colleague
Suleiman Mourad for assistance with the Arabic original.
113 In Aristotle’s psychology, perception of, say, a tree requires (i) sensory data coming from
the tree, (i ) the abstraction from that data of its rational content, the form or essence of tree, and
(i i) the appropriation of this form in the mind of the perceiver. The abstracting is done by the
“agent” (or active) intellect, the appropriation by the “passive” or receptive intellect.
114 [ I]ntellectus agens non sufficit per se ad reducendum intellectum possibilem perfecte in
actum, cum non sint in eo determinatae rationes omnium rerum, ut dictum est. Et ideo requiritur
ad ultimam perfectionem intellectus possibilis quod uniatur aliqualiter illi agenti in quo sunt
rationes omnium rerum, scilicet Deo.
121
capable of it by nature, having been made to the likeness of God, as stated above. But the
uncreated knowledge is in every way above the nature of the human soul.115
( STh III,9,2,ad3, emphasis added)
The by now familiar problem should be obvious: how can the rational soul be
“capable of [the Beatific Vision] by nature” when that Vision “is in every way above the nature
of the human soul”?
Thomas is left with a curiously split ethic, foreordained, I would suggest, in his notion of the
human will as by nature oriented to a fulfillment it cannot naturally attain, i.e., the Beatific
Vision. Since, in his view, there is an (Aristotelian) end that is proportional to our nature, but one
that cannot completely satisfy our deepest longing for happiness, our condition points at a kind
of completion that is beyond both our unaided nature and this life itself. Hence, in a passage we
saw earlier, he speaks of our “twofold end”:
Man . . . has a twofold final good, which first moves the will as a final end. The first of these is
proportionate to human nature since natural powers are capable of attaining it. This is the
happiness about which the philosophers speak, either as contemplative, which consists in the act
of wisdom; or active, which consists first of all in the act of prudence, and in the acts of the other
moral virtues as they depend on prudence. The other is the good which is out of all proportion
with man’s nature because his natural powers are not enough to attain to it either in thought or
desire. It is promised to man only through the divine liberality: “The eye hath not seen . . ” (1
Cor.2:9). This is life everlasting.116
( DVer. , 14,2,reply; cf. also STh IaIIae, 3,2, ad4 and 3,6,c.) 115 [ V]isio seu scientia beata est
quodammodo supra naturam animae rationalis, inquantum scilicet propria virtute ad eam
pervenire non potest. Alio vero modo est secundum naturam ipsius, inquantum scilicet per
naturam suam est capax eius, prout scilicet ad imaginem Dei facta est, ut supra dictum est. Sed
scientia increata est omnibus modis supra naturam animae humanae. Eckhart would agree with
this citation up to the final sentence. How that sentence can avoid contradicting what precedes it
is mysterious. As Bradley says of the passage: “Aquinas flatly states that the desire for the vision
of God is both natural and not natural,” Aquinas on the Twofold, 456. To the extent that the
desire is natural, i.e., to the extent that humans as rational beings are capax dei, to that extent the
visio must also be natural; but this Thomas explicitly denies!
116 Est autem duplex hominis bonum ultimum, quod primo voluntatem movet quasi ultimus finis.
Quorum unum est proportionatum naturae humanae, quia ad ipsum obtinendum vires naturales
sufficiunt; et hoc est felicitas de qua philosophi locuti sunt: vel contemplativa, quae consistit in
actu sapientiae; vel activa, quae consistit primo in actu prudentiae, et consequenter in actibus
aliarum virtutum moralium.
Aliud est bonum hominis naturae humanae proportionem excedens, quia ad ipsum obtinendum
vires naturales non sufficiunt, nec etiam ad cognoscendum vel desiderandum; sed ex sola divina
liberalitate homini repromittitur; I Corinth. II, 9: oculus non vidit etc., et hoc est vita aeterna.
122
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As the first sentence of this text indicates, the wil —along with the goal-oriented works to which
it gives rise—has a role in the attainment of both kinds of fulfillment. But how a finite, created
will can possibly succeed in attaining a supernatural fulfillment that is apparently suited only for
uncreated beings remains a mystery.117
The difficulty that, in my view, afflicts Thomas’s teachings about the human will and human
beatitude is closely related to his conception of two notions—
namely, images and analogy—both of which are crucial for understanding Eckhart’s importantly
different views. Both are connected to the question of the relationship between the human and
the divine, since in Genesis 1:26 we are told that humans were made in God’s image. In chapter
1 (p. 5) we saw that Aquinas begins the second main part of the STh by quoting John of
Damascus to the effect that “man is said to be made to God’s image in so far as the image
implies an intel igent being endowed with free choice and self-movement.” Further, in chapter 3,
we saw how Augustine interpreted Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our
image, in our likeness,’” and noted the role his reading gave to the idea of divinization. Thomas
also addresses these issues, and we begin with his reading of that Genesis text in STh Ia,93.
Thomas’s views follow those of Augustine fairly closely. First of all, the notion of image adds to
that of likeness the element of origin: “an image adds something to likeness—namely, that it is
copied from something else”118 (Ia,93,1,c.). “But,”
Thomas immediately adds,
equality does not belong to the essence of an image; for as Augustine says ( QQ. 83,74): “Where
there is an image there is not necessarily equality,” as we see in a person’s image reflected in a
glass. Yet this is of the essence of a perfect image; for in a perfect image nothing is wanting that
is to be found in that of which it is a copy.119
117 Discussion of this “mysterious” doctrine continues even today. It has been at the center of an
intense debate in recent Roman Catholic theology, ignited by the publication of the book
Surnaturel by Henri de Lubac, S.J., in 1946. De Lubac argued against the notion of a twofold
good for human beings, according to which a purely natural, though in its way complete,
fulfillment is possible for us; on the contrary, according to his view (and, he thinks, Aquinas’s)
our nature is thoroughly open to the divine and capable only of a supernatural perfection. The
triumph of this view at the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent disputes about it are the
subjects of a summary review by Edward T.
Oakes, S.J., “The Surnaturel Controversy: a Survey and a Response,” Nova et Vetera, English
Edition, 9:3 (2011): 625–56. I am indebted to Tobias Hoffmann for this reference.
118 [I]mago aliquid addit supra rationem similitudinis, scilicet quod sit ex alio expressum.
119 Aequalitas autem non est de ratione imaginis, quia, ut Augustinus ibidem dicit, ubi est
imago, non continuo est aequalitas; ut patet in imagine alicuius in speculo relucente. Est tamen
de ratione perfectae imaginis, nam in perfecta imagine non deest aliquid imagini, quod insit illi
de quo expressa est.
123
In a reply to an objection (ad 2), Aquinas draws a contrast between the Son, “the First-Born of
creatures [who] is the perfect Image of God,” and human beings, who are “said to be both
‘image’ by reason of the likeness; and ‘to the image’
by reason of the imperfect likeness.”120 This mix of perfect and imperfect is the mark of a
special and important kind of relation, namely, “analogy or proportion.” He continues, “In this
sense a creature is one with God, or like to Him”121
(93,1,ad 3). In what sense? In what way(s) is the human being the image of God?
According to Thomas:
[W]e see that the image of God is in man in three ways. First, inasmuch as man possesses a
natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of
the mind, which is common to all men. Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually
knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace.
Thirdly, inasmuch as man knows and loves God perfectly; and this image consists in the likeness
of glory.122
( STh Ia 93,4,c.)
According to the first way, we have the divine image in the very existence of our minds, the
intellect and wil ; according to the second, we can (albeit imperfectly) through grace know and
love God, which are the very modes of divine action itself; and finally, by the third way, those
who are glorified (deified) can know and love God perfectly, in the Beatific Vision. In this final
way we become, by grace, a perfect image.
The progression among these three ways is essential. It is not merely our mental capacities per se
that make us an imago Dei, but especially their orientation, the fact that the intellect and will are
fundamentally made for God. As Thomas puts it:
Augustine says ( De Trin. xiv,12): “The image of God exists in the mind, not because it has a
remembrance of itself, loves itself, and understands itself; but because it can also remember,
understand, and love God by 120 [P]rimogenitus omnis creaturae est imago Dei . . . Homo vero
et propter similitudinem dicitur imago; et propter imperfectionem similitudinis, dicitur ad
imaginem.
121 [S]ic est unitas vel convenientia creaturae ad Deum.
122 Unde imago Dei tripliciter potest considerari in homine. Uno quidem modo, secundum quod
homo habet aptitudinem naturalem ad intelligendum et amandum Deum, et haec aptitudo
consistit in ipsa natura mentis, quae est communis omnibus hominibus. Alio modo, secundum
quod homo actu vel habitu Deum cognoscit et amat, sed tamen imperfecte, et haec est imago per
conformitatem gratiae. Tertio modo, secundum quod homo Deum actu cognoscit et amat
perfecte, et sic attenditur imago secundum similitudinem gloriae.
124
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Whom it was made.” Much less, therefore, is the image of God in the soul, in respect of other
objects.123
( STh 93,8,s.c.)
That is to say, “the image of God is found in the soul according as the soul turns to God, or
possesses a nature that enables it to turn to God”124 (93,8,c.). This turning is what the mind was
made for. Through it, or at least the capacity for it, we are images of God. But we are always, or
at least until glorified, images of God in an analogical sense. A brief look at Thomas’s thought
about analogy and univocality will pave the way for a look at Eckhart’s views on these
seemingly abstruse topics that nonetheless are the key to understanding his advice to live without
why.
Thomas rejects out of hand the idea of a univocally divine component in the (unglorified) human
soul. Having discussed, in Question 12 of STh Part 1, “How God is known by us,” he next offers
a refutation of any such idea. His line is that we are (undeniably) creatures, and that creatures and
God have literally nothing that is the same; or, as he subsequently puts it, “Univocal predication
is impossible between God and creatures”125 (Ia,13,5,c.). This was part of Aquinas’s response to
the claim of Moses Maimonides and some Christian thinkers that nothing positive at all could be
said of God. They overstate the case, according to Aquinas. He concedes to the “negative
theologians” the point that nothing that is truly said of human beings is also true of the Creator in
the same sense, so great is the difference between the finite and the infinite. But he resists the
conclusion that predications of God and creatures are necessarily equivocal. Instead, taking his
cue from both Aristotle and St. Paul, he insists that such predications (“names”) are used
analogically. That is, when we for example say that God is wise and that Socrates is wise, the
predicate “is wise” is used neither ambiguously (equivocally) nor univocally, for we mean the
two usages in neither a radically different sense nor in the identical sense. In his summary
treatment of the question, “Whether what is said of God and of creatures is univocally said of
them,” Aquinas responded:
[E]very effect which is not an adequate result of the power of the efficient cause, receives the
similitude of the agent not in its full degree, but in a measure that falls short, so that what is
divided and 123 [ Q]uod Augustinus dicit, XIV de Trin., quod non propterea est Dei imago in
mente, quia sui meminit, et intelligit et diligit se, sed quia potest etiam meminisse, intelligere et
amare Deum, a quo facta est. Multo igitur minus secundum alia obiecta attenditur imago Dei in
mente.
124 Et sic imago Dei attenditur in anima secundum quod fertur, vel nata est ferri in Deum.
125 [ I]mpossibile est aliquid praedicari de Deo et creaturis univoce.
125
multiplied in the effects resides in the agent simply, and in the same manner; as for example the
sun by exercise of its own power produces manifold and various forms in all inferior things. In
the same way . . .
all perfections existing in creatures divided and multiplied, pre-exist in God unitedly. Thus when
any term expressing perfection is applied to a creature, it signifies that perfection distinct in idea
from other perfections; as, for instance, by the term “wise” applied to man, we signify some
perfection distinct from a man’s essence, and distinct from his power and existence, and from all
similar things; whereas when we apply it to God, we do not mean to signify anything distinct
from His essence, or power, or existence. Thus also this term “wise” applied to man in some
degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is
applied to God; but it leaves the thing signified as uncomprehended, and as exceeding the
signification of the name. Hence it is evident that this term “wise” is not applied in the same way
to God and to man. The same rule applies to other terms. Hence no name is predicated
univocally of God and of creatures. 126
( STh Ia,13,5)
By the same token Aquinas insists that
neither, on the other hand, are names applied to God and creatures in a purely equivocal sense, as
some [e.g., Maimonides and other propo-nents of negative theology] have said. Because if that
were so, it follows that from creatures nothing could be known or demonstrated about 126 Quia
omnis effectus non adaequans virtutem causae agentis, recipit similitudinem agentis non
secundum eandem rationem, sed deficienter, ita ut quod divisim et multipliciter est in effectibus,
in causa est simpliciter et eodem modo; sicut sol secundum unam virtutem, multiformes et varias
formas in istis inferioribus producit. Eodem modo, ut supra dictum est, omnes rerum
perfectiones, quae sunt in rebus creatis divisim et multipliciter, in Deo praeexistunt unite. Sic
igitur, cum aliquod nomen ad perfectionem pertinens de creatura dicitur, significat illam
perfectionem ut distinctam secundum rationem definitionis ab aliis, puta cum hoc nomen sapiens
de homine dicitur, significamus aliquam perfectionem distinctam ab essentia hominis, et a
potentia et ab esse ipsius, et ab omnibus huiusmodi. Sed cum hoc nomen de Deo dicimus, non
intendi-mus significare aliquid distinctum ab essentia vel potentia vel esse ipsius. Et sic, cum hoc
nomen sapiens de homine dicitur, quodammodo circumscribit et comprehendit rem significatam,
non autem cum dicitur de Deo, sed relinquit rem significatam ut incomprehensam, et excedentem
nominis significationem. Unde patet quod non secundum eandem rationem hoc nomen sapiens
de Deo et de homine dicitur. Et eadem ratio est de aliis. Unde nullum nomen univoce de Deo et
creaturis praedicatur. In the first sentence Thomas is assuming the Aristotelian notion that every
per se (i.e., nonaccidental) causal agent produces effects similar to itself: Omne agens agit sibi
simile. Cf., e.g., STh Ia,4,3.
126
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God at all; for the reasoning would always be exposed to the fallacy of equivocation.127
(Ibid.)
The obvious solution, he thinks, is clear: “It must be said that these names are said of God and
creatures in an analogous sense, i.e., according to proportion”128
(ibid.): God and Socrates are both wise, but not in exactly the same way or sense.
We should also note that univocation, analogy, and ambiguity (or equivocation) are for Aquinas
properties of terms, e.g., identity of term-meaning in the case of univocation, diversity of
meaning—more or less complete—in the other two cases. As Ralph McInerny puts it:
A point of extreme importance which warrants repetition is that things are said to be ( dicuntur)
equivocals or univocals. In themselves, in rerum natura, they are neither, for in order to be
univocals or equivocals they must be known and named by us. We are talking about the things
signified in so far as they are signified. The problem of equivocals is a logical problem; the
problem of univocals is a logical one.129
Thomas’s teaching on this is drawn from Aristotle’s Categories: When things have the name in
common, and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is the same, they are called
synonymous
[i.e., univocal]. Thus, for example, both a man and an ox are animals.
Each of these is called, by a common name, an animal, and the definition of being is also the
same; for if one is to give the definition of each—what being an animal is for each of them—one
will give the same definition.130
(I, 1a7–12)
127 Sed nec etiam pure aequivoce, ut aliqui dixerunt. Quia secundum hoc, ex creaturis nihil
posset cognosci de Deo, nec demonstrari; sed semper incideret fallacia aequivocationis.
128 Dicendum est igitur quod huiusmodi nomina dicuntur de Deo et creaturis secundum
analogiam, idest proportionem.
129 Ralph McInerny, The Logic of Analogy: An Interpretation of St. Thomas (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 71. This is a problem area familiar to analytic philosophers under the
guise of
“analyticity.”
130 συνώνυμα δὲ λέγεται ὧν τό τε ὄνομα κοινὸν καὶ ὁ κατὰ τοὔνομα λόγος τῆς οὐσίας ὁ αὐτός,
οἷον
ζῷον ὅ τε ἄνθρωπος καὶ ὁ βοῦς• τούτων γὰρ ἑκάτερον κοινῷ ὀνόματι προσαγορεύεται ζῷον, καὶ
ὁ λόγος
δὲ τῆς οὐσίας ὁ αὐτός• ἐὰν γὰρ ἀποδιδῷ τις τὸν ἑκατέρου λόγον τί ἐστιν αὐτῶν ἑκατέρῳ τὸ ζῴῳ
εἶναι, τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον ἀποδώσει. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation, transl.
J. L. Ackril , ed. Jonathan Barnes, Vol. 1 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 3.
127
Thomas argues that where a name is used of two things that share neither species nor genus, it is
not used univocally. Hence any likeness between the two will be analogous:
If there is an agent not contained in any “genus,” its effect will still more distantly reproduce the
form of the agent, not, that is, so as to participate in the likeness of the agent’s form according to
the same specific or generic formality, but only according to some sort of analogy; as existence
is common to all. In this way all created things, so far as they are beings, are like God as the first
and universal principle of all being.131
( STh Ia, 4,3,c.)
Thus a discourse is possible, even on Aristotelian terms, in which we apply the same terms to
God and humans, but we do so only analogously. What, however, of the talk in the Christian
scriptures of a parent/child relationship between God and the human being, i.e., of a relationship
that in ordinary life is always univocal? Thomas must treat such talk as metaphorical. But
Meister Eckhart, as we will see, disagrees, arguing that there is a literal or univocal sense in
which humans can be said to be God’s children.
In any event, the question whether the application of a name to two entities a and b is univocal or
analogous can sensibly arise only within a discourse or conceptual scheme. For example, does
the term (name) “planet” apply both to, say, Mars and Earth? For a medieval thinker the answer
would clearly be “No, Mars, Jupiter et al. are planets (i.e., ‘wandering stars’), but Earth is not,
since it was created by God in the center and is immovable. If a human were somehow trans-
ported to the sphere of Mars, which does move, it might seem to that observer that the Earth is
moving, but that would only be apparent motion, since it would be the sphere that was moving
and not the Earth. Hence Earth and Mars cannot both be said to be ‘planets’ in the same sense.
Stil , from the vantage-point of the sphere of Mars the Earth could be called a planet by ‘analogy
or proportion,’ e.g., because of its apparent motion and hence its resemblance to genuine
planets.”
Today, however, in post-Copernican astronomy, Earth is classified quite literally as a planet,

along with Mars, Jupiter, et al., with which it shares the same definition. Hence the term “planet”
is today applied to both Earth and Mars univocally. Putting the point more generally: to ask
whether two entities a and b are 131 Si igitur sit aliquod agens, quod non in genere contineatur,
effectus eius adhuc magis accedent remote ad similitudinem formae agentis, non tamen ita quod
participent similitudinem formae agentis secundum eandem rationem speciei aut generis, sed
secundum aliqualem analogiam, sicut ipsum esse est commune omnibus. Et hoc modo illa quae
sunt a Deo, assimilantur ei inquantum sunt entia, ut primo et universali principio totius esse.
128
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univocally related is to ask whether there is an accepted frame of discourse in which a and b
belong to the same species or genus.
The importance of this point for our investigation is that univocal relatedness is a matter of how
the entities in question are defined, and hence of how we think and talk about them. We turn next
to Meister Eckhart’s view on this topic. It will turn out to provide a key to understanding his
teaching on living without why.
5
Meister Eckhart, Living on Two Levels
Thus far we have seen some important similarities and differences among the virtue-ethical
systems of Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. Each seeks to be a eudaimonist, viewing
the goal of happiness as something to be achieved through a process of acquiring by moral
education (or otherwise coming to possess) various virtues; and each thinks of the will (or, in
Aristotle’s case, boulêsis, rational wish and prohairesis, choice) and action, conceived in means-
end terms, as occupying a crucial place in the quest for the happy life. The principal differences
among them, we saw, lie in their respective conceptions of what eudaimonia consists in, and in
their differing opinions about the virtues: what they are, how we come to have them, and their
place in the happy life. For Aristotle, they are excellences of mind and character that we gain by
habituation and effort, and the virtuous life constitutes eudaimonia. In the case of Augustine, the
classical virtues he initially admired came to be seen as tainted by self-reliance, while their
Christian counterparts are subsumed under the heading of love, thought of as an orientation of
will to the highest Good (while vice is self-love, an orientation to a lesser good). For him and for
Thomas, even an earthly life of the divinely infused virtues is infinitely inferior to, but also (if
one is blest with grace) preparatory for the reward of bliss that awaits the just in Heaven. In
Meister Eckhart we encounter a fourth and importantly different version of virtue eudaimonism,
one that is not teleological, and the key to understanding the difference is to understand the way
he parts company with those eminent Christian authorities on the issues of images and analogy.
Eckhart von Hochheim, born in Thuringia around 1260 when Thomas was coming into his
prime, himself became an eminent philosopher/theologian and one of Aquinas’s successors as
the Dominican regent master for theology at the University of Paris. He was accorded the
unusual honor of appoint-ment to this rotating chair twice (1302–1303 and 1311–1313). In
between he held important administrative posts in his order. After completing his second regency
Eckhart was given special pastoral assignments by his superiors that called for him to do much
vernacular preaching in the Rhineland. As one of the 129
130
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first to translate philosophical and theological terminology into Middle High German—he
coined, for example, the term würklicheit ( Wirklichkeit) for the Latin actualitas (reality)1 — he
became a celebrated (some would say notorious) figure in the pulpit. In the religious turbulence
of the early fourteenth century he was, as we saw above, eventually accused of heresy, and tried
before the Inquisition. In 1329 Pope John XXII, who had canonized Thomas Aquinas a few
years before, condemned as heretical or misleading twenty-eight propositions from Eckhart’s
writings, a substantial number of which involved his criticisms of aspects of teleological ethics.2
In this chapter we will outline the metaphysical/
theological views that underlay his ethical theory. In the next chapter we will look more directly
at that theory.
It should be remarked at the start that, unlike Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart did not draw a sharp
distinction between metaphysics and theology. His general attitude is well expressed in this
claim made in his interpretation of John 1:17 (“For the Law was given through Moses; grace and
truth were realized through Jesus Christ”):
Accordingly the holy scripture is very appropriately explained in such a way that it is consonant
with what the philosophers have written about the nature of things and their properties,
especially since everything that is true proceeds from a single root of truth, whether in being or
in knowing, in the scripture or in nature. In harmony with this is what I noted above in the last
explanation of the words: “all things were made through him, and without him nothing was
made” (Jn. 1:3). Agreeing with this in every way is the verse, “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth” (Gn. 1:1). So it is the same thing that Moses, Christ and the Philosopher
teach; the only difference is in the manner, i.e., as credible, as acceptable or probable, and as
true.3
( In Ioh. n.185, LW 3:154–55)
1 I am indebted for this piece of information to Achatz von Müller.
2 Articles 7 through 22 of the bull deal with Eckhart’s views on how we should live, e.g., “The
sixteenth article. God does not properly command an exterior act” ( Deus proprie non precipit
actum exteriorem). The bull denounces Eckhart in harsh terms. But in 1987, when members of
the Dominican Order were urging that Rome lift the bull’s condemnation, Pope John Paul II,
himself a philosopher, spoke approvingly of Eckhart’s central teachings. However, then-Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger was more cautious, warning of the “danger . . . of syncretism.” John Paul II’s
remarks and Cardinal Ratzinger’s can be found respectively at
http://www.eckhartsociety.org/eckhart/eckhart-man, and
http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm
3 [C]onvenienter valde scriptura sacra sic exponitur, ut in ipsa sint consona, quae philosophi de
rerum naturis et ipsarum proprietatibus scripserunt, praesertim cum ex uno fonte et una radice
procedat veritatis omne quod verum est, sive essendo sive cognoscendo, in scriptura et in natura.
Ad hoc facit, quod iam supra notavi in ultima expositione ejus quod dicitur: ‘omnia per ipsum
facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil’. Cui
131
Truth is assigned of course to the teaching of Christ, faith is called for toward the teaching of
Moses, and credence (on probabilistic grounds) to the views of Aristotle and other philosophers.
In more general and sweeping terms Eckhart laid out his program at the start of this same
Commentary on John: In interpreting this Word [“In the beginning was the Word”] and
everything else that follows my intention is the same as in all my works—to explain what the
holy Christian faith and the two Testaments maintain through the help of the natural arguments
of the philosophers4 . . .
Moreover, it is the intention of this work to show how the truths of natural principles,
conclusions and properties are well intimated for him “who has ears to hear” (Mt. 13:43) in the
very words of sacred scripture, which are interpreted through these natural truths. Now and then
some moral interpretations will be advanced.5
( In Ioh. nn.2–3, LW 3:4,4–17; McGinn, Essential Sermons, 122–23) Eckhart goes so far as to
identify theology, the science of revelation, with metaphysics, for “the Gospel considers being as
being”6 ( In Ioh., n. 444, LW 3:380, 13–14). In thus applying Aristotle’s definition of
metaphysics ( Met. IV, 1003a21) to the Gospel, however, Eckhart does not stop with the
Philosopher’s approach.
According to Burkhard Mojsisch,
He takes up in his metaphysics the entire wealth of the tradition available to him, whether of
theological or philosophical provenience, thereby founding a new metaphysics which does not
set aside, but actually discusses, contents like the Trinity and the Incarnation—a metaphysics
which for this very reason is a fundamental science, one investigating above all the realm of the
godly ( divina), in accordance with which everything else is fashioned.7
per omnia concordat illud: ‘in principio creavit deus caelum et terram’, Gen. 1. Idem ergo est
quod docet Moyses, Christus et philosophus, solum quantum ad modem differens, scilicet ut
credibile, probabile sive verisimile et veritas. That Eckhart’s project was to present a
philosophically grounded version of Christianity is the thesis of Kurt Flasch, Meister Eckhart:
Philosoph des Christentums.
4 Already here one can see a profound change from the largely hostile stance toward (pagan)
philosophy taken by Augustine, especially in his later writings.
5 In cujus verbi expositione et aliorum quae sequuntur, intentio est auctoris, sicut et in omnibus
suis editionibus, ea quae sacra asserit fides christiana et utriusque testimenti scriptura, exponere
per rationes naturales philosophorum . . . Rursus intentio operis est ostendere, quomodo
veritates principiorum et conclusionum et proprietatum naturalium innuntur luculenter—‘qui
habet aures audiendi!—in ipsis verbis sacrae scripturae, quae per illa naturalia exponuntur.
Interdum etiam ponuntur expositiones aliquae morales.
6 [E]vangelium contemplatur ens in quantum ens.
7 Burkhard Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart: Analogy, Univocity and Unity, transl. Orrin F.
Summerell (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publ. Co., 2001/1983), 10–11.
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Finally, we must also note that Eckhart at one point quotes with approval the identification of
theology (and thus metaphysics) with ethics, adding: The moral philosopher or theologian
inquires into the ideas of things which have existed in the mind of God in intel igible form from
all eternity before proceeding into the physical world.8
( Sermo die, n. 2, LW 5:90,8–10)

Clearly, Eckhart is not referring to “practical” or applied ethics here, but rather to what we might
call the ontological or metaphysical basis of ethics, to which we will return later (in chapter 6,
pp. 181 ff.). In any case, it is from these inquiries—metaphysical-theological-ethical—
intermixed with a substantial amount of Aristotelian natural philosophy, that Eckhart derives his
highly original, antiteleological practical philosophy, expressed in the motto, “Live without
why.” We must look closely at how he brings this about.
Although generally regarded as a Neoplatonist on whom the works of Augustine also had a
substantial impact, “there is,” as Bernard McGinn has pointed out, “no philosopher [Eckhart]
knew better or cited more often than Aristotle.”9
Furthermore, Eckhart quotes Thomas hundreds of times, especially in his Latin writings. And he
repeatedly uses the standard Aristotelian framework of final causality, often as a source of
comparisons between the workings of nature and the human quest for happiness. A typical
example is the opening paragraph of his exegesis of John 1:43, Sequere me (“Follow me”): First
of all one must know that through the creation God says and proclaims, advises and orders all
creatures—precisely by creating them—
to follow Him, the First Cause of their entire being, to orient themselves to Him, to return to Him
and hurry to Him according to the Scripture:
“To the place from which the waters flow they shall return” [ Ecclesiastes, I, 7]. This is why the
creature by its nature loves God, indeed more than itself.10
( In Ioh. n.226 LW 3:189, 8–12)
8 Ethicus sive theologus ideas rerum, quae in mente divina, antequam prodirent in corpora, ab
aeterno quo modo ibi intelligibiliter exstiterunt, subtilius intuetur.
9 Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (New York: Crossroad Publishing,
2001), 168.
10 Quantum ergo ad primum sciendum quod deus omnem creaturam creando ipsi dicit et indicit,
con-sulit et praecipit, hoc ipso quod creat, sequi et ordinari, reflecti et recurrere in deum
tamquam in causam primam totius sui esse, secundhm illud Eccl. 1: ‘ad locum, unde exeunt
flumina, revertuntur’. Hinc est quod creatura ipsum deum amat naturaliter, plus etiam quam se
ipsam. Eckhart’s citation here is based on an older translation of Ecclesiastes.
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Further, Eckhart at times seems expressly to endorse, or at least tolerate, a
“merit-reward” schema of living that seems very like that of Aquinas. He writes, for instance, in
his Commentary on the Book of Wisdom:
“They will live forever.” Here the reward [of the just person] is pointed out . . . “And their
reward is with the Lord.” . . . nothing but God is the reward of the just.11( In Sap. nn. 69–70,
LW 2:397,1 and 12; and 398,1) Or again, in Pr. 26:
All things that are in time have a ‘Why?’. Ask a man why he eats: ‘For strength.’—‘Why do you
sleep?’—‘For the same reason.’ And so on for all things that are in time.12
(DW 2:27,19–22; Walshe, 96)
But if “nothing but God is the reward of the just” and “all creatures . . . have a why” and are
meant to “orient themselves” to God, “to return to Him and hurry to Him,” it is all the more
surprising when Eckhart plainly criticizes teleological conceptions of the good life. This criticism
is the more puzzling as the official Dominican theologian, Thomas Aquinas, had so extensively
and authoritatively formulated one such conception during Eckhart’s own lifetime. Eckhart’s flat
and repeated rejections of an intuitively plausible approach to such a centrally important issue,
namely, how we should live, is unusual and, given other statements of his, such as those just
cited, surprising.13 His rejection is furthermore often couched in memorable (and what seems
deliberately provocative) imagery—at one point he calls those who think of salvation in
teleological terms (i.e., as a reward) esel (“asses”). How to explain this?
11 ‘[I]n perpetuum vivent’, ubi notatur praemium . . . ‘Et apud dominum est merces eorum’ . . .
nihil citra deum est merces justi.
12 Alliu dinc, diu in der zȋt sint, diu hȃnt ein warumbe. Als der einen menschen vrȃgete: ‘war
umbe izzest dȗ?’—‘dar umbe, daz ich kraft habe’; ‘war umbe slæfest dȗ?’—‘umbe daz selbe’;
und alsus sint alliu dinc, diu dȃ sint in der zȋt.
13 Eckhart’s critique, in both German and Latin works, of teleological eudaimonism is never
explicitly stated as a criticism of Thomas, Augustine, or Aristotle. He comes close to doing so,
however, in German sermon 101, where he declares the superiority of complete detachment—“to
keep still and silent . . . and let God speak and work” ( daz der mensche sich halte in einem
swȋgenne, in einer stille . . . und lȃze got in im sprechen und würken)—to a more active, one
could say Aristotelian or Thomist, form of contemplation—“to do something . . . to imagine and
think about God” ( daz der mensche etwaz sȋnes werkes dar zuo tuo als ein ȋnbilden und ein
gedenken an got) (DW 4–1:354,3–5; Walshe, 33). Interestingly, this very aspect of Eckhart’s
teaching was raised as an object of suspicion by Cardinal Ratzinger—cf. note 2, above.
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We begin, as we did earlier, with the central question of the goal of life.
Eckhart could say with Aristotle that we all want to be happy, that what our happiness consists in
is a function of our nature, and that we are initially de facto ignorant of that nature and thus of
what our bliss consists in. He agrees too that its attainment requires attention and effort on our
part. So Eckhart’s ethic, as with Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas, is what we called “broadly
teleological,”
that is, it aims to discover, describe, and advocate a process of human development toward the
goal of life. It is also (in an albeit peculiar sense) a virtue ethic, since justice in particular plays a
central role. But Eckhart gives all these ideas a radical twist. In German sermon ( Pr. ) 1, Jesus
intravit in templum (“Jesus entered the Temple,” DW 1:4 ff.), Eckhart preaches on the Gospel
text (Matthew 21:12) that tel s of Jesus driving the merchants from the temple. After identifying,
in his typically allegorical fashion,14 the temple with the (highest part of the) soul, Eckhart asks
what the Evangelist meant by the merchants in the temple/soul.
He answers that the merchants (and he explicitly says he is talking of "none but good people")
are those whose inclination it is to
do good works to the glory of God, such as fasts, vigils, prayers and the rest, all kinds of good
works, but [to] do them in order that our Lord may give them something in return, or that God
may do something they wish for—all these are merchants. That is plain to see, for they want to
give one thing in exchange for another, and so to barter with our Lord.15
(DW 1:7,2–7; Walshe, 66–67)
The “spiritual merchant”16 is seeking a reward for his efforts, his merits. Eckhart’s counterpart
to such is the “just person” ( der gerehte, in his Middle High 14 I have discussed Eckhart’s
hermeneutical approach, with many further references to the copious recent literature, in
“Applicatio and Explicatio in Gadamer and Eckhart,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, eds. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, MA
and London: MIT Press, 2002).
15 [T]uont ir guoten werk gote ze ȇren, als vasten, wachen, beten und swaz des ist, aller hande
guotiu werk, und tuont sie doch dar umbe, daz in unser herre etwaz dar umbe gebe, oder daz in
got iht dar umbe tuo, daz in liep sȋ: diz sint allez koufliute. Daz ist grop ze verstȃnne, wan sie
wellent daz eine umbe daz ander geben und wellent alsȏ koufen mit unserm herren.
16 Eckhart appears to have principally in mind those monks, nuns, and others who think that
their ascetic practices will assure salvation for themselves. They cling to such practices with
attachment and seek to offer them in barter to God. By contrast, Eckhart calls it “a fair bargain
and equal exchange” ( ein glȋcher kouf) when one “surrenders all things” ( alliu dinc begeben),
all one’s attachments, and thereby “receives all things” ( alliu dinc . . . nemen) from God ( RdU
23, DW 5:295,2–3; Walshe, 518). The criticism of mercantile praise of God was prominent in
Bernard of Clairvaux’s De diligendo Deo, e.g., “One praises God because he is mighty, another
because he is gracious, yet another solely because he is essential goodness. The first is a slave
and fears for himself; the second is greedy
135
German). In Pr. 6, Justi vivent in aeternum (“The just shall live forever,” DW 1:99
ff., Walshe, 328 ff.), Eckhart explains that the just person is one “who gives to God His due, and
to the saints and angels theirs, and to his fellow man what is his”17 (ibid.:99,6–8 ) It is in the
first of these that the contrast to the merchant most strikingly emerges:
God’s due is honor. Who are they who honor God? Those who have gone completely out of
themselves and seek not their own in anything at all, whatever it may be, whether great or small;
who pay special heed to nothing anywhere, neither above nor below nor next to nor on
themselves; who aim not at possessions or honors or comfort or pleasure or utility or inwardness
or holiness or reward or heaven; and who have renounced all of this, all that is theirs. From such
people God has honor, and they honor God in the proper sense and give Him his due.18
(Ibid.:100,1–7; Walshe, 328, emphasis added)
Again, in Pr. 41, Qui sequitur justitiam (“Those who pursue justice,”), Eckhart says:
[The just person] wants and seeks nothing, for he knows no why. He acts without a why just in
the same way as God does; and just as life lives for its own sake and seeks no why for the sake of
which it lives, so too the just person knows no why for the sake of which he would do
something.19
(DW 2:289,2–5; Walshe 239, emphasis added)
( mercenarius), desiring further benefits; but the third is a son who honors his Father. He who
fears, he who profits, are both concerned about self-interest.” [ Est qui confitetur Domino
quoniam potens est, et est qui confitetur quoniam sibi bonus est, et item qui confitetur quoniam
simpliciter bonus est. Primus servus est, et timet sibi; secundus, mercenarius, et cupit sibi;
tertius, filius, et defert patri. Itaque et qui timet, et cupit, utrique pro se agunt] (XII:34).
17 Die Gote gebent, daz sȋn ist, und den heiligen und den engeln, daz ir ist, und dem
ebenmenschen, daz sȋn ist.
18 Gotes ist diu ȇre. Wer sint, die got ȇrent? Die ihr selbes alzemȃle ȗzgegangen und des irn
alzemȃle niht ensuochent an keinen dingen, swaz ez joch sȋ, noch grȏz noch klein, die niht
ensehent under sich noch über sich noch neben sich noch an sich, die niht enmeinent noch guot
noch ȇre noch gemach noch lust noch nuz noch innicheit noch heilicheit noch lȏn noch
himelrȋche und dis alles sint ȗzgegangen, alles des irn, dirre liute hȃt got ȇre, und die ȇrent got
eigenlȋche und gebent im, daz sȋn ist. As we saw in chapter 1, this text is the source of the eighth
of the condemned propositions at Avignon.
19 [E]r enwil niht noch ensuochet niht; wan er enhȃt kein warumbe, dar umbe er iht tuo, alsȏ als
got würket sunder warumbe und kein warumbe enhȃt. In der wȋse, als got würket, alsȏ würket
ouch der gerehte sunder warumbe . . .
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In sermon 6 we are told that the truly just differ from those who merely “want what God wants . .
. but [who] if they should fall sick, would wish it were God’s will that they should be better.” By
contrast, “the just have no will at all: whatever God wil s, it is all one to them, however great the
hardship”20 (DW 1:102,12–14; Walshe, 329, emphasis added). Importantly, such people “are so
set on justice that if God were not just they would not care a bean for God”21 (ibid.:103,1–2;
Walshe 329). Eckhart places the highest importance on this teaching: “Whoever understands
about the just one and justice understands all that I am saying”22
(ibid.:105,2–3; Walshe, 329). What can warrant such puzzling and extravagant-sounding claims?
For Aristotle, the just or virtuous life is itself (a central aspect of) happiness, so in a way he too
could say, “The just man wants and seeks nothing [other than justice], he knows no why,” i.e.,
has no further goal in acting virtuously. For Thomas, on the other hand, although the just person
does what is just for its own sake, such behavior does not constitute (complete) happiness; at best
it may (with the help of grace) merit it, and this happiness too he seeks by dint of his actions.
Thus, in his moral theology a door is (perhaps inadvertently) left open to spiritual or ethical
mercantilism, to thinking of virtuous behavior as a means of barter. It is this door that Eckhart
means to close, even though such teleological behavior was (and still is) regularly encouraged by
Christian churches. What does Eckhart think is lacking in action that, to ordinary common sense,
not to mention church teachings, seems commendable? And why does he dwell on
“going out of oneself,” elsewhere identified as detachment ( abegescheidenheit), of which he

says in the treatise “On Detachment” that it “surpasses all things, for all virtues have some regard
to creatures, but detachment is free of all creatures”23
(DW 5:401,6–7; Walshe, 566)?
For Eckhart, what is wrong with the merchant mentality in the search for eudaimonia is that
merchants have made the most fundamental of mistakes, i.e., as to who—or what—they
themselves are, and what their true relationship to God is. Knowledge of these things—whose
role we saw in Thomas Aquinas’s 20 [D]ie wellent wol, waz got wil . . . wæren sie siech, so
wölten sie wol, daz ez gotes wille wære, daz sie gesunt wæren . . . Die gerehten enhȃnt zemȃle
keinen willen; waz got wil, daz ist in allez glȋch, swie grȏz daz ungemach sȋ. Note again the
contrast with Augustine, in this case the view cited above in chapter 3, p. 84, according to which
the humble are those who align their wills with God’s will.
21 [D]en ist alsȏ ernst ze der gerechticheit, wære, daz got niht gereht wære, sie enahteten eine
bȏne niht ȗf got. Contrast again this attitude to Augustine’s, here the view in Ad Simplicianum
according to which whatever God does is considered just, whether or not we can see the justice
in it. See chapter 3, p. 75.
22 Swer underscheit verstȃt von gerehticheit und von gerehtem, der verstȃt allez, daz ich sage.
23 [D]az lȗteriu abegescheidenheit ob allen dingen sȋ, wan alle tugende hȃnt etwaz ȗfsehennes ȗf
die crȇatȗre, sȏ stȃt abegescheidenheit ledic aller crȇatȗren.
137
thought—is essential if one is to know what eudaimonia consists in and therefore how we should
live. As we have seen, the standard Christian view of the God–human relationship—which
Genesis 1:26 depicts as creation in the divine image and likeness—was, in the formulation by
Aquinas (and itself rooted in Augustine’s teaching), that nothing that is truly said of human
beings is also true of the Creator in the same sense, so great is the difference between the finite
and the infinite. Predications, e.g., of wisdom or goodness, that are true of God and the created
must stand in an analogical relationship to one another: “Univocal predication is impossible
between God and creatures”24 ( STh Ia,13,5,c.).
In a way, Eckhart can agree with everything Thomas claims in STh Ia,13,5.25
He too thinks that “univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures.” That is,
between God and creatures, thus described. For example—and this is one of his favorite themes
—he says the relation between “uncreated Justice” (which, as a spiritual perfection, he equates
with God) and a concrete just person or just action “is one of analogy, by way of exemplar and
antecedent”26
( In Sap. , n.44, LW 2:367,1; Walshe, 475). But now one aspect of this relationship is that the
perfection in question, here, justice, is only truly present in uncreated Justice, which bestows it
on creatures in the form of a grace, “on loan” as it were: For the virtues [in the creature], such as
justice and the like, are more like gradual acts of conformation than anything imprinted and
immanent which has its fixed root in the virtuous man: they are in a continuous state of
becoming, like the glow of light in mid-air or the image in a mirror.27
(Ibid., n.45 LW 2:368,4–7; Walshe, 475)
The same applies, he says, to transcendental qualities such as being and oneness: they are
actually the qualities of God alone, who loans them temporarily to creatures.28 But the creatures
in themselves are a pure nothing: “Thus every creature in 24 [I]mpossibile est aliquid praedicari
de Deo et creaturis univoce.
25 The full citation of Thomas’s view is given in chapter 4, pp. 124–26.
26 analogice, exemplariter et per prius. Note that in this example, and often, Eckhart is clearly
speaking of formal causality, the kind that he regards as suitable for metaphysical analysis:
(uncreated) Justice is the analogical formal cause of the justice in just persons or actions; we call
them “just” because their actions somehow resemble the exemplar.
27 Virtutes enim, justitia et huismodi, sunt potius quaedam actu configurationes quam quid
figuratum immanens et habens fixionem et radicem in virtuoso et sunt in continuo fieri, sicut
splendor in medio et imago in speculo.
28 Cf. for instance, Tabula Prologorum in opus tripartitum, LW 1:132,4–6. An English version
is given by Armand Maurer, C.S.B., in Meister Eckhart: Parisian Questions and Prologues
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), 79.
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itself is from nothing and is nothing” ( In Ioh. , n.308, LW 3:256,6–7).29 The very being of
creatures itself, and not only their spiritual qualities (“justice and the like”), is to be compared
with the image in a mirror, which is truly present there, but only as long as its original, its source,
is in front of the glass.
Although Eckhart’s general view of analogy was condemned in 1329, it is arguably based on, or
at least consistent with, that of Aquinas, who had claimed (using the same example that Eckhart
would later employ):
[W]hen anything is predicated of many things analogically, it is found in only one of them
according to its proper nature, and from this one the rest are denominated . . . although health is
neither in medicine nor in urine, yet in either there is something whereby the one causes, and the
other indicates health.30
( STh Ia,16,6,c.)
As health is only truly in a living being, it is predicated of medicine and urine “by loan,” as it
were. So too, according to Eckhart, since being, etc., are only truly in God, they are said of
(imputed to) creatures by loan.
Eckhart’s conception of the God–human relationship is, however, not limited to analogy, and as
a result is radically different from the lesson one might draw from a straightforward reading of
St. Thomas. For Eckhart thinks that in a certain, carefully defined sense there is also a univocal
relation between God and the human being to the extent that the latter is, for example, just, that
is: just as such. Thus Eckhart asserts near the start of the Commentary on John: The just one as
such is in justice itself, for how would he be just if he were apart from justice, if he stood outside
and apart from justice?31
(n.14, LW 3:13,4–5; McGinn, Essential Sermons, 126) 29 Sic omnis creatura id, quod in se est,
ex nihilo est et nihil est. This claim, often repeated by Eckhart, scandalized his censors. It is
included as one of the eleven propositions condemned as “evil-sounding, rash and suspect of
heresy” in the papal bull ( male sonare et multum esse temerarios de heresique suspectos; LW
5:600,1–2; McGinn, Essential Sermons, 80). This, although the same had been said by the newly
sainted Aquinas almost word for word, in STh IaIae,109,2,ad 2: “Now as every created thing has
its being from another, and, considered in itself, is nothing . . . ” [ Unaquaeque autem res creata,
sicut esse non habet nisi ab alio, et in se considerata est nihil. ]
30 [Q]uando aliquid dicitur analogice de multis, illud invenitur secundum propriam rationem in
uno eorum tantum, a quo alia denominantur . . . quamvis sanitas non sit in medicina neque in
urina, tamen in utroque est aliquid per quod hoc quidem facit, illud autem significat sanitatem.
31 [J]ustus ut sic est in ipsa justitia. Quomodo enim justus esset, si extra justitiam esset, divisus
a justitia foris staret. The theory of predication in this citation was derived from Aristotle; its use
by Eckhart is explored at length by Flasch in Meister Eckhart, e.g., pp. 212–24.
139
Here the talk is not of the just person or action, i.e., not of a concrete particular, not of a creature,
but simply of the justus ut sic, the just one as not further modified. Bearing in mind that analogy,
ambiguity, and univocity are properties of descriptions, of terms, let us note that in these early
sections of the Commentary Eckhart introduces a number of terms that are the hallmarks of his
view, the building blocks of his discourse, on univocity: the just one is “the word” of justice
“through which justice speaks and manifests itself”32 (ibid. n. 15, LW 3:13,8–9; McGinn,
Essential Sermons, 126, emphasis added); the just one “proceeds from and is born of justice, and
in this way distinguishes itself from it”33 (ibid., n.
16:14,6; McGinn, Essential Sermons, 127, emphasis added); the just one is “the offspring and
son of justice . . . another in person, not in nature”34 (ibid.: ll. 11–12; McGinn, Essential
Sermons, 127, emphasis added). In connection with this last claim, Eckhart observes that the two
are “‘ one’ in nature because otherwise justice would not give birth to the just one nor the father
to the son, who would become different, nor would this be univocal generation ( generatio
univoca)”35 (ibid.: ll.
13–15). In other words, Eckhart is providing examples that purport to amend or extend, in an
important way, Aquinas’s sweeping claim that “it is impossible for anything to be predicated
univocally of God and of creatures”36 ( STh, Ia,13,5,c.).
The point of these terminological pairs: speaker-word; birthing father-birthed son, etc., is to
stress their univocal character. Thomas had written: The begotten, furthermore, receives its
nature from the generator. If, then, the Son is begotten by the Father, it follows that He has
received the nature which He has from the Father. But it is not possible that He has received
from the Father a nature numerically other than the Father has, but the same in species, as
happens in univocal generations, when man generates man, or fire, fire.37
( SCG, IV,10,4)
32 [J]ustus verbum est justitiae, quo justitia se ipsam dicit et manifestat.
33 [J]ustus procedens et genitus a justitia, hoc ipso ab illa distinguitur.
34 [J]ustus est proles et filius iustitiae . . . alius in persona, non aliud in natura.
35 ‘[U]num’ in natura, quia aliter justitia non gigneret justum, nec pater filium, qui fieret alius,
nec esset generatio univoca.
36 Eckhart’s contemporary, the Franciscan John Duns Scotus, who was in Paris at the same time
as Eckhart in the early 1300s, reached a similar conclusion about the univocity of “being.” Cf.
Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer, The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus: An
Introduction (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 38 ff.
37 Genitum naturam accipit a generante. Si ergo filius genitus est a Deo patre, oportet quod
naturam quam habet, a patre acceperit. Non est autem possibile quod acceperit a patre aliam
naturam numero quam pater habet et similem specie, sicut fit in generationibus univocis, ut cum
homo generat hominem, et ignis ignem.
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Eckhart seems to have this definition in mind. Certainly the “man generates man” motif is
present in the birthing father/birthed son pairing. But Thomas also thinks univocal generation
requires that the form of what is generated preexists in the generator according to the same mode
of being, and in similar matter. Thus one can see at once why he would claim that univocal
predication is impossible between God and creatures. For creatures and God do not share the
same mode of being, much less similar matter. To overcome these hurdles Eckhart, first, makes
clear that his focus is on spiritual, not material, perfections.
Justice, goodness, and the like are not properties of material entities as material.
A crucial difference is that in the univocal reception of these spiritual perfections, what is
involved is not a loan, but permanent possession. The “just one”
qua just is just:
With spiritual things, e.g., justice and the like, it is one and the same to desire and to possess
them. Conception is (here) possession.38
( In Ex. , n.205, LW 2:172,16–17)
Secondly, Eckhart is at pains to argue that with respect to this realm of the spiritual perfections—
which at the same time is the realm of intellect—there is a sense in which the human being, or an
aspect thereof, is that just one, the Word of Justice, the Son, and one with the Father, the
Principiate of the Principal. It is important to appreciate that these claims, on which Eckhart’s
reputation as a mystic is based, are derived, not from mystical experience, but from an intricately
developed, only partially Aristotelian metaphysical structure. Eckhart intended a systematic
presentation of that structure in his planned Three-Part Work, of which only fragments have
come down to us, with the result that the status of many of his claims, presented piecemeal in
various surviving texts, can seem obscure or ungrounded.39 But they are clearly not meant as
reports of personal mystical experience—Eckhart is silent or even dismissive on this score—nor
are they wild, random speculation. In any case, he is very clear that the spiritual life he wants his
listeners and readers to follow is based on their/our univocal, and 38 In rebus autem
spiritualibus, puta in iustitia et similibus, ipsa concupiscere utique est ista adipisci et habere:
ipsa conceptio est ipsa adeptio. An English translation appears in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and
Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), 108.
39 It is not known exactly how much of the planned Opus Tripartitum Eckhart actually
succeeded in composing during his three years in Paris (or elsewhere). Loris Sturlese has written,
“Whereas even today works like the quodlibeta of Henry of Ghent fill the shelves of old
libraries, all that remains of Eckhart’s two periods as Master at Paris is five quaestiones— an
unparalleled catastrophe.” “Mysticism and Theology in Meister Eckhart’s Theory of the Image,”
Eckhart Review 2 (March 1993): 18–31, at 20.

141
not analogical, connection with God. In his German treatise, The Book of Divine Consolation, he
lays out exactly this contrast:
Solomon says [ Proverbs 12:21]: “The just will not grieve, whatever may befall.” He does not
say “the just man” or “the just angel” or this or that: he says “the just.” Whatever belongs in
some way to the just, in particular whatever in any way makes his justice his and that he is just,
all that is son and has a father on earth and is creature, made and created, for his father is
creature, made and created. But the pure just one, since it has no made or created father, and God
and justice are one, and justice alone is its father, therefore pain and sorrow cannot enter into
such a one, any more than into God.40
( BgT, DW 5:12,7–15; Walshe, 526, transl. slightly altered. Eckhart makes the same point in Pr.
39, DW 2:258; Walshe, 306.) The personal, the particular—for example, my just behavior in
settling a debt, to the extent it concerns me as a specific human being—in a word, the analogical
with respect to the divine perfections: all this is set against “the pure one,” pure in the sense that
such a one is detached from the personal and the particular (and indeed from time and space). Its
perfections are said of it in the same sense as of God.41 But, one must wonder, what aspect of us
is Eckhart talking about, and how does he suppose it to overcome Thomas’s scruples about
univocal predication of God and creatures?
Immediately following his remarks about Justice and the just one in the Commentary on John
Eckhart says, “On the basis of the above, a great deal in the scriptures can be explained,
especially what was written about the only begotten Son of God, such as that he is ‘the image of
God’ (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15)”42 ( In Ioh.
n.23, LW III:19,3–4; Essential 129). The centrally important Eckhartian theme of the image
provides a good example of his use of Neoplatonism to interpret scriptural texts, for instance
when he says:
40 S a l o m ȏ n sprichet: ‘den gerehten enbetrübet niht allez, daz im geschehen mac’. Er

ensprichet niht
‘den gerehten menschen’ noch ‘den gerehten engel’ noch diz noch daz. Er sprichet ‘den
gerehten’. Swaz des gerehten ihtes ist, sunder, daz sȋn gerehticheit ist und daz er gereht ist, daz
ist sun und hȃt vater ȗf ertrȋche und crȇatȗre und ist gemachet und geschaffen, wan sȋn vater ist
crȇatȗre gemachet oder geschaffen. Aber gereht lȗter, wan daz niht geschaffen noch gemachet
vater enhȃt und got und gerehticheit al ein ist und gerehticheit aleine sȋn vater ist, dar umbe mac
leit und ungemach als wȇnic in in gevallen als in got.
41 More will be said of this “univocal correlation” of humans and the divine in the next chapter,
where we look more closely at Eckhart’s teaching on the transcendentals and the spiritual
perfections such as justice.
42 Ex praemissis possunt exponi quam plurima in scriptura, specialiter illa quae de filio dei
unigenito scribuntur, puta quod est ‘imago dei’.
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[A]n image properly speaking is a simple formal emanation that transmits the whole pure naked
essence. This is what the metaphysician considers, leaving aside the efficient and final cause,
which for the philosopher of nature constitute the basis of the study of nature. An image is thus
an emanation from the innermost while everything exterior is silent and excluded. It is life,
which one can imagine as though of itself and in itself an essence swel s and surges up, while the
swel ing over is not yet considered.43
( Sermo XLIX, n.511, LW 4:425,14–426,4; McGinn, Teacher and Preacher, 236, emphasis
added)
In Neoplatonism essence desires to manifest and communicate itself, to extend itself through its
image or “offspring”.44 In the Commentary on John Eckhart gives us nine theses about images
that are very similar in content to those about the relationship between Justice and the just one,
e.g., “The image as image receives nothing of what belongs to it from the subject in which it is;
rather it receives its entire being from the object whose image it is.” And further: “It receives its
being from [the imaged object] alone.” And: “The image is in its prototype [i.e., its object]; for
that is where it receives its entire being.” And again: “It follows that the image and that of which
it is the image, insofar as they are such, are one”45 (nn. 23–24, LW 3:19,5–20,2; McGinn,
Essential Sermons, 129). Eckhart obviously is referring to what we might call the essential
notion of being an image—the “pure intentionality of the image”—as opposed to any actual
image in its particularity. The relevance of this observation becomes clearer when seen in the
light of Eckhart’s further claim that the traditional distinguishing mark of the human being, i.e.,
reason, is in a certain way itself essentially to be an image.
Here is an example that might help illustrate what Eckhart means in these claims about images.
Take some fact—say, that Paris is in France—and give it some form of expression, e.g., in an
English sentence, “Paris is in France”; then the sentence could be said to be an image or
expression, even the picture, of 43 [I]mago proprie est emanatio simplex, formalis transfusiva
totius essentiae purae nudae, qualem considerat metaphysicus circumscriptio efficiente et fine,
sub quibus causis cadunt naturae in consideratione physici. Est ergo imago emanatio ab intimis
in silentio et exclusione omnis forinseci, vita quaedam, ac si imagineris rem ex se ipsa et in se
ipsa intumescere et bullire in se ipsa necdum cointellecta ebullitione.
44 On Eckhart’s teaching about images, cf. Donald F. Duclow, “‘Whose image is this?’ in
Eckhart’s Sermones,” Mystics Quarterly 15 (1989): 29–40; as well as Sturlese, “Mysticism and
Theology,” and Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, 86–94.
45 [I]mago enim, inquantum imago est, nihil sui accipit a subiecto in quo est, sed totum suum
esse accipit ab obiecto, cuius est imago . . . accipit esse suum a solo illo . . . imago est in suo
exemplari. Nam ibi accipit totum suum esse . . . sequitur quod imago et cuius est imago, in
quantum huiusmodi, unum sunt.

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the fact.46 In itself this imaging relation is intentional, not causal: the sentence means the
(purported) fact. Now consider a German translation of the sentence:
“Paris ist in Frankreich.” Although physically different from the English version, it shares
something essential—its content—with both the original thought and the English sentence. Frege
called this abstract content a ‘sense’ ( Sinn). It is in virtue of expressing a certain sense that a
term can refer to an object (or a concept), a sentence can have a truth-value, and translational
equivalents have the same meaning.47 Eckhart might say that the meaning of an image—the
object intended— is its being, and that hence a (purported) fact or object and its expression qua
expression or image share the same being. Further, the Fregean notion of sense corresponds to
Eckhart’s claim that the “the image as image ( imago inquantum imago est) receives nothing of
what belongs to it from the subject in which it is; rather it receives its entire being from the
object whose image it is.” The “image as image” would be the expression qua sense-bearer, the
“object whose image it is” would be the purported fact or object, while the “subject in which it
is” would be the English or German sentence, the spoken or written
“vessel.”48 The sense that the latter carry is identical with that of the object or purported fact
from which it originates, just as—for Eckhart—the image inquantum image is identical with its
prototype, with this one difference: the one is the source, the other the recipient.
The comparison limps slightly, however, in that for Eckhart the central case is where the
prototype is a Thinker (or better: ‘Think ing’), while its thought/
expression—its “Word”—is the prototype’s image. Drawing on both Christian and Neoplatonic
traditions, Eckhart in his Parisian Questions uses this notion of univocal correlation to upend the
common view of his scholastic predecessors, preeminently Aquinas, on the nature of the Deity:
[I]t is not my present opinion that God understands because he exists, but rather that he exists
because he understands. God is an intellect and understanding, and his understanding is itself the
ground of his existence. It is said in John 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God.” The Evangelist did not 46 Something like this was indeed
said, memorably, by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus: “The logical picture of facts is the
thought” (3); “The thought is the proposition with a sense” (4); “The proposition shows its
sense” (4.022). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. Mac-guinness
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
47 Gottlob Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische
Kritik 100(1892): 25–50; English version, “On Sense and Meaning,” in Translations from the
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. P.T. Geach and M. Black, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwel , 1980).
48 One of Eckhart’s presentations of the image-doctrine is in Pr. 16B, in which he applies a

scriptural text beginning, “Like a vessel of solid gold . . .” to St. Augustine and to “every good,
holy soul”
( einer ieglȋchen guoten, heiligen sȇle) (DW 1:263,3–4; Walshe, 114).

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say: “In the beginning was being, and God was being.” A word is completely related to an
intellect, where it is either the speaker or what is spoken, and not existence or a composite being
. . . After the text of John 1 just quoted there follows: “All things were made through him”
(Jn 1:3). This should read, “All things made through him, are (exist),”
so that existence itself comes to creatures afterward.49 Thus the author of the Book of Causes
says, “The first of created things is being.”50 Hence, as soon as we come to being we come to a
creature.51
( Qu. Par., n.4, LW 5:40,4–41,7; Parisian, 45).
In addition to the Neoplatonic element, Eckhart’s unusual view is also based on a more
conventional idea, one found for instance in Aquinas: that “His [i.e., God’s] knowledge is the
cause of things, whereas our knowledge is caused by them”52 (ibid.: n.8, LW 5:44,11–12;
Parisian, 48). It follows, Eckhart says, that
“since our knowledge is dependent upon the being by which it is caused, with equal reason being
itself is dependent upon God’s knowledge”53 (ibid.). If one complains that one cannot imagine
an intellect beyond being, Eckhart concedes that “here the imagination fails ( hic imaginatio
deficit),” unable to distinguish God’s knowledge from our own. He is wil ing to make
concessions to this weakness: “Of course, if you wish to call understanding ‘being,’ I do not
mind.” But it is more proper to see that “since being belongs to creatures, it is not in God except
as its cause. Therefore being is not in God, but the purity of being,”54 a notion that Eckhart
associates with the transcendent “I” of the Divinity.
49 The Latin of Jn 1:3 is “Omnia per ipsum facta sunt.” Eckhart’s reading requires a comma or
pause after “facta. ”
50 Liber de causis, prop. 4. Based on the writings of Proclus (fifth century C.E.), the Liber was
among the most influential sources of Neoplatonic thought in the High Middle Ages.
51 [N]on ita videtur mihi modo, ut quia sit, ideo intelligat, sed quia intelligit, ideo est, ita quod
deus est intellectus et intelligere et est ipsum intelligere fundamentum ipsius esse. Quia dicitur
Ioh. 1: ‘in principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud deum, et deus erat verbum’. Verbum
autem se toto est ad intellectum et est ibi dicens vel dictum et non esse vel ens commixtum . . . Et
sequitur post verbum assumptum Ioh. 1: ‘omnia per ipsum facta sunt’, ut sic legatur: ‘omnia per
ipsum facta sunt, ut ipsis factis ipsum esse post conveniat. Unde dicit auctor D e c a u s i s:
“prima rerum creatarum est esse”. Unde statim cum venimus ad esse, venimus ad creaturam.
52 [S]cientia dei est causa rerum et scientia nostra est causata a rebus. Aquinas uses the notion
at, e.g., STh IaIIae,3,5,obj.1: God’s practical intellect is causa rerum intellectarum.
53 [I]deo cum scientia nostra cadat sub ente, a quo causatur, et ipsum ens pari ratione cadit sub
scientia dei.
54 Et si tu intelligere velis vocare esse, placet mihi . . . Et ideo cum esse conveniat creaturis, non
est in deo nisi sicut in causa, et ideo in deo non est esse, sed puritas essendi. In ibid., nn.8–9,
LW 5:45,3–11; n. 12:48,8. Where Maurer translates “esse” as “existence,” I prefer “being.”
Compare Sermons and Lectures on Ecclesiasticus, n.8, LW 2, 235,14–15, where Eckhart
connects the “purity” of God’s wisdom with ‘I’: “For ‘I’ denotes the naked and pure substance” (
Li ‘ego’ enim meram et puram substaniam significat).
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The phrase “purity of being” may have been meant as a concession to the oddity (not to say
scandal) of placing God above being altogether. The “God beyond being” was an important
theme among Neoplatonists, including such Christian thinkers as the Pseudo-Dionysius
Areopagite, and it recalls the Plotinian One, of which nothing at all can be predicated, not even
being.
But whereas the One of Plotinus is prior to Intellect ( nous)—and indeed is its source—Eckhart
in a sense identifies the two by drawing on Aristotle’s contention (itself derived from
Anaxagoras) that “before it thinks, [the intellect or rational part of the soul] is not actually any
real thing”55 ( De anima III,429a22–24). Eckhart does not call God a res intelligens, but simply
intelligere, prior to any res. Accordingly, God’s Word or Image will also essentially be
intelligere, intellect, and the term will be used univocally of both God and Word.
Eckhart’s audacious claim is that an aspect of the human intellect—and indeed a particular use of
that aspect—is identical with, i.e., non-distinct from, this Word and therefore from its Source.
The lamentable absence of Eckhart’s systematic treatises is, from the vantage point of this study,
especially unfortunate in the area of psychology. If we had from him even a commentary on
Aristotle’s De anima, it would likely shed much important light on his views of the intellect. As
it is, all we have are scattered remarks in various works, an important example of which appears
in German sermon 69. Eckhart is here preaching on the Gospel text, John 16:16—“A little while
and you will no longer see me.” Unsurprisingly, this leads him to reflect on vision, as well as the
medium in which we see and the nature of images. Eckhart wants to say that we do not see
objects directly, but instead their images, but this does not give rise to a regress:
I do not see my hand or a stone, but rather I see an image of the stone.
But I do not see that image in another image or a medium. Rather I see it without means and
without image, for the image is the means and not another means . . . an image is imageless, in
that it is not seen in another image.56
(DW 3:168,3–8; Walshe, 235)
The image par excellence is God’s Word: “The eternal Word is the medium and the image itself,
which is without means or image, so that the soul may grasp 55 ὁ ἄρα καλούμενος τῆς ψυχῆς
νοῦς . . . οὐθέν ἐστιν ἐνεργείᾳ τῶν ὄντων πρὶν νοεῖν.
56 Dar umbe ensihe ich niht die hant oder den stein, mȇr: ich sihe ein bilde von dem steine. Aber
daz selbe bilde daz ensihe ich niht in einem andern bilde oder in einem mittel, mȇr: ich sihe ez
ȃne mittel und ȃne bilde, wan daz bilde ίst daz mittel und niht ein ander mittel, . . . Alsȏ ist ouch
bilde ȃne bilde, wan ez enwirt niht gesehen in einem andern bilde.
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God in the eternal Word, and know him im-mediately and without any image”57
(ibid.: l .8–9; Walshe, 235). Since the Word is the univocal correlate of the Principal or Speaker,
God, it has what McGinn calls the “union of indistinction”
with God.58 Hence, and paradoxically, it both serves as medium and abolishes the medium at
the same time, so that grasping the Word/Image is grasping the Prototype.
At this point in the sermon we might expect Eckhart to explain how one can grasp the Word.
Instead he seems to embark on a digression, stating: There is a power in the soul, which is the
intellect. From the moment that it becomes aware of God and tastes Him, it has five properties.
The first is that it becomes detached from here and now. The second is that it is like nothing. The
third is that it is pure and uncompounded. The fourth is that it is active and seeking in itself. The
fifth is that it is an image.59
(Ibid.:169,1–5; Walshe, 235)
In each of these ways, the soul/intellect that has become aware of God becomes like the Word;
indeed for Eckhart it (by grace) becomes “indistinctly one” with the Word. For example, in
becoming “detached from here and now,”
it shifts its perspective from the sensible to the intelligible world; in becoming
“like nothing,” i.e., empty or detached, the intellect paradoxically becomes like God, the
Indistinct One. (Creatures differ from one another through their multiple distinctions, but God
has none of those characteristics, is in-comparably other, a state the intellect can approximate by
detaching from all things.)60
It is with the fifth of these properties that the theme of image and Word is taken up again:
57 Daz ȇwic wort ist daz mittel und daz bilde selbe, daz dȃ ist ȃne mittel und ȃne bilde, ȗf daz
diu sȇle in dem ȇwigen worte got begrȋfet und bekennet ȃne mittel und ȃne bilde.
58 McGinn, Mystical Thought, 48.
59 Ein kraft ist in der sȇle, daz ist vernünfticheit. Von ȇrste, sȏ diu gotes gewar wirt und
gesmecket, sȏ hȃt si vünf eigenschefte an ir. Daz ȇrste ist, daz si abescheidet von hie und von nȗ.
Daz ander, daz si nihte glȋch enist. Daz dritte, daz si lȗter und unvermenget ist. Daz vierde, daz
si in ir selber würkende oder suochende ist. Daz vünfte, daz si ein bilde ist.
60 Eckhart’s important reflections on the One as Indistinct are briefly outlined in his
Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, nn.154–55, LW 2:489–91; Teacher, 169–70. Eckhart’s
theory is discussed (as
“dialectical Neoplatonism”) by McGinn in Mystical Thought, 90–100, and by Mojsisch (as

“objective paradox-theory”) in Meister Eckhart, sects. 5.2–5.21.
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[The soul is] an image. Well now! Mark this well and remember it: here you have the whole
sermon in a nutshell. Image and image[d]61
are so fully one and joined that no difference can be discerned. We can well understand fire
without heat, and heat without fire. We can understand the sun without light and light without the
sun. But we can understand no difference between image and image[d]. I say further: God in His
omnipotence can understand no difference between them, for they are born together and die
together . . . if the image should perish that is formed after God, then God’s image would also
disappear.62
(Ibid.:176,3–178,2; Walshe, 236–37)
I suggest that the “image that is formed after God” refers to the intellect qua intellect, while
“God’s image” here is the Word. The justification for Eckhart’s claim lies in the univocal-
correlational relationship among the three: God-the-Father, the Son-as-Word, and the intellect—
these necessarily co-exist with one another.
In thus highlighting the intellect, Eckhart drew on a wide field of philosophical speculation
reaching back to antiquity. Roughly speaking, according to various views originally inspired by
Plato and Aristotle and enjoying currency in the Middle Ages, ordinary human intellection
involves a kind of identification of knower and known: the two become identical in form, though
not in matter, when the form of the object comes to be present in the soul or mind of the
knower.63 In addition to memory and experience, this process assumes the use of the senses,
while the work of the intellect is divided into two functions. The 61 Here I depart from Walshe’s
literal rendering of the original “bilde und bilde” in favor of a version of the modern German
translation (“Bild und <Ur>bild”) given by Josef Quint, editor and translator of several volumes
of the Deutsche Werke (here, DW III:176–77). This seems to me to make better sense of the text
and brings it into line with what Eckhart says elsewhere. On the other hand, “image and image”
could also be acceptable if the preacher means that the soul as image is image of the Word, itself
an Image (of God).
62 [D]az ez ein bilde ist. Eyȃ, nȗ merket mit vlȋze und gehaltet diz wol; in dem hȃt ir die predige
alzemȃle: bilde und bilde ist sȏ gar ein und mit einander, daz man keinen underscheit dȃ verstȃn
enmac.
Man verstȃt wol daz viur ȃne die hitze und die hitze ȃne daz viur. Man verstȃt wol die sunnen
ȃne daz lieht und daz lieht ȃne die sunnen. Aber man enmac keinen underscheit verstȃn zwischen
bilde und bilde.
Ich spriche mȇ: got mit sȋner almehticheit enmac keinen underscheit dȃ verstȃn, wan ez wirt mit
einander geborn und stirbet mit einander . . . vergienge daz bilde, daz nȃch gote gebildet ist, sȏ
vergienge ouch daz bilde gotes.
63 “And in fact thought, as we have described it, is what it is by virtue of becoming all things . . .
actual knowledge is identical with its object” (καὶ ἔστιν ὁ μὲν τοιοῦτος νοῦς τῷ πάντα γίνεσθαι .
. . τὸ δ'
αὐτό ἐστιν ἡ κατ' ἐνέργειαν ἐπιστήμη τῷ πράγματι). Aristotle, DA III,5:430 a13–15 and a20 (
Complete Works, vol. 1, 684, transl. J. A. Smith).
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“active” (“productive” or “agent”) intellect abstracts the intelligible forms of objects from the
‘perceptual species’ produced by the various senses and coordinated by the common sense. Of
this function Aristotle says “it makes all things” (ὁ δὲ τῷ πάντα ποιεῖν, DA 430 a12), while the
other function—
dubbed “passive” or “potential” intellect—“is what it is by virtue of becoming all things” (ὁ μὲν
τοιοῦτος νοῦς τῷ πάντα γίνεσθαι). The references to
“all things” indicate the infinite or unlimited capacity of the intellect. In addition Aristotle says
of the active intellect that it is “separable,” and “when separated it is alone just what it is . . .
immortal and eternal”64 ( DA, 430a17
and 23–24).
These latter remarks, both cryptic and provocative, about a non-material aspect of the soul that is
“immortal and eternal” understandably inspired much speculation both in later antiquity and
especially among Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages, for instance on
whether there is a single active intellect for all intelligent beings. In this ongoing debate
Eckhart’s older Dominican contemporary, Dietrich of Freiberg, drew on diverse sources—
Aristotle, Augustine, Neoplatonism, Averroes, and Albert the Great—to assign a decisive role to
the active intellect in the human quest for happiness; the possible intellect is ultimately a
hindrance in this quest, and one needs the help of grace to overcome it, though there is then no
need of further grace for the active intellect to attain its natural object, the vision of God.65 Quite
different was the view of Eckhart. In German sermon 104 he says:
Now observe. We spoke just now of an active intellect and a passive intellect. The active
intellect abstracts images from outward things, stripping them of matter and of accidents, and
introduces them to the passive intellect, begetting their mental image therein. And the passive
intellect, made pregnant by the active in this way, cherishes and knows these things with the aid
of the active intellect. Even then, the passive intellect cannot keep on knowing these things
unless the active intellect illumines them afresh. Now observe: what the active intellect does for
the natural man, that and far more God does for one with detachment: 64 χωριστὸς . . . χωρισθεὶς
δ' ἐστὶ μόνον τοῦθ' ὅπερ ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον.
65 For a summary of the views of Dietrich and how they differ from Eckhart’s, as well as of how
both were received in the early fourteenth century, cf. Niklaus Largier, “‘intellectus in deum
ascensus’: Intellekttheoretische Auseinandersetzungen in Texten der deutschen Mystik,”
Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 69 (1995): 423–71.
149
He takes away the active intellect from him and, installing Himself in its stead, He Himself
undertakes all that the intellect ought to be doing . . .66
(DW 4-1:585,8–587,9; Walshe, 49, emphasis added)67
Unlike Dietrich, Eckhart apparently sees only a natural application for the human intellectus
agens, i.e., a use restricted to abstracting the essences from the sensory presentations of objects
in this world. But neither our highest knowledge nor our blessedness is creaturely, so our
attainment of them cannot be a matter of the active intellect. Indeed, we must cease seeking
outside, in the world of the senses, and turn inward, for the intellect is also endowed for this task
through its passive or receptive side.
The special mark of the Eckhartian path is that it transcends the level on which we are
analogously related to God, i.e., as creatures of the Creator, beings—from the perspective of both
Augustine and Aquinas—whose highest aspirations seem to depend entirely on a transformation
of our human nature through God’s grace. For Eckhart, too, grace is absolutely necessary, but it
does not so much transform our true nature as reveal it and make it once again accessible to us: it
restores our original (i.e., pre-Fall) rectitude. The intellect, both active and passive, is part of our
human nature, indeed its defining element. To the extent that we are creatures, it shares in our
creatureliness, and with its natural use we are thoroughly familiar. But Eckhart suggests that it
has a more-than-natural use, paradoxically by way of, indeed in, its nonuse, i.e., complete
detachment. This means a turning away from the intellectus agens altogether. Through the thus
detached intellectus possibilis the rational soul becomes pure possibility. According to the last
text quoted, for example, once we quiet the restless striving of the natural intellect, the
subsequent action is entirely from the side of God, and Eckhart describes it principally in terms
of grace.
66 Nȗ merket! Wir hȃn dȃ vor gesprochen von einer würkender vernunft und von einer lȋdender
vernunft. Diu würkende vernunft houwet diu bilde abe von den ȗzern dingen und entkleidet sie
von materie und von zuovalle und setzet sie in die lȋdende vernunft, und diu gebirt ir geistlȋchiu
bilde in sie. Und sȏ
diu lȋdende vernunft von der würkenden swanger worden ist, sȏ behebet und bekennet si diu dinc
mit helfe der würkenden vernunft. Nochdenne enmac diu lȋdende vernunft diu dinc niht behalten
in bekantnisse, diu würkende enmüeze sie anderwerbe erliuhten. Sehet, allez daz diu würkende
vernunft tuot an einem natiurlȋchen menschen, daz selbe und verre mȇ tuot got einem
abegescheiden menschen. Er nimet im abe die würkende vernunft und setzet sich selber an ir stat
wider und würket selber dȃ allez daz, daz diu würkende vernunft solte würken.
67 There has been disagreement about whether Eckhart himself wrote this sermon. Largier (in
“intellectus” ), for example, thought this was certainly not the case, though he agrees that the
content is Eckhartian. But in 2003 the editor of volume 4:1 of the Deutsche Werke, Georg Steer,
argued strongly for Eckhart’s authorship, and published a critical edition of the sermon (as Pr.
104).
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What is grace, according to Eckhart?68 He gives a metaphorical and quite general

characterization when he says:
Grace is a kind of boiling over [ ebullitio] from the generation of the Son
[by the Father] and has its root in the innermost heart of the Father. It is life, not just being
—“His name is: the Word” [Revel.: 19:13]—higher than nature.
( Sermo XXV-2, n.263, LW 4:239,10–240,1; McGinn, Teacher and Preacher, 219–20).69
Grace is a divine overflow, i.e., it is the divine life itself. Every form of grace
“comes from God alone from the same ground as being itself”70 (ibid., n. 264, LW 4:240,7;
McGinn, Teacher and Preacher, 220). Importantly, grace is twofold: The first [grace] comes
from God insofar as he is understood as a being, or rather as something good . . . The second
grace comes from God as He is understood under the property of “personal notion,”71 for which
reason only an intellective being which properly reflects the image of the Trinity can receive it.
Further, God as good is the principle of the boiling over [ ebullitio] on the outside; [but] as
personal notion [i.e., as Father, Son, etc.] He is the principle of the boiling [ bullitio] within
himself, which is the cause and exemplar of the boiling over. Thus the 68 My understanding of
Eckhart’s complex pronouncements on grace is much indebted to the writings of McGinn and
Largier. Cf. McGinn, Mystical Thought, 127–31; and Largier, “zu Sermo XXV: Gratia dei sum
id quod sum,” in Lectura Eckhardi II: Predigten Meister Eckharts von Fachgelehrten gelesen
und gedeutet, eds. G. Steer and L. Sturlese (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2003), 177–203; as
well as Largier’s commentary in his edition, Meister Eckhart: Werke in zwei Bänden (Frankfurt
am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), vol. II, 904–09. Cf. the rather different and
tentative investigation by Kurt Flasch in “zu Predigt 52: Beati pauperes spiritu,” Lectura
Eckhardi I: Predigten Meister Eckharts von Fachgelehrten gelesen und gedeutet, eds. Georg
Steer and Loris Sturlese (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1998), 182–99, esp. 194–97. Flasch also traces
the development of mainline views about grace in Latin Christendom from Peter Lombard to
Eckhart; in Meister Eckhart, esp. 284–87.
69 Gratia est ebullitio quaedam parturitionis filii, radicem habens in ipso patris pectore intimo.
Vita est, non solum esse—‘nomen eius: verbum’—eminentior natura. Eckhart’s view of grace is
widely expressed in his writings. I will focus on the two parts of Sermo XXV, both because this
Latin work is a more sustained, treatise-like discussion, and because it is readily available in
English translation, in Teacher, 216–23. I am indebted to Marco Brösch and the Cusanus-Stift
for the opportunity to examine Nicolaus Cusanus’s own copy of Sermo XXV with his original
marginal notes.
70 [G]ratia est a solo deo pari ratione sicut et ipsum esse.
71 In the medieval discussion a notio is “the proper idea whereby we know a divine Person”
( Aquinas, STh I,32,3,c.: notio dicitur id quod est propria ratio cognoscendi divinam personam).
Examples would be paternity, sonship, etc. As we will see, Eckhart plainly means to tie the
second kind of grace closely to the relations among the Three Persons in the Trinity.
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emanation of the persons in the Godhead is prior, the cause and exemplar of creation. . . . The
first grace consists in a type of flowing out, a departure from God; the second consists in a type
of flowing back, a return to God Himself. Both first and second grace have in common that they
are from God alone . . . The reason is that it is of the nature of grace to be given without merits,
freely, for nothing, without any preparatory medium. That belongs only to what is First . . .
Therefore, every act of God in the creature is grace.72
(Ibid., n.258–59, LW 4:235,9–237,10; McGinn, Teacher and Preacher, 218–19)
This twofold distinction that Eckhart appeals to is Neoplatonic in origin, the contrast between the
“boiling” within the divine and the “boiling over” that produces the whole creation. Eckhart goes
on to blend it with an established scholastic contrast, that between gratia gratis data, “grace
freely bestowed [on all],” and gratia gratum faciens, the “grace that makes one acceptable [to
God]”
(denoted “sanctifying grace”). Let us call these “grace-1” and “grace-2,” respectively. The latter,
grace-2, according to Eckhart in a German sermon, is the bullitio of the Trinity as received by a
soul that is “collected into the single power that knows God” ( gesament ist an die envaltige
kraft, diu got bekennet), i.e., the passive intellect:
This grace springs up in the heart of the Father and flows into the Son, and in the union of both it
flows out of the wisdom of the Son and pours into the goodness of the Holy Ghost, and is sent
with the Holy Ghost into the soul. And this grace is a face of God and is impressed without
cooperation in the soul with the Holy Ghost and forms the soul like God.73
( Pr. 81, DW 3:399,2–6; Walshe, 323–24)
72 Prima procedit a deo sub ratione et proprietate entis sive boni potius . . . Secunda gratia
procedit a deo sub ratione et proprietate personalis notionis. Propter quod ipsius capax est
solum intellectivun, in quo relu-cet proprie imago trinitatis. Rursus deus sub ratione boni est
principium bullitionis in se ipso, quae se habet causaliter et exemplar[iter] ad ebulitionem.
Propter quod emanatio personarum in divinis est prior, causa et exemplar creationis . . . prima
gratia consistit in quodam effluxu, egressu a deo. Secunda consistit in quodam reflexu sive
regressu in ipsum deum. Hoc tamen habent commune gratia prima et secunda quod utraque est a
solo deo . . . Ratio, quia gratia est ex sui natura quod datu sine meritis, datur gratis, pro nihilo,
sine medio disponente. Hoc autem competit tantum primo . . . Sic ergo omnis operatio dei in
creatura gratia est.
73 Diu gnȃde entspringet in dem herzen des vaters und vliuzet in den sun, und in der vereinunge
ir beider vliuzet si ȗz der wȋsheit des sunes und vliuzet in die güete des heiligen geistes und wirt
gesant mit dem heiligen geiste in die sȇle. Und diu gnȃde ist ein antlüze gotes und wirt ȃne
underscheit gedrücket in die sȇle mit dem heiligen geiste und bildet die sȇle nȃch gote. Flasch,
Meister Eckhart, 284–87, stresses the identification of grace in the soul with the Holy Spirit, and
he traces it to Peter Lombard in the twelfth century.
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Eckhart calls this “saving grace” ( gratia gratum faciens) and remarks that it is
“proper only to intellective and good creatures”74 ( S. XXV-2, n.258, LW 4:235,8; McGinn,
Teacher and Preacher, 218). While this way of looking at grace-2 sounds traditional enough,
Eckhart quite unusually identifies grace-1 with ebullitio, the overflowing that creates and is
“common to good and evil, and indeed all, creatures” (ibid.:235,7–8; McGinn, Teacher and
Preacher, 218).75
But even in the case of grace-2 Eckhart’s view is not as traditional as it might seem. For when he
says that only creatures who are both “rational and good”
have a share in grace-2, he is relying on his view of the intellect qua intellect as univocally
correlated with the divine, as itself Son and Image of the divine, and hence partaking in the
bullitio- dynamic of the Trinity. But this image is also lodged in a creature, in human beings who
qua creatures are analogically related to the Creator, and are furthermore fallen. Thus, the
immediate task of such an intellective creature is to begin the process of restoration to its original
rectitude by laying aside its attachment to creatureliness and restoring—through grace-2
or the divine presence in the soul—the predominance of that aspect of its soul that is Son and
Image. As a result, Eckhart’s original twofold contrast among the divine activities of bullitio and
ebullitio acquires a crucial complication. The inner-Trinitarian bullitio assumes in its relation to
the now-detached rational creature the form of gratia gratum faciens, making the good rational
creature
“ acceptable” to God, i.e., divine.76 It can do this only because the intellect by its own nature has
a capacity that is more than natural:
The gratia gratum faciens, which is called supernatural, is in the intellective power alone, but it
is not in it [the intellect] as a natural thing, rather it is in it qua intellect, insofar as it tastes the
divine nature, and as it Thomas, by contrast, thinks of grace not as a direct divine presence in the
soul, but rather as a “divine quality” which God bestows on the soul. For example, at STh IaIIae,
110,2,c, Aquinas writes that God infuses “into such as He moves towards the acquisition of
supernatural good, certain forms or supernatural qualities, whereby they may be moved by Him
sweetly and promptly to acquire eternal good; and thus the gift of grace is a quality.” [ illis quos
movet ad consequendum bonum supernaturale aeternum, infundit aliquas formas seu qualitates
supernaturales, secundum quas suaviter et prompte ab ipso moveantur ad bonum aeternum
consequendum. Et sic donum gratiae qualitas quaedam est. ]
74 propria tantum intellectivis et bonis.
75 On the tradition, cf. Alister McGrath: “In broad terms, gratia gratum faciens came to be
understood [in the thirteenth century] as a supernatural habit [i.e., an infused virtuous
disposition] within man, while gratia gratis data was understood as external divine assistance,
whether direct or indirect,”
Justitia Dei, 103. Grace-2, one could say, reforms the soul into something pleasing to God; while
on this traditional view gratia gratis data is the assistance the soul receives in performing
individual meritorious acts. This latter of course is quite different from Eckhart’s usage.
76 Or—in Eckhartian terms—capable of receiving the “birth of God’s Son in the ground of the
soul.” We will have more to say about this theme below.
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is thus superior to nature. . . . Therefore it is all and only supernatural and saving grace [i.e.,
grace-2] that is received and brought about there [i.e., in the intellect].77 ( In Sap., n.273, LW,
2:603,7–604,2, my emphasis)78
Eckhart seems largely uninterested in the medieval controversies over the respective
contributions to our salvation of divine grace and unaided human efforts. It might seem that if
grace-2 alone is crucial to our search for blessedness, i.e., to our “flowing back, [and] return to
God Himself,” and this grace is simply there, as it were waiting for us in the intellect qua
intellect, then it would follow that for Eckhart no additional grace is needed to turn us to the path
that leads to “the Temple;”79 we only need to want to turn. Eckhart would thus be at least a
semi-Pelagian. But this conclusion would overlook Eckhart’s (again unusual) teaching about
grace-1, which is freely bestowed on all creatures in the act of creation. One aspect of this grace
is surely what we saw Eckhart say on p. 132, above:
[T]hrough the creation God says and proclaims, advises and orders all creatures—precisely by
creating them—to follow Him, the First Cause of their entire being, to orient themselves to Him,
to return to Him and hurry to Him according to the Scripture: “To the place from which the
waters flow they shall return” [ Ecclesiastes, I,7]. This is why the creature by its nature loves
God, indeed more than itself.
( In Ioh. , n.226, LW 3:189,8–12)
Like all creatures, we humans are “ordered to God,” we “love God, indeed more than
[ourselves].” To be sure, as fallen creatures we have forgotten the way home.
But the desire to find it is alive in the natural human desire for happiness, which is ours by grace-
1. Thus his position, however peculiar, is technically not Pelagian, since grace is needed to move
us toward God.80 Eckhart suggests that this 77 [G]ratia gratum faciens, quae et supernaturalis
dicitur, est in solo intellectivo, sed nec in illo, ut res est et natura, sed est in ipso ut intellectus et
ut naturam sapit divinam, et ut sic est superior natura . . . Propter quod omne et solum hoc est
supernaturale et gratia gratum faciens quod ibi recipitur et agitur.
78 This notion of a supernatural capacity of the (passive) intellect could have saved Aquinas
from the embarrassment he experienced in trying to explain how a purely natural capacity could
literally see God.
79 This is one of Eckhart’s terms for the ground of the soul. Cf. Pr. 1, DW 1:5,5–6; Walshe 66.
80 However, one might ask how something that is part of the nature of creatures can be called
“grace,” which is normally thought of as supernatural. Stil , the Inquisitors did not object to his
views on grace. Be that all as it may, there is no denying that Eckhart’s overall view about the
availability of grace is far less restrictive than what we saw were Augustine’s conclusions on the
subject.
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desire can fruitfully combine with our capacity for self-reflection, enabling us to see: first, that
everything created that we possess is a pure gift of God, and hence a loan, not our own; and
second, that both the gospels and philosophy teach that blessedness depends on the fact that at
our core there is something divine and un created, something we can however access or realize
only in the process of letting go of our attachment to creatureliness. The interplay of “own-
effort” and divine help is audible in this text from RdU:
One work does indeed truly and genuinely belong to [us], and that is the annihilation of self. But
this annihilation and shrinking of self is never so great but it lacks something unless God
completes it in us.81
(DW 5:292,6–8; Walshe, 517)
The work of grace-1, given us in creation, plainly needs the help of grace-2 to complete the task
of self-emptying.
For creatures such as us, the “flowing back” or return to God through grace proceeds via the
passive intellect, not through the active intellect (as Dietrich of Freiberg had taught), nor the wil
.82 This focus on detachment and passivity seems initially strange, since we are used to thinking
of salvation or the attainment of happiness as something we must actively strive for, even if we
need the prior gift of grace to do so. Eckhart agrees with Augustine and Thomas that
“grace is from God alone”83 ( S. XXV-1, n.259, LW 4:37,3–4; McGinn, Teacher and Preacher,
218), we cannot produce it in ourselves: “No creature can bring about the work of grace”84
(ibid., n.268:244,2; McGinn, Teacher and Preacher, 221). But at the same time, in order to be
capable ( capax) of receiving grace (presumably grace-2), the creature must be “ordered to God
and detached and freed from all relationship and regard for itself or another creature or any this
and that”85 (ibid., n. 266:241,13–242,1; McGinn, Teacher and Preacher, 220). It is for this
reason that, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter, Eckhart regards detachment as “the
best and highest virtue.” It is what makes one a “good 81 [É]in werk blȋbet im billȋchen und
eigenlȋchen doch, daz ist: ein vernihten sȋn selbes. Doch ist daz vernihten und verkleinen niemer
sȏ grȏz sȋn selbes, got envolbringe ouch daz selbe in im selber, sȏ
gebrichet im.
82 By contrast, Aquinas—following Augustine—stressed the effect of grace on the will, as

opposed to the intellect, and thus on our ability to love selflessly, e.g., writing that in our fallen
state humans need grace “for two reasons, i.e., in order to be healed, and furthermore in order to
carry out works of supernatural virtue, which are meritorious” ( STh IaIIae, 109,2, emphasis
added).
83 [G]ratia prima et secunda . . . utraque est a solo deo.
84 [N]ulla creatura in opus potest gratiae
85 [S]olum ut in ordine ad deum, circumscripta et exuta ab omni ordine et respectu sui ad se aut
ad aliud creatum sive ad hoc et hoc.
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[intellective] being,” open to the reception of grace-2 which then completes the work of
divinization on its own, i.e., by making the ready soul a participant in the divine “flowing back”
or “return.”86 Only a person who is thus passively aligned with the intellective ground of the
soul is able to participate in the “return,” in what Eckhart memorably calls “the birth of God’s
Son in the soul.” In another Latin sermon Eckhart deftly brings together both of these aspects of
grace-2, the soul’s passive reception of it from God and its participation in the return via the
“Birth”:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. [2 Cor.13:13]
Note that this is said, either because he [Jesus Christ] gives the grace to the extent he is God; or
because the Son of God alone receives the grace. For grace itself makes the one who receives it
the Son of God, it brings it about that this person is a Christian, a brother of Christ from the same
parents.87
( S. II-2, LW 4:19,10–12)
As he frequently does, Eckhart here takes a scriptural phrase, which at first glance expresses a
familiar doctrine—i.e., grace comes to us through Jesus Christ—and suggests a grammatically
admissible rereading of it that opens up an unobvious (even subversive) new meaning: “[the
grace] of Christ” (read as a subjective genitive) is that which the Son has and bestows [on us],
i.e., “The Son graces us”; but read as an objective genitive, it is that by which the recipient (and,
by implication, I-the-listener-as-Son) becomes, gives birth to, the Son of God in the soul: “Only
the Son can receive this grace.”88 Thus the giving (by God) and receiving (by the soul) of grace
play the decisive role in “the birth of God’s Son in the soul.”
Before we turn to this theme, let us note that with one or two exceptions, the numerous citations
of authorities in Sermo XXV are all from the Hebrew and Christian traditions. Thus one might be
tempted to think that Eckhart’s claims about grace, and hence about the path to human
blessedness, are largely 86 It would be an overstatement to say that for Eckhart humility or
detachment alone “is what makes one a ‘good [intellective being]’ and open to the reception of
grace.” His view seems rather to be that detachment completes the process that also includes the
practice of the virtues, etc. Cf.
following chapter, 174 ff.
87 Gratia domini nostri Iesu Christi. Nota quod sic dictum est, aut quia gratiam dat in quantum
deus, aut quia solus ille gratiam accipit, qui est filius dei. Ipsa enim gratia facit suscipientem
filium dei, facit esse christianum, fratrem Christi ex utroque parente.
88 More on Eckhart’s various rhetorical strategies, with copious references to the secondary
literature, can be found in chapter 2 of McGinn, Mystical Thought; and in Michael Sel s,
Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chs. 6–7.
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or even purely theological in nature, based on faith. But one must not forget his programmatic
aspiration “to show how the truths of natural principles, conclusions and properties are well
intimated for him ‘who has ears to hear’ (Mt.
13:43) in the very words of sacred scripture, which are interpreted through these natural
truths”89 ( In Ioh., nn.2–3, LW 3:4,14–17; McGinn, Essential Sermons, 122–23). At the very
least we should ask whether there is a purely philosophical version of grace that Eckhart was
inspired by, or which at least he might have endorsed.
One authority outside the Christian tradition whom Eckhart does cite with approval in Sermo
XXV—and frequently elsewhere—is the (anonymous) Neoplatonic author of the Book of
Causes; Eckhart writes: “No creature has any power over grace, because nothing acts upon what
is above it. (‘The First is always rich in itself,’ Liber de causis, prop. 31)”90 (n.268, LW
4:244,2–3; Teacher 221). In the (Neo-)Platonic tradition the One (“the First”) and the Good are
self-diffusive.
Plotinus, for example, wrote that
[A]ll existences, as long as they retain their character, produce—about themselves, from their
essence, in virtue of the power which must be in them—some necessary, outward-facing
hypostasis continuously attached to them and representing in image the engendering archetypes:
thus fire gives out heat . . . [A]ll that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved
[the One] eternally engenders an eternal being [the Intellect]. . . The Intellect stands as the image
of the One . . .
( Enneads, V,1,6–7)91
From the One, the Source of all, which is identical with the Good itself, there is an effusive
radiation outward. Its converse attractive power, qua Good, is immensely strong, but most
creatures are entirely or largely unconscious of it, lost in the life of the senses and worldly
attachments, so much so that a conversion requires more than human efforts: “if we could,”
instead of looking outward, 89 [Q]uomodo veritates principiorum et conclusionum et
proprietatum naturalium innuuntur luculenter—‘qui habet aures audiendi!’—in ipsis verbis
sacrae scripturae, quae per illa naturalia exponuntur.
90 Nihil enim agit in suum superius, quia ‘primum’ semper ‘est dives per se’.
91 Καὶ πάντα τὰ ὄντα, ἕως μένει, ἐκ τῆς αὐτῶν οὐσίας ἀναγκαίαν τὴν περὶ αὐτὰ πρὸς τὸ ἔξω
αὐτῶν
ἐκ τῆς παρούσης δυνάμεως δίδωσιν αὐτῶν ἐξηρτημένην ὑπόστασιν, εἰκόνα οὖσαν οἷον
ἀρχετύπων ὧν
ἐξέφυ· πῦρ μὲν τὴν παρ´ αὐτοῦ θερμότητα . . . Καὶ πάντα δὲ ὅσα ἤδη τέλεια γεννᾷ· τὸ δὲ ἀεὶ
τέλειον ἀεὶ
καὶ ἀίδιον γεννᾷ· καὶ ἔλαττον δὲ ἑαυτοῦ γεννᾷ . . . Εἰκόνα δὲ ἐκείνου λέγομεν εἶναι τὸν νοῦν.
Eckhart did not know this work directly. But he certainly was familiar with other Neoplatonist
classics, as well as with Augustine’s esteem for “the Platonists” in general and for Plotinus in
particular.
157
“turn around—either spontaneously or if we were lucky enough to ‘have Athena pull us by the
hair’ [ Iliad, I,194 ff.]—then, all at once, we would see God, ourselves and the Al ”92 ( Enneads,
VI,5,7). For Plotinus the role of Athena in getting us to change our perspective is played by the
Good itself. Even recognizing that the highest principle of our soul is the intellect, itself a part of
the cosmic Intelligence, is not enough to move us away from the world of the senses: Prior to
[awareness of the Good] the soul is not attracted by the Intel igence, beautiful though the latter
may be, for the beauty of Intel igence is, as it were, inert before it receives the light of the
Good.93
(Ibid., VI,7,22)
Though the issue was somewhat ambiguous in Plato, for Plotinus it is clear that the Good reaches
out to us, as it were. True, we must purify ourselves and be prepared for the inner epiphany of
the divine. Though all but invisible to worldly eyes, the divine is already within us: “When the
soul has the good fortune to meet him, and he comes to her— rather, once he, already present,
makes his presence known—, . . . then, suddenly, she sees him appear within her”94 (ibid.,
VI,7,34, my emphasis). Plotinus calls this epiphany an “outflow” (ἀπορροὴ, ibid., VI,7,22), and
also refers to it as a “grace” (χάριτας, ibid.). As Pierre Hadot remarks,
The grace [Plotinus] speaks of reveals to us the gratuitousness of divine initiative . . . [what I say
here] is not an attempt to Christianize Plotinus . . . [But:] if philosophical reflection goes to its
own extreme, and still more if it attempts to express the content of mystical experience, it, too,
will be led to this notion of gratuitousness. It wil , moreover, become clear upon reflection that
all necessity and all duty presuppose the absolute initiative of an original love and freedom.95
For our part in this process of return, we must “take away everything [worldly]!”96
( Enneads, V,3,17) so that the intellect in us can turn back to its source. However, 92 Εἰ δέ τις
ἐπιστραφῆναι δύναιτο ἢ παρ´ αὐτοῦ ἢ τῆς Ἀθηνᾶς αὐτῆς εὐτυχήσας τῆς ἕλξεως, θεόν τε
καὶ αὑτὸν καὶ τὸ πᾶν ὄψεται·
93 Πρὸ τοῦδε οὐδὲ πρὸς τὸν νοῦν κινεῖται, καίπερ καλὸν ὄντα· ἀργόν τε γὰρ τὸ κάλλος αὐτοῦ,
πρὶν
τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ φῶς λάβῃ.
94 Ὅταν δὲ τούτου εὐτυχήσῃ ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ ἥκῃ πρὸς αὐτήν, μᾶλλον δὲ παρὸν φανῇ . . . ἰδοῦσα δὲ
ἐν αὐτῇ
ἐξαίφνης φανέντα . . .
95 Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), 51.
96 Ἄφελε πάντα.
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for Plotinus, too, a successful outcome is not attainable through the intellect’s efforts alone.
Fortunately, the Source is always beckoning to its lost children and sending them strength for
their journey home.
There are numerous similarities here to Eckhart’s views (and indeed to those of Augustine, as he
detailed at length in book 7 of Confessions). Plotinus’s One or Good is nameless and ineffable,
as is Eckhart’s Godhead; seekers must empty themselves to be open to the grace that is freely
given; they must thereby become
“like the Good,” etc. Eckhart knew and greatly admired Neoplatonism (though he could have
read no more than excerpts of the Enneads themselves, perhaps in Macrobius’s Commentary on
the Dream of Scipio).97 In this purely philosophical tradition he no doubt found an awareness of
the importance for human eudaimonia of an element at least comparable to the specifically
Christian notion of grace, a gift from the nameless Other, indeed the presence of that Other in the
soul. On this crucial topic, as elsewhere, Eckhart could find a convergence of theology and
philosophy.98
As already mentioned, the grace-2 that is the divine birth in the soul is only receivable when the
intellect has become detached from all “this or that,” all creaturely distinction. Thus, “all God
wants of you is to go out of yourself in the way of creatureliness and let God be God within
you”99 ( Pr. 5b, DW 1:92,7–9; Walshe, 110). Indeed, as Eckhart repeatedly insists, God cannot
but enter into the soul that has emptied itself of its creaturely attachments: I said in the schools of
Paris that all things shall be accomplished in the truly humble man . . . [who] has no need to pray
to God for anything: 97 Cf. McGinn’s discussion of Eckhart’s access to Neoplatonist writings,
Mystical Thought, 170–71.
98 A similar conclusion is reached by Niklaus Largier, writing about Eckhart’s insistence on

transcending the intellect itself if one is to attain true freedom: “One would like to ask, what—
given this starting point—one can make of the concept of grace? What is ‘grace’ in this context
other than a concept that refers to this fundamental heteronomy, or generally to the alterity of the
ground as the ground of the possibility of freedom? ‘Grace’ can then here too be understood
entirely philosophically. How else but with a concept of ‘grace’ or of ‘gift’ can a relationship of
grounding be conceived that should not be thought of instrumentally, nor in terms of purpose,
and not in concepts of reflex-ivity, representation, or referentiality, that is thus never a
relationship or a process?” Largier, “Negativität, Möglichkeit, Freiheit: Zur Differenz zwischen
der Philosophie Dietrichs von Freiberg und Eckharts von Hochheim,” in Dietrich von Freiberg:
Neue Perspektiven seiner Philosophie, Theologie u.
Naturwissenschaft, eds. Karl-Hermann Kandler, Burkhard Mojsisch, and Franz-Bernhard

Stammkötter (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: B.R. Gruener, 1999), 149–68, at 167, my translation.
Kant, too, in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, AK 6:44, also sees the need for
the concept of grace:
“some supernatural cooperation is also needed to [one’s] becoming good or better.” Ed. and tr.
Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 65.
99 Nȗ begert got niht mȇ von dir, wan daz dȗ dȋn selbes ȗzgangest in crȇatiurlȋcher wȋse und
lȃzest got got in dir sȋn.
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he can command God, for the height of the Godhead seeks nothing but the depth of humility.100
( Pr. 14, DW 1:235,4–9; Walshe, 267)
In the imagery of Pr. 1 (on Jesus driving the merchants from the temple), the
“humble” soul is the “empty Temple,” from which the “merchants” (of the creaturely,
teleological framework) and the “doves” (attachment to our own properties, our “this and that”)
have been removed.101 God wants it empty “so that He may be there all alone”102 (DW 1:6,2–
3; Walshe, 66); it is only in the unencum-bered Temple that Jesus, the Word, can “begin to
speak.” Eckhart picks up this same theme with a different set of biblical images in Pr. 2, where
he admonishes the listener to be “a virgin who is a wife.” A “virgin,” he says, is “a person who is
void of alien images, as empty as he was when he did not exist”103 (DW 1:25,1–
2; Walshe, 77). We are empty in this virginal way when we indeed have images (for we are still
creatures who live in the world), but have them âne eigenschaft, without ownership or
attachment (ibid.). But however necessary this virginal state is, it is not enough. “If a person
were to be ever virginal, he would bear no fruit. If he is to be fruitful, he must needs be a wife.”
For only the fruitfulness of the gifts is the thanks rendered for that gift, and herein is the spirit a
wife, whose gratitude is fecundity, bearing Jesus again in God’s paternal heart.104
(Ibid.:27,1–9; Walshe, 78)
100 Ich sprach zo paris in der schoelen, dat alle dynck sollen volbracht werden an deme rechten
oitmo-edegen mynschene . . . der in darff got neit byden, hey mach gode gebeden, want de hoede
der gotheit in suit neyt anders an den de doifde der oitmoedicheit. McGinn has remarked that it
is strange this very radical-sounding position did not draw fire from church authorities ( Mystical
Thought, 137). This is a good point, though as Loris Sturlese has pointed out, Eckhart’s use of
“commanding,” even in his earliest works, is really a metaphorical reference to a metaphysical
necessity. The emptied soul is ipso facto open to its own univocal correlation with God in the
ground. Cf. Sturlese, “A Portrait of Meister Eckhart,” Eckhart Review 5(1996): 7–12, at 9–10.
101 See the detailed analysis of the imagery and themes in this sermon by Alessandra Beccarisi,
“Zu Predigt 1: Intravit Jesus in templum,” in Lectura Eckhardi II: Predigten Meister Eckharts
von Fachgelehrten gelesen und gedeutet, eds. Georg Steer and Loris Sturlese (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer Verlag, 2003), 1–27.
102 daz ouch niht mȇ dar inne sȋ dan er aleine.
103 [E]in mensche, der von allen vremden bilden ledic ist, alsȏ ledic, als er was, dȏ er niht
enwas.
104 Daz nȗ der mensche iemer mȇ juncvrouwe wære, sȏ enkæme keine vruht von im. Sol er
vruhtbære werden, sȏ muoz daz von nȏt sȋn, daz er ein wȋp sȋ . . . wan vruhtbærkeit der gȃbe daz
ist aleine dankbærkeit der gȃbe, und dȃ ist der geist ein wȋp in der widerbernden dankbærkeit,
dȃ er gote widergebirt Jȇsum in daz veterliche herze.
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The point of emptying the temple, or of becoming a virgin, is to become a wife, a spiritual
mother, and to let the Word be born and speak in our souls.
Eckhart frequently connects to the theme of detachment the idea of coming from knowing to a
“not-knowing” ( unwizzen) that is to be distinguished from ignorance (compare Nicholas of
Cusa’s docta ignorantia 105). As Eckhart says:
[H]ere we must come to a transformed knowledge, and this unknowing must not come from
ignorance, but rather from knowing we must get to this unknowing. Then we shall become
knowing with divine knowing, and our unknowing will be ennobled and adorned with
supernatural knowing.106
( Pr. 102, DW 4-1:420,5–8; Walshe, 43)
Eckhart does not elaborate very much about this “unknowing” that is “ennobled and adorned
with supernatural knowing.” But the theme is important for this present investigation because in
one of his most famous and radical sermons he presents not-knowing as parallel to living without
why. In Pr. 52, on the Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Eckhart claims that our
happiness depends on our becoming spiritually poor. The person who is poor in spirit, he claims,
is one who “wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing”107 (DW 2:488,5–6; Walshe, 420).
This has nothing to do with poverty in the ordinary sense, even of the voluntary variety (which
Eckhart says is “much to be commended”). Instead we are again in the now-familiar territory of
detachment. The results of detachment in the realm of the will, i.e., of “wanting nothing,” will be
our focus in the next chapter. As for “knowing nothing,” Eckhart has this to say:
For a man to possess this poverty he must live so that he is unaware that he does not live for
himself, or for truth, or for God. He must be so lacking in all knowledge that he neither knows
nor recognizes nor feels that God lives in him: more stil , he must be free of all the understanding
105 Cf. his On Learned Ignorance. The term apparently was first used by Augustine, “Est ergo
in nobis quaedam, ut dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem
nostram” ( Epist. ad Probam, 130,15,28).
106 [M]an sol hie komen in ein überformet wizzen. Noch diz unwizzen ensol niht komen von
unwizzenne, mȇr: von wizzenne sol man komen in ein unwizzen. Danne suln wir werden wizzende
mit dem götlȋchen wizzenne und danne wirt geadelt und gezieret unser unwizzen mit dem
übernatiurlȋchen wizzenne.
107 [D]az ist ein arm mensche, der niht enwil und niht enweiz und niht enhȃt.
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that lives in him . . . a man should be as free from all his own knowledge as he was when he was
not.108
(Ibid.:494,6–495,4; Walshe, 422)
The point is apparently that the “poor person” has become empty of all knowledge that involves
difference or distance from Self and God. As Kurt Flasch puts it in his commentary on this
sermon:
The spiritually poor one renounces knowledge to the extent that knowledge has an other-than-
itself for content. For to the extent that the person is in God—in His essence, ideas, His world-
creating skil —
that person is indistinctly one with Him and with everything.109
The phrase, “as free from all x [here: knowledge] as he was when he was not,” appears in a
number of places in Eckhart’s corpus. It has been variously interpreted.
Josef Quint, among others, takes “as he was when he was not” to refer to “the
[pre-]existence of the person as an idea in God.”110 This rather Augustinian reading, however,
has been contested, e.g., by Mojsisch. He argues that Eckhart here refers to the special character
of the “ground and essence of the soul,” of which this same Pr. 52 goes on to say:
[T]here is something in the soul from which both knowledge and love flow: but it does not itself
know, nor does it love, in the way the powers of the soul do. Whoever knows this, knows the
seat of blessedness. It has neither before nor after, nor is it expecting anything to come, for it can
neither gain nor lose. For this reason it is so bereft, that it does not know God is working in it;
rather, it just is itself, enjoying itself as God does. It is in this manner, I declare, that a man
should be so acquitted and free that he neither knows nor realizes that God is at work in him: in
that way can a man possess poverty.111
(Ibid.:496,3–497,3; Walshe, 422–23)
108 [D]er mensche, der diz armüete haben sol, der sol leben alsȏ, daz er niht enweiz, daz er niht
enlebe in keiner wȋse weder im selben noch der wȃhreit noch gote; mȇr: er sol alsȏ ledic sȋn
alles wizzenes, daz er niht enwizze noch enbekenne noch enbevinde, daz Got in im lebe; mȇr: er
sol ledic sȋn alles des beken-nennes, daz in im lebende ist . . . daz der mensche alsȏ ledic sol stȃn
sȋnes eigenen wizzennes, als er tete, dȏ
er niht enwas.
109 Flasch, “Zu Predigt 52,” 186, my translation.
110 Quint, in DW 1:25, fn. 1.
111 [E]inez ist in der sȇle, von dem vliuzet bekennen und minnen; daz enbekennet selber niht
noch enminnet niht alsȏ als die krefte der sȇle. Der diz bekennet, der bekennet, war ane sælicheit
lige. Diz enhȃt weder vor noch nȃch, und ez enist niht wartende keines zuokomenden dinges, wan
ez enmac weder gewinnen noch
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As we will see in a moment, Mojsisch contends that Eckhart’s journey of the soul goes several
steps beyond the level of the possible intellect and its univocal correlation to the
Son/Word/Image, initially to the origin of that correlation, i.e., “to the I/Self in its univocal-
transcendental function as Source, i.e., as transcendental being.” Thus Eckhart’s phrase, “as he
was when he was not,” does not mean
“[when he was] an idea in God, especially since for the I/Self, God is not yet even God.”112 At
this level, Self and God-as-“transcendental being” are so united that the subject-object duality
essential to our relational notion of knowledge has no place. Here one can no longer speak of
knowledge in this ordinary sense: hence the Self knows nothing.113
The “ground and essence of the soul” is where Eckhart locates what he calls
“the birth of God’s Son.” For the Meister there is no theme more typical or re-nowned.114 Not
surprisingly, the phrase has been variously interpreted. In light of the line taken in this chapter, it
can be understood in this way: qua detached intellect, the soul’s ground and essence is the image
of, and univocally correlated with, the divine intellect; as such, it is uncreated, i.e., not a creature,
not analogically related to the Creator; thus from all eternity it is the birthplace of God’s Son, but
only qua detached intellect.115 At the same time, however, it functions as the essence and
ground of a created soul with its powers, and which animates a human being alive in the world.
When this human being turns with the help of grace-1 away from its attachment to the things of
this world, including its own body and its (created) soul, and is flooded with the divine grace-2,
it realizes verliesen. Her umbe sȏ ist ez beroubet, daz ez niht enweiz got in im ze würkenne; mȇr:
ez ist selbe daz selbe, daz sȋn selbes gebrȗchet nȃch der wȋse gotes. Alsȏ sprechen wir, daz der
mensche sol quȋt und ledic stȃn, das er niht enwizze noch enbekenne, daz got in im würke: alsȏ
mac der mensche armuot besitzen.
112 That is, God is here conceived as prior to the characteristics we think of as divine, e.g.,
goodness, truth, etc., but also prior to the “personal notions” of Father, Son, Holy Spirit. More on
this below. The Mojsisch citation is from Meister Eckhart, 6.2, 139, fn. 51. There he gives
numerous citations to Eckhart’s views on transcendental being, the “purity of being;” e.g.,
“Fourthly, ‘I’ indicates the bare purity of the divine being, bare of any admixture. For goodness
and wisdom and whatever may be attributed to God are all admixtures to God’s naked being . . .
” [ Ze dem vierden mȃle meinet ez die blȏzen lȗterkeit götlȋches wesens, daz blȏz ȃne allez
mitewesen ist. Wan güete und wȋsheit und swaz man von gote sprechen mac, daz ist allez
mitewesen gotes blȏzen wesens. ] ( Pr. 77, DW 3:341,1–3; Walshe, 264, transl. slightly altered).
113 The same point is made in different terms by Largier: for Eckhart “poverty means absolute
immediacy,” i.e., nonmediation or nondifferentiation. Meister Eckhart 1, 1059.
114 It is noteworthy that Eckhart replaces the common metaphorical description of salvation as
the “beatific vision” with the decidedly female metaphor of giving birth. A concise summary of
Eckhart’s teaching on the birth of God’s Son is given by McGinn, Mystical Thought, ch. 4, and
also ch. 6, 139–42.
115 Qua detached, there is nothing to distinguish it from any other detached passive intellect.
Aristotle seems to have thought of the active intellect in such impersonal terms, concluding that
the active intellect is “immortal and eternal,” as we saw.
163
its true nature, and one result is that the created soul is transformed by its acceptance of the
eternal Birth in its own ground. In this way, the Word is literally incarnated, “made flesh,” in this
soul, this person. The created soul has become, one might say, transparent to the divine light
within,116 receiving it and pouring it out in its own activities. We will return to this theme of
“pouring out” below.
The description, “birth of the Son in the soul,” can be misleading, for the birth does not take
place in the soul as ordinarily conceived, e.g., as the source of life, or as its powers of perception,
intellect, or wil . To attain this birth one must go beyond the powers of the soul and enter its
nameless ground ( grunt in Middle High German, by which Eckhart means sometimes cause, or
origin, or essential cause, or sometimes simply essence117). It is only in the uncreated-but-born
ground of the soul that the birth takes place. Given his teaching on univocal correlation—e.g., in
the case of prototype/image—it should not surprise that Eckhart insists that “God’s ground and
the soul’s ground is one ground”118 ( Pr. 15, DW 1:253,6; Walshe, 273). Taken out of context
this kind of statement sounds like a kind of pantheism or the rhapsodic claim of a seer. For
Eckhart it is neither, but rather the teaching of scripture (“I and the Father are one,” Jn.14:10)—
philosophically interpreted—and it is the consequence of what he regards as wel -established

truths, i.e., that God is intellect; that intellect is prior to, and the source of, being; by nature it
thinks/speaks; its thought/word is its image, one in nature and coeval with it, regardless of the
bearer in which the image might be 116 Eckhart himself uses the image of transparency in Pr.
102: “It is a property of this birth that it always comes with fresh light. It always brings a great
light to the soul, for it is the nature of good to diffuse itself. In this birth God streams into the
soul in such abundance of light, so flooding the essence and ground of the soul that it runs over
and floods into the powers and the outward man . . .
No sinner can receive this light, nor is he worthy to, being full of sin and wickedness, which is
called
‘darkness’ . . . That is because the paths by which the light would enter are choked and
obstructed with guile and darkness.” [ Eigenschaft dirre geburt is, daz si alwege geschihet mit
niuwem liehte. Si bringet alwege grȏz lieht in die sȇle, wan der güete art ist, daz si sich muoz
ergiezen, swȃ si ist. In dirre geburt eriuzet sich got in die sȇle mit liehte alsȏ, daz daz lieht alsȏ
grȏz wirt in dem wesene und in dem grunde der sȇle, daz ez sich ȗzwirfet und übervliuzet in die
krefte ouch in den ȗzern menschen . . . Des enmac der sünder niht enpfȃhen noch enist sȋn niht
wirdic, wan er ervüllet ist mit den sünden und mit bȏsheit, daz dȃ heizet vinsternisse . . . Daz ist
des schult, wan die wege, dȃ daz lieht ȋn solte gȃn, bekümbert und versperret sint mit valscheit
und mit vinsternisse] (DW 4–1:412,5–413,5; Walshe, 40).
117 There is a vast literature on the grunt; copious references are given in McGinn, Mystical
Thought, ch. 3. Eckhart’s understanding of “essential cause” in his Latin works seems to me to
fit, in a number of ways, his use of grunt in the German writings. In In Ioh. 38 Eckhart lists the
four marks of an essential cause or principal: it contains its principiate in itself as the effect in the
cause; it contains in itself its principiate in a higher or more eminent way than the latter is in
itself; the principal is always pure intellect; and principal and principiate are coeval. Essential,
135. In Sermo II-1 Eckhart gives as an example of such a cause “the power through which the
Father begets and the Son is born”
( potentia, qua pater generat et filius generatur) (N.6, LW 4:8,12–13).
118 [G]ottes grund und der sele grund ain grund ist.
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found, etc. One could say that for Eckhart the notion of the birth of God’s Son in the soul marks
the pinnacle of self-realization, and indeed of happiness, for
“the just one’s blessedness and God’s blessedness are one blessedness”119 ( Pr.
39, DW 2:257,2–3; Walshe, 306). Union with God in the ground of the soul is for us at once
task, reality, and bliss.
As major aspects of Eckhart’s teaching about the human relationship to God and how we can
attain union with the divine, the themes of detachment and the Birth are of central relevance to
the topics of this book: the wil , virtues, and the search for happiness. But it would distort
Eckhart’s metaphysics if we did not recognize that, as Mojsisch says,
[F]or Eckhart himself the univocity-theorem of the Birth of God with its ethical implications is a
beloved and frequent theme, but it is also not the center of his thought. For wherever multiplicity
appears, even in transcendental-univocal correlationality, there one finds unified being, but not
absolutely unified being.120
The end of the soul’s search for happiness lies not in a life of virtuous activity, as Aristotle
thought; not in the Beatific Vision, as generally understood by Christian thinkers; nor even in the
Birth, as Eckhart has described it. For the ground and essence of the soul is pure intellect, and as
such it cannot rest until it can dissolve in “absolutely unified being.” This can happen only in
what Eckhart variously called “the Temple,” “the Castle” ( bürgelîn), “the Spark” ( vünkelîn), “a
light,” or as the core of the soul that is “free of all names and naked of all forms, entirely empty
and free as God is empty and free”121 ( Pr. 2, DW 1:40,1–3; Walshe, 80, transl. altered). That it
is in this “placeless place” that our blessedness lies Eckhart states frequently, including in this
lengthy but crystal-clear passage in Pr. 48:
[I]f a man turns away from self and all created things, then—to the extent that you do this, you
will attain to oneness and blessedness in your soul’s spark, which time and place never touched.
This spark is opposed to all creatures: it wants nothing but God, naked, just as He is. It is not
satisfied with the Father or the Son or the Holy Ghost, or all three Persons so far as they preserve
their several properties ( eigenschaft). I declare in truth, this light would not be satisfied with the
unity of the whole fertility of the divine nature. In fact I will say still more, 119 [D]es gerehten
sælicheit und gotes sælicheit ist éin sælicheit.
120 Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, 162.
121 [V]on allen namen vrȋ und von allen formen blȏz, ledic und vrȋ zemȃle, als got ledic und vrȋ
ist in im selber.
165
which sounds even stranger: I declare in all truth, by the eternal and everlasting truth, that this
light is not content with the simple, changeless divine being which neither gives nor takes: rather
it seeks to know whence this being comes,122 it wants to get into its simple ground, into the
silent desert into which no distinction ever peeped, of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost. In the inmost
part, where none is at home, there that light finds satisfaction, and there it is more one than it is
in itself: for this ground is a simple stillness, motionless in itself, and by this immobility all
things are moved, and all those lives are conceived that live rationally in themselves. That we
may live rationally in this sense, may the eternal truth of which I have spoken help us.123
(DW 2:419,1–421,5; Walshe, 310–11, transl. slightly altered) A few points to note: “oneness and
blessedness” are found “in your soul’s spark,” which is “a simple stillness,” a “silent desert into
which no distinction ever peeped,” neither the persons of the Trinity nor even “the simple,
changeless divine being,” i.e., transcendental being with which the soul can become unified, but
not thereby “simply one.” This nameless “spark” of the soul is absolutely one with the nameless
Godhead, and this oneness is our blessedness. To live from this ground of oneness is to live
rational y, in a certain sense: it is to live from the deepest realization of the nature of reason, i.e.,
absolute unity.
This final step in the soul’s self-realization is what Eckhart calls “breaking through,” i.e., the
pure recognition of unity—as opposed to unification or becoming unified or united124—in the
Godhead that is beyond, and is the source 122 This notion of the relentless quest of the intellect
for the causa omnium we saw also in Thomas; see chapter 4, p. 115.
123 [S]wenne sich der mensche bekȇret von im selben und von allen geschaffenen dingen,—als
vil als dȗ
daz tuost, als vil wirst dȗ geeiniget und gesæliget in dem vunken in der sȇle, der zȋt noch stat nie
enberuorte.
Dirre vunke widersaget allen crȇatȗren und enwil niht dan got blȏz, als er in im selben ist. Im
engenüget noch an vater noch an sune noch an heiligem geiste noch an den drin persȏnen, als
verre als ein ieglȋchiu bestȃt in ir eingenschaft. Ich spriche wærliche, daz diesm liehte niht
engenüeget an der einbærkeit der vruhtbærlȋchen art götlȋcher natȗre. Ich wil noch mȇ sprechen,
daz noch wunderlȋcher hillet: ich spriche ez bȋ guoter wȃrheit und bȋ der ȇwigen wȃrheit und bȋ
iemerwernder wȃrheit, daz disem selben liehte niht engenüeget an dem einvaltigen stillestȃnden
götlȋchen wesene, daz weder gibet noch nimet, mȇr: er wil wizzen, von wannen diz wesen her
kome; ez wil in den einvaltigen grunt, in die stillen wüeste, dȃ nie underscheit ȋngeluogete weder
vater noch sun noch heiliger geist; in dem innigesten, dȃ nieman heime einist, dȃ genüeget ez
jenem liehte, und dȃ ist ez inniger, dan ez in im selben sȋ; wan dirre grunt ist ein einvlatic stille,
diu in ir selben unbewe-gelich ist, und von dirre unbeweglicheit werdent beweget alliu dinc und
werdent enpfangen alliu leben, diu vernünfticlȋche lebende in in selben sint. Daz wir alsus
vernünfticlȋche leben, des helfe uns diu iemerwernde wȃrheit, von der ich gesprochen hȃn.
Ȃmen.
124 Eckhart makes this distinction in, e.g., Pr. 12: “As I have said before, there is something in
the soul that is so near akin to God that it is one and not united.” [ Als ich mȇr gesprochen hȃn,
daz etwaz in der sȇle ist, daz gote alsȏ sippe ist, daz ez ein ist und niht vereinet. ] (DW 1,197,8–
9; Walshe, 296–97).
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of, God. However we think of God—as transcendental Being, or as Father (Son and Holy Spirit),
or as Creator—for Eckhart each such aspect of the complexity in the divinity: the “purity” of
(transcendental) Being, the “boiling” in the Trinity, and the “boiling over” in Creation, has its
counterpart in the soul. The individual soul and its powers are created as God’s likeness; 125 but
as detached intellect the soul is God’s image, univocally correlated with the Word/Son. Intellect,
however, is not satisfied with the realization of its relational role in the Sonship; nor with its
unification with the transcendental and spiritual perfections—not even with its grasp, qua pure
intellect, of transcendental being itself (the puritas essendi). For as intellect per se, as ground of
the soul, its drive is to find unity and to grasp the source of all, where God “is neither Father,
Son, nor Holy Ghost, and yet is a Something which is neither this nor that”126 ( Pr. 2, DW
1:44,1–2; Walshe, 81). Here Eckhart’s Neoplatonically inspired thinking bears its final fruit:
behind and beyond all determinations, distinctions, and differences lies their source, itself
undetermined, indistinct, undifferentiated.127 Summing up Eckhart’s teaching on the
breakthrough, McGinn speaks of a “mysticism of the ground,” and Mojsisch of a “metaphysics
of the ground.”128 The latter writes: Eckhart’s original contribution . . . consists on one hand in
his conceiv-ing of the ground of the soul in connection with the birth of the Son in the soul, and
hence what is highest in the soul in its identity with the Son of God as univocally related to
transcendental being, on the other hand in his having the ground of the soul transcend even this
transcendental relationality, in order to locate it there where it is the indistinct, unity as divine
essence, the I.129
(153–54)
125 As Augustine claimed in De Trinitate.
126 [D]ȃ enist er vater noch sun noch heiliger geist in disem sinne und ist doch ein waz, daz
enist noch diz noch daz.
127 He himself in Pr. 28 credits as his authority “Plato, that great cleric [!], . . . who speaks of
something pure that is not in the world . . . It remains ever the One, that continually wel s up in
itself.
Ego, the word ‘I’, is proper to none but God in His oneness. Vos, this word means ‘you’, that you
are one in unity, so that ego and vos, I and you, stand for unity.” [P l ȃ t o, der grȏze pfaffe . . .
sprichet von einer lȗterkeit, diu enist in der werlt niht . . . Ez blȋbet allez daz eine, daz in im
selben quellende ist. ‘Ego’, daz wort ‘ich’, enist nieman eigen dan gote aleine in sȋner einicheit.
‘Vos’, daz wort daz spriceht als vil als
‘ir’, daz ir sȋt in der einicheit, daz ist: daz wort ‘ego’ und ‘vos, ‘ich’ und ‘ir’, daz meinet die
einicheit.] (DW
2:67,1–69,2; Walshe, 131–32).
128 Cf. McGinn, Mystical Thought, ch. 3; and Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, ch. 6.5.3.
129 Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, 153–54.
167
We must now ask how Eckhart puts the metaphysical framework outlined in this chapter to work
in his thinking about how we ought to live in the world. For it can certainly seem as though his
path is a purely mental one, as though our bliss consists in a series of inner realizations (or
perhaps revelations) to which human action and the virtues are apparently irrelevant. But this is
not Eckhart’s view. Detachment and interiority are clearly meant to play a central role in the
happy life, but Eckhart is far from suggesting that to attain happiness we need to become hermits
or enter a religious order. These paths are fine for some, but they are not necessary, and they
have their own spiritual dangers. To appreciate this we must understand what Eckhart means
when he says we should “live without why,” and must see how exactly he supposes that his
“metaphysics of the ground”
implies this curious injunction. Although much of his inspiration is—as I have suggested—
Neoplatonic in origin, his position is not open to the typical criticism that by encouraging an
attitude of detachment, understood as attending to one’s own bliss, this path leads us to an
unchristian ignoring of the world and the needs of other creatures. We turn now to these and
other questions about Eckhart’s ethics.
Meister Eckhart, Living without Wil
I claimed above that Eckhart’s ethic—as with Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas—can be called
“broadly teleological,” that is, it aims to discover, describe, and advocate a process of human
development toward a perfected moral life. As we have seen, detachment—“not-doing”— plays
a crucial role for Eckhart in that process, and its endpoint lies in a recognition and acceptance,
through grace, of the indistinct union of the ground of the soul and the Godhead. Eckhart could
also be called a (somewhat peculiar) eudaimonist, but he has no use for the sort of teleological
eudaimonism we found in Thomas, where every voluntary action is seen as (at least implicitly)
seeking the highest good, the end whose attainment constitutes our perfection, and where the
virtues are means to this end. That perfection is already in our nature, on Eckhart’s view, and it
needs only to be acknowledged, released from encumbrance, and embraced. The virtues play two
roles for Eckhart: while they are essential to a wel -ordered soul, and thus are a precondition for
the kind of detachment that opens our minds to the divine within, an expanded—one might say
supernatural—life of the virtues is a consequence of the birth of God’s Son in the soul.
Nonetheless, like his predecessors Eckhart sees the created world in a teleological framework: all
creatures by their very nature seek God, in one way or another. Still he resists, even scornfully,
teleology in the further two ethical senses we identified: as setting the means-end framework of
human action, and—especially—in the idea of virtuous action as itself a means. The question
arose earlier, what accounts for this ambivalent attitude to the teleological? To begin an answer
let us return to those three texts quoted early in the last chapter. We should now be in a position
to see why Eckhart can seem both at times to be endorsing the teleological framework—or even
recommending it as an approach to the search for happiness—while at other times decisively
rejecting it.
The first text was his interpretation of John 1:43, Sequere me (“Follow me”): First of all one
must know that through the creation God says and proclaims, advises and orders all creatures—
precisely by creating them—to 168
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169
follow Him, the First Cause of their entire being, to orient themselves to Him, to return to Him
and hurry to Him according to the Scripture:
“To the place from which the waters flow they shall return” [ Ecclesiates, I, 7]. This is why the
creature by its nature loves God, indeed more than itself. ( In Ioh., n.226, LW 3:189,8–12; the
Latin in given in chapter 5, p. 132.)
The teleological-eudaimonist framework is here applied to creatures, i.e., to beings that stand in
an analogical relationship to the Creator. As we saw, Eckhart regards such beings as a pure
nothing in themselves. Everything they have, even their being itself, is the gift, gratia gratis data
(grace-1), of their Source. Hence, they are “ordered to God in being, truth, and goodness.”
Nonrational beings are of course ignorant of their utter dependence on the Creator, and we fallen
humans have largely forgotten it, instead viewing ourselves as autonomous beings in our own
right. This view, Eckhart notes, amounts to “a lie” ( mendacium—S. XXV-2, n.264, LW
4:240,12).1 The theory of analogy sets the record straight. As Mojsisch remarks:
. . . [T]he dynamic revealing itself in the relation between esse [being]
as the prime analogate [God] and esse as secundum analogatum [the creature] is the constant
reception of what is external, implying at the same time an uninterrupted thirst or hunger, an
uninterrupted striving.
Things consume being, since they are, yet they hunger for being, since they are from another.2
Thus Eckhart can say, as we just saw, “through the creation God says and proclaims, advises and
orders all creatures—precisely by creating them—to follow Him, the First Cause of their entire
being, to orient themselves to Him, to return to Him and hurry to Him.” In other words: creation
is teleologically ordered to the Creator. As creatures we are called back to God. But as kin we, in
a certain sense, never left home.
In the second text, quoted in chapter 5, p. 133—part of his commentary on the Book of Wisdom
—we noted that Eckhart seems expressly to endorse a
“merit-reward” schema of living that seems very like what we saw in chapter 4, in the Summa
Theologiae of Aquinas:
1 Note that, if a lie is an intentional falsehood meant to deceive, then Eckhart here seems to be
claiming that at some level we know we are not the autonomous embodied creatures we claim
ourselves to be.
2 Mojsisch, Meister Eckhart, 64.
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“They will live forever.” Here the reward [of the just] is pointed out . . .
“And their reward is with the Lord.” . . . Nothing but God is the reward of the just.
( In Sap., nn.69–70, LW 2: 397,1–399,1; for the Latin see ch. 5, p. 133.) But the full context of
these remarks shows that Eckhart is not speaking analogically at all. For instance, “they [the just]
will live forever,” refers not to the promised future reward in heaven, but instead to “the life that
God brings about, not in the body but in the soul itself, and furthermore . . . not in time, but in
eternity. That is the sense of these words . . .”3 (ibid., n. 69, LW 2:397,5–7). Eckhart plainly
means the Son’s Birth in the soul, the basis of which is the univocal correlation of the soul’s
ground and essence to God’s ground and essence. Similarly, Eckhart’s reading of “Their reward
is with the Lord” stresses the equality of the just one “with” Uncreated Justice, saying that “the
reward of the just consists in the fact that they are Sons of God. For the Son—and He alone—is .
. . with the Lord.” By contrast, creatures qua creatures are under God, are “servants and
hirelings,” their reward “is not with the Lord, for such people set themselves goals that are
outside of God and under God, not God himself and not ‘with God’”4
(ibid., n.70, 398,6–7).
Finally, here is the third of the quotes with which we began: All things that are in time have a
‘Why?’ Ask a man why he eats: ‘For strength.’—‘Why do you sleep?’—‘For the same reason.’
And so on for all things that are in time.5
( Pr. 26, DW 2:27,3–6; Walshe, 96)
This is plainly said of creatures (“things that are in time”), including human creatures. Again, the
context of the remark clarifies Eckhart’s meaning. In Pr. 26 he is explicitly contrasting a
creaturely mode of thought and behavior with that of
“a good person,” i.e., one who realizes her univocal relationship with the Father.
Of the former he says: “If you seek God and seek Him for your own profit and bliss, then in truth
you are not seeking God”6 (ibid.:6–7). Note: “your own.”
3 [V]ita quam operatur deus, non anima, operatur etiam non in corpore, sed in ipsa anima . . .
non in tempore, sed in perpetuitate. Et hoc est quod hic dicitur . . .
4 [M]erces justorum est quod sint filii dei, quia, ut dictum est, filius, et his solus, est apud
dominum.
Nemo ergo heres nisi filius . . . ‘apud deum’ . . . Secus de servo, de mercennario, cujus merces
non est apud dominum , quia talis sibimet ponit finem aliquid citra deum et sub deo, non ipsum
deum nec ‘apud deum.’
5 Alliu dinc, diu in der zȋt sint, diu hȃnt ein warumbe. Als der einen menschen vrȃgete: ‘war
umbe izzest dȗ?’—‘dar umbe, daz ich kraft habe’; ‘war umbe slæfest dȗ?’—‘umbe daz selbe’;
und alsus sint alliu dinc, diu dȃ sint in der zȋt.
6 Suochest dȗ got und suochest dȗ got umbe dȋnen eigenen nutz oder umbe dȋne eigene sælicheit,
in der wȃrheit, sȏ ensuochest dȗ got niht.
171
This signals the self-consciousness of a creature, a being that regards itself as distinct from its
Creator, on whom it is analogically dependent.7 By contrast, Eckhart says,
Ask a good man, “Why do you seek God?”—“Because He is God.”—
“Why do you seek truth?”—“Because it is truth.”—“Why do you seek justice?”—“Because it is

justice.” With such persons all is right.8
(Ibid.:26,8–27,3; my translation)
Eckhart’s complaint is not so much that the people who “seek God” for their
“own profit and bliss” are behaving selfishly as that they completely mistake what they
themselves are, what their proper relationship is to God, and what—
or how—it is proper to want. They take themselves to be “servants and hirelings” ( servi et
mercennarii) who are “beneath God” ( sub deo), when in fact they are by nature “Sons” who are
“with God” ( apud deum) ( In Sap., n.70, LW
2:398,6–11).
In addition, these “servants and hirelings” are also “merchants” ( koufliute), for they seek God
for their own profit and bliss, convinced that only God can bestow these goods on them, and can
only do so from without. Hence they do
“good works to the glory of God, . . . but they do them in order that our Lord may give them
something in return, or that God may do something they wish for—
all these are merchants”9 ( Pr. 1, DW 1:7,2–5; Walshe, 66–67). We are now in a better position
to understand what lies behind this kind of criticism by Eckhart.
In one sense “mercantile” behavior may look like the familiar teleological means-end schema we
use in our everyday activity: we think we need some object y, so we do (or “spend”) x in order to
get (or “buy”) y: fair and equal exchange. As Eckhart himself says, “All things that are in time
have a ‘Why?’” To be sure, there is nothing at all per se foolish about working to earn a living,
traveling to broaden one’s horizons, or taking a daily walk for the health of one’s heart. So why
does Eckhart say the merchants “are very foolish folk”? ( tȏrehte liute, Pr. 1, DW
1:8,5–6; Walshe 67). Initially, it seems to be because they take the means-end schema, which is
unavoidable for creaturely maintenance and creature-creature 7 Much has been written recently
about Eckhart’s notion of eigenschaft, literally own-ness or property (in both the ordinary legal,
and the related, but more general, philosophical senses). Cf. Alessandra Beccarisi, “Zu Predigt
1,” and Largier, Meister Eckhart 1, 754–57.
8 Ein guot mensche, der ze dem spræche: ‘war umbe suochest dȗ got?’— ‘dar umbe, daz er got
ist’; ‘war umbe suochest dȗ die wȃrheit?’— ‘dar umbe, daz ez diu wȃrheit ist’; ‘war umbe
suochest dȗ die gerehticheit?’— ‘dar umbe, daz ez diu gerehticheit ist’: den liuten ist gar reht.
9 [T]uont ir guoten werk gote ze ȇren . . . und tuont sie doch dar umbe, daz in unser herre etwaz
dar umbe gebe, oder daz in got iht dar umbe tuo, daz in liep sȋ: diz sint allez koufliute.
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interactions, and attempt to transfer it to a realm where it is completely out of place, i.e., to our
dealings with God. When Eckhart faults the “merchants” for being “mistaken in the bargain”—
they in fact have nothing of their own to give to God, “for what they are, they are from God, and
what they have, they get from God and not from themselves”10—he is pointing to their twofold
mistake: first, they imagine their salvation can only take place within the confines of their
analogical relationship to God, and second, even if they were right about this, they mistakenly
think that they actually own something with which they can barter with God. But creatures qua
creatures are truly naked, empty-handed before God. By contrast, qua intellective beings, their
task is to detach from creatureliness and accept the gift of Sonship, which is a consequence of
their true blessedness, i.e., union in the Godhead.
But Eckhart “says further,” since he regards our entire lives as in one way or another involved
with God:
I say further: as long as a man, in all his doings, desires anything at all that God can or will give,
still he ranks with these merchants. If you would be free of any taint of trading, so that God may
let you enter this temple [the ground of the soul], then you must do all that you can in all your
works solely to God’s glory, and be as free of it as Nothing is free, which is neither here nor
there. You should ask nothing whatever in return. Whenever you act thus, your works are
spiritual and godly, and the merchants are driven right out of the temple, and God is in there
alone, for one is thinking only of God.11
(Ibid.:9,7–10,3; Walshe, 67, emphases added)
This is a truly radical claim, a complete rejection not of teleology, but of teleological
eudaimonism. It casts a revealing light on what Eckhart’s notion of detachment means: not,
indeed, an ascetic rejection of life, but an attitude of ultimate acceptance, come what may. Here
is a homely example. Suppose I get into my car one morning to go to work; I turn the key in the
ignition, and nothing happens. If I am made angry, anxious, or frustrated by this result, it shows
that there was something I “desired” here, in the sense criticized by Eckhart 10 An disem koufe
sint sie betrogen . . . wan daz sie sint, daz sint sie von gote, und daz sie hȃnt, daz hȃnt sie von
gote und niht von in selber (DW 1:7,7–8,1).
11 Ich spriche noch mȇ: alle die wȋle der mensche ihtes iht suochet in allen sȋnen werken von
allem dem, daz got gegeben mac oder geben wil, sȏ ist er disen koufliuten glȋch. Wiltȗ
koufmanschaft zemȃle ledic sȋn, alsȏ daz dich got in disem tempel lȃze, sȏ soltȗ allez, daz dȗ
vermaht in allen dȋnen werken, daz soltȗ
lȗterlich tuon gote ze einem lobe und solt des alsȏ ledic stȃn, als daz niht ledic ist, daz noch hie
noch dȃ enist.
Dȗ ensolt nihtes niht dar umbe begern. Swenne dȗ alsȏ würkest, sȏ sint dȋniu werk geistlich und
götlich, und denne sint die koufliute ȗz dem tempel getriben alzemȃle, und got ist aleine dar inne,
wan der mensche niht wan got meinet.
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as “mercantile;” my failure to achieve my goal is not something I am going to accept easily, and
this shows I am a merchant. But does an Eckhartian agent then not desire to go to work? I
suggest that such an agent can and does want things, but does so without attachment ( ȃne
eigenschaft). If the ignition switch does not work, an Eckhartian accepts that with equanimity
(though of course she will take steps to address the problem, since her work is also an obligation
or interest). To react with agitation or anger is to cling to the result we wanted, in a sense to
make an idol of it.12 Perhaps a distinction from Buddhism can help to clarify the intended
distinction. The Noble Truths identify attachment-desire-craving-clinging as the sources of
suffering, while the Eightfold Path describes the means we must take to overcome them. The
latter, however, includes Right Action and Right Livelihood as essential steps, which of course
involve, e.g., wanting to get to work: wanting, but—here’s the catch—without clinging or
attachment.13 There is no apparent linguistic marker for this distinction of kinds of wanting in
either English or, as far as I can see, in Eckhart’s Middle High German—one can want
something with or without attachment—but the fact that the notion of wanting without
attachment is central to a major religious and philosophical tradition such as Buddhism may help
us to see its coherence, and one mark of this kind of conative attitude is the tranquil way one
reacts to its frustration by events.
I believe this notion is the key to an understanding of Eckhart’s motto, “live without why.” In
Aquinas’s teleological eudaimonism every human action is de facto aimed at the attainment of
happiness, which in actuality consists in the Beatific Vision. So everybody from Mother Teresa
to a Mafioso is in fact seeking the Beatific Vision in everything they do. The true path to that
happiness involves divine grace and virtuous behavior. In Eckhart’s view this is a substantive
and profoundly mistaken thesis. MacDonald has argued that what Aquinas actually gives us is an
analysis of rational action.14 But this is persuasive only if we identify rational action with
teleologically eudaimonistic action. Whether one chooses to do so or not will largely depend on
one’s metaphysical commitments, e.g., in the medieval Christian world we have been discussing,
whether or not 12 In Pr. 76 Eckhart connects the achievement of such equanimity with the Birth
of the Son in the soul: “And so, when you have reached the point where nothing is grievous or
hard to you, and where pain is not pain to you, when everything is perfect joy to you, then your
child has really been born.” [ Dar umbe, sȏ dȗ dar zuo kumest, daz dȗ noch leit noch swȃrheit
hȃn enmaht umbe iht und daz dir leit niht leit enist und daz dir alliu dinc ein lȗter vröude sint, sȏ
ist daz kint in der wȃrheit geborn. ] (DW
3:328,7–329,2; Walshe, 76).
13 Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, once advised an audience to regard a red
traffic light not as an annoyance, but as a welcome opportunity for a moment’s meditation. For
those who learned to drive in places such as New York City, the size of the challenge will be
immediately evident!
14 MacDonald, “Ultimate Ends,” 46–59. Cf. also Irwin, Development of Ethics, ch. 17.
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one thinks humans are related to God in a purely analogical manner. Eckhart clearly rejected this
view. Through the passive intellect and the gift of grace humans can become what the Son is by
nature, and the attainment of this status depends not on action, but on detachment; i.e., not on
aiming each of our deeds at ultimate bliss, but on accepting that this bliss already dwel s within
us, though its realization in our lives requires that we surrender our creaturely attachments (
eigenschaften).
Yet even given all of this, Eckhart can be seen as a kind of eudaimonist: to realize our oneness
with God, which is the most pressing task in our lives, is to realize our happiness. Does this leave
a role in his version of eudaimonism for human action and the virtues? Yes, thus far we have
only an incomplete picture of the Eckhartian ethic, which I now seek to emend. We begin with
the virtues, recalling that for Aristotle a life of the virtues constitutes happiness; Augustine sees
the genuine (i.e., Christian) virtues as so many forms of the love of God as opposed to love of
self, and hence as necessary conditions for salvation, though we have no way of fulfil ing these
conditions without divine grace. For Aquinas, by contrast to Aristotle, a life of the “natural”
virtues makes for only a limited sort of happiness, while the supernatural (“infused”) virtues play
an instrumental role in the attainment of salvation or true blessedness. St. Thomas (and the
Christian tradition quite generally) distinguished between these two different kinds of virtue, a
distinction not altogether absent in Eckhart, though he seldom mentions, much less discusses, it.
One mention of it occurs in the Latin Sermo XXV-1:
A virtue or habit is born in us from actions that are still strange, and therefore come about with
difficulty. It is different with an infused habit.15
(n.260, LW 4:237, 12–238,1; Teacher, 219)
How is it “different”? Eckhart does not say, but he presumably means that an infused habit is not
“born in us from actions,” nor, perhaps, is it associated with
“difficulty.” We should note the context of this remark, i.e., in the Latin sermon on grace which
we looked at carefully earlier, in which Eckhart distinguished grace-1, which is bestowed on all
creatures in their creation, from grace-2, the gratia gratum faciens, which is reserved for beings
that are intellective and good.
I want to suggest that for Eckhart the two kinds of virtue correspond to the two kinds of grace. I
proposed earlier (chapter 5, p. 153) that his (peculiar) notion of grace-1 protects Eckhart from the
taint of Pelagianism: by sheer dint of being 15 Virtus enim sive habitus in nobis ex actibus adhuc
dissimilibus nascitur, ideo cum labore. Secus de habitu infuso.
175
created by God, creatures are at the same time called by grace back to Him, each according to its
kind. Virtue at this level is the set of practices that tend to perfect the creature in question. For
plants and nonhuman animals healthy growth is an expression of a thing’s ordinary development
in accord with its nature. But for us fallen human beings such (naturally perfective) practices are
“born . . . from actions that are still strange” or are the product of learning “with difficulty.” So,
for instance, it is of such habits—call them “virtue-1”—that I take Eckhart to be speaking in Pr.
104:
All outward works were established and ordained to direct the outer person to God and to train
him to spiritual living and good deeds, that he might not stray into ineptitudes: to act as a curb to
his inclination to escape from self to things outside . . . all works and virtuous practices—
praying, reading, singing, vigils, fasting, penance, or whatever virtuous practice it may be—these
were invented to catch a person and restrain him from things alien and ungodly. Thus, when a
person realizes that God’s spirit is not working in him and that the inner person is forsaken by
God, it is very important for the outer person to practice these virtues.16
(DW 4-1:603,1–604,4; Walshe, 52)
Without such outward discipline we cannot overcome our human “inclination to escape from self
to things outside.”17 That is, we cannot detach from outer things, from our eigenschaft, and
hence cannot open ourselves to grace-2. Here then is a task of grace-1 in human beings: just as it
leads lesser creatures by natural instinct toward their perfection, it leads a person, via “outward
works” (the works of virtue-1, acquired with “difficulty”) to a kind of earthly perfection, a
readiness for the divine call, “so that God may find him near at hand when He chooses to return
and act in his soul”18 (ibid.:604,12–13).
It would, however, be a mistake to think that Eckhart has thus adopted something like the
position of Aquinas on the role of the virtues in our quest for eudaimonia. Thomas wrote: “[T]he
theological virtues direct man to supernatural 16 Alliu ȗzwendigiu werk sint dar umbe gesetzet
und geordent, daz der ȗzer mensche dȃ mite werde in got gerihtet und geordent und ze
geistlȋchem lebene und ze guoten dingen, daz er im selber niht entgȇ
ze keiner unglȋcheit, daz er hie mite gezemet werde, daz er im selber iht entloufe in vremdiu dinc
. . . [dar umbe ist] allez würken vunden umbe üebunge der tugende: beten, lesen, singen, vasten,
wachen und swaz tugentlȋcher üebunge ist, daz der mensche dȃ mite werde gevangen und
enthalten von vremden und un-götlichen dingen. Dar umbe wan der mensche gewar wirt, daz der
geist gotes in im niht enwürket und daz der inner mensche von gote gelȃzen ist, sȏ ist ez gar nȏt,
daz sich der ȗzer mensche in allen tugenden üebe.
17 A “thunder-clap” revelation like that of St. Paul is an obvious exception to the rule.
18 [D]az in got nȃhe vinde, swenne er wider komen wil und sȋn werk würken in der sȇle.
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happiness in the same way as by the natural inclination man is directed to his connatural end”19 (
STh IaIIae,62,3,c., emphasis added). That is, just as all desire happiness, and by the use of natural
reason can discern that this lies in a life of the virtues, so the infused theological virtues (faith,
hope, and charity) “direct man to supernatural happiness,” i.e., to the performance of deeds
meritorious of salvation (ibid.,109,5,ad 1). But neither part of this is Eckhart’s view. His grace-1
makes it possible for us to acquire the virtues-1, but he has almost nothing to say about
“natural happiness.” Nor, as we shall see, is it the role of the virtues-2 to “direct man to
supernatural happiness” for Eckhart. Instead, virtues-1 are for him a necessary component of
being a “good person,” and this in turn is ordinarily a necessary condition for receiving or
accepting grace-2. Necessary, but not sufficient. Take, for instance, the spiritual merchants of
whom Eckhart complains in Pr. 1. He is speaking, he tel s us, “of none but good people” ( niht
dan von guoten liuten). For, to repeat, See, those all are merchants who, while avoiding mortal
sin and wishing to be good, do good works to the glory of God, such as fasts, vigils, prayers and
the rest, all kinds of good works, but they do them in order that our Lord may give them
something in return, or that God may do something they wish for—all these are merchants.20
(DW 1:7,1–5; Walshe, 66–67, transl. slightly altered)
By the same token, those who have become virtuous in this realm of “outer works” must also
beware of another spiritual trap, i.e., becoming wedded to the outer practices. Virtue-1 is no
replacement for detachment. Reliance on it alone would be akin to the Pelagianism that
Augustine found so objectionable.
A similar distinction between kinds or levels of virtue seems to be at work in a passage in the
Book of Divine Consolation. Here Eckhart contrasts “natural human virtue” (which is “so
excellent and so strong that there is no external work too difficult for it”) with virtue’s “interior
work” (which is “divine and of God and tastes of divinity . . . [and] receives and creates its whole
being out of nowhere else than from and in the heart of God. It receives the Son, and is born Son
in the bosom of the heavenly Father”21) (DW 5:38,3–4; 40,15–16, and 41,2–3; Walshe, 539–
41).
19 [V]irtutes theologicae hoc modo ordinant hominem ad beatitudinem supernaturalem, sicut

per naturalem inclinationem ordinatur homo in finem sibi connaturalem.
20 Sehet, diz sint allez koufliute, die sich hüetent vor groben sünden und wæren guote liute und
tuont ir guoten werk gote ze ȇren . . . und tuont sie doch dar umbe, daz in unser herre etwaz dar
umbe gebe, oder daz in got iht dar umbe tuo, daz in liep sȋ: diz sint allez koufliute.
21 [N]atiurlȋchiu menschlichȋu tugent [ist] so edel und sȏ kreftic . . ., daz ir kein ȗzerlȋches werk
ze swære ist . . . ouch ist daz inner werk dar ane götlich und gotvar und smacket götliche
eigenschaft . . . [ez] nimet und schepfet allez sȋn wesen niergen dan von und in gotes herzen; ez
nimet den sun und wirt sun geborn in des himelschen vaters schȏze.
177
With this “interior work,” we have clearly left behind the creaturely realm of grace-1 and virtue-
1, and are now in the realm of grace-2. How, if my distinction is accurate, does Eckhart think of
virtue-2?
To understand Eckhart’s view on the “inner work” of virtue we need to consider his unusual
doctrine of the “transcendentals” (being, goodness, unity, and truth) and the related “spiritual
perfections,” chiefly wisdom and justice.22 For in his scattered discussions of virtue Eckhart
assigns pride of place to detachment ( abegescheidenheit) as well as to justice ( gerehticheit),23
and he identifies both the spiritual perfections and the transcendentals with God.24 For him it is
no mere metaphor to say, as in the Book of Divine Consolation, “God and justice are one,” no
more than to say that God and being, or God and truth, are one. Eckhart conceives of all these
perfections as themselves, in a way, constituting a single abstract or spiritual entity (“abstract” in
the sense of having no spatial or temporal determinations). They are, literally, absolute, i.e.,
unlimited. Being, for example, is per se undetermined; but in a concrete individual being, e.g.,
Martha Washington, being is “captured”
or formed: for example, she is (or was) a woman, born in Virginia in 1731, was the wife of the
first president of the United States, cooked for the soldiers during the Revolutionary War, etc. As
we saw, Eckhart regards being—
as well as unity, truth, and goodness—as only a “loan” to the creature, not truly the creature’s
own. “Being,” as he says, “is God”25 ( Prol.Gen. , n.11, LW
1-2:29,12; Parisian, 85–86). But since the transcendental—as well as the spiritual—perfections
are convertible with one another, the same features 22 Cf. the discussion of the transcendentals
in Eckhart’s thinking in Aertsen, “Metaphysik,” and the English summary in Aertsen’s entry,
“Meister Eckhart,” in Gracia and Noone, Companion to Philosophy, 434–42.
23 In his treatise On Detachment, he calls detachment “the best and highest virtue whereby a
man may chiefly and most firmly join himself to God, and whereby a man may become by grace
what God is by nature” [ welhiu diu hœhste und diu beste tugent . . . dȃ mite der mensche sich ze
gote aller-meist und aller næhest gevüegen müge und mit der der mensche von gnȃden werden
müge, daz got ist von natȗre] (DW 5:400,3–401,2; Walshe, 566). On the other hand, many of
Eckhart’s writings, Latin and German, include discussions of justice, and he says in Pr. 39, “the
just one accepts and practices all virtues in justice, for they are justice itself” [ der gerehte nimet
und würket alle tugende in der gerehticheit, als sie diu gerehticheit selbe sint] (DW 2,260,5–6;
Walshe, 306, emphasis added, translation slightly altered). The clash between these statements
may be only apparent, since Eckhart also holds that all the virtues are, in the end, one.
24 In general, justice seems to stand for all the moral virtues for Eckhart, and wisdom for the
intellectual virtues. As noted in the preceding footnote, he says in Pr. 39, “all virtues . . . are
justice itself.”
25 Esse est deus.
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apply to all of them.26 “God alone is properly being, one, true and good”27
( Prologue to the Book of Propositions, n.4, LW 1-2:43,1–2; Parisian, 94).28
In each case the abstract perfection—being or justice etc.— exists prior to its concrete instances,
and is (formally) generative of them, is their “father,” as Eckhart likes to say. One of his most
important statements on this theme, especially as it applies to the topics of this study, is found in
section I of the German Book of Divine Consolation, which lays out the connections in Eckhart’s
understanding among (i) the transcendental and spiritual perfections, (i ) the Birth of God’s Son
in the soul, and (i i) the wil . It begins:
In the first place we should know that the wise one and wisdom, the true one and truth, the good
one and goodness are in correspondence and are related to each other as follows: goodness is not
created nor made nor begotten, it is procreative and begets the good; the good one, in as far as it
is good, is unmade and uncreated, and yet the begotten child and son of goodness.29
(DW 5:9,5–9; Walshe, 524–25, transl. corrected.30)
Here we find Eckhart applying what Flasch calls his “metaphysics of the sonship”31 (or of
generation) and the by-now familiar concept of univocal correlation: the good one and goodness
itself are one in goodness: “The good one and 26 Cf. Largier, Meister Eckhart 2, 755.
27 [S]olus deus propter est ens, unum, verum et bonum.
28 At the same time Eckhart claimed in Parisian that “God is intellect,” and that intellect is
above being. The idea seems to be that being is one of God’s “proper attributes,” but does not
constitute the divine essence. Cf. McGinn, Mystical Thought, 97–99, for a discussion of this
issue, with copious further references.
29 Von dem ȇrsten sol man wizzen, daz der wȋse und wȋsheit, wȃre und wȃrheit, gerehte und
gerehticheit, guote und güete sich einander anesehent und alsȏ ze einander haltent: diu güete
enist noch geschaffen noch gemachet noch geborn; mȇr si ist gebernde und gebirt den guoten,
und der guote, als verre sȏ er guot ist, ist ungemachet und ungeschaffen und doch geborn kint
und sun der güete. In Eckhart’s view the spiritual perfections, e.g. justice or wisdom, pertain to
the intellect and thus are uncreatable, since whoever could create them must first have them. Cf.
Qu. Par. LW 5: n.4,41,10–11. Cf. also Flasch, Meister Eckhart, 116 and 272 ff., where Flasch
adds: “Wisdom is one and cannot, according to its essence, be thought of as created. This is the
simple, foundational thought of Eckhart’s philosophy” (at 273).
30 Compare In Sap. , n.42: “[T]he just one, as such, receives its whole being from justice itself,
so that justice is in truth the parent and father of the just one, and the just one, as such, is the
offspring and son of justice.” [ [J]ustus ut sic totum suum esse accipit ab ipsa iustitia, ita ut
justitia vere sit parens et pater iusti et justus ut sic vere sit proles genita et filius justitiae] (LW
2:364,5–7; Walshe, 473, transl. corrected, as above, to reflect the distinction Eckhart himself
makes between the “just one” and the “just man” at DW 5:12,7–9; Walshe, 3: 64). Cf. chapter 5,
pp. 138–39.
31 Meister Eckhart, 266–70.

179
goodness are nothing but one goodness, all in one, apart from the bearing and being born . . . All
that belongs to the good one it gets from goodness and in goodness”32 (ibid.:9,12–16; Walshe,
525). In other words, the goodness that the Father is and has, the Son has as well by his very
nature, which is nothing but the Father’s nature itself. More broadly:
All that I have said of the good one and goodness applies . . . to every God-begotten thing that
has no father on earth, and into which too nothing is born that is created and not God, in which
there is no image but God alone, naked and pure.33
(Ibid.:10,11–16; Walshe, ibid., translation slightly altered.) Created human beings can, by grace,
share in that same nature because the
“ground and being of the soul” has that nature, since it was not created, but begotten as the
image of God. In one of his German sermons Eckhart put this (certainly controversial) teaching
in this way: “There is a power in the soul, of which I have spoken before. If the whole soul were
like it, she would be uncreated and uncreateable . . . It is one in unity [with God], not like in
likeness”34 ( Pr. 13, DW
1:220,4–5 and 222,1–2; Walshe, 161).
But the “whole soul,” and especially the wil , is not “like” its ground in a number of crucial
respects: it is created, it has a “father on earth,” and its powers of intellect and will are what
Augustine called “disordered,” i.e., they are de facto not oriented to God alone. Since the will is
central to this study, we want to focus on what Eckhart writes of it in this same passage in the
BgT:
. . . St. John says in his gospel: “To all of them [who received the Word, who believed in His
name] is given the power to become Sons of God, who are born, not of blood nor of the will of
the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God and from God alone” (Jn.1:12f.). By the blood [St.
John] means everything in man not subordinate to the human wil . By the will of the flesh he
means whatever in a man is subject to his wil , but with resistance and reluctance, which inclines
to the carnal appetites and is common to the body and the soul, not peculiar to the soul 32 Guot
und güete ensint niht wan éin güete al ein in allem sunder gebern und geborn-werden . . . Allez,
daz des guoten ist, daz nimet er beidiu von der güete und in der güete.
33 Allez, daz ich nȗ hȃn gesprochen von dem guoten und von der güete, daz ist ouch glȋche war .
. . von allem dem, daz von gote geborn ist und daz niht enhȃt vater ȗf ertrȋche, in daz sich niht
gebirt allez, daz geschaffen ist, allez, daz niht got enist, in dem kein bilde enist dan got blȏz lȗter
aleine.
34 Ein kraft ist in der sȇle, von der ich mȇr gesprochen hȃn,—und wære diu sȇle alliu alsȏ, sȏ
wære si ungeschaffen und ungeschepflich . . . si ist ein in der einicheit, niht glȋch mit der glȋcheit.
The teaching was included as number 27 in the list of incriminated doctrines in the papal bull.
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alone . . . By the will of man St. John means the highest powers of the soul, whose nature and
work is unmixed with flesh, which reside in the pure nature of the soul . . . in which man is of
God’s lineage and God’s kindred. And yet, since they are not God Himself but are in the soul
and created with the soul, therefore they must lose their form and be transformed into God and
be born in God and from God, with only God for Father, for thus they too become God’s sons
and God’s only-begotten Son . . . a man should strive earnestly to de-form himself of himself and
of all creatures, and know no father but God alone.35
(DW 5:10,17–13,1; Walshe, 525–27, emphasis added)
Note, first, that Eckhart here takes over the tripartite conception of soul found in the
Nicomachean Ethics and Aquinas: vegetative (as not subject to wil ), sensate (subject to the wil ,
but with resistance and reluctance), and rational (with which we desire the rational or universal
good, thus “unmixed with flesh”). What Eckhart adds, crucially, are two elements: his version of
the Jewish and Christian notion that human beings—here summed up in the highest powers of
the soul, i.e., intellect and wil —were created in “the likeness of God” (Gn. 1:26); to which he
adds the Christian and Neoplatonic idea of a higher, noncreaturely destiny for the soul (made
possible by the even nobler origin of its ground or
“spark,” the vünkelîn). To attain this destiny the powers “must lose their form and be
transformed into God and be born in God and from God, with only God for Father, for thus they
too become God’s sons and God’s only-begotten Son.”
Roughly speaking, this implies both coming to think divinely (Eckhart speaks of “seeing all
things in God”) and will divinely. We have seen what this divine behavior requires with respect
to the intellect: it must detach from its active, form-abstracting, world-oriented (“active”) part in
order to become totally passive and open to the divine grace. But what does “losing its form”
imply with respect to the wil ?
35 . . . sant J o h a n n e s [sprichet] in sȋnem ȇwangeliȏ, daz ‘allen den ist gegeben maht und
mugent, gotes süne ze werdenne, die niht von bluote noch von vleisches willen noch von mannes
willen, sunder von gote und ȗz gote aleine geborn sint’. Bȋ dem bluote meinet er allez, daz an
dem menschen niht undertænic ist des menschen willen. Bȋ des vleisches willen meinet er allez,
daz in dem menschen sȋnem willen undertænic ist, doch mit einem widerkriege und mit einem
widerstrȋte und neiget nȃch des vleisches begerunge und ist geme-ine der sȇle und dem lȋbe und
enist niht eigenlȋche in der sȇle aleine . . . Bȋ dem willen des mannes meinet sant J o h a n n e s
die hœhsten krefte der sȇle, der natȗre und ir werk ist unvermischet mit dem vleische, und stȃnt
in der sȇle lȗterkeit . . . in den der mensche nȃch got gebildet ist, in den der mensche gotes
geslehte ist und gotes sippe. Und doch, wan sie got selben niht ensint und in der sȇle und mit der
sȇle geschaffen sint, so müezen sie ir selbes entbildet werden und in got aleine überbildet und in
gote und ȗz gote geborn werden, daz got aleine vater sȋ; wan alsȏ sint sie ouch gotes süne und
gotes eingeborn sun . . . Herumbe sol der mensche gar vlȋzic sȋn, daz er sich entbilde sȋn selbes
und aller crȇatȗren, noch vater wizze dan got aleine . . .
181
If Eckhart’s advice concerning our cognitive side is to “live without (the active) intellect,” it is
not surprising that he says with respect to our conative side, our wil : “Live without why,” i.e.,
without creaturely wil . Let us look again at Pr. 104:
When you have completely stripped yourself of your own self, and all things and every kind of
attachment, and have transferred, made over and abandoned yourself to God in utter faith and
perfect love, then whatever is born in you or touches you, within or without, joyful or sorrowful,
sour or sweet, that is no longer yours, it is altogether your God’s, to whom you have abandoned
yourself . . . God bears the Word in the [ground of the] soul, and the soul conceives it and passes
it on to her powers in varied guise: now as desire, now as good intent, now as charity, now as
gratitude, or however it may affect you. It is all His, and not yours at all.36
(DW 4-1:597,12–600,3; Walshe, 51)
The detached person has thus surrendered the soul’s created powers, i.e., her (active) intellect
and her wil . This latter must mean primarily the “will of man”
of which we just saw Eckhart speak, i.e., one’s own creaturely and rational conception of the
human good, of what we as humans want most of all. The result, Eckhart tel s us, is that this “wil
-less” person is guided by the inner Word in the ground of the soul, presumably working in its
guise of Justice itself and Wisdom itself. In such a person the soul’s highest powers have
followed the injunction to
“lose their form and be trans-formed into God and be born in God and from God, with only God
for Father.” In such a soul the Birth takes place, and the person becomes by grace what the Word
is by nature.
We get a somewhat different description of Eckhart’s teaching on the reform (or transformation)
of the will from a relatively brief and elegant German sermon, Pr. 30, on the Pauline injunction:
Praedica verbum, vigila, in omnibus labora: “Preach the word, be vigilant, labor in all things” (2
Tim.4:2,5). This sermon was given on the feast of St. Dominic, the founder of Eckhart’s own
Order of Preachers, and it clearly shows his reflections on that order’s defining task. But
typically for Eckhart, since the concept of the word (or Word), the 36 Swenne dȗ dich alzemȃle
entblœzet hȃst von dir selber und von allen dingen und von aller eigenschaft in aller wȋse und dȗ
dich gote ȗfgetragen und geeigenet und gelȃzen hȃst mit aller triuwe und in ganzer minne, swaz
denne in dir geborn wirt und dich begrȋfet, ich spriche: ez sȋ joch ȗzerlich oder innerlich, ez sȋ
liep oder leit, sȗr oder süeze, daz enist alzemȃle niht dȋn, mȇr: ez ist alzemȃle dȋnes gotes, dem
dȗ dich gelȃzen hȃst . . . got gebirt in der sȇle sȋn geburt und sȋn wort, und diu sȇle enpfæhet ez
und gibet ez vürbaz den kreften in maniger wȋse: nȗ in einer begerunge, nȗ in guoter meinunge,
nȗ in minnewerken, nȗ in dankbærkeit, oder swie ez dich rüeret. Ez ist allez sȋn und niht dȋn mit
nihte.
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verbum, is central to his discourse of univocal correlation, the sermon quickly takes on broader,
indeed cosmic dimensions. Beginning with the observation that it is “very wonderful . . . that the
Word should pour forth and still remain within,” the first part of the sermon deals with the
various modes of the divine omnipresence, and culminates in the Birth of the Son in the soul’s
“inmost and highest part” (the Temple):
God is in all things; but as God is divine and intel igible, so God is nowhere so truly as in the
soul, and in the angels if you wil , in the inmost soul, in the summit of the soul . . . The Father
bears His Son in the inmost part of the soul, and bears you with his only-begotten Son, no less. If
I am to be the Son, then I must be Son in the same essence as that in which He is Son, and not
otherwise.37
( Pr. 30, DW 2:94,1–96,9; Walshe, 133–34)
Eckhart then reminds his listeners that the Latin praedica (literally, “speak forth”
or “publish”) “implies that you have it [the Word] within you,” and that “the reason why He
became man was that he might bear you as His only-begotten Son, no less”38 (ibid.:97,6–98,8;
Walshe, 134). Having thus arrived at his familiar theme of the Birth, Eckhart then—seemingly
out of context—reports an anecdote: Yesterday I sat in a certain place and quoted a text from the
Lord’s Prayer, which is: “Thy will be done.” But it would be better to say, “May will become
thine,” for what the Lord’s Prayer means is that my will should become His, that I should
become He.39
(Ibid.:99,1–3; Walshe, 134)
37 Ez ist ein wunderlich dinc daz . . . daz wort ȗzvliuzet und doch inneblȋbet . . . Got ist in allen
dingen, aber als got götlich ist, und als got vernünftic ist, alsȏ ist got niendert als eigenlȋche als
in der sȇle und in dem engel, ob dȗ wilt, in dem innigesten der sȇle und in dem hœhsten der sȇle .
. . Der vater gebirt sȋnen sun in dem innigesten der sȇle und gebirt dich mit sȋnen eingeborenen
sune, niht minner. Sol ich sun sȋn, sȏ muoz ich in dem selben wesene sun sȋn, dȃ er sun inne ist,
und in keinem andern.
38 ‘Sprich ez her ȗz!’, daz ist: bevint, daz diz in dir ist . . . dar umbe ist er mensche worden, daz
er dich geber sȋnen eingebornen sun und niht minner.
39 Ich saz gester an einer stat, dȏ sprach ich ein wörtelȋn, daz stȃt in dem pater noster und
sprichet: ‘dȋn wille der werde!’ Mȇr: ez wære bezzer: ‘werde wille dȋn!’; daz mȋn wille sȋn wille
werde, daz ich er werde: daz meinet daz pater noster. Literally, the Latin fiat voluntas tua can
mean either. I disagree with those commentators—e.g., Quint ( DW 2:99) and Largier ( Meister
Eckhart 1:971)—who call Eckhart’s retranslation of this petition in the Lord’s Prayer “arbitrary.”
For him, whoever truly accepts Jesus’s teaching “sees God in all things” and can thus accept
whatever happens in her life. For her, “Thy will be done” does indeed mean “May will become
thine.” She has become “blessed” in the sense which Eckhart in Pr. 52 (DW 2:486 ff; Walshe,
420 ff.) gives to the Beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit,”
i.e., she “wants nothing” with her creaturely wil , indeed she has surrendered it. For Eckhart his
retranslation is more accurate than the traditional one.
183
The transition here appears abrupt, but the passage is central to the sermon, the rest of which is,
in one way or another, a comment on it. Its connection to what went before seems to be this: the
Son or Word is in us; we are commanded to
“speak it [Him] forth”; which in turn is done in various ways, all of which require that our
creaturely will be surrendered (that we “be asleep to all things”), letting the divine will replace it:
“And so, when all creatures are asleep in you, you can know what God works in you”40
(ibid.:100,6; Walshe, 134).
The mention of “what God works in you”41 brings Eckhart back to the epistle text, “in omnibus
labora,” which he says has three meanings: first, “see God in all things, for God is in all things;”
second, “love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself;” and third, “love God in all
things equally . . . as much in poverty as in riches . . . in sickness as in health,” etc.42
(ibid.:100,7–106,2; Walshe, 134–36). These three kinds of working, of laboring, are equally
divine, the effects of grace working in us. Summing up in the final paragraph, and no doubt
speaking as much to himself as to his audience, Eckhart says:
“Labor in all things” means: When you stand on manifold things and not on bare, pure simple
being, let this be your labor: “strive in all things and fulfill your service” (2 Tim 4:5) This means
as much as “Lift up your head!”, which has two meanings. The first is: Put off all that is your
own, and make yourself over to God. Then God will be your own, just as He is His own, and He
will be God to you just as He is God to Himself, no less . . . The second meaning . . . is “Direct
all your works to God.”43
(Ibid.:107,1–108,5; Walshe, 136)
40 Dar umbe: slȃfent alle crȇatȗren in dir, sȏ maht dȗ vernemen, waz got in dir würket. This
shift effected by detachment (or “obedience” or “humility”) is a frequent theme in Eckhart,
particularly in his Talks of Instruction. For example, “Whenever a man in obedience goes out of
his own and gives up what is his, in the same moment God must go in there.” [ Swȃ der mensche
in gehȏrsame des sȋnen ȗzgȃt und sich des sȋnen erwiget, dȃ an dem selben muoz got von nȏt
wider ȋngȃn.] (DW 5:187,1–2; Walshe, 486).
41 The echo of Aquinas’s Augustinian definition of virtue is unmistakable ( STh IaIIae,55,4).
42 Daz wort: ‘arbeite in allen dingen!’, daz hȃt drȋe sinne in im. Ez sprichet als vil als . . . nim
got in allen dingen! wan got ist in allen dingen . . . Der ander sin ist: . . . ‘minne got obe allen
dingen und dȋnen næhsten als dich selben!’ . . . minne got in allen dingen glȋche!, daz ist: minne
got als gerne in armuot als in rȋchtuome und habe in als liep in siechtuome als in gesuntheit.
43 ‘Arbeite in allen dingen!’, daz ist: swȃ dȗ dich vindest ȗf manicvaltigen dingen und anders
dan ȗf einem blȏzen, lȗtern, einvaltigen wesene, daz lȃz dir ein arbeit sȋn; daz ist: ‘arbeite in
allen dingen’ ‘vüllende dȋnen dienest!’ Daz sprichet als vil als: hebe ȗf dȋn houbet! Daz hȃt
zwȇne sinne. Der ȇrste ist: lege abe allez, daz dȋn ist, und eigene dich gote, sȏ wirt got dȋn eigen,
als er sȋn selbes eigen ist, und er ist dir got, als er im selben got ist, und niht minner . . . der
ander sin ist: . . . rihte aliu dȋniu werk in got!
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Since in this life we de facto can hardly fail to “stand on manifold things,” our task according to
Eckhart is always to “strive in all things and fulfill [our] service,” the prerequisite of which is
that we practice detachment (“put off all that is [our]
own”), and then “direct all [our] works to God.”
Let us return to our example, in chapters 1 and 4, of Louise, the successful but harried executive
who in order to calm her nerves at work has decided to practice Daoist breathing exercises and
not to imbibe strong drink. Let us imagine now that she is has become an accomplished follower
of the teachings of Meister Eckhart. What would her action look like? Presumably no different in
outcome: Louise would still prefer the breathing exercises. But her thinking, her motivation, will
be different from those of an Aristotelian or Thomist Louise. Eckhart wants us to act from a keen
appreciation of our inner union with the Divine, where, as he says in Pr. 5b, “God’s ground is
my ground and my ground is God’s ground”44 (DW 1:90,8; Walshe, 109). He continues:
Here I live from my own as God lives from His own. For the man who has once for an instant
looked into this ground, a thousand marks of red minted gold are the same as a brass farthing.
Out of this inmost ground, all your works should be wrought without Why. I say truly, as long as
you do works for the sake of heaven or God or eternal bliss, from without, you are at fault. It
may pass muster, but it is not the best.45
(Ibid., 90,9–100,3; Walshe, 109–10)
In this “inmost ground” our Eckhartian Louise is one with God, who is Justice and Wisdom; thus
in acting “out of this inmost ground” she is concerned solely to act justly and wisely. Drinking
strong alcohol while at work would be neither just nor wise, hence she abstains; whereas the
breathing exercises pass both tests, so she chooses them. Note that Eckhart says that if she were
to act for the sake of any gain or profit that is external (“from without”), she would be “at
fault.”46 He does not claim that such external motivation makes one’s deeds sinful (“it may pass
muster”), but it is clearly undesirable, presumably because of its mistaken basis.
44 Hie ist gotes grunt mȋn grunt und mȋn grunt gotes grunt.
45 Hie lebe ich ȗzer mȋnem eigen, als got lebet ȗzer sȋnem eigen. Swer in disen grunt ie
geluogete einen ougenblik, dem menschen sint tȗsent mark rȏtes geslagenen goldes als ein
valscher haller. Ȗzer disem innersten grunde solt dȗ würken alliu dȋniu werk sunder warumbe.
Ich spriche wærliche: al die wȋle dȗ dȋniu werk würkest umbe himelrȋche oder umbe got oder
umbe dȋn ȇwige sælicheit von ȗzen zuo, sȏ ist dir wærlȋche unreht. Man mac dich aber wol lȋden,
doch ist ez daz beste niht.
46 The anticipation here of Kant’s claim of the incompatibility of acting from inclination and
acting from moral duty is palpable.
185
As a creature, analogically related to God, Louise cannot help but plan, form intentions, perhaps
hope for rewards—even heavenly rewards—and seek her own happiness in the process. But if
she understands the tradition as Eckhart does, she will realize that she has a different and
incompatible status as wel , i.e., as God’s Offspring, univocally related to the Source,47 and this
status requires of her a different motivation in her life that must supersede her creaturely
(teleological) desires. The external acts performed under either motivation may well be—or at
least look48—the same. But the life of the teleologically eudaimonist agent is for Eckhart a kind
of dream, an illusion oblivious of the agent’s true nature, and thus “not the best.” What import
does this have for the conception of the virtues and hence the state of one’s soul?
Recall that we were struck by the fact that in his teaching on the path to our blessedness Eckhart
makes no reference to the need for (teleologically oriented) action or virtue, except what we
called “virtue-1,” i.e., habits that help keep our creaturely impulses in check. His central point is
for us to recognize the ground of the soul, for, as Pr. 52 puts it, “Whoever knows this, knows the
seat of blessedness”49 (DW 2:496,4–5; Walshe, 422). If blessedness lies somehow in the ground
of the soul, then what role in our quest for beatitude is played by virtue-2? Is our happiness a
matter simply of recognizing this ground and/or the Birth that takes place in it? Or does virtue-2
have some important role? This question led us to Eckhart’s teaching on the transcendentals, e.g.,
on the “just one and justice,” who are respectively “God’s Son and God the Father,” a “Son in
which there is no image but God alone, naked and pure”50 (DW 5:10,13–16; Walshe, 525).
Central for Eckhart is not the just act, but the just one, i.e., becoming one with Justice. This he
connects with John 1:12f. on becoming Sons of God, i.e., being born not “of the will of man but
of God and from God alone,” which in turn means that the soul’s highest powers, intellect and
wil , must be remade, and the will transformed into the divine will itself. As Pr. 30 teaches, we
must
“strive in all things and fulfill our service.” If we have surrendered our creaturely wil s and the
Birth has taken place in the ground of our souls, then the works we perform by grace will be, by
definition, works of goodness, justice, and wisdom.
For “It is all His, and not yours at all”51 (DW 4-1:600,2–3; Walshe, 51). Our job is to keep the
creaturely will in check; the divine will can then act through us. As 47 It is tempting to see in
Eckhart’s approach something analogous to Kant’s notion of the noumenal self.
48 “‘I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had.’—And didn’t the
intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole history of the incident.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. (Malden, MA/Oxford:
Wiley/Blackwel , 2009, §644.) 49 Der diz bekennet, der bekennet, war ane sælicheit lige.
50 [G]otes sune und . . . gote dem vater . . . [ein sune] in dem kein bilde enist dan got blȏz lȗter
aleine.
51 Es ist allez sȋn und niht dȋn mit nihte.
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the poet Hopkins put it, “the just man justices.”52 He does so not in order to attain blessedness,
for qua just one ( justus, der gerehte) he is by definition already in “the seat of blessedness.”
Virtue-2 is what he, qua Son, has become, and his virtuous deeds are simply the expression of
that fact: “for none loves virtue but he who is virtue itself”53 ( Pr. 29, DW 2:79,11–80,1;
Walshe, 125).
The Father bears His Son, His Word, without ceasing; and He bears it in whatever is (passive)
intellect, including the ground of the soul. The detached or “virginal” person’s soul has opened
its powers to become transparent to this Birth, so that they too may become productive of
thoughts, desires, and deeds that are the expression of the Son’s Birth. Thus the thoughts, desires,
deeds, etc.
that proceed from this ground are an extension of the bullitio in the Trinity itself, in particular of
the Father’s Birth-giving. To the extent they are such, they are ipso facto expressions of virtue,
of the divine justice, goodness, and wisdom.
Just as grace-2 makes us participants in the life of the Trinity as adopted Sons, it simultaneously
enables us to become practitioners of virtue-2, performers of just and loving deeds without why,
simply because they are just and loving as proceeding from the divine ground within. These
deeds are performed “without why,” since “God acts without why and has no why”54 ( Pr. 41,
DW 2:289,3–4; Walshe 239). As the highest virtues—goodness, justice, wisdom—are identified
as spiritual perfections with God,55 the newly aware person recognizes that her unity with God
amounts to a unity with these virtues themselves. As Rolf Schönberger puts it:
The unity of human beings with God is thus an ontological fact and at the same time a norm.
Now it is first and foremost from this fact that the peculiar structure of what one calls “mystical
ethics” results . . . the
“should” [of ethics] follows not from man’s “goal-determined being,” that is, from his final
cause (as in Aristotle), but instead from his inner nature or formal cause, which is his emptiness
and freedom as the image of God.
52 “Í say móre: the just man justices; / Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; / Acts in
God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—/ Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in
limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” (From: G.
M. Hopkins: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”)
53 Wan nieman enminnet die tugent, dan der diu tugent selber ist.
54 [G]ot würket sunder warumbe und [enhȃt] kein warumbe.
55 “It has been written that a virtue is no virtue unless it comes from God or through God: one of
these things must always be. If it were otherwise, it would not be a virtue; for whatever one seeks
without God is too small. Virtue is God or without mediation in God.” [ Ein geschrift sprichet:
diu tugent enist niemer ein tugent, si enkome denn von gote oder durch got oder in gote; der
drȋer muoz iemer einez sȋn. Ob si joch wol anders wære, sȏ enwære ez doch niht ein tugent, wan
swaz man meinet ȃne got, daz ist ze kleine. Diu tugent ist got oder ȃne mittel in gote.] ( Pr. 41,
DW 2:296,6–9; Walshe, 241–42).
“ Written,” as we saw in the earlier chapters, by Augustine and Aquinas.
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Thus Schönberger can speak of “Eckhart’s ontologizing of ethics.”56
In a passage from In Ioh. (n. 583) Eckhart comments on verse 14:10, “It is the Father living in
me who does the work,” and describes the goodness of an action as a state of its being, its formal
cause:
In every good work there are two things to consider, the inner and the outer act. The former is in
the soul, in the wil , and it is this that is truly praiseworthy, meritorious and divine, and God
brings it about in us . . .
this is the act of virtue, which makes both the person who has it and also the external act good.
The outer act, however, does not make the person good. For how should something make a
person good that is outside the person and not in her and that depends on another . . . and that can
be hindered and interrupted against the person’s wil ? But the inner act, which is divine, can be
neither interrupted nor hindered; it is constantly at work, neither sleeping nor slumbering, but
watching over the person who possesses it . . .57
(LW 3:510,7–511,2)
He then proceeds to give as “an appropriate example” of the relationship between the “inner and
the outer act” the inclination of a stone to fall, i.e., a formal cause.58 Just as a stone’s natural
heaviness can be overcome by “hindrance” and by what Aristotle called “violent motion,” so too
our “God-formedness” can be hindered, violated not by external obstacles, but rather when we
allow ourselves to be distracted by the particularities of life and our own finite, self-centered
purposes, our “hoc et hoc”:
56 Rolf Schönberger, “Secundum rationem esse: Zur Ontologisierung der Ethik bei Meister
Eckhart,” in ΟΙΚΕΙΩΣΙΣ. Festschrift für Robert Spaemann, ed. Reinhard Löw, Acta Humaniora
(Weinheim: VCH 1987), 262. A clear statement of this ontologizing is Eckhart’s “virtue is God”
(see previous footnote).
57 [I]n omni opere bono est duo considerare, actum scilicet interiorem et actum exteriorem.
Actus interior ipse est in anima, in voluntate, et ipse est laudabilis proprie, meritorius, divinus,
quem deus operatur in nobis. Et hoc est quod hic dicitur: pater in me manens, ipse facit opera.
Iste est actus virtutis qui bonum facit habentem et opus eius etiam exterius bonum reddit. Actus
vero exterior non facit hominem bonum.
Quomodo enim bonum faceret hominem quod est extra hominem et non in homine et quod
dependet ab altero . . . et quod impediri potest et intercipi potest invito homine? Actus vero
interior, utpote divinus, intercipi non potest nec impediri; semper operatur nec dormit, neque
dormitat, sed custodit hominem habentem se . . .
58 In Aristotelian physics gravity is an intrinsic property of objects, essential to their

corporeality.
Eckhart goes on to say of it, “Gravity and its father, the substantial form which it follows, work
right from the start of the stone’s existence, continuously tending downward” (ibid., 511)
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[God] is a thousand times more eager to give to us than we are to receive. But we do Him
violence and wrong in hindering His natural work by our unreadiness.59
( RdU, DW 5:280,12–281,2; Walshe, 514)
Our “readiness” is achieved in full self-abandonment and the subsequent Birth, which transform
the finite, historical individual’s self-awareness to that of an image of the divine, an adopted Son
and thus a fountain of virtue who, like God, performs just/good/wise deeds simply because they
are just/good/wise.
Virtuous acts “pour forth” from such an individual for the sake of no further goal or purpose.
Their role in the drama of salvation is thus never that of means to an end (a role they play, in
part, in Aquinas), nor that of constituting the goal (Aristotle), but are rather a manifestation of the
goal’s already having been attained.60
One might legitimately wonder whether Eckhart is not overly optimistic about our human
capacity for true detachment and thus for allowing God to work through us. We are inclined to
think (and not unreasonably), “The occasional saint may be able to achieve such equanimity, but
not ordinary mortals such as almost all of us are.” This impression may stem from the fact that in
his preaching Eckhart is often speaking on the level of univocal correlation: much of what he
says, for example, is more true of the “just one” than the “just person,”
the concrete, embodied human being struggling to find her way through the many obstacles and
temptations of this vale of tears. Are his exhortations too demanding for ordinary mortals?
Though his precepts do in fact often invite the reaction that they are too challenging, there is
another side to Eckhart, one more sympathetic to our common weaknesses. Recall that for him
all genuine virtues are really in God, and in us humans only by grace and intermittently. He says,
for instance, in the Latin Sermons and Lectures on Ecclesiasticus (n. 52):
[B]eing and every perfection, particularly the general ones such as being, oneness, truth,
goodness, light, justice and the like are said analogously of God and creatures. From this it
follows that goodness, justice, and the like [in creatures] have their goodness entirely from 59
[Got] ist tȗsentstunt gæher ze gebenne wan uns ze nemenne. Aber wir tuon im gewalt und unreht
mit dem, daz wir in sȋnes natiurlȋchen werkes hindern mit unser unbereitschaft.
60 “In place of a guarantee [of salvation] via works, we have in them the expression of the
Guaran-tor and of what has been guaranteed [i.e. salvation]: the imprinted seal.” Dietmar Mieth,
“Predigt 86:
‘ Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum’” in Lectura II, 173.
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a being outside of themselves, that is, God, to which they stand in an analogous relationship.61
(LW 2:281,1–5; Teacher 178)
And a few pages earlier, in n. 45:
Every finite being . . . has its being not from itself, but from a superior being for which it thirsts,
hungers, and longs . . . Thus it thirsts for the presence of the superior, and one can more properly
say that it continually receives its being than that it has it as its own fixed or even partially fixed
possession.62
(LW 2:274,4–9; Teacher 175)
From the vantage point of one’s own finite being, one can mistakenly—even disastrously—think
one has in oneself a firm and fixed just character, just as one is tempted to think of oneself as an
autonomous substance in one’s own right.63
What is at first glance puzzling is that Eckhart seems to be denying that the just person really is
just, as we usually understand this in terms of a habit (acquired or infused). He is aware of this
problem, and seeks to allay the worry: What we want to say is that the virtues—justice and the
like—are something more like gradually proceeding conformations than something impressed
and remaining firmly rooted in the virtuous person.
They are in a constant becoming, like the luster of light in its medium and the image in a
mirror.64
( In Sap., n.45, LW 2:368,3–6; Teacher 175; Walshe, 475; here, my translation)
61 [E]sse et omnis perfectio, maxime generalis, puta esse, unum, verum, bonum, lux, justitia et
huiusmodi, dicutur de deo et creaturis analogice. Ex quo sequitur quod bonitas et iustitia et
similia bonitatem suam habent totaliter ab aliquo extra, ad quod analogantur, deus scilicet.
62 [O]mne ens . . . non habet ex se, sed ab alio superiori esse quod sitit, esurit et appetit . . .
Propter hoc semper sitit presentiam sui superioris, et potius et proprius accepit continue esse
quam habeat fixum aut etiam inchoatum ipsum esse.
63 Remember that both assumptions are in a sense true on Thomas’s understanding of analogy,
according to which it is equally true to say that God is and that I am, though the verb ‘to be’ is
used analogously, not univocally, in the two cases. Cf., e.g., STh Ia,13,5. By contrast Eckhart
says that “God alone properly speaking exists and is called being, one, true and good,” while our
being, oneness, etc.
are borrowed from His ( Tabula Prologorum LW 1:132; Parisian 79).
64 Et hoc est quod volumus dicere. Virtutes enim, justitia et huiusmodi, sunt potius quaedam
actu configurationes quam quid figuratum immanens et habens fixionem et radicem in virtuoso
et sunt in continuo fieri, sicut splendor in medio et imago in speculo. One could argue that
Eckhart’s doctrine of the virtues is in this respect more true to experience than Aristotle’s, whose
approach makes even the possibility of moral weakness in the virtuous hard to fathom.
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While the Son is the just one (and hence so too are all humans, in the ground and being of the
soul), each of us individually is also a creature, in whom “justice and like,” i.e., our identification
with the Son, or with the Birth of the Son in the soul, are at best “gradually proceeding
conformations.” If one’s creaturely ego gets in the way of this process, Eckhart advises that one
pray for assistance.65 If the prayer seems unanswered, he does not advise striving through one’s
own efforts: “In truth I should be satisfied with God’s wil , whatever God wished to do or give . .
.”66 ( RdU, DW 5:303,5–6; Walshe, 520).
The person who has “gone out of herself” has given up the notion that her eudaimonia is a matter
of fulfil ing her particular purposes, be they banal and everyday or sublime and far-reaching. But
it would be mistaken to think that she is meant to withdraw into quietism or nonaction, i.e., to
give up purposes altogether. We shall take a closer look in a moment at how one lives and acts
“without why,” but for now we focus on the idea that to the extent she is unified with justice (for
example), the just person acts justly, even as the released stone falls because of its “inner act.”
Paradoxical as it may sound, just (and good and wise) action becomes natural to such a person
precisely in her state of detachment. In this way Eckhart’s “mysticism” has no more to do with
avoiding the world than it does with “mystical experiences,” but it has much to do with the
realization of one’s unity with God and the results of this realization in action: as Dietmar Mieth
notes, Eckhart “anticipated the idea of the in actione contemplativus.”67 Mieth has written
extensively on the action-oriented aspect of Eckhart’s thought.68 He points out that Eckhart has
given us several examples of such “active contemplatives.” One was Martha (of the Gospel story
of Martha and Mary, Lk. 10: 38–42, both in Pr. 2 and especially Pr. 86), another was St.
Elisabeth of Thüringen in Pr. 32.69 Eckhart could say of each of them that she 65 As he himself
generally does at the end of most German sermons, e.g., at the end of the famous justice sermon (
Pr. 6): “May God help us to love justice for its own sake and God without why.
Amen.” [ Daz wir die gerehticheit minnen durch sich selben und got ȃne warumbe, des helfe uns
got. Amen]
(DW 1:115,5–6; Walshe, 332). The clear suggestion is that such love is not possible for the
unaided likes of us, and not easy for the others.
66 In der wȃrheit, alsȏ solte mir genüegen an dem willen gotes: in allem dem, dȃ got wölte
würken oder geben . . .
67 In Lectura II, 164. The Latin epithet comes from Jerónimo Nadal, a sixteenth-century Jesuit
who advocated being contemplative both in prayer and in action.
68 In addition to the works cited directly in this essay, see also his Die Einheit von vita activa
und vita contemplativa in den deutschen Predigten und Traktaten Meister Eckharts und bei
Johannes Tauler (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1969).
69 Elisabeth (1207–1231) was born in Hungary, but spent much of her brief life at the court in
Thuringia and, later, Marburg. She became very attracted to the ideals of the then-new
Franciscan order, eventually assuming the habit of the lay third order. Her piety and charity were
legendary, inspiring the foundation of orders of nuns devoted to the care of the sick and the poor.
191
was “so well grounded in her essence that her activity was no hindrance to her”70
( Pr. 86, DW 3:491,6–7; Walshe, 89). Of Elisabeth he tel s his audience:
[W]hen her outward comforts failed her, she fled to Him to whom all creatures flee, setting at
naught the world and self. In that way she transcended self and scorned the scorn of men, so that
it did not touch her and she lost none of her perfection. Her desire was to wash and tend sick and
filthy people with a pure heart.71
( Pr. 32, DW 2:147,2–7; Walshe, 278)
We see here a good example of the Eckhartian dynamic of virtuous action. The person who
realizes the emptiness of “outward comforts” ( hoc et hoc) “flees to God to whom all creatures
flee” (an example of grace-1 at work) by “setting at naught the world and self.” She thus
“transcends [the worldly] self,” becoming immune to human praise and blame (“scorning the
scorn of men”) and thus—
via grace-2—dwel s securely in “her perfection,” i.e., her union with God. From this union and
without why (this is her “pure heart”) came her desire to perform her acts of selfless love. In Pr.
86 it is not Mary, the sister who famously sits at the feet of Jesus to absorb everything he says,
but rather Martha, who busily tends to the needs of the guest and the household, who exemplifies
“groundedness in the essence;” from that ground she does her good works.
Thus for Eckhart, no less than for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the virtues and the virtuous
actions to which they give rise play a central role. For Aristotle they are the very essence of
happiness, and it is fundamental to his conception of virtuous action qua virtuous that it is
performed for its own sake. Aquinas, as we saw, argues that a life of virtuous behavior for its
own sake is not our true happiness; virtuous behavior remains crucial, but now—aided by grace
—is equally a means to the end, the Beatific Vision. Eckhart, for all his distance from Aristotle
on the question of the nature of our blessedness, avoids Aquinas’s instrumentalization of virtuous
action. Indeed, his idea that the just person qua just acts justly for its own sake, and not for some
goal distinct from it, is Aristotelian through and through. So another way to express the idea of
“living without why” would 70 Marthȃ was sȏ weselich, daz sie ir gewerb niht enhinderte. The
sermon treats of Jesus’s visit to the home of Martha and Mary, in which Eckhart, contrary to
most of the tradition, portrays the “contemplatively active” Martha as the one who deserves the
highest praise. So radical is the sermon’s departure from his predecessors and from what seems
the manifest sense of the Gospel text, that some commentators have doubted that Eckhart was its
author.
71 Und dȏ ir der ȗzwendic trȏst abegie, dȏ vlȏch si, ze dem alle crȇatȗren vliehent, und versȃhte
die werlt und sich selben. Dȃ mite kam si über sich selben und versmȃhte, daz man sie
versmȃhte, alsȏ daz si sich dȃ
mite niht enbewar und daz si ir volkomenheit dar umbe niht enliez. Si gerte des daz si sieche und
unvlætige liute waschen und handeln müeste mit einem reinen herzen.
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be to say: “live virtuously!” i.e., “virtuously-2.” That is, be just, good, wise, etc., as God is,
without thought of reward, without the spiritual merchant’s mentality, for that is your true nature.
A third way to put Eckhart's point might be this: since in his discourse of univocal correlation
our very being by adoption is the divine being, and since this mode of being is rational life itself
—which means to live justly, etc.—it follows that for us to ‘live genuinely’ is to live rationally,
which is a life of the virtues-2, a living without why.
Let us turn now to the notion of action itself, which as we saw has a thoroughly
teleological/eudaimonist cast in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. If they are right that most
human action de facto takes place in a means-end framework, founded as G. E. M. Anscombe
reminded us72 on the reasons-seeking question
“Why?,” what sense can we make of Eckhart’s striking injunction to “live without why”? How is
it even possible to live in that way if meaningful action can, for the most part, only be conceived
in teleological, i.e., means-end, terms? When we ask an agent why she did this or that, we often
expect to be told her goal or intention in what she did. And yet Eckhart says, in Pr. 5b: “If you
were to ask a genuine man who acted from his own ground, ‘Why do you act?,’ if he were to
answer properly he would simply say, ‘I act because I act’”73 (DW 1:92,3–6; Walshe, 110). But
in everyday life such an answer would likely be regarded as either disingenuous or a rebuff to the
questioner, as if to say, “Don’t bother me with your foolish questions!” Could Eckhart seriously
be proposing that we altogether eliminate the teleological framework, to which this why-
question is central?
No, I think not. Note, first, that in the sermon just quoted Eckhart is using a by-now familiar
contrast between “a genuine person ( einen wârhaften menschen) who acts out his own ground,”
i.e., a person fully aware of his union with God, with one who “does works for the sake of
heaven or God or eternal bliss, from without,” in other words, a spiritual merchant, whose deeds
are characterized in terms of having an ultimate purpose—what Aristotle called the agent’s
boulêsis, and Thomas the goal or end—but they have it “from without” ( von ȗzen zuo. See
ibid.:91–92; Walshe, 109–10). We should no longer be surprised that within the discourse of
univocal correlation the “genuine person,” i.e., an “adopted Son,”
would act the way God acts, i.e., without why, since God seeks—indeed can seek—nothing
“from without.” The rebuff in Pr. 5b is as much as to say, “I do the right thing for its own sake,
because I love justice; if your question, ‘Why?,’ is looking for some further goal, something I
hope to attain by acting justly, I have none such.” Secondly, recall the example of the stone,
whose inner inclination is 72 In Anscombe, Intention.
73 Swer nȗ vrȃgte einen wȃrhaften menschen, der dȃ würket ȗz eigenem grunde: war umbe
würkest dȗ dȋniu werk? solte er rehte antwürten, er spræche niht anders dan: ich würke dar
umbe daz ich würke.
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realized by falling when the circumstances are right. So too the good/just/wise person’s
inclinations are realized, as Theo Kobusch says,
[in] the concrete moral action, [which] is characterized by the fact that it has its meaning in itself.
Just as God performs all his works “without a why,” and life is lived for its own sake, without
needing to seek for a purpose outside of itself, so too the moral person as such acts “without a
why,” because he regards his activity as meaningful and purposeful in itself, an effect of the birth
of the Son in the person.74
Qua just actions, a further goal is neither necessary nor possible for actions performed from
Justice within.
Eckhart’s “ontologization” of ethics, his stress on what we truly are in the ground of the soul and
thus should become as creatures in the world, relies upon an important distinction between the
“inner act” and the “outer act”: if an agent has “gone out” of her everyday self and recognized
her true identity as Son or Image of the divine Source, then she realizes that her inner act is
justice, while her outer act can and should become its concretization in given empirical
circumstances, e.g., in St. Elisabeth’s case, her attending to the needs of some particular poor
person. For Eckhart, what is moral per se about her action is the inner act that motivates it;
indeed, the same outer act (alms-giving) could be performed by a “spiritual merchant,” but since
it would not be performed for its own sake and from the divine ground, it could not express
virtue-2 (God never acts for a why). Now it might seem that what Eckhart means by the just
one’s
“inner act” is the agent’s intention, i.e., some desired state of affairs that the “outer act,” e.g.,
moving one’s limbs in a certain way, is meant to bring about. As Thomas Aquinas says,
Intention denotes a certain order to an end . . . [it is] an act of the will
[that] regards an end . . . For we are said to intend health not only because we will it but because
we will to attain it by means of something else.75
( STh IaIIae,12,obj.3,c.; ad 3; ad 4)
74 Theo Kobusch, “Mystik als Metaphysik des moralischen Seins,” in Abendländische Mystik im
Mittelalter: Symposion Kloster Engelberg 1984, ed. Kurt Ruh (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1986), 58.
75 [I]ntentio designat ordinationem quandam in finem . . . intentio primo et principaliter pertinet

ad id quod movet ad finem. . . . Non enim solum ex hoc intendere dicimur sanitatem, quia
volumus eam, sed quia volumus ad eam per aliquid aliud pervenire.
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Thus we intend to be healthy by exercising, and to carry this out on a given day by Daoist
breathing: “inner act” (intending) and “outer act” (Daoist breathing).
Is this Eckhart’s meaning?
I think not. I want to claim that the intention as such is an integral part of what Eckhart means by
the outer act, for it makes the outer act the spatio-temporal particular that it is, e.g., Daoist
breathing for the sake of health and equanimity.
Eckhart’s “inner act,” by contrast, is the agent's nature, as seen in the example of the stone and
its inclination to fall. The “father” of this inclination is, Eckhart says, the stone’s “substantial
form” ( forma substantialis; see In Ioh., n.583, LW
3:511,10). Our divine nature-by-adoption (i.e., by grace) is an Image or Offspring of God’s

nature. It hence can express itself outwardly only in acts of virtue, that is, acts of justice,
goodness, etc., marked by free choice, performed for their own sake, and proceeding from that
internal inclination. For Aristotle these are fixed habits in the virtuous person,76 but for Eckhart,
as we saw, they “are something more like gradually proceeding conformations” of the spatio-
temporal creature to the inner divine “spark.” This line of thought is powerfully developed in a
passage in the Book of Divine Consolation, where Eckhart says in part:
[No one] can hinder this [inner] work of virtue, any more than one can hinder God. Day and
night this work glistens and shines . . . We have a clear illustration of this teaching [on inner and
outer work] in a stone . . . [whose] downward tendency is inherent in it . . . In the same way I say
that virtue has an inner work: a will and tendency toward all good and a flight from and
repugnance to all that is bad, evil and incompatible with God and goodness . . .”77
( BgT, DW 5:38,15–39,10. The entire long passage runs from page 38,3
to page 42,20; Walshe 539 ff.)
Thus the “inner act” is a (complex) disposition, a form, for Eckhart, while in this tradition an
intention is an “act of wil .”
But surely, one might say, the spiritual merchant is a human being too, and thus has the same
nature as St. Elisabeth or Martha. So how can his nature not be manifested in his outward acts, as
Eckhart claims? The stone, after all, has no choice about its inclination to fall. This is true, but
our intellectual nature 76 Though the moral and logical problem of akrasia creates difficulties
for his account.
77 Ouch enmac daz inner werk der tugent als wȇnic ieman gehindern, als man got niht hinder
enmac.
Daz werk glenzet und liuhtet tac und naht . . . Dirre lȇre hȃn wir ein offenbȃre bewȋsunge an dem
steine . . .
[mit seiner] neigunge niderwert, und daz ist im anegeborn . . . Rehte alsȏ spriche ich von der
tugent, daz si hȃt ein innigez werk: wellen und neigen ze allem guoten und ȋlen und widerkriegen
von allem dem, daz bœse und übel ist, güete und gote unglȋch . . .
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demands that we choose not only what to do, but also the motivation from which to do it. Just as
a stage actor can adopt the character of a sinner or a saint, so too must each of us decide what we
are and thus how and why to act. For Eckhart it makes all the difference whether my act of alms-
giving is done for the sake of obtaining some reward, or rather done without why simply because
it is just.
The distinction and interplay between motive and intention are subtle, yet crucial for
understanding Eckhart’s point. The “just one”—who by the grace of adoption is Image of the
divine prototype, Son of the Father—is what we are in the ground of the soul. But this ground—
Eckhart is very clear on this—is outside of time and space (i.e., it is not creaturely).78 The “just
person,” however, is a flesh-and-blood denizen of the world, one who is made just by her
identification through detachment with the uncreated, uncreateable Justice in the ground.
Through this identification she becomes a channel for Justice to manifest itself in the world.
Thus her actions, qua just and with justice as her motivation, have by definition no exterior
purpose or goal. But Justice “incarnates” or embodies itself in concrete deeds, and each of these,
like “all things that are in time[,] have a ‘why?’”79 ( Pr. 26, DW 2:27,3–4; Walshe 96). Martha
of the Gospel pours wine into a pitcher in order to serve her guest. If she is thereby acting from
the motive of Justice, she has no further goal in her intentional deed, no why for treating her
guest hospitably and thereby “fulfil ing her service.” Her motive is what could be called “general
justice,” and it has no further purpose. By contrast, a spiritual merchant donates money to the
church in order to gain heaven, his motive in this intentional act is profit. Qua creatures,
analogously related to the Creator, each of them performs actions with an intention, we might
say with a “why-1,” i.e., with one or another goal. But qua justa, a just one univocally correlated
with the Father, Martha’s intentional act is not done for any reward, it has no “why-2,” no
external motivation. She embodies Justice in her deed and can only do so without a why, without
an external goal or further intention. But the merchant’s action embodies his creaturely profit-
motive in its orientation to an additional goal, heaven. If asked, “Why do you pour wine for the
guest?” Martha can only say,
“I act because I act,” i.e., “I have no further reason (for doing what is right).” The merchant, on
the other hand, does have a further reason: he wants to be rewarded for his benefaction.
Anscombe distinguished between three kinds of motive: “forward-looking”
(which is the same as intention), “backward-looking” (toward something that has happened, as in
revenge or gratitude), and “motive-in-general” (such as 78 “The inner act falls not under time, it
is always being born, not interrupted . . . ” [ actus interior non cadit sub tempore, semper
nascitur, non intercipitur . . . ] ( In Ioh. , n.585, LW 3:512,8).
79 Alliu dinc, diu in der zȋt sint, diu hȃnt ein warumbe.
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admiration, curiosity, spite, friendship, fear, love of truth, despair, etc.).80 With respect to human
action Aquinas does not often speak of motive ( motivum), and it is notable that he does not treat
it at all in his systematic discussions of the will in the STh IaIIae, 6–18. In one place where it
does come up (IaIIae, 72, on the distinction of vice and sin) it is treated as equivalent to (further)
intention.81 In Eckhart, by contrast, the central use of the notion, I suggest, is as “motive-in-
general.” One important feature of this kind of motive is the way it tends to exclude particular
sorts of intentions and, of course, other motivations.
How can a motive(-in-general) “tend to exclude” certain kinds of intentions and (other) motives?
Actually, the phenomenon is quite familiar. To the extent my motive for repaying a loan is
honesty, my primary intention in doing so cannot be to hoodwink you so that you will later loan
me a larger sum that I plan to abscond with.82 Motives-in-general, while distinguishable from
other aspects of our psychological make-up, have characteristic expressions in actions,
intentions, wishes, emotions, and the like. Generosity as a motive does not rule out that one
profit through one’s actions, but it does clash with acting in order to swindle. Likewise, venality
as a motive comports poorly with making a hefty donation to charity out of the motive of
religious duty. Envy, a powerful and familiar motivator, finds a characteristic outlet in
schadenfreude, but is in opposition to feelings and acts of love, generosity and kindness. Of
course, our lives are de facto replete with such conflicts, and our motivations are perhaps never
entirely pure. The Christian tradition in which Eckhart stands is under no illusions on this score.
Indeed, Augustine held—as we saw—that without divine grace we can never act from worthy,
i.e., non-egoistic, motives. Eckhart’s point is similar, if less jaundiced: those who properly
understand “God’s truth” will act without why; as for those who do not, they may still be “good
people” whose “intention is right, and we commend them for it . . . May God in His mercy grant
them the kingdom of heaven!”83 ( Pr. 52, DW 2:490,4–6; Walshe, 421). But the proper
understanding of God’s truth clearly implies correct motivation in our actions.
Kurt Flasch puts the point this way:
80 Anscombe, Intention, §§ 12–14.
81 “Wherever there is a special motive for sinning, there is a different species of sin, because the
motive for sinning is the end and object of sin.” [ Ubi occurrit aliud motivum ad peccandum, ibi
est alia peccati species, quia motivum ad peccandum est finis et obiectum], emphasis added.
82 Motives, of course, can be mixed. Honesty does not per se rule out a self-serving purpose, but
the two comport uneasily with one another, the one threatening to unseat the other. For someone
like Aristotle, the more one is self-serving, the less is one honest.
83 Dise menschen sint wol dar ane, wan ir meinunge ist guot; her umbe wellen wir sie loben.
Got der sol in geben daz himelrȋche von sȋner barmherzicheit. Of course, they also may not be
“good people,” but Eckhart is less interested in discussing these.
197
The just person, insofar as he is just, is justice; next to that, heaven and earth, purgatory and hell
count for nothing. This leads to the elimina-tion of the reward-motive and every means-end
construction of life. Life is its own goal. The just person lives in justice; he lives not to do the
will of God and thereby attain heaven. God only interests him insofar as God is justice itself.84
We may in fact seldom attain this ideal, but Eckhart wants us to recognize its possibility in our
lives.
If the motive of the just person, qua just, is justice, then it would seem that the motive of the
merchant is, in a word, profit. The merchant gives in order to get, and it may be his job do his
best to come out ahead in the bargain. Indeed, in everyday life this may seem unavoidable and, in
itself, harmless or morally neutral; but Eckhart gives us reason to pause. True, the medieval
church, though opposed to usury, had no problem with fair profit per se. Nor does Eckhart, who
is hostile to it only to the extent that it interferes with detachment and the motivation of Justice.
The imagery of Pr. 1 is about keeping the merchant mentality out of the Temple, the inner
sanctum of the soul and our place of union with the divine, where it has no right to be:
God wants this Temple cleared, that He may be there all alone. This is because the Temple is so
agreeable to Him, because it so like Him and He is so comfortable in this Temple when He is
alone there.85
(DW 1:6,3–5; Walshe, 66)
One might be tempted to think this way about Eckhart’s polemic against mercantilism: it is
confined to the discourse of univocal correlation, which is meant to constitute our spiritual lives,
while the mercantile attitude has its natural home in the creaturely world where we have many
needs that must be met, and the organization of society into markets is one reasonable way to
achieve that.86
Markets, of course, work on the notion of mutual profit; their maxim is, “Act with why!”, and
their home is the agora, not the Temple. The admonition to live and act without why is, and can
only be, applicable to the Temple: it belongs to the Sabbath alone, not to the Work-Week, one
might say figuratively.
84 Kurt Flasch, “Zu Predigt 6,” 50, emphasis added. Compare Bruce Milem, The Unspoken
Word (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 125.
85 Her umbe wil got disen tempel ledic hȃn, daz ouch niht mȇ dar inne sȋ dan er aleine. Daz ist
dar umbe, daz im dirre tempel sȏ wol gevellet, wan er im alsȏ rehte glȋch ist und im selber alsȏ
wol behaget in disem tempel, swenne er aleine dar inne ist.
86 Or so argued “that great priest,” Plato in Republic 2, 368 ff., e.g., “[A] city comes to be
because none of us is self-sufficient, but we all need many things” (369b).
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But this attempt to “domesticate” Eckhart, to make his views more compatible with our everyday
“buying and sel ing” in the broadest sense, must fail if we take seriously the continuation of his
reasoning in Pr. 1, as already cited in this chapter, p. 171:
So long as a man, in all his doings, desires anything at all that God can or will give, still he ranks
with these merchants. If you would be free of any taint of trading, so that God may let you enter
this temple [the ground of the soul], then you must do all that you can in all your works solely to
God’s glory,87 and be as free of it as Nothing is free, which is neither here nor there. You should
ask nothing whatever in return. Whenever you act thus, your works are spiritual and godly, and
the merchants are driven right out of the temple, and God is in there alone, for one is thinking
only of God.
(Ibid.:9,7–10,3; Walshe, 67, emphases added)
Eckhart clearly means the agora of our lives, including our personal relations of all kinds, and
not merely the Temple. Behaving as a “spiritual merchant” out in the marketplace makes it
impossible for God to get “in there”: our lives are all of a piece, and hence the choice between
being a spiritual merchant and a gerehte (just one) is a stark and decisive one.
Think again of the “genuine man” of Pr. 5, who says “I act because I act,” and recall that Eckhart
elsewhere says of the gerehte, the just one: The just are so set on justice that if God were not just,
they would not care a bean for God . . . 88
( Pr. 6, DW 1:103,1–2; Walshe, 329)
Eckhart’s point here is both profound and radical. One of its most startling aspects is its implied
rejection of the ultimate claim of teleological eudaimonism, that the path to Happiness consists
of acts the doing of which leads (with the help of grace) to Heaven, the Beatific Vision. Eckhart
concedes that by virtue of our creation by God we are impelled, as we saw, to “return to Him and
hurry 87 Wittgenstein writes, in the foreword to Philosophical Remarks, “I would like to say,
‘this book is written to the glory of God’ . . . [i.e.,] written in good wil , and so far as it was not
but was written from vanity etc., the author would wish to see it condemned.” See Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. R. Hargreaves and R. White
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 7. This connection between acting “to the glory of
God” and “good wil ” is one of a number of Eckhartian echoes in Wittgenstein’s thought.
88 Den gerehten menschen den ist alsȏ ernst ze der gerehticheit, wære, daz got niht gereht wære,
sie enahteten eine bȏne niht ȗf got
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to Him according to the Scripture: ‘To the place from which the waters flow they shall return’ [
Eccl. 1: 7]. This is why the creature by its nature loves God, indeed more than itself” (LW
3:189,8–12). Yet precisely this motivation—
which is natural to creatures—is part of the mercantilism Eckhart rejects. The coherence of his
rejection rests of course on his claim that we are not only creatures, that as intellectual beings
and Sons by adoption we have a univocal connection to the divine, and hence our task is to
forsake the profit-seeking of the agora as the framework for our lives and embrace the Temple
instead, living without why. Thus the audacious claim at the beginning of Pr. 6 that those who
honor God “seek not their own in anything whatever it may be, whether great or small [,] . . . not
clinging to possessions . . . nor [to] holiness nor reward nor heaven.” As we saw, this was
condemned in the eighth article of the bull.89 What marks off the motivation of the just or
“genuine” agent derives its content not from anything whatsoever considered to be outside of
one, but from the “inner act”; thus:
one should not work for any ‘why,’ neither for God nor one’s honor nor for anything at all that is
outside of oneself, but only for that which is one’s own being and one’s own life within
oneself.90
( Pr. 6, DW 1:113,3–6; Walshe, 332)
Remembering what Flasch said about the “just person [who] lives in justice; he lives not to do
the will of God and thereby attain heaven,” we can see what Eckhart’s “genuine man” means: “I,
qua just, act thus because Justice, with which I am one, acts through me; and it—which is my
motive—has no goal outside itself. Its demand is absolute.”
At stake in insisting that Eckhart is talking about motive, not intention, when he advises that we
“live without why” is not a merely verbal point. Intentions are unavoidable. We are inclined to
think that an intention is by its very nature part of the “means-end construction” of our lives. As
we saw above, in summing up the tradition and his own views, Aquinas defined intention as an
“act of the wil ,” one that is a wil ing of both an end and a means to that end ( STh IaIIae,12), a
characterization that also nicely expresses the commitment to act that we associate with
intending, as opposed to mere wishing. Coupled with the Thomist view that every human action
is for the sake of attaining the ultimate 89 When coupled with the canonization of Thomas
Aquinas six years earlier by the same Pope John XXII, this article virtually amounts to an
official endorsement by the Catholic Church of teleological eudaimonism.
90 [N]och man ensol dienen noch würken umbe kein warumbe, noch umbe got noch umbe sȋn
ȇre noch umbe nihtes niht, daz ȗzer im sȋ, wan aleine umbe daz, daz sȋn eigen wesen und sȋn
eigen leben ist in im.
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goal of happiness, it also places intention for Thomas squarely within the mercantile framework
that Flasch referred to, i.e., within the sphere of analogical dependence. But it does so only when
combined with teleological eudaimonism.
An Eckhartian agent has intentions too, but they are not mercantile per se, for their motivation is
different. No matter how complex they may be, they are undertaken with detachment. Such
agents have means and ends in their action, but their lives are not constructed that way. Consider
what Eckhart says at In Ioh. , n. 68:
If you want to know if your work is done in God, then see if your work is alive. For it is said
here: “what was made was life in him” [Jn.1:3–4].
But that work is alive that has no motive ( movens) and no goal aside from God and beyond
God.”91
(LW 3:57,1–3; McGinn, Essential Sermons, 146)
What moves God is only love (standing for all the spiritual perfections): For God and everything
divine have as such neither origin nor goal. For if, as Aristotle says [ Met. 996a29–31], in the
realm of the mathematical we speak of neither good nor evil, but only of the formal cause, so too
all the more in the realm of the metaphysical and the divine. And this is what prevents the divine
person from having a father and mother on earth [Mt. 23:9] . . . These words [“So it is with
everyone who is born of the spirit”] show that the divine work as such knows neither source nor
goal; it does not bother about such, nor think about it, nor look at it; it has God alone as its
formal cause: “I became a lover of his form”
[Ws.8:2].92
( In Ioh., n.336, LW 3:284,7–285,5; my translation) As creatures we cannot but have means and
ends, i.e., intentions and goals. However, the movens—in the sense of “motive-in-general”—of
the divine person qua divine is God alone, who is Justice and Goodness, and these perfections
constitute the inner act, and are thereby the motive, the moving cause of her actions.
91 [V]is scire, si opus tuum factum sit in deo: vide si opus tuum sit vivum. Nam hic dicitur: quod
factum est in ipso vita erat. Vivum autem opus est, quod extra deum et praeter deum non habet
movens nec finem.
92 [Q]uia deus et omne divinum, in quantum huiusmodi, nescit principium a quo nec finem ad
quem.
Si enim ‘in mathematicis non est bonum’ et finis, sed solum causa formalis, ut ait p h i l o s o p h
u s, quanto magis in metaphysicis et divinis. Et hoc est quod homo divinus prohibetur habere
patrem et matrem super terram, Matth. 23 . . . In quibus verbis [Sic est omnis, qui natus est ex
spiritu, Ioh 3:8 ] significatur quod opus divinum ut sic non habet, non curat nec cogitat nec
intuetur principium nec finem, sed solum deum causam formalem: ‘amator factus sum formae
illius’.
201
Her intentions, which are acts of her wil , constitute—along with the appropriate bodily
movements—the outer act.
But what of those passages in the English versions of Eckhart’s works where he seems to speak
of intentions in a way directly contrary to my claims here, i.e., as an attitude we should adopt
toward our final end? Take, for instance, a line from the early German work Rede der
underscheidunge, in the version of Edmund Colledge, where Eckhart is speaking of the detached
person: “He has only God, and his intention is toward God alone” (McGinn, Essential Sermons,
251, a translation of DW 5:201,11). The original has und meinet aleine got, literally: “and means
God alone.” The crucial question is the rendering of the verb meinen (and the noun form
meinung), which Colledge regularly (and Walshe sometimes, as well as Quint in the modern
German translation) gives as “intention” (German Absicht). But this is a translational choice,
since the Middle High German noun can mean a variety of things, including sense, meaning,
thought, intention, will, friendship, love, attitude, or disposition.93 In the present case, I think
Walshe’s version, “thinks only of God” (to which Eckhart later adds the caution, “but not in a
continuous and equal thinking of Him”) is more consistent than Colledge’s with Eckhart’s stated
views on living without why.94
But there are certain passages in his Latin writings where Eckhart uses the term intentio in ways
that seem precisely to parallel the Middle High German und meinet aleine got, i.e., where he
speaks of God as the end or goal, as in In Ioh.
n.68, just cited:
The principal of an activity brings about nothing beyond its nature; accordingly, if the goal of
your intention is God [ si finis intentionis tuae est deus] and nothing else, then your deed will be
divine, good, worthy of eternal life, worthy of God: “I am your reward” (Gn.: 15:1). This deed
the Father begins in you, who also completes it.95
( In Ioh. n.576, LW 3:505,12–506,2)
The choice of the English “intention” is unavoidable here, but what does it mean? To begin with
—and quite apart from Eckhart’s many explicit rejections of “the means-end construction of
life”—note the peculiarity in speaking of 93 Cf. Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches
Taschenwörterbuch mit grammatischer Einleitung (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1881), 117.
94 Examples of this kind are copious, but I restrict myself to this one for reasons of economy.
95 Nihil agit ultra suam speciem principium operationis; ergo si finis intentionis tuae deus, nihil
praeter eum, ipsum opus divinum, bonum, dignum erit vita aeterna, dignum deo, merces eius
solus deus, Gen. 15:1
‘ego merces tua’. Ipsum pater in te principiat qui et finit.
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God, as opposed to “the vision of God” or “attaining God,” as a goal; and also in talking of God
as the “goal of [an] intention. ” A statement of intention typically has its own goal or end-state
built in, e.g., to bake a loaf of bread. How does God become a goal of that kind of intention? I
suggest these peculiarities are explained by the sentence that follows: “This deed the Father
begins in you, who also completes it.” Eckhart was fond of quoting Jn. 14:10, where Jesus says:
“The Father dwel ing in me does the works.” What is true of Jesus-the-Son is also true of us qua
Sons-by-grace-of-adoption. The person who has emptied herself and turned decisively toward
God within her has in this (very literal) sense in-tended (i.e., pointed herself toward) God,
thereby making the divine attributes (Goodness, Justice, etc.) her motive. I suggest we should
understand Eckhart’s admonition to “make God the goal of your intention” in this sense: we have
a choice between living our lives as “merchants” or as “gerehte, ” just ones, Sons. In either case
we must have intentions to structure our deeds. For merchants those intentions ultimately aim at
“profit” for themselves from without; for a Son they aim at God who “begins the deed [in the
Son] . . . and also completes it.” But God can have no external goals whatsoever; God performs
in eternity one act only, the generation of the Son; thus the homo divinus, acting in time, must do
the same mutatis mutandis: the performance of various acts of justice and goodness are different
forms of a single act: the Birth of the Son.
Why did Elisabeth perform her many acts of tending to the sick? “For the glory of God,” which I
take to mean, as an expression, an outward manifestation, a birth-giving of the divine in the
ground of her soul. In this sense, God can be the goal (and of course source) of her intention in
each single act of tending the sick.
I have not found any discussion of the distinction between intention and motive among Eckhart’s
modern interpreters. This may help explain why there is sometimes a lack of clarity in what they
write on key questions. When Alessandra Beccarisi, for instance, says that
God, in whom the general perfections are united, is at work in man to the extent he is good or
just, that is, in man in a non-creaturely sense, who is not guided by external principles, but rather
. . . ‘attends to no why outside himself’, but acts only through himself, 96
she is right about Eckhart, but what precisely is meant by the phrases “not guided by external
principles” and “acts only through himself”? Is she referring here to intentions? Or motives? So
too with Theo Kobusch:
96 Beccarisi, “Zu Predigt 1,” in Lectura II, 16.
203
This [ground-act of] self-negation, detaching from oneself and surrendering, is to be thought of
as a movement of the will. For this reason, Eckhart can speak in the same sense of “giving up the
will.” It is not at all that giving up the will makes a person will-less, rather it annihilates only the
“natural will,” to use the terminology of Eckhart and Hegel, that is, the particular will with its
drives, desires and inclinations.97
True enough, but Kobusch does not specify what “giving up” this “natural wil ”
that “does not make one wil -less” might mean. In medieval thought, acts (or actualizations) of
will ( voluntas) can include inclinations, desires, choices, intentions, enjoyment, etc., to which
one can appropriately add motives-in-general (i.e., as distinct from intentions). Which is it that
Eckhart’s “genuine man” gives up?
In an important passage for this theme, Kobusch writes:
The object of every act of will is the good. However, while the creaturely will always wants only
“this” or “that,” that is, wants “to have,” the moral person places his will in the Good that lies
beyond all ways, in the simply and unconditionally Good, or as Eckhart says the “Absolute
Good,” the Good in its truth. This moral good in the sense of general justice cannot be an object
of the will like the many external goods. Rather, as the actually and finally willed, it determines
the essence of the human being. So that everything that one does out of willing this absolute
good bears the character of the moral.98
I agree with the first italicized phrase, but not with the suggestion in the next two sentences, if
the terms “willed” and “wil ing” are meant to designate some special “ultimate” goal, since this
would automatically imply a “why,” and thus would impute to Eckhart an un-Eckhartian claim:
“Live not for this why, but for that one.”99 Instead, I suggest we see Eckhart as using (tacitly) a
distinction between motive and intention. His “general justice” of the homo divinus is the new
motive, replacing the merchant’s reward-motive, the “why” of the “natural person” that we
should reject. But it is a motive we reject, not the framework of 97 Kobusch, “Mystik,” 54. The
Eckhart text referred to is in DW V:45,12.
98 Ibid., 56–57, emphases added.
99 I find a similar confusion in Largier, Meister Eckhart 1:746: “In his criticism [in Pr. 1] of the
‘merchants’ Eckhart is aiming primarily at the why, at the intentional actions of human beings . .
.”
(Emphasis added.) In my view the target is a motive, not the framework of intentional action
itself, which as I have stressed is indispensable.
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means and ends itself. Acting out of this core, the divine one is motivated to do all that she does.
The Eckhartian agent becomes new in that she now has a different motivation for everything she
does, including those same—intentional—
deeds, e.g., attending to the needs of her guests (Martha) or of the poor and sick (Elisabeth),
which she might formerly have performed out of a different, and on Eckhart’s view radically
inferior, motivation.
Putting the point differently, if one’s actions (e.g., tending the sick or serving a guest) were not
intentional, they could not express any motive at all. A consciously motivated act is ipso facto
intentional. Only an external goal or intention, one that implies acting from the conviction of
creaturehood, makes one’s action unworthy, according to Eckhart, since its motivation is
inconsistent with
“general justice”:
I once said, and it is very true: Whatever a man draws into himself or receives from without is
wrong ( unreht). One should not receive God nor consider Him as outside oneself, but as one’s
own and as what is within oneself.100
( Pr. 6 DW 1:113,1–3; Walshe, 331–32)
What, one might ask, of bodily needs, e.g., for food and drink? Is attending to them
automatically unreht for Eckhart? Again it depends on the motivation. To treat food and drink as
components of one’s happiness or completion is to regard oneself as essentially embodied, which
for Eckhart is a serious error. But the use of intellectual capacities, which are essential to us and
to our happiness, requires, as things stand, care of the body and hence food and drink.
A spiritual merchant’s failing is not that she has goals or intentions in her actions: these are
unavoidable. Her error is to perform her good deeds out of an instrumental conception of virtue.
She misunderstands herself and her relationship to God—which she takes to be purely analogical
in nature—and hence her motivation is defective ( unreht). Hers is a reward-motivation, oriented
to a future or further end, an end “from without.” Her actions are based on the misconcep-tion
that her eudaimonia lies in something to be achieved by her own virtuous deeds, consisting either
in those deeds themselves (Aristotle), or in a state of beatitude outside of, and attained either
entirely by grace (Augustine) or also in part by her meritorious works (Thomas). As we have
seen, what underlies this whole way of thinking is the conviction that we are beings entirely
separate from 100 Ich sprach einest alhie und ist ouch wȃr: waz der mensche ȗzer im ziuhet oder
nimet, dem ist unreht.
Man ensol got niht nemen noch ahten ȗzer im sunder als mȋn eigen und daz in im ist.
205
God. One wonders whether Eckhart could have been thinking, ironically, of his august and
learned predecessors when he wrote, in the final paragraph of Pr. 6: Some simple folk imagine
they will see God as if He were standing there and they here. That is not so. God and I are
one.101
(Ibid.:113,6–7, Walshe, 332)
101 Sumlȋche einveltige liute wænent, sie süln got sehen, als er dȃ stande und sie hie. Des enist
niht. Got und ich wir sint ein.
Living without Why, Conclusion
Meister Eckhart’s critique of the medieval conception of the will turns out in the end not to be a
rejection of purposeful or intentional action per se, nor a quietistic call to withdrawal from the
world, say, in the later spirit of Miguel de Molinos.1 As we have seen, it is not acting
intentionally per se that is the focus of his criticism—to criticize and theorize, as he did, in
treatises and sermons is of course itself to act intentionally—but rather to act intentionally with
what he metaphorically characterizes as the “mercantile” mentality. Ministering to the sick and
the poor (Elisabeth) or attending to the needs of one’s guest (Martha) are intentional, purposeful
actions. But, according to Eckhart, those holy women did not perform their deeds “in order that
our Lord may give them something in return, or that God may do something they wish for—all
[such] are merchants”
( Pr. 1).
To escape from mercantilism, in Eckhart’s view, it is not enough—it is perhaps not even right—
to engage in asceticism or to remove oneself from the turbulence and demands of the world.
Neither Elisabeth nor Martha are praised for such practices. In the imagery of Pr. 2 each is “a
virgin who is
[also] a wife,” virginal in that by detachment they emptied the Temple of their souls so that God
alone might dwell there; but also wifely in that their detachment allowed the begetting of “many
and big fruits” in works of justice and love:
Numberless indeed are [a wife’s] labors begotten of the most noble ground or, to speak more
truly, of the very ground where the Father 1 This is so, even though there are many
terminological, conceptual and even biographical similarities between him and Eckhart.
Molinos’s work, initially widely influential in Rome and praised even by his friend Pope
Innocent XI, was later condemned by Innocent (1687). Sadly, Molinos himself was imprisoned
and tortured for heresy. Eckhart was fortunate to have avoided this fate.
206
207
ever begets His eternal Word:—it is thence she becomes fruitful and shares in the procreation.2
(DW 1:31,1–4; Walshe, 78–79)
“The most noble ground,” as we saw, is the essence of the soul wherein no distinction can be
drawn between God and soul, other than that the one engenders and the other is engendered.
Whoever acts from this ground acts divinely—
i.e., justly, wisely, etc.—be the act ever so humble in worldly terms. There is no suggestion in
Eckhart’s writings that our involvement in the world should be reduced to a minimum: he
certainly did not do so in his own busy career as lese- und lebemeister (“master of letters and of
life,” as Heidegger called him3). As scholar, teacher, preacher, and administrator of his order,
Eckhart was outstand-ingly successful, and all of these tasks involve countless intentional deeds
and a wil ingness, if not eagerness, to accept substantial responsibility touching the lives of many
people. To use his own metaphor, the Meister was by all accounts himself both “virgin and
wife.”
Eckhart did not invent the injunction “to live without why.” Conceptually the idea is almost
certainly inspired by the thought of Bernard of Clairvaux, the great twelfth-century Cistercian
who wrote in his commentary on the Song of Songs: “I love because I love; I love that I may
love.”4 The first known use of the phrase “to live without why” has been traced to the Cistercian
Abbess, Beatrijs van Nazareth (d. 1268), whence it was used in the writings of the well-known
Beguines Hadewijch of Brabant and Marguerite Porete.5
Porete had the tragic fate of having her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls (in which the term is
rendered “se donner sans pourquoy” ), condemned twice, as a result of which she herself was
burned at the stake in Paris in 1310.
Eckhart, who returned to Paris the following year as regent master and lived in the same house as
Marguerite’s chief inquisitor, very likely got to know this book, but he had also been using the
notion decades earlier, in his vernacular Talks of Instruction (1294):
2 [V]ruht joch ȃne zal gebernde und vruhtbære werdende ȗz dem aller edelsten grunde; noch
baz gesprochen: jȃ, ȗz dem selben grunde, dȃ der vater ȗz gebernde ist sȋn ȇwic wort, dar ȗz wirt
sie vruhtbære mitgebernde.
3 Der Feldweg (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1986), 4.
4 Amo quia amo; amo ut amem. From Sermones in Cantica Canticorum 83,4, PL 183,1183. The
concept is used by Bernard in a number of places, and is central in his treatise De diligendo Deo.
5 At around the same time the notion also appears in the religious poetry of the Italian Spiritual
Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), an interesting medieval example of rapid transmission
from a Dutch original into other vernaculars.
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When in fact virtue performs itself more by itself and for love of virtue without any why or
wherefore—then one has the perfection of virtue, and not before.6
( RdU DW 5:282,6–10; Walshe, 514)
Though he was not the first, Eckhart was probably the most influential user of this idea, which
went on to appear in the fourteenth-century Theologia Deutsch, as well as in the mystical
writings of Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510), who lived a life reminiscent of St. Elisabeth of
Thuringia, and Angelus Silesius (d. 1677), whose use of the theme later would attract the
attention of Heidegger.7 Eckhart was surely the first to give the notion of living without why a
thoroughgoing theological and philosophical justification, the outlines of which were laid out in
chapters 5 and 6. In its simplest formulation, we should live without why because it is our task in
life to lay aside our creaturely nature and identify—with the help of divine grace—with the
essence and ground of the intellectual soul; in this identification we achieve indistinct union with
God, and God exists and acts without why. These claims, which—as we just saw—they
repeatedly found fer-tile ground among Christians before and after Eckhart,8 apparently shocked
his Inquisitors. Thus, although those claims were grounded in the work of respected
philosophical, patristic, and theological authorities (which may have made them doubly troubling
to the Papal Court), they were condemned.9 This fact, which likely contributed to the
disappearance of many of Eckhart’s treatises, may well be the reason why even at Catholic
institutions his work is rarely given the attention it would seem to deserve.
But if Catholic thinkers treat Eckhart with suspicion, secular philosophers in the Anglo-
American tradition ignore him virtually completely. Indeed his work would likely strike most of
them as bizarre, even though that work is rooted in some of the most revered names in the
history of the discipline. Bernard 6 und wenne . . . si würket sich als mȇr durch sich selber und
durch die minne der tugent und umbe kein warumbe—denne hȃt man die tugent volkomenlȋche
und niht ȇ.
7 My sketch of the concept’s history is indebted to Louise Gnädinger, “Die spekulative Mystik
im ‘Cherubinischen Wandersmann’ des Johannes Angelus Silesius,” Studi Germanici, Neue
Folge 4
(1966): 29–59 and 145–90, at 174–82. Of the Theologia Deutsch Martin Luther later wrote, in
the preface to his own 1518 edition of that work, “Next to the Bible and St. Augustine, no book
has ever come into my hands from which I have learned more of God and Christ, and man and
all things that are.” Of course, such exuberant praise from the Reformer probably did little to
inspire enthusiasm among Catholics for that book and the (Eckhartian) mystical mode of thought
it contains.
8 Though, as my brief survey showed, these Christians were often enough condemned as
heretics.
The theme has also had its adherents among Jews, Muslims, and members of other (and no)
religions.
9 Kurt Flasch argues that the condemnation, if not laudable, was at least to be expected quite
apart from any political or personal animosities, given the philosophical and theological climate
among Catholic clerics in the 1320s. Cf. Flasch, Meister Eckhart, ch. 20.
209
McGinn has provided a valuable overview of Eckhart’s sources, which were classical, scriptural,
patristic and later Christian, Jewish, and Muslim: Eckhart had command of a vast array of
learning, he could (and did) provide trenchant arguments, and could cite respected antecedents,
for each of his positions.10
Aristotle was the ancient thinker most frequently cited by Eckhart, in whose era the works of
“the Philosopher” were still being digested by Christian thinkers.11 But he also called Plato “the
great priest,” doubtless a sign of his respect (though he had hardly any direct access to Platonic
texts). Clearly he saw Plato through the lens of Neoplatonism, and not so much the
Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry as that of later writers such as Proclus, the Pseudo-
Dionysius and the author(s) of the Book of Causes. His crucial division of the intellect into
passive and active parts is thoroughly Aristotelian, as is the contention that when the intellect is
still “empty” (i.e., prior to knowing), it is literally a no-thing.
Equally Aristotelian, as we saw in chapter 6, is the important interpretation he makes of the

division of the soul in the Gospel of John into the three parts: vegetative, sensory, and
intellectual.
True, the notion of a univocal relationship between the intellect and God has only faint echoes in
Aristotle, namely, in the latter’s reference to the (active) intellect as “immortal and eternal” (and
thus presumably divine, or akin thereto); as well as in the wel -known sections in book X of
Nicomachean Ethics about the life of contemplation as “divine,” based as it is in the highest part
of the soul, the intellect. But the ideas of the ineffability of the One, of our univocal relationship
with It, and of our mission to return to the original union with It all are clearly present in the
emanationist thought of Neoplatonic thinkers. From there it is but a short step to the notion of the
birth of God’s Son (Image, Word, etc.) in the soul, or for that matter to that of the ultimate return
to the Godhead, a step which Eckhart refers to as the “breakthrough.”
So Eckhart’s philosophical pedigree is flawless. Yet, although Plato and Aristotle (sometimes
with at least a passing reference to Augustine, Aquinas, and even Wil iam of Ockham) are taught
today in virtually every Western- oriented philosophy department, in most of them Eckhart’s
thoroughly Platonic/
Aristotelian works must seem outlandish. Why is this? With some few exceptions (notably at
Catholic universities) Western philosophy departments today are dominated by a scientific (and
often scientistic) outlook inherited from Cartesianism and, especially, British empiricism. To the
extent that these latter movements have their original roots in classical philosophy, these are not
with Plato and Aristotle but rather with the views of the Atomists. Talk of God is 10 McGinn,
Mystical Thought, 162–82.
11 In Pr. 15 alone—a vernacular sermon, no less—which is a mere five pages in Walshe’s

English translation, Eckhart cites Aristotle by name seven times.
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today often relegated to the religious studies department, while the philosophy of psychology
takes its cues largely from neuroscience and computationalism, and the general outlook is often
dubbed “naturalistic.”12 And yet some essential aspects of Eckhart’s project are not altogether
beyond the range of interests of philosophers within this self-styled naturalist tradition. One sign
of this is the mainstream revival of virtue ethics in recent decades, which of course has its roots
in Aristotle and his successors. The idea that virtuous behavior is the core of living well lies
close to the heart of Eckhart’s views.
In addition, I have at several points alluded to similarities, especially in the sphere of ethics,
between Eckhart and Kant, almost universally regarded as the greatest of early modern
philosophers. No one could have had more admiration for Newtonian science than Kant did, yet
in his moral philosophy he found it necessary to make room for normative elements that
themselves go beyond the concepts used in the modern natural sciences.13 Thus Kant held that
the only way to explain the rational demands of duty was to appeal to the autonomy of the will
and human freedom, and hence to the notion of a noumenal self beyond the spatio-temporal
realm universally governed by causal laws of nature. In this separate realm the will as practical
reason can formulate rationally consistent maxims of action which we experience as “categorical
imperatives.” This conception of a second, higher self, undisturbed by the distractions of the
flesh and thus capable of perfect rationality, is reminiscent of Eckhart’s view that we are at once
“creatures”—immersed in space and time—and “Sons” or “Images” who exist in a transcendent
realm where the demands of duty (Justice, Goodness, etc.) are of primary concern.14
Closely related to this similarity is one concerning the wil . Kant distinguished between the
Wille, the will as our capacity to form rationally binding 12 For interesting and somewhat
skeptical reflections on philosophic “naturalism” by one of the leading philosophers of science,
see Hilary Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism,’” in Philosophy in an Age of
Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, eds. Mario de Caro and David Macarthur
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), ch. 5.
13 Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Eckhart himself was every bit as much of a
“scientific thinker” as Kant, though the dominant science (or “natural philosophy”) of his day
was (neo-) Aristotelian, which was on its way to becoming an active, questioning discipline in its
own right. (The great Nicole Oresme, who among other things proposed the rotation of the Earth
200 years before Copernicus, was born in the final decade of Eckhart’s life.) 14 Of course both
Kant and Eckhart—and indeed most Christian thinkers—have to confront the thorny issue how
this purer, noumenal self could fal , i.e., allow itself, in the absence of sensate temptations, to
turn away from the demands of reason. Kant’s notion of “radical evil” is his version of the
classical Augustinian notion of “original sin,” and his most sustained treatment of these issues is
in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, eds. Allen Wood, and George Digiovanni
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Eckhart’s more cursory treatment is in his In
Gen. I nn.201 ff., LW 1:348 ff.
211
or acceptable goals for action (“maxims”) and Willkür, our capacity for choice, i.e., for adopting
or rejecting those maxims, a distinction reminiscent of that of Augustine between the original
free will ( libera voluntas, lost for us by Adam and Eve), and free choice ( liberum arbitrium).
Kant writes, “[T]here is in man a power of self-determination, independent of any coercion
through sensuous impulses;”15 as rational beings we (can) act according to concepts. But
Willkür he calls a “pathologically affected capacity of choice,” since we are subject to sensual
inclinations.16 Whereas Wille represents the demand of the moral law to act in accordance with
it, Willkür is our power to choose to act on that demand or not, and can determine the ground or
rationale of our acting on it. The morally good person not only chooses, i.e., exercises her
Willkür, in accord with the commands of Wille, i.e., acts in accord with the moral law, she also
acts out of respect for it. In Eckhartian terms, she is gereht, just, and not a merchant. Similar is
the Eckhartian notion of the Birth, in which the agent qua Son surrenders her natural desires for
self-realization and acts in accord with her internalized demands of Justice, Wisdom, etc.17
It might be thought that this notion of acting according to the divine will is automatically
heteronomous, and thus directly contrary to Kant’s insistence that the moral must be
autonomous. But this would be a complete misunderstanding of Eckhart, in whose view the
divine is precisely not “an Other,” except to the extent we (mistakenly) identify ourselves with
the phenomenal self. Indeed, what could be more Kantian in spirit and less heteronomous than
Eckhart’s provocative claim, in Pr. 6, that “the just are so set on justice that if God were not just,
they would not care a bean for God”? This is surely close to a formulation of the categorical
imperative. Or, in the same sermon, “If you count one thing more than another, that is not the
right way. You must go right out of self-wil ,”18
15 Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmil an
& Co., 1964), 465.
16 Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis/New
York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1956), 32–33.
17 In his Erfurter Rede Eckhart wrote “there are two different meanings of ‘wil ’: the one is an
accidental and non-essential wil , and the other is a decisive wil , a creative and trained wil .” [
Ez sint zwȇne sinne ze nemenne an dem willen: der ein ist ein zuovallender und ein ungewesenter
wille, der ander ist ein zuoverhengender wille und machender wille und ein gewenter wille] (In
RdU, n.21, DW 5:280,3–4; Walshe, 513). In Kantian terms the distinction might be that between
a Willkür that is determined by its “pathological affections” and one in harmony with the rational
demands of Wille, of practical reason in its spontaneity. In his later writings Eckhart repeatedly
refers to this “other wil ” as the inner dwel ing divinely inspired wil . My thinking about
similarities and differences between Eckhart and Kant has been helped by exchanges with Lara
Denis.
18 Den gerehten menschen den ist alsȏ ernst ze der gerehticheit, wære, daz got niht gereht wære,
sie enahteten eine bȏne niht ȗf got . . . Wigest dȗ daz ein iht mȇr dan daz ander, sȏ ist im unreht.
Dȗ solt dȋnes eigenen willen alzemȃle ȗzgȃn. Pr. 6, DW I:103, 1–2; 102, 4–5; Walshe, 329.
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where the context makes clear that “self-wil ” is very like that of a Kantian “pathologically
affected” Willkür.19 For both thinkers the moral task is to rise above demands arising in the
realm of “this and that” (Eckhart) or the “phenomenal/
sensual” (Kant) to those at home in the rational or noumenal.20 The Eckhartian obligation of the
just one to act justly (and wisely, wel , etc., i.e., according to the transcendental perfections) with
no consideration of “why” seems very much in the Kantian spirit.
The most important similarity between the two German thinkers follows directly from the above:
their hostility to teleological and eudaimonist conceptions of ethics, and their advocacy instead
of a form of morality that advocates acting out of an identification with the highest ideals and
capacities of which we are capable—in a word, justice (Eckhart) or duty (Kant). If Kant’s
deontological approach to ethics stands against the predominantly teleological or
consequentialist trend of modern moral thought, by the same token Eckhart’s “live without why”
represents a very similar revolt against the leading direction of medieval moral philosophy. The
eminent Kant scholar Paul Guyer has written that Kant “eradicated the last traces of the medieval
worldview from modern philosophy.”21 While this is doubtless true in some ways (e.g., the
overthrowing in the first Critique of all speculative proofs of God’s existence, and the avowed
admiration for the Newtonian worldview), one should not overstate the extent of the rejection.
Kant was raised in a profoundly Lutheran/Pietist household, where the notion of duty for its own
sake was surely prominent. Luther was himself impressed, through Eckhart’s pupil Johannes
Tauler and the treatise Theologia Deutsch, by Eckhartian ideas including the notion of living
without why. It may well be that via this route, Eckhart’s opposition to teleological
eudaimonism, and indeed his deontological views—rare in medieval thought—
indirectly influenced Kant.22
19 That is, the self-will is “pathologically affected.” Both citations are from Pr. 6, DW 1:102,4–5
and 103,1–2; Walshe, 329.
20 Robert Pasnau—in his Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 462–63, fn.3—notes the kinship between Eckhart and Kant (Leibniz,
too) on the inherent dignity of the human intellect, which makes humans “ends in themselves”
(Kant) and led Eckhart to say that the just soul should be “equal with God and beside God, just
equal, neither below nor above” ( glȋch bȋ gote sȋn und bȋ neben gote, rehte glȋch, noch unden
noch oben) ( Pr. 6, DW 1:107,3–4; Walshe, 330).
21 Paul Guyer, “Kant, Immanuel.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig

(London: Routledge, 1998, 2004). Retrieved July 13, 2012, from
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB047.
22 For another instance of Kant’s indebtedness—in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason— to the medieval Christian tradition, especially Augustine, see Philip Quinn’s “In
Adam’s Fall, We Sinned Al ,” Philosophical Topics, 16: 2 (1988): 89–118. On the Lutheran
aspects of Kant’s thought, especially in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, see
the Introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams to the edition of that work by Allen Wood and
George DiGiovanni, vi –xxxi .
213
Whatever their (indirect) influence on the great Enlightenment thinker (and hence modern,
secular thought) may have been, Eckhart’s ethical ideas certainly provoked hostility at the Papal
Court in Avignon. But it was not because that court regarded Eckhart’s philosophical pedigree as
inept that it found reason for its harsh condemnation. Here is the opening section, in full, of Pope
John XXII’s In agro dominico ( In the field of the Lord): In the field of the Lord over which we,
though unworthy, are guardians and laborers by heavenly dispensation, we ought to exercise
spiritual care so watchfully and prudently that if an enemy should ever sow tares over the seeds
of truth (Mt. 13:28), they may be choked at the start before they grow up as weeds of an evil
growth. Thus, with the destruc-tion of the evil seed and the uprooting of the thorns of error, the
good crop of Catholic truth may take firm root. We are indeed sad to report that in these days
someone by the name of Eckhart from Germany, a doctor of sacred theology (as is said) and a
professor of the Order of Preachers, wished to know more than he should, and not in accordance
with sobriety and the measure of faith, because he turned his ear from the truth and followed
fables. The man was led astray by the Father of Lies who often turns himself into an angel of
light in order to replace the light of truth with a dark and gloomy cloud of the senses, and he
sowed thorns and obstacles contrary to the very clear truth of faith in the field of the Church and
worked to produce harmful thistles and poisonous thorn bushes. He presented many things as
dogma that were designed to cloud the true faith in the hearts of many, things which he put forth
especially before the uneducated crowd in his sermons and that he also admitted into his
writings.23
(LW 5:597,2–17; Essential, 77)
23 In agro dominico, cuius dispositione superna licet inmeriti sumus custodes et operarii,
oportet nos sic vigilanter et prudenter spiritualem exercere culturam, ut, siquando in eo inimicus
homo supra semen veritatis zizania seminet, priusquam se in incrementa noxie pullulationis
extollant, prefocentur in ortu, ut enecato semine vitiorum et spinis errorum evulsis leta seges
veritatis catholicae coalescat. Sane dolenter referimus, quod quidam hiis temporibus de partibus
Theutonie, Ekardus nomine, doctorque, ut fertur, sacre pagine ac professor ordinis fratrum
Predicatorum, plura voluit sapere quam oportuit et non ad sobrietatem neque secumdum
mensuram fidei, quia a veritate auditum avertens ad fabulas se conversit. Per illum enim patrem
mendacii, qui se frequenter in lucis angelum transfigurat, ut obscuram et tetram caliginem
sensuum pro lumine veritatis effundat, homo iste seductus contra lucidissimam veritatem fidei in
agro ecclesie spinas et tribulos germinans ac nocivos carduos et venenosos palliuros producere
stagens, dogmatizavit multa fidem veram in cordibus multorum obnubilantia, que docuit quam
maxime coram vulgo simplici in suis predica-tionibus, que etiam redegit in scriptis. March 27,
1329.
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There has been much discussion in the past few decades whether John XXII’s claims about
Eckhart’s teaching are in fact true: were they really contrary to Catholic dogma? Evidence has
recently emerged that the Vatican has, in effect, tacitly overturned the negative conclusions of
the Bull of 1329.24 Among the arguments for such a reversal was the presentation of proof that
much of what Eckhart taught is to be found in earlier fathers and doctors of the church.
Whether or not Eckhart’s theological views were in fact heretical, the effect of the Bull was to
cast a cloud over his name, which surely inhibited the free discussion of his views, since the Bull
threatened with a charge of heresy “anyone [who]
should presume to defend or approve the same articles.” But given the impressive authorities
Eckhart offered in his own defense, many have wondered what motivated the condemnation
(which, as we saw, targeted among other things an article—on the per se nothingness of
creatures—that had been expressly endorsed by the recently canonized Aquinas). Aside from
ecclesial and secular politics in Cologne and beyond, one element in the papal readiness to issue
the Bull clearly lies in its mentions of Eckhart’s vernacular preaching to “the uneducated crowd”
and the “hearts of the simple.” John XXII, himself the son of a French shoemaker, had risen to
eminence via the study of medicine and law, and had controversial theological views of his own.
He and his court were alarmed that the deliberately provocative Eckhart25 was preaching in the
vernacular to ordinary Christians, and not simply circulating his controversial ideas in Latin
among other scholars. Many have noted that in this troubled era of the church’s history the
authorities were especially vigilant against any signs of the “heresy of the ‘free spirit.’” In his
book on this theme Robert Lerner catches what the church regarded as the central faults of this
movement, namely “two heresies:”
Pantheism (or more properly autotheism . . .) and antinomianism; that is, not only can a soul
become one with God, but in consequence of such a state it can ignore the moral law.26
The earliest traces of this trend were thought to be found in Amalric of Bena (cf. chapter 4) and
others early in the thirteenth century, but ecclesiastical vigilance was heightened in the late
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries when such views came to be attributed to some of the
lay Beghards and Beguines, such 24 Markus Vinzent describes the decades-long attempt by
English Dominicans and other Eu-ropean scholars to have the condemnation revoked. Though
the results are somewhat unclear, the efforts appear to have been successful: see his “Discussion:
Meister Eckhart rehabilitated by the Pope,” http://academici.cloud9network.com/blog.aspx?
bid=10026
25 Eckhart prided himself on the effects of his teaching nova et rara, “the new and unusual,”
Prol.
gen. n.2, LW 1:149,1.
26 Lerner, Heresy, 1.
215
as Marguerite Porete. That Eckhart gave an appearance of having taken up their cause was surely
one reason for the Bull’s strong condemnation.
I want to suggest that one central aspect of his views may have been especially provocative.
Eckhart taught that salvation lies within. Each human being has a divine core in the passive
intellect. Grace-1 is given to all, the virtues-1 are clearly possible for all (non-Christians and
Christians alike), and there is nothing in his writings to suggest that grace-2, i.e., the sharing in
the life of the Trinity, is available only to baptized Christians. If Plato was “the great priest,” this
was not because the venerable, pre-Christian-era Athenian had been ordained by some bishop. It
would seem to follow, though Eckhart did not say so openly, that membership in the Catholic
Church and use of the sacraments are not strictly necessary for salvation.27 This is not to say that
in his eyes the church was super-fluous. As conservator and interpreter of the scriptures the
church was for Eckhart an immensely important institution, something he sought to represent in
exemplary fashion in his own roles of teacher and preacher. Stil , the suggestion of his work is
hard to overlook: the crucial step toward salvation is detachment, and the rest must be left to
God. Indeed, many of his most trenchant criticisms are of what he regarded as excessive and
unnecessary ascetic practices found in some religious orders as well as among the laity.
Eckhart’s teaching thus implies, I contend, that the church hierarchy does not have the authority
to control access to salvation. He nowhere says this explicitly, but he did not always leave the
implication altogether hidden. In the powerful Pr. 5b on the text (1 Jn.4:9) “God’s love was
disclosed and revealed to us in this, that God sent His only-begotten Son into the world, that we
might live with the Son and in the Son and through the Son,” Eckhart stresses that in the
Incarnation God not only became man, but also “took on human nature”28 (DW 1:86; Walshe,
108). We praise and magnify Christ
because He was a messenger from God to us and has brought our blessedness to us. The
blessedness He brought us was our own. Where the Father bears His Son in the innermost
ground, this nature flows in there . . . Whoever would exist in the nakedness of this nature, free
27 He avoids such a claim even in his almost extravagant paean to the Eucharist in the twentieth
of the Talks of Instruction. Access to the sacraments—and thus, by traditional Catholic teaching
—to the possibility of salvation was, and still is, a powerful disciplinary tool in the hands of the
church hierarchy. (Compare the attempts by some US Catholic bishops to deny access to the
eucharist to prochoice politicians.) On Eckhart’s views see also Markus Vinzent, “Salus extra
ecclesiam? Meister Eckharts Institutionenskepsis,” in Mystik, Recht und Freiheit: Religiöse
Erfahrung und kirchliche Institutionen im Spätmittelalter, eds. Dietmar Mieth and Britta Müller-
Schauenburg (Stuttgart: Verlag W.
Kohlhammer, 2012).
28 [Got] hȃt menschlȋche natȗre an sich genomen.
216
livingwithoutwhy
from al mediation, must have left behind all distinction of persons . . .
[Further,] you must be pure of heart, for that heart alone is pure that has abolished creatureliness
. . . As surely as the Father in His simple nature bears the Son naturally, just as surely He bears
Him in the inmost re-cesses of the spirit, and this is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my
ground and my ground is God’s ground . . . Out of this inmost ground all your works should be
wrought without why . . .29
(Ibid.:87,4–90,12; Walshe, 108–09; emphasis added)
This is all familiar territory by now, but based on it Eckhart in his conclusion to this sermon
boldly states:
People often say to me, “Pray for me.” And I think, “Why do you go out?
Why do you not stay within yourself and draw on your own treasure?
For you have the whole truth in its essence within you.” That we may thus truly stay within, that
we may possess all truth immediately, without distinction, in true blessedness, may God help us.
Amen.30
( Pr.5b, DW 1:95,4–96,3; Walshe, 111)
In this sermon Eckhart gives a capsule summary of his teaching on salvation.
The only role for the church explicitly recognized is that of its teachers, die meister, among
whom he counts himself (and he here—as often—corrects the
“common opinion” of the others). The sacraments are not mentioned, nor the cross, nor the
Resurrection. Crucial is the Birth, the inner one, and essential to it is detachment. As a result, it is
a mistake if we look to any other human being to mediate for us, which would of course be a
prime example of at tachment: “Why do you go out?” he asks; the treasure is within you. The
pope and the Curia can scarcely have overlooked the threat this contained to their authority and
control; it was perhaps meant as one of the “many things [Eckhart taught] . . . designed to cloud
the true faith in the hearts of many,” as the Bull states. But it is not included directly in the list of
incriminated doctrines, a curious omission given 29 wan er ist gewesen ein bote von gote ze uns
und hȃt uns zuo getragen unser sælicheit. Diu sælicheit, die er uns zuo truoc, diu was unser. Dȃ
der vater sȋnen sun gebirt in dem innersten grunde, dȃ hȃt ein ȋnsweben disiu natȗre . . . swer in
der blȏzheit dirre natȗre ȃne mitel sol bestȃn, der muoz aller persȏnen ȗzgegangen sȋn . . . Ze
dem andern mȃle solt dȗ reines herzen sȋn, wan daz herze aleine reine, daz alle geschaffenheit
vernihtet hȃt . . . Als wærlȋche der vater in sȋner einvaltigen natȗre gebirt sȋnen sun natiurlȋche,
als gewærliche gebirt er in in des geistes innigestez, und diz ist diu inner werlt. Hie ist gotes
grunt mȋn grunt und mȋn grunt gotes grunt . . . Ȗzer disem innersten grunde solt dȗ würken alliu
dȋniu werk sunder warumbe.
30 Die liute sprechent dicke zuo mir: bitet vür mich. Sȏ gedenke ich: war umbe gȃt ir ȗz? war
umbe blȋbet ir niht in iu selben und grȋfet in iuwer eigen guot? ir traget doch alle wȃrheit
wesenlich in iu. Daz wir alsȏ
wærliche inne müezen blîben, daz wir alle wȃrheit besitzen ȃne mitel und ȃne underscheit in
rehter sælicheit, des helfe uns got.
217
its explosive content. Perhaps the officials who drew up the Bull were loath even to mention the
idea publicly.31
The extent of papal authority, and hence the correct structure of the Christian Church, were very
much in dispute in this period. A prominent anti-papal figure in these disputes was none other
than the Franciscan Wil iam of Ockham. After being embroiled during the 1320s in the conflict
with John XXII over the issue of Christian poverty,32 Ockham wound up fleeing for protection
from papal wrath to the court of Ludwig IV of Bavaria, one of the claimants to the imperial
crown and an enemy of the pope. There Wil iam composed polemical tracts against John as well
as more generally against papal claims to supremacy over secular rulers.
Ockham is of special interest here, because in conclusion I wish to return to the question raised
earlier: why does Eckhart’s work receive so little notice from Anglo-American philosophers?
Eckhart and Ockham may well have known one another personally.33 They surely knew of one
another’s works, at least to the extent that those works had aroused papal suspicion. For,
remarkably enough, both of them were under investigation by the Curia in Avignon at the same
time. We know nothing of any interaction between them, but Ockham later ridiculed some of
Eckhart’s philosophical views, including the proposition that all creatures are in themselves a
pure nothing. The proposition is a straightforward consequence of Eckhart’s views on the
relationship between Creator and created, and as we saw above had earlier been endorsed by
Thomas Aquinas. Ockham derided the idea, “and others similar, most absurd, [which]
were advanced by a certain master of theology of the Order of Preachers called Aychardus [ sic],
a German . . . who afterwards came to Avignon and, when investigators had been assigned to
him, did not deny that he had taught and preached them.”34 Ockham’s scorn in these sentences
was surely heightened by his polemical intent in writing them in 1334, for the context is one of
an attack 31 The contrast between “going out” and “staying within” is a commonplace in
Neoplatonic thought, and it was also an important theme for Augustine. Cf. O’Donovan,
Problem of Self-Love, 71 ff.
32 Ockham lent his considerable rhetorical skil s to defense of the views of the Franciscan
“Spirituals,” the party that held that Jesus and his disciples had owned no property, either
individually or collectively, a position implicitly critical of the pomp and wealth of the papacy
and of many bishops, cardinals, abbots, etc.
33 Eckhart may also have been personally acquainted with another eminent British Franciscan,
John Duns Scotus, with whom he overlapped in Paris during the academic year 1302–1303. He
certainly conducted a disputation, important parts of which survive, with the General of the
Franciscan Order, whose assistant Scotus was.
34 [E]t alia similia absurdissima opinabatur quidam magister in theologia de ordine Fratrum
Praedi-catorum, nomine Aycardus Theutonicus, de quibus accusatus fuit primo vel denunciatus .
. . Qui postea veniens in Avinionem assignatis sibi auditoribus se praedicta docuisse et
praedicasse non negavit. Dialogus III,2,2,vi i, “De potestate papae et cleri.” Text and tr. by John
Scott, at http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/
dialogus/t32d2Con.html.
218
livingwithoutwhy
on John XXII, whom he (bizarrely) presents as endorsing Eckhart’s teachings (did he not know
of the papal condemnation?). But there can be no doubt that he, whom one might call a
“progressive Aristotelian,” genuinely had little or no sympathy for Eckhart’s Neoplatonist views.
To secular Anglo-American philosophers Ockham is probably the most accessible and appealing
medieval thinker. Like them he had strong interests in logic and the workings of language, to
both of which fields he made important contributions. He was also actively involved in the
emerging critique of Aristotelian physical science, took a dim view of teleological explanations
(except with respect to human actions), and—as already noted—championed something like the
separation of church and state. He was also an ethical voluntarist, his views on universals at
times seem nominalist, and he clearly had an empiricist bent. In all of this we can see an ancestor
of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mil , and Russel ; in other words, of a dominant stream in Anglo-
American thought. By contrast Eckhart, with his focus on the intellect, the self, and the
transcendent, is frequently regarded as a forerunner of German Idealism. Thus, already in the
1320s the Anglo/
Continental rift emerges clearly in the collocation—if not confrontation—of these two great
thinkers, each defending his cause before the Papal Court in Avignon. Perhaps like many another
rift, this one might profitably be revisited and, if not overcome, at the least learned from. After
all, in our new century with its environmental, climatic, financial, terrorist, and other threats—
not to mention the ever-accelerating pace of our lives and our other personal challenges—the
idea of living without why may be more appealing and important than ever.
Meister Eckhart has struggled, from his own lifetime right down to the present, to be heard and
understood correctly. Philosophers are proverbially quar-relsome, but in Eckhart’s case some of
the critics—the accusers in Cologne, the papal commission, even the polemical Ockham—seem
not to have made enough effort to understand what he was saying. The shadow of the
condemnation of 1329 then made it dangerous to take Eckhart’s part in any of the ongoing
disputes. Even the powerful cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, who admired Eckhart’s thinking, wrote in
the fifteenth century that “his books should be removed from public places, for the people are not
ready for what he often intersperses,” even though (Cusanus adds) “the intel igent find in [these
works] many astute and useful things.”35 Now that Eckhart’s works, or what remains of them,
are fully available and the papal ban has apparently been lifted, perhaps both “the people”
and “the intel igent” will take the trouble to explore the riches of those works and thereby learn
why we should, in Eckhart’s view, live without why.
35 [S]ed optavit, quod libri sui amoverentur de locis publicis, quia vulgus non est aptus ad ea,
quae praeter consuetudinem aliorum doctorum ipse saepe intermiscet, licet per intelligentes
multa subtilia et utilia in ipsis reperiantur. Nicholas of Cusa, Apologia doctae ignorantiae, vol.
2, ed. Raymond Klibansky (Leipzig, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1932), 25, 7–12.
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INDEX
abegescheidenheit (detachment), x, 136, 177. See 104–106, 110, 120, 124–125, 127, 148,
also detachment
173, 185, 192–194, 199–200, 204, 211
Absicht (intention), 201. See also intention akolastos (licentious person), 27, 29n33, 68
absolutely unified being, 164
akrasia, akratic, 14–15, 39–40, 42, 52, 54n36, 68, Academic skepticism, 43–44
194n76. See also incontinence

Ackril , John L., 33n44, 33n45, 126n130
Albert the Great, 7, 87n4, 148
Action-oriented psychological (or propositional)
Amalric of Bena, 114–115, 214
attitudes, 11. See attitude
ambiguity, 57n51, 126, 139. See also equivocation action, x, 2, 5, 9, 10, 11n16, 12, 17–22, 24,
27,
amor, 49, 50n24, 51nn27–29, 56nn48–49,
29, 38, 39n61, 40–41, 46–47, 59, 62n69,
69n87, 85n139. See also erôs; love
71, 76, 77–78, 84–85, 86–88, 92n25,
analogy, analogical, analogically, 81n126, 88,
95–97, 99–111, 123, 129, 130n2, 135–137,
122–124, 126–127, 129, 137–139, 141,
139, 149, 152n75, 167–168, 172–175,
149, 152, 162, 169–172, 174, 185, 188,
184, 186–188, 190–191, 195–202, 207,
189n63, 195, 200, 204
210–212, 218
analyticity, 126n129
intention, 12–13, 16, 21, 49, 95, 97, 100, 185,
Anaxagoras, 145
192–196, 199–200, 203–204
angels, 70n92, 81, 105–106, 118, 135, 141, 182,
intentional, 13–14, 16n27, 39–40, 98, 104, 195,
213
203n99, 204, 206
aniatos (incurable), 29n33
motive, 40, 68, 77–78, 85, 96–97, 100, 107–110,
Anscombe, G. E. M., 12n23, 18n1, 98n46, 192,
184–185, 193, 195–196, 199–200,
195, 196n80, 219
203–204
Anselm of Canterbury, 111n84
involuntary, 10, 15, 85
antecedent, 137. See also analogy
voluntary, 6, 8–12, 13–14, 28, 30n34, 47, 54n36,
antiteleological philosophy, 9, 132
60, 61n66, 62, 70, 72–73, 85, 96n35, 99,
apostasy, 94
160, 168. See also hekousion
appetite, 6, 10–12, 21, 28, 39n61, 90–91,
active intellect. See intellect: active
98, 179
active life, 18, 32, 101, 121, 190, 191n70
Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas
acts of wil , 12, 16, 201
archetypes, 156
actualizations, 98, 203
Aristotle, 2, 6, 42–43, 46, 61–63, 68, 72n99,
Adam and Eve, 55, 59, 61, 71–72, 84, 211

87n4, 90, 93, 98, 100, 106, 114n94, 115,
Adams, Don, 106n72, 219
117n105, 121, 124, 125n126, 127, 132,
Adams, Robert Merrihew, 212n22, 219
133n13, 138n31, 147, 164, 168, 184, 186,
adoption, 82, 192, 194–195, 199, 202
187n58, 188, 196n82, 218–219
Aertsen, Jan, 3n7, 177n22, 219
and active intellect, 36, 120n113, 148–149,
afterlife, 5, 38, 93, 119
162n115, 209
agent, 3, 10n11, 11–12, 14, 20–21, 26, 27n24, 28,
Categories, 48n19, 64, 126
30n34, 39–40, 47, 53, 59–61, 76, 96–101,
De anima, 12, 25, 36, 83n132, 145, 147–148
225
226 i n d e x
Aristotle ( continued)
virtue, 8–9, 12, 14–15, 39–41, 43, 47–52, 56–57,
eudaimonia (happiness), 4, 9, 12–13, 15–16,
61–63, 72–73, 75, 77, 79, 85, 100–101,
18–21, 26, 29–30, 33–35, 37–41, 51, 54,
104, 129, 134, 137, 168, 174, 176, 183n41,
73, 78, 88–89, 92, 94, 101–102, 104–105,
204; as forms of pride, 38, 64, 69, 70n91,

108–109, 111–112, 119, 129, 134, 136,
78, 84, 91n21, 110
174, 191–192, 204. See also eudaimonism;
wil , 7–8, 39–40, 42–43, 45–47, 49n20, 49n23,
teleological eudaimonism
51–64, 66–81, 81n126, 84–85, 95n34,
Metaphysics, 36, 38n59, 83n132, 131, 200
129, 136n20, 179, 211
Nicomachean Ethics, 7–8, 17–20, 22–32, 34–39,
autonomy, 16, 60, 210
47, 48n18, 52, 67n84, 80, 85–89, 91–92,
Averroes, 148
95, 98–101, 108, 110, 117n103, 119n110,
Avicenna, 120
180, 209
Avignon, 1, 135n18, 213, 217–218
nous (intellect), 31, 33–34, 36, 38, 119, 145
Aychardus (Eckhart), 217
passive intellect, 120, 148, 162n115
phronêsis (practical wisdom), 22, 24, 25n15,
26–28, 30–32, 35–39, 99
Baker, Lynne R., 61n64, 219
praxis, 15, 21–22, 23n11, 24, 32, 38, 40–41,
barter (with God), 134, 136, 172
99n47
Basil of Caesarea, 81n124, 83
sophia (intellectual/theoretical wisdom), 30–32,
Bastable, Patrick, 118n107, 219
35–39
Beatific Vision, 88, 89n14, 92, 94, 97, 102–105,
and virtue, 8–9, 12–15, 19–27, 30–41, 47–49,
107, 109, 112–114, 115n97, 116n103, 117,
51–52, 56, 73, 78, 85, 91–95, 99–112, 129,
118n107, 119–121, 123, 162n114, 164,
134, 136, 168, 174, 188, 189n64, 191, 194,
173, 191, 198
204, 210
beatitude, beatitudo, 5n1, 6, 8, 43, 46n10, 46n12, and wil . See boulêsis
47, 48n16, 75, 87–89, 90n18, 92, 95,
asceticism, 97n40, 206
97n42, 101n55, 101n56, 104–106, 109n81,
astronomy, 38n59, 127
112n87, 112n88, 113, 115, 118n106, 119,
Athanasius of Alexandria, 81n124, 82
122, 160, 176n19, 182n39, 185, 204. See
Athena, 157
also happiness
Atomists, 209
Beccarisi, Alessandra, 159n101, 171n7, 202, 219
attachment, 134n16, 152, 154, 156, 158–159,

Beghards, 214
162, 173–174, 181, 216. See also eigenschaft
Beguines, 207, 214
attitude, 3, 11, 62n69, 107, 130, 167–168,
Bejczy, István, 87n4, 219
172–173, 197, 201
belief, 9, 11n16, 28–29, 59, 64n75, 89, 109
audacia (boldness), 69
benevolence, 15. See also voluntas
Augustine, 2, 4, 6, 14, 18n2, 86, 92, 122, 131n4,
Bennett, Wil iam, 8n7
132, 133n13, 134, 137, 143n48, 148,
Bernard of Clairvaux, 134, 135n16, 207
156n91, 160n105, 161, 166n125, 168,
biology, 17
186n55, 208n7, 209, 210n14, 212n22, 219
bios politikos, 35
Ad Simplicianum, 43, 70, 74–76, 136n21
bios praktikos, 32n42. See also active life and Manichees, 44, 53, 67, 70
Birth of God’s Son in soul, 152n76, 155, 162,
and Pelagians, 56, 79–80, 176
164, 168, 170, 173n12, 178, 181–182,
City of God, 46, 51, 59n57, 60n63, 63, 69n87,
185–186, 188, 190, 193, 202, 209, 211, 216
69n90, 76, 78n120, 84n136, 89, 101n57, 110

Bishop Ambrose, 81
Confessions, 43–47, 48n19, 51, 58n53, 64–66,
blessedness, 51, 87, 149, 153–155, 161, 164–165,
67n84, 68, 70, 83–85, 104, 158
172, 174, 185–186, 191, 215–216. See also
De beata vita, 45, 91
beatitude, beatitudo; bliss; eudaimonia,
evil, problem of, 43–44, 52–55, 57, 61, 64,
eudaimonism, eudaimonists
69–70. See also God: and evil
bliss, 5, 129, 134, 164, 167, 170–171, 174, 184,
grace. See grace: Augustine on
192
happiness, 8, 12, 42–43, 45–47, 49, 51, 54, 56,
Boethius, 48n19
58n53, 60n63, 61, 63–64, 75–76, 83, 89
Boethius of Dacia, 100, 109, 111–112,
love, 46–47, 49–52, 56–57, 59n57, 61–63, 68,
114, 219
76, 79–80, 81n126, 84–85, 89, 123,
boiling ( bullitio), 150–152, 166, 186
129, 174
boiling over ( ebullitio), 142n43, 150–152, 166
On Free Choice of the Will (DLA), 43, 45–48,
boldness, 69
50–54, 57, 60–64, 68–70, 73–75,
Bonner, Gerald, 82n129, 219
78nn119–120, 79–80, 83, 93, 100
Book of Causes, 144, 156, 209
index
227
boulêsis, 11–12, 14–15, 22, 23n11, 24–26, 28, 30, contemplation, 32n41, 33–38, 45n5, 80, 88,
32, 39–40, 49, 51–52, 54n36, 57, 62n67,
89n14, 92, 103, 108, 112, 121, 133n13,
67, 76, 78, 95, 96n35, 129, 192. See also
190, 191n70, 209
wil ; wish
control, 5, 10n11, 37, 55, 58, 68–69, 70n91, 91
Bradley, Denis, 16n27, 18n2, 27n24, 33n45,
conversion, 27, 43–44, 62, 64, 66–67, 69, 81,
35n50, 92n24, 92n25, 95n33, 111n85,
85n141, 156
114n92, 116n102, 117–118, 119n110,
Cooper, John M., 34n46, 220
121n115, 220
Copleston, S.J., Frederick, 111n85, 220
British empiricism, 209
Cordner, Christopher, 109n79, 220
British Meister Eckhart Society, x

cosmology, 38n59
Broadie, Sarah, 32n41, 219
courage, 20, 41, 102n63, 103, 107
Brösch, Marco, 150n69
Creator, 42, 44, 54, 72–73, 75, 81, 92, 116n100,
Brown, Peter, 66n78, 75, 220
120, 124, 137, 149, 152, 162, 166, 169, 171,
Brown, Robert F., 59n58
195, 217
Buddhism, 173
Curia, 216–217
Bull. See Papal Bull ( In agro dominico)
Cusanus, Nicolaus, 150n69, 218. See also
bullitio. See boiling
Nicholas of Cusa
bürgelîn (castle of soul), 164
Cusanus-Stift, 150n69
Bush, Stephen, 33n45, 34–35, 119n110, 220
Byers, Sarah, 62n69, 220
da Todi, Jacopone, 207n5
Damascene (John of Damascus), 5, 122
Cajetan (Tomasso de Vio), 116n102
Davidson, Donald, 11, 12n23, 59–60, 220
calculative part of soul, 25, 31
Davies, Brian, 104, 220

caritas, 50n26
de Lubac, S.J., Henri, 122n117
Cartesianism, 209. See also Descartes, René
de Molinos, Miguel, 206
Catherine of Genoa, 208
de Vogel, C. J., 18n2, 220
Catholicism, Catholics, 8, 47, 83, 122n117,
decision, 16, 21, 53, 60
199n89, 208–209, 213–215
deduction, 27n24, 31
Chappel , Timothy, 48n18, 59n58, 61n66,
deification, 82, 84. See also divinization
64n75, 220
deiform, 104
character, 13–14, 20–23, 25–26, 30, 40, 61n66,
deity, 42, 44, 54, 73, 119, 143
67, 77, 99–100, 129, 189, 195, 203
delectatio. See delight
charity, 9, 64–65, 77, 87, 101, 102n63, 103–107,
deliberation, 10–12, 15, 16n27, 21–22, 24, 26,
176, 181, 190n69, 196
28–29, 32, 60, 91, 96–97
choice, 5, 10nn11–12, 14, 15n25, 16–17, 21–24,
delight, 58, 77–78, 89n14
25n15, 26–29, 39, 52–53, 57–58, 59n57,

Demetrias, 79
61, 62n69, 67, 71–73, 75–76, 91, 94–96,
demonstration, 27n24, 31
99, 100n53, 100n54, 110, 122, 129, 194,
den Bok, Nico W., 78n118, 220
198, 202–203, 211. See also prohairesis
Denis, Lara, x, 211n17
Cicero, 43–45, 48n19, 62n69, 85n141
deontology, 212. See also Kant, Immanuel
Cistercian, 207
Descartes, René, 39. See also Cartesianism
Clarke, S.J., W. Norris, v
desire(s), 10, 19–21, 28, 39–40, 51–52, 55–57,
clinging, 45, 173, 199. See also attachment
59–62, 67, 69, 71–72, 79, 88, 98, 100–101,
cognitive, 10, 26–27, 31, 64, 91, 119–120, 181
107, 110, 140, 142, 154, 172–173, 180–181,
Colledge, Edmund, O.S.A., xv, 1n1, 201
185–186, 191, 193, 198, 203, 211
Cologne, 2, 214, 218
for happiness, 11–15, 17, 23–26, 40, 42, 46–47,
communion, 43
49, 52, 68, 76, 81n124, 83, 89–90, 92n25,
conation, 10, 53, 173, 181
96–97, 111, 153, 176

concupiscence, 59, 76, 85
for the Beatific Vision, 88, 97–98, 105–106, 109,
condemnation (of Eckhart), 111, 130n2, 208n9,
111, 115–118, 121
213–215, 218. See also twenty-eight
detachment, 2, 7, 56, 83, 133n13, 136, 148–149,
propositions, condemned 1329
154–155, 155n86, 160, 164, 167–168,
conduct, 23, 40, 58, 101, 107
172, 174, 176–177, 183n40, 184, 188,
connatural, 105, 111, 176
190, 195, 197, 200, 206, 215–216. See also
Connolly, John M., 105n68, 220
abegescheidenheit
consent, 11, 16, 73, 76–77, 95
determinism, 77n116
consequentialism, consequentialists, 3, 41,
Di Muzio, Gianluca, 67n84, 220
106–107, 212
Dietrich of Freiberg, 148–149, 154, 158n98
228 i n d e x
Dihle, Albrecht, 39n62, 42n1, 220
Expositio Libri Genesis, Commentary on the Book
Diotima, 90n20
of Genesis ( In Gen.I), 210

discernment, 26
Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem,
disorder, 15, 55, 57, 66, 92n25, 179
Commentary on John ( In Ioh. ), 130–132,
disposition, 39n61, 45, 47, 62n69, 91–92, 104,
138–139, 141–142, 153, 156, 163n117,
152n75, 194, 201
169, 187, 194, 195n78, 200–201
divine, 2, 5–9, 13n24, 34–36, 40–41, 53, 57,
Expositio Libri Sapientiae, Commentary on the
63–64, 69, 77, 80, 84–85, 89n14, 94, 101,
Book of Wisdom ( In Sap. ), 133, 137,
104–105, 109, 112–113, 115n97, 116n100,
146n60, 153, 169–171, 178n30, 189
118–119, 122n117, 129, 137, 141, 157,
grace. See grace: Eckhart on
160, 162–166, 162n112, 176, 178n28,
merchant mentality, 85, 134–136, 159, 171–173,
182–183, 192, 195, 199–202, 204
176, 192–195, 197–199, 202–204, 206,
aspect of human soul, 33, 36, 38, 101–102, 107,
211
113–114, 119n110, 120, 123–124, 158,
Predigt 1, 134–136, 153n79, 159, 171, 176, 162, 168, 175, 182–183, 186–188,
197–198, 203n99, 204, 206

193–194, 197, 202, 209, 211, 215
Predigt 2, 159, 164, 166, 190, 206
grace, 27n26, 38, 72–73, 78, 85, 87n6, 88, 93,
Predigt 5b, 158, 184, 192, 198, 215–216
98, 100n54, 102, 112, 116n103, 121,
Predigt 6, 135, 190n65, 198–199, 205, 211, 150–155, 162, 173–175, 176–177, 180,
212n19, 212n20
196, 208, 215
Predigt 28, 2, 166n127
wil , 183, 185, 211
Predigt 29, 186
See also Beatific Vision; God; transcendence
Predigt 30, 181–185
divinity, 36, 144, 166, 176
Predigt 41, 135, 186
divinization, 81, 83, 119, 122, 155
Predigt 48, 164
Dominican, 1, 4, 7, 9, 129, 130n2, 133, 148,
Predigt 52, 160–162, 182n39, 185, 196
214n24
Predigt 69, 145–147
Donagan, Alan, 16n27, 95n33, 220
Predigt 76, 173n12
Dreyer, Mechthild, 139n36, 220
Predigt 77, 162n112

dualism, dualists, 34, 35n51, 53, 119n110
Predigt 81, 151
Duclow, Donald F., 142n44
Predigt 86, 190–191
Predigt 102, 160, 163n116
Predigt 104, 148, 149n67, 175, 181
Eastern Orthodoxy, 81, 119
Prologus generalis in Opus tripartitum, General
ebullitio. See boiling over ( ebullitio)
Prologue to the Tripartite Work ( Prol.gen. ), ecclesiastic concerns, 2, 93, 214
177, 214
Eckhart, Meister, 88, 116n102, 119–122, 124,
Quaetiones Parisienses, Parisian Questions ( Qu.
127–128, 131, 137–138, 145, 161,
Par. ), 140n39, 144, 178n29
165–166, 217–218
Sermo die beati Augustini Parisius habitus, Parisian
Birth of God’s Son in soul, 152n76, 155, 162,
Sermon on the Feast of St. Augustine ( Sermo
164, 168, 178, 209
die), 132
condemnation of, 1, 3–4, 111, 114, 130n2, 135,
Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici, Sermons
138, 199, 208, 213–215, 218
and Lectures on Ecclesiasticus ( In Eccli. ), Daz buoch der goetlichen troestunge, Book of
144n54, 188–189
Divine Consolation (BgT), 3n6, 141,
Tabula Prologorum in Opus Tripartitum, 137n28,
176–179, 194
189n63
der gerehte, 134, 135n19, 136n20, 136n22,
on virtue, 8–9, 40–41, 129, 134, 136–137, 143,
141n40, 164n119, 177n23, 178n29, 186,
154, 155n86, 164, 167–168, 173–174,
198, 202, 211n18. See also just one
183n41, 187–189, 191–192, 194, 198,
detachment, x, 2, 7, 56, 83, 133n13, 136, 141,
204, 208, 210, 215; virtue-1, 175–177,
146, 148–149, 152, 154, 155n86, 158, 160,
185; virtue-2, 177, 185–186, 193
164, 166–168, 172, 174–177, 180–181,
Von abegescheidenheit, On Detachment ( Vab), 183–184, 183n40, 186, 188, 190, 195, 197,
136, 177n23
200–201, 203, 206, 215–216
without why/wil , ix–x, 2–4, 7, 9, 15–16, 40,
Die rede der underscheidunge, Talks of Instruction 83–84, 100n51, 124, 128, 132, 135, 160,
( RdU), 134n16, 154, 183n40, 188, 190,
167, 173, 181, 184, 186, 190–193, 195–
207–208, 211n17, 215n27
197, 199, 201, 207–208, 212, 216, 218

Expositio Libri Exodi, Commentary on the Book of
egoism, egoist, 103–104, 107, 196
Exodus ( In Ex. ), 7–8, 140
egotism, 59
index
229
eigenschaft, 15, 159, 163n116, 164, 171n7,
faculty of wil , 40, 53, 57n51, 61n66, 62
173–175, 181n36. See also attachment
failure, 22, 70, 173
Eightfold Path, 173
faith, 7, 64, 73–74, 79–81, 87, 93n27, 94,
Elisabeth of Thüringen. See St. Elisabeth
101, 103–105, 107, 109, 114–115,
emotions, 19–20, 27, 47, 53, 91, 196
117, 119, 131, 156, 176, 181, 213,
end, 6, 9–12, 15, 16–18, 20–22, 23n11, 24–29,
216
36, 38, 40–41, 86, 88, 90, 92, 95–98, 100,
Fall, 42, 59, 72–73, 76, 84, 149, 169, 175,
104–107, 109–111, 119n110, 121, 129,
210n14, 212n22
164, 168, 171, 176, 188, 191–193, 196n81,
Father, 3, 69, 135n16, 139–140, 147, 150–151,
197, 199, 200–202, 204, 212n20. See also

162n112, 162–166, 170, 176, 179–182,
goal; ultimate end
185–187, 195, 201–202, 206, 213,
Epictetus, 56n47, 66n79
215–216
Epicurus, 55
final causality, 132
equanimity, 173, 188, 194
First Cause, 115, 132, 153, 169
equivocals, 124–126
Flasch, Kurt, 3n7, 75n106, 131n3, 138n31,
equivocation, 126. See also ambiguity
150n68, 151n73, 161, 178, 196, 197n84,
Eriugena, John Scotus, 114n94
199–200, 208n9, 220
erôs (love, desire), 49, 84, 90n20, 91n20, 94.
Fortenbaugh, Wil iam, 25n15, 220
See also amor; love
fortitude, 47, 49, 51
error, 29, 46, 60n63, 71–72, 204, 213
Franciscan Spirituals. See spiritual
Esau and Jacob, 74
Franciscans
eternal law, 55–56
free choice, 5, 57–59, 59n57, 61, 71–73,

ethics, 2, 7–9, 12, 17, 18n2, 23, 26–27, 30,
75–76, 94, 96, 100n53, 122, 194, 211.
37–41, 48nn18–19, 49n20, 51, 56, 63,
See also consent; liberum
66, 79, 86–89, 91n21, 94–95, 100, 104,
arbitrium
107–109, 111–112, 116n102, 119, 121,
Free Spirit, 114, 214
129–130, 132, 134, 136, 164, 167–168,
freedom, 56–59, 61n64, 76, 83, 103, 118, 157,
174, 210, 212–213, 218
158n98, 186, 210
consequentialism and, 41, 106
Frege, Gottlob, 143, 143n47, 220
eudamonism and. See eudaimonia, etc.
friendship, 20, 52, 89n14, 196, 201
“mystical ethics”, “ontologizing” of ethics,
fulfillment, 4, 6, 8–9, 13, 17–18, 37, 80, 83, 88,
186–187, 193
95, 97, 107, 109, 111–112, 114, 116–118,
teleology and. See teleological ethics, etc.
121–122. See also happiness
virtue and. See virtue
function argument, 18–20, 108, 134
êthikê, 30
ethos, 30. See also habits, habituation
eudaimonia, eudaimonism, eudaimonists, 2n4, 4, 9, Gallagher, David, 10n11, 221
12–13, 17–18, 21, 29, 33, 35, 37–41,
Garfield, Jay, x, 39n63
43–44, 46–47, 52, 60n63, 63–64, 68,
generosity, 20, 196
75, 83, 87–88, 92, 94, 98, 101–103, 108,
gerehte, 134, 186, 198, 202, 211n18. See also just 111–112, 117n105, 119n110, 129, 133n13,
one
136137, 158, 168–169, 172–175, 185, 190,
gerehticheit, 136n22, 141n40, 171n8, 177,
192, 198, 199n89, 200, 204, 212
178n29, 190n65, 198n88, 211n18. See also
eupraxia, 21
justice
evil, 43–44, 52–55, 57, 61, 64, 69–70, 73,
German Idealism, 218
84n136, 92, 138n29, 152, 194, 200,
Gerson, Lloyd, 70n91, 91n21, 221
210n14, 213
gift, 18, 38n60, 65, 69–70, 74, 82n128, 94,
Evodius, 48, 52, 57, 60n62, 61
101–102, 117, 152n73, 154, 158–159, 169,
excellences (virtues), 19, 21–22, 24, 26, 30–31,
172, 174. See also grace

34, 38, 91–92, 99–101, 108–109, 129
Gnädinger, Louise, 208n7, 221
excess, 20–22, 70n91, 114, 120, 215
goal, 2, 9, 11–15, 17, 18n1, 24, 26, 28–29, 36,
exclusivism, exclusivists, 19, 33–35, 92
38–41, 46–47, 49, 51–52, 65, 67–68,
excommunication, 94
78n120, 83, 87, 88n8, 89–91, 97–98,
exemplar, 5, 137, 150–151
100, 102–103, 105–106, 108–109, 111,
experience, 30, 37, 85n141, 140, 147, 157, 210
122, 129, 134, 136, 170, 173, 186, 188,
external acts, 2–3, 130n2, 185
191–193, 195, 197, 199–204, 211. See also
external compulsion, 72
end; ultimate end
Ezekiel, 92n24
goallessness, 2
230 i n d e x
God, 1–3, 5–8, 36–38, 42–44, 47, 52–55, 57–59,
117n105, 118–119, 121, 129, 132, 134,
61, 63–85, 87–90, 94, 97, 99–107,
136, 148, 153–154, 160, 164, 167–168,
110–127, 130, 132–141, 143–155,
173–174, 176, 185, 191, 198, 200, 204. See

157–166, 168–172, 174–194, 196–202,
also beatitude, beatitudo; bliss; eudaimonia, 204–209, 211–212, 214–216
eudaimonism, eudaimonists
analogous relation to, 81, 123–124, 126–127,
Harrison, Simon, 61n65, 63n70, 221
137–138, 141, 149, 152, 162, 169–172,
health, 32, 35, 97, 105, 138, 171, 183, 193–194
174, 185, 188–189, 195, 200, 204
heaven(s), 1, 38n59, 51, 81, 104, 106, 111,
and evil, 43–44, 52–55, 57, 59, 61, 70
129–130, 135, 170, 184, 192, 195–199
Beatific Vision of. See Beatific Vision
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 203
is without why, 2n3, 7–8, 184, 186, 192, 208
Heidegger, Martin, 207–208, 221
love of, 49–51, 59n57, 63, 76
hekousion, 11n18, 28, 54n36, 61–62. See also
univocal relation to, 124–125, 127, 137–141,
actions: voluntary
143, 145–147, 152, 159n100, 162–164,
heresy, 114, 130, 138n29, 206n1, 214
166, 170, 178, 182, 185, 188, 189n63, 192,
hermits, 4, 167
195, 197, 199, 209
heterodoxy, 115. See also heresy

Trinity, 131, 150–152, 165–166, 186, 215
heteronomy, 108, 158n98
Godhead, 151, 158–159, 165, 168, 172, 209
High Middle Ages, 48n18, 144n50
God-the-Father, 147, 185
Hobbes, Thomas, 218
Gospel, 9, 131, 134, 154, 179, 190, 191n70, 195,
Hoffmann, Tobias, x, 122n117
209
holiness, 1, 111, 135, 199
Gospel Beatitudes, 87
Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, 81n126, 104, 151n73,
grace, 9, 15, 18, 38, 112, 148, 156–158, 198
162n112, 164–166
Thomas Aquinas on, 77n116, 87–89, 93, 95, 98,
Homer, Homeric ethic, 27, 41
102–107, 119n109, 123, 129, 136–137, 149,
hope, 87, 101, 103–107, 114, 176, 185, 192
150n71, 152n73, 154n82, 173, 191, 204
Hopkins, G. M., 186n52
Augustine on, 9, 27n26, 43, 59n57, 61, 65–66,
Hopko, Thomas, 81n124, 221
69, 72–80, 82–83, 85, 100n54, 103, 129,
Hortensius. See Cicero
149, 153n80, 154, 174, 196, 204

human nature, 18n2, 27, 37, 71, 73, 79, 92n25,
Eckhart on, 130, 133–137, 146, 148–149,
94, 102–103, 106, 109, 111, 116n102, 119,
150–156, 168–169, 173–177, 179–181,
121, 149, 215
183, 185–186, 188, 198, 208
Hume, David, 25, 218, 221
grace-1, 151–154, 162, 169, 174–177, 191, 215
humility, 64–65, 79, 84, 155n86, 159, 183n40
grace-2, 151–155, 158, 162, 174–177, 181,
Hursthouse, Rosalind, 8n7, 221
185–186, 191, 194–196, 202, 215
hypostasis (substance, reality), 156
Pelagius on/Pelagianism and, 79–80, 111, 153,
174, 176
sanctifying, 102, 151
I/Self, 162
See also gift
ignorance, 15, 71–72, 76, 82, 160
greed, 59, 134n16
ill will. See malevolence
ground of the soul, 152n76, 153n79, 155, 159n100,
image(s), 5–6, 38, 43, 59, 80–83, 87, 111,
161–168, 170, 172, 179, 180–181, 184–186,
116n102, 122–124, 129, 137–138,

191–193, 195, 198, 206–208, 215–216
141–143, 143n48, 145–148, 150, 152, 156,
ground-act, 203
159, 162–163, 166, 179, 186, 188–189,
Guyer, Paul, 212n21, 221
193–195, 197, 209–210
immediacy, 162n113
immortality, immortals, 33, 36, 81, 84, 148,
habits, habituation, 13, 20, 24–27, 29–30, 37,
162n115, 209
64n75, 66–67, 71, 78, 91, 99, 101, 123,
In agro dominico, 1, 213. See also Papal Bull 129, 152n75, 174–175, 185, 189, 194
( In agro dominico)
Hadewijch of Brabant, 207
inclination(s), 9–10, 25, 57, 61, 105, 108,
Hadot, Pierre, 157, 221
111n84, 134, 175–176, 184n46, 187,
Hanh, Thich Nhat, 173n13
192–194, 203, 211
happiness, 2n4, 4, 6, 8–9, 11–13, 15–16, 18–20,
inclusivism, inclusivists, 20, 33, 35, 92
26, 29–30, 32–35, 37–38, 40–43, 45–47,
incontinence, 14, 59, 67n84. See also akrasia, 49, 51, 54, 60n63, 64, 73, 75–76, 78,
akratic
80, 83, 86–92, 94–95, 97–98, 101–102,

Indistinct One/union, 146, 161, 166, 208
104–106, 108–109, 111–114, 117n103,
induction, 26
index
231
Ingham, Mary Beth, 139n36, 220
Kahn, Charles, 16n28, 42n2, 78, 221
inmost ground/soul, 165, 182, 184, 216
kalon (fine, noble, right), 100, 107, 109
inner acts, 187, 190, 193–194, 195n78, 199–200.
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 9, 37n58, 39–40, 108,
See also interior acts
158n98, 184n46, 185n47, 210–212, 221
inner one, 216
Kenny, Anthony, 8n8, 16n27, 88n9, 98n46, 221
Inquisition, Inquisitors, 3, 130, 153n80, 207–208
Kent, Bonnie, 111n84, 221
instruction, 25–26, 79. See also Eckhart, Talks of Keyt, David, 35n51, 221
Instruction
Kirwan, Christopher, 61n64, 75n108, 222
instrumentalism, 9, 103–104
knowledge, 5, 10n11, 12, 17, 20–21, 26, 27n24,
intellect, 6, 9–10, 13n24, 16n27, 26–27, 30,
30–32, 49, 58, 65, 83, 99, 104, 120–121,
33–34, 36–38, 49, 53, 61n66, 64, 70, 80,

136, 144, 147n63, 149, 160–162
88, 90, 92, 96, 98, 103n65, 107, 109, 111,
Kobusch, Theo, x, 193, 202–203, 222
114–115, 117–120, 123, 140, 143–158,
koufliute (merchants), 134n15, 171, 172n11,
162–166, 172, 174, 177n24, 178n28,
176n20. See also mercantilism, merchants
178n29, 179–181, 185–186, 194, 199, 204,
kurios (master), 61, 96n35
208–209, 212n20, 215, 218
active, 120n113, 148–149, 154, 162n115
passive, 120, 148, 151, 153n78, 154, 162n116,
Largier, Niklaus, 148n65, 149n67, 150n68,
174, 186, 215
158n98, 162n113, 171n7, 178n26, 182n39,
See also nous
203n99, 222
intellection, 147
Last Judgment, 69, 115n97
intellectus agens, 149
learning, 37, 64, 175, 209
intellectus possibilis, 149
Leclerq, Jean, 81n124, 81n126, 81n127, 222
intemperance, 67n84
leisure, 32, 37, 46, 63

intention(s), intentionally, 4, 11–14, 16, 21, 40,
Lerner, Robert E., 114n93, 214, 222
53, 62n69, 95, 97–98, 100, 131, 142–143,
Letter to Simplician ( Ad Simplicianum), 43,
169n1, 185, 192–196, 199–204, 206–207
74–75. See also Augustine
interior acts, 3. See also inner acts
Levin, Susan, 38n59
interiority, 167
Lexer, Matthias, 201n93, 222
intermediate, 21–22, 45, 58
libertas voluntatis, 59
invitus, 71n98, 73, 84
liberum arbitrium, 6n2, 73, 94, 96n36, 96n38,
inwardness, 1, 111, 135
211. See also free choice
irrational, 25, 30, 37, 55, 96, 98
libido, cupiditas. See disorder
Irwin, Terence, 11, 16, 23n11, 25n19, 26, 39n63,
libri Platonicorum, 64
49n20, 61n66, 75n108, 78n120, 86n1,
Liddell & Scott lexicon, 23n11
87n6, 95n34, 97n40, 173n14, 221
lie, 60n63, 169
live without why, 2–4, 7, 9, 15, 83, 100n51, 124,

132, 167, 173, 181, 192, 199, 207–208,
Janssens, Jules, 120n112
212, 218. See also without wil
Jerome, 92n24, 221
Locke, John, 94n29, 218
Jesus Christ, 63–65, 72–73, 80, 85, 130–131,
Lombard, Peter, 86, 150n68, 151n73
134, 155, 159, 182n39, 186n52, 191, 202,
love, 2n3, 3, 20, 46–47, 49–52, 56–57, 59n57,
208n7, 215, 217n32
61–63, 68, 70n91, 76, 79, 80, 81n126,
Jews, Judaism, 48n18, 55, 116n102, 148, 180,
84–85, 89, 90n20, 91n21, 104–105, 123,
208n8, 209
129, 132, 153, 154n82, 157, 161, 169, 174,
Joachim of Fiore, 114
181, 183, 186, 190–192, 190n65, 196,
John of Damascus. See Damascene (John of
199–201, 206–208, 215
Damascus)
Lucifer, 70n92. See also Satan
Johnson, Galen, 76n12, 221
Ludwig IV of Bavaria, 217
judgment, 11n16, 16n27, 39, 60n63, 69, 115n97
lumen gloriae (light of glory), 118

just one, 136, 138–142, 170, 177n23, 178n30,
Luther, Martin, 208n7, 212
185–186, 188, 190, 193, 195, 198, 202,
212. See also gerehte
justice, 9, 20–21, 30, 48–49, 51, 54, 75, 84, 93,
MacDonald, Scott, 18n1, 59n56, 61n66, 62n69,
103, 107, 111n84, 134–142, 170–171,
75n108, 88n8, 88n9, 98, 103n65, 173, 222
177–178, 181, 184–186, 188–190,
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 39n62, 42n1, 222
192–195, 197–200, 202–204, 206,
Macrobius, 158
210–212. See also gerehticheit
macrocosm, 6
232 i n d e x
Maimonides, Moses, 124–125
development, 40, 44, 46, 48, 63, 74, 85, 99,
Malachi, 74
102n61, 103, 134, 168, 175
malevolence, 15
moral philosophy, 2, 7, 8n7, 48n18, 210, 212
malista (most of all), 34
Moses Maimonides. See Maimonides, Moses
Manichaeism, Manichees, 44, 53, 67, 70
motivation, 3–4, 51, 53n32, 62n69, 67–68,

Martha and Mary, 190–191, 194–195, 204, 206
76–78, 90, 97, 107–109, 111n84, 184–185,
materialism, 44, 64
195–197, 199–200, 204. See also attitude
mathematics, 31, 37
motive, 22, 40, 53, 76, 85, 100, 102n63, 107,
maturity, 40
195–197, 199–200, 202–204
Maurer, Armand, 137n28, 144n54
Mourad, Suleiman, 120n112
McCool, S.J., Gerald, 81n125, 83n133, 222
Muslim, 48n18, 55, 148, 208n8, 209
McGinn, Bernard, x, 1n1, 81n124, 81n126,
mysticism, mystics, 64, 85n141, 140, 157, 166,
81n127, 131, 132n9, 138–139, 140n38,
186, 190, 208
142, 146, 150–152, 154, 155n88, 156,
158n97, 159n100, 162n114, 163n117,
166n128, 178n28, 200–201, 209, 222
Nadal, Jerónimo, 190n67
McGinnis, Jon, 120n112
natural law, 87, 92–94
McGrath, Alister, 102n61, 152n75, 222
natural wil , 203
McInerny, Ralph, 95n33, 126, 222

needs, 13, 167, 191, 193, 197, 204
mean, 13, 21–22, 26, 99, 101. See also eupraxia Neoplatonism, Neoplatonists, 2, 9, 42–44,
media bona, 58
48–49, 55, 62–65, 81, 86, 89, 114n94,
medicine, 32, 138, 214
118n106, 119, 132, 141–145, 146n60, 148,
medieval. See Middle Ages
151, 156, 158, 166–167, 180, 209, 217n31,
Meister Eckhart. See Eckhart, Meister
218
Meister-Eckhart-Gesellschaft, x
Newton, John, 27n26
mendacium. See lie
Nicene Creed, 115n97
Meno, 77
Nicholas of Cusa, 160, 218, 223. See also
mercantilism, merchants, 85, 134–136, 159,
Cusanus, Nicolaus
171–173, 176, 192–193, 194–195,
Noble Truths, The, 173
197–200, 202, 203n99, 204, 206, 211
noncompulsion. See hekousion
mercenaries. See greed
nondifferentiation. See immediacy
mercy, 74, 196

nonmediation. See immediacy
metaphysics, metaphysicians, 2–4, 13n24, 17,
nonteleologist, 41
27n24, 31–32, 37, 49, 54, 86, 88, 116n100,
not-knowing, 160
117, 119, 130–132, 137n26, 140, 142,
nous, 31, 33, 36, 38, 119, 145
159n100, 164, 166–167, 173, 178, 200
Nussbaum, Martha, 8n7, 223
Meyendorff, John, 81n124, 81n126, 222
microcosm, 6
Middle Ages, medieval, 2, 14, 38n59, 42–43,
O’Connel , S.J., Robert J., v, ix, 45n5, 68n86, 223
48n18, 48n19, 75, 86–87, 92n24, 117n105,
O’Donovan, Oliver, 45n5, 50n26, 82n130,
127, 144n50, 147–148, 150n71, 153, 173,
217n31, 223
197, 203, 206, 207n5, 212, 218. See also
Oakes, S.J., Edward T., 122n117, 223
High Middle Ages
obedience, ix–x, 79, 85, 93, 183n40
Mierth, Dietmar, 188n60, 190, 215n27, 222
oikeiôsis. See self-possession
Milem, Bruce, 197n84, 222
Oneness, One, 44, 53, 156, 165, 166n127, 174, 205

Mil , John Stuart, 218
Only-Begotten Son of God, 3, 141, 180, 182
moderation, 13. See also mean; temperance
ontological, 132, 186
Mojsisch, Burkhard, 131, 142n44, 146n60,
order, ordered, 13n24, 50, 55–57, 59, 68,
158n98, 161–162, 164, 166, 169, 222
116n100, 132, 153–154, 168–169, 193
monism. See exclusivism, exclusivists
Order of Preachers (Dominicans), 4, 130, 181,
Monk, Ray, 77n116
213, 217
moral, 2, 7–9, 13, 21–22, 24–28, 29–30, 33–37,
Oresme, Nicole, 210n13
39n61, 40, 42–43, 48n18, 53, 62, 64, 73,
Origen, 81
78n119, 79, 87–88, 91–92, 97, 99, 101,
original sin, 59, 71–73, 79, 85, 92n25, 95,
107–109, 111n84, 111n85, 114, 121, 129,
210n14
131–132, 136, 168, 177n24, 184n46,
orthodoxy, 114n94
189n64, 193, 194n76, 197, 203, 210–212,
Osborne, Thomas, 103n65, 223
214
O’Sullivan, Jeremiah, v
index
233
outer act, 187, 193–194, 201
Porphyry, 209
outflow, 157
possessiveness. See eigenschaft
poverty, 1n2, 49, 160–161, 162n113, 183, 217
practical, 5, 11–12, 16n27, 18n1, 18n2, 22,
paganism, pagans, 7, 9, 46, 49, 65, 78n120, 84,
24, 25n15, 26–28, 30n34, 31, 32n41, 33,
101n57, 104, 114, 131n4
35–37, 39, 49, 91–92, 96n39, 99, 101, 108,
pantheism, 114, 163, 214
132, 144n52, 210, 211n16
Papal Bull ( In agro dominico), 1–3, 130n2,
practical syllogism, 14, 24n14, 30
138n29, 179n34, 199, 214–218
practical wisdom (prudence, phronêsis), 22, 24,
Papal Court, 1, 208, 213, 218
25n15, 26, 31–32, 35–39, 47, 49, 51, 99,
Pasnau, Robert, 212n20, 223
121
passion, 21–22, 25, 49n23, 59–60, 87, 102
practice, 8–9, 13, 20, 32, 34, 36–38, 78, 103, 105,
passive intellect. See intellect: passive
107, 134n16, 155n86, 175, 177n23, 184,
passivity. See intellect: passive
206, 215
Paul, Apostle, 49, 63n71, 65–66, 69, 74, 76, 81,
praxis, 15, 21, 23n11, 24, 32, 38, 40–41, 99n47
83, 85n141, 124, 175n17, 181
predestination, 54, 75, 81
Pelagius, Pelagianism, Pelagians, 56, 79–80, 111,
predications, 124, 137, 138n31, 140–141
153, 174, 176
pride, 38, 64, 69, 70n91, 78, 84, 91n21, 110, 177
Perfect Good, 55, 88n9, 90, 97, 104, 112, 117
primal sin, 55, 59–60, 62
perfection, perfect happiness, 9, 35–38, 40n64,
prime analogate (God), 169. See also analogy
41, 44, 49, 75, 78n120, 79, 80–82, 88,
Prime Mover, 38n59
90–93, 97–98, 103–104, 109, 111–113,
principle, 5, 6n2, 10, 12, 14, 18–20, 22, 30–32,
116–117, 120, 122n117, 125, 137,
53, 72n99, 83, 91–93, 96n39, 108, 113,
140–141, 166, 168, 175–178, 186, 188,
114n92, 116–117, 127, 131, 150, 156–157,
191, 202, 208, 212

202
Peripatetics, 60n63
proairoumenoi, 29
perversion, 15, 46, 57, 64n75, 66, 69, 70–71,
Proclus, 144n50, 209
93, 100
prohairesis, 27–29, 39, 95n34, 129. See also choice philia. See friendship
proportion. See analogy
Philosopher, the (Aristotle), 6, 86, 89, 91, 93–94,
Prototype, 142–143, 146, 163, 195
104n66, 115, 117n103, 130–131, 209
providence, 53, 116n100, 118
philosophy, philosophers, 2, 7–9, 27n24, 32,
prudence. See practical wisdom (prudence)
35n46, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48n18, 63n71,
Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, 145, 209
65, 87, 109, 117, 119n109, 121, 126n129,
psychology, 2, 11, 28, 40, 42, 67, 86, 100,
130–132, 142, 154, 157–158, 173, 178n29,
120n113, 145, 196, 210
208–210, 212–213, 217–218
Putnam, Hilary, 210n12, 223
phronêsis. See practical wisdom (prudence) phronimos, 22
physics, 17, 187n58
Quinn, Philip, 212n22, 223

Pinckaers, O.P., Servais, 88n7, 223
Quint, Josef, 147n61, 161, 182n39, 201
Plato, Platonism, Platonists, 9, 32, 36, 38, 43–44,
48n19, 49, 51, 63, 65, 70n91, 80–81,
83n132, 89–90, 91n21, 94, 108, 111, 147,
rational appetite, 6, 9–11, 90n19, 98
156n91, 157, 166n127, 197n86, 209, 215
rational choice, 11, 39, 91
pleasure, 20–21, 27–29, 52, 56, 58, 79, 88, 135
Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph, 130n2, 133n13
Plotinian One, 145, 158
reason, 10–14, 19–20, 24–28, 31, 33, 37, 55,
Plotinus, 69, 82n130, 83, 120n112, 145, 156n91,
59–60, 64n75, 67, 90n19, 91–94, 96,
156–158, 209, 223
99–101, 108, 109n80, 111, 114–115, 117,
poiêsis, 15, 21, 39n61, 40, 99n47
142, 165, 176, 210n14
politics, political theory, 2, 17, 31, 32n42, 35n50,
reception, 140, 155, 169
36–37, 87n6, 93, 116, 208n9, 214
receptive intellect. See intellect: passive
Pope Benedict XII, 115n97
Reformation, 3, 103, 106n71
Pope Honorius III, 114n94

responsibility, 44, 47, 61, 70, 72, 79, 207
Pope Innocent XI, 206n1
revelation, 104, 111, 114, 117n103, 118n106,
Pope John Paul II, 8n8, 130
131, 167, 175n17
Pope John XXII, 1, 4, 130, 199n89, 213–214,
right action, 6, 12, 27, 173
217–218
right livelihood, 173
Porete, Marguerite, 207, 215
right wil , 6, 78. See also boulêsis
234 i n d e x
rigorism, 79
Source (God), 47, 145, 156, 158, 162–163,
Rist, J. M., 45n5, 50n26, 53n32, 68n85, 69n89,
165–166, 169, 185, 193, 202
84, 86n2, 91n20, 223
Specht, Ernst Konrad, v
Rosen, Stanley, 49, 223
speculative reason, 91–92. See also reason
Ross, W. D., 23n11
spiritual Franciscans, 1n2, 207n5, 217n32
Russel , Bertrand, 218
spiritual merchant, 134, 176, 192–195, 198, 204.
See also mercantilism, merchants

spiritual perfections, 140, 141n41, 166, 177–178,
Saarinen, Risto, 68n85, 223
186, 200
sacred doctrine, 5, 114
spirituality, 2
salvation, 3, 7, 9, 42, 50n26, 51, 56, 64, 66, 75,
spoudaios (person of excellent virtue), 23–24,
77n116, 78–79, 83, 107, 109, 133, 134n16,
26, 28, 101
153–154, 162n114, 172, 174, 176, 188,
St. Elisabeth, 190–191, 193–194, 202, 204, 206,
215–216
208
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 102, 223
Staley, Kevin M., 90–91, 223
Satan, 55n38. See also Lucifer
Steer, Georg, 149n67, 150n68, 159n101
Schönberger, Rolf, 186–187, 223
Stoicism, Stoics, 9n9, 15n25, 42–43, 49, 55n40,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 39
56, 60n63, 62–63, 85n141, 86, 92
science, 18n2, 27n24, 31–32, 35, 37, 114, 116,
Stump, Eleonore, 16n27, 61n64, 75n108,
131, 210, 218
77n116, 88n9, 224

Scott, Dominic, 34n47, 35n51
Sturlese, Loris, 140n39, 142n44, 150n68,
Scotus, John Duns, 9, 12, 15, 39, 111n84,
159n100, 159n101, 224
139n36, 217n33
substantialist view of evil, 44
scriptures, 2, 38n59, 55, 63, 65, 83, 117, 127,
summum bonum, 67, 87, 91n21, 95, 107, 109n80
141, 215
sunkatathesis (consent), 62
self-abandonment, 188
superbia, 69, 84n136. See also pride
self-determination, 211
supernatural, 88, 102, 105, 109, 112, 116n102,
self-movement, 5, 122
117–119, 122, 149, 152–153, 154n82,
self-negation, 203
158n98, 160, 168, 174–176
self-possession, 15n25
supreme goal/good, 18n1, 29, 49, 64, 67, 90,
self-will 69, 211–212. See also boldness; pride
109n80
Sel s, Michael, 155n88, 223
syllogism, 14, 24, 30
Silesius, Angelus, 208

Symposium, 49–50, 90, 108n74
Simplician, 43, 70, 74–76. See also Augustine:
synderesis, 91, 92n24, 92n25, 101
Ad Simplicianum; Letter to Simplician ( Ad
synonym, 126
Simplicianum)
sin, sinners, 14, 29n33, 37n58, 45, 53–55, 57–61,
68–69, 70n91, 70n92, 71–73, 77, 79–80,
Tauler, Johannes, 190n68, 212
84–85, 92n25, 95, 107n73, 163n116, 176,
teleia. See perfection
184, 196, 210n14
teleological ethics/framework/ eudaimonism, 2, 4,
Socrates, 9n9, 37n58, 49n20, 90n20, 124, 126
9, 12–13, 17–18, 37–41, 46–47, 52, 63, 75,
Son, 3, 82, 123, 135n16, 139–141, 147, 150–152,
83, 88, 92n25, 94–96, 98, 99n47, 103–104,
155, 162–166, 168, 170–174, 176,
111–112, 116, 129–130, 133–134, 136,
178–180, 182–183, 185–186, 188, 190,
159, 168–169, 171–173, 185, 192, 198,
192–193, 195, 199, 202, 209–211, 215–216
199n89, 200, 212, 218
Song of Songs, 50n26, 207
telos. See goal

Sophia (theoretical wisdom), 30–32, 35, 37–39
temper ( thumos), 28
sôphrosûnê. See temperance
temperance, temperate, 13, 15, 20, 25, 39n61,
Sorabji, Richard, 16n28, 25n15, 27, 39n63, 42n2,
47–49, 51–52, 99, 110
98n46, 221, 223
temporalia, 56, 83
soul, 3, 12, 19–20, 24–25, 30, 36–38, 45, 47–48,
temptations, 13–14, 59, 85, 188, 210n14
54–58, 60, 62, 66–69, 72, 77n116, 81,
theodicy, 43, 100n53
83–84, 89, 92n25, 101–102, 108, 114,
Theologia Deutsch, 208, 212
115n97, 119–121, 124, 134, 143n48,
theology, theologians, 1–2, 4, 7–9, 31–32, 37–38,
145–149, 151–152, 153n79, 155, 157–166,
53, 63, 76, 80, 85, 87, 101–102, 104–107,
168, 170, 172, 173n12, 175, 178–182,
114n92, 114n94, 115n97, 116n100,
185–187, 190, 193, 195, 197–198, 202,
122n117, 124–125, 129–133, 136, 156,
206–209, 212n20, 214
158, 175–176, 208, 213–214, 217
index
235
theôrein, 32, 89n14
University of Paris, 7, 86, 114n94, 129
theôria, 32n42
univocal, 124–128, 137–141, 143, 145–147, 152,
this-worldliness, 9, 108, 111
159n100, 162–164, 166, 170, 178, 182,
Thomas Aquinas, 2, 4, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 16, 18n1,
185, 188, 189n63, 192, 195, 197, 199, 209
23n12, 24, 33n45, 35n50, 39–41, 47,
univocation, 126
48n18, 49n23, 54, 60, 63, 70n91, 83,
univocity-theorem, 164
85–87, 89, 90n19, 91–107, 109–111,
unwizzen. See not-knowing
113–119, 121–123, 130, 132–134, 136,
Urmson, J. O., 11, 23n11, 223
143–144, 165n122, 168, 174–176, 180,
utilitarianism, 106n72
183n41, 186n55, 188, 191–193, 196,
199n89, 200, 204, 209, 214, 217
on analogy, 88, 122–129, 137–141, 149, 189n63,
Van Riel, Gerd, 49n20, 62n67, 62n69, 78n119,
200
78n120, 224
on Beatific Vision, 88, 89n14, 92, 94, 97, 99,
Varro, 48n19
102–105, 107, 109, 112–115, 115n97,
velleitas, velleity, 117n105, 118n106. See also 117–121, 123, 173, 191
wish
on grace. See grace: Aquinas on
vices, 8, 26, 47, 59n57, 87, 100, 101n57, 110,
on the two-fold human good, 104, 116n102,
129, 196
121, 122n117
Vinzent, Markus, 214n24, 215n27
Summa Theologiae, 5–6, 9, 10n12, 16n27, 47,
virtue
49n23, 60, 63, 70n91, 86–89, 94–95,
in Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas: on virtue
98n46, 100n52, 102n61, 103, 114,
in Aristotle. See Aristotle: and virtue
116n100, 116n103, 118n107, 121–125,
in Augustine. See Augustine: virtue
127, 137–139, 144n52, 150n71, 152n73,
in Eckhart. See Eckhart: virtue
154n82, 169, 176, 183n41, 189n63, 193,
supernatural, 102, 105, 109, 112, 122, 149,
196, 199
152n73, 152n75, 154n82, 158n98, 168,

on virtue, 8–9, 12, 24, 39–41, 48, 85, 87–88, 91,
174–176
94–95, 98–112, 116, 121, 129, 134,
virtue ethics, 8, 40, 94, 210
136–137, 154n82, 168, 174–176, 183n41,
vision(s) (mystical), 85n141, 202. See also
188, 191, 204
Beatific Vision
Thomist(ic), 89n14, 95, 103, 106–107, 109,
volition, 62n69
113n91, 114n92, 133n13, 184, 199. See also voluntarie. See actions: voluntary Thomas Aquinas
voluntariness. See actions: voluntary
tolma. See boldness; self-wil ; pride
voluntarists, 12, 61n66, 62, 64n75, 218
transcendence/transcendent good, 40, 89–90,
voluntas, 6n10, 10n12, 10n14, 11, 14–15, 39,
108, 144, 210, 218. See also divine
45n8, 54, 55n43, 57, 58n55, 60n61, 61,
transcendental being, 162, 165–166
62n67, 66n80, 67–68, 73, 77n113, 78n117,
transcendentals, 141n41, 177, 185
84n136, 90n19, 92n25, 95, 98n43, 103n64,
Trinity, 81, 131, 150–152, 165–166, 186, 215
117n105, 182n39, 203, 211. See also
truth, 18n2, 20, 23, 27, 31, 44, 48, 50, 55, 58, 63–
benevolence; wil
66, 68–69, 71, 114n92, 116, 130–131, 143,
von Müller, Achatz, 130n1
156, 160, 162n112, 163–165, 169–171,
vünkelîn (little spark), 164, 180
173, 177–178, 188, 196, 203, 213, 216
twenty-eight propositions (condemned 1329), 1,
130, 135n18
Walshe, M.O’C., xv, 147n61, 178n30, 201
twofold nature/good, 104, 116n102, 121,
Wawrykow, Joseph, 107n73, 224
122n117
weakness of wil , 14, 59, 68n85. See also akrasia, akratic; incontinence
wel -being. See happiness
ultimate end, 6, 18, 86, 88, 95, 97–98. See also
Westberg, Daniel, 95n33, 224
end; goal
Western philosophy and tradition, 4, 7, 40, 42,
understanding, 31, 46, 143–144. See also nous 48n18, 67, 86n3, 209
ungovernedness. See akrasia, akratic
Wetzel, James, 75n108, 224
unified being, 164
why-questions, 21, 192
union of indistinction, 146
wil , 2–16, 27, 33, 37–47, 102–103, 129, 162

union (with the divine), 64, 105, 118n106, 151,
history of concept, 16, 39, 42, 49
164, 168, 172, 184, 191–192, 197, 208–209
in Aristotle, 20, 22–23; and wish ( boulêsis), 23, university faculty of liberal arts, 7, 37n58
39–41, 49n20, 62, 129
236 i n d e x
will ( continued)
wil -centered tradition, 7
in Augustine, 40, 42–43, 45–49, 49n20, 49n23,
Wil iam of Ockham, 1n2, 209, 217, 224
51–81, 81n126, 85, 100n53, 129, 154n82;
Wil iams, Thomas, 45n7
and freedom of the wil , 59, 70n93, 72–73;
Willkür (Kant), 211–212
and “two wil s”, 66–67; and the “will of
Wippel, John, 109n80, 111n86
grace”, 79–80, 154n82; and God’s wil , 84
wish, 11, 14, 22–25, 28–30, 32, 39, 52–53, 68,
in Aquinas, as rational appetite, 5–16, 49n23,
96n35, 117n105, 129, 134, 136, 171, 176,
86–87, 90–92, 95–98, 129, 154n82; and
196, 199, 206. See also boulêsis; will
Platonic erôs, 94, 111; and grace 102–103,
without wil , 2, 4, 16, 84. See also live without 154n82; and the Beatific Vision, 105–106,
why
111–112, 121–123; and velleitas, 117n105;
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, x, 77n116, 143n46,
and intention, 193, 199
185n48, 198n87, 224
in Eckhart, 40, 154, 163–164, 178–183, 187,
Word, 81n124, 81n126, 131, 140, 143, 145–147,
206; creaturely will/divine wil , 183, 185,
150, 159–160, 162–163, 166, 179,
190; God’s wil , 136; the just have no wil ,
181–183, 186, 207, 209
136, 160, 197, 199; and virtue, 194; and
works, 3, 7–8, 63, 77, 79–80, 100, 103, 122, 134,
Wittgenstein on good wil , 198n87; and
154n82, 171–172, 175–176, 183–185,
intentions, 193–195, 201; and Beccarisi,
188n60, 191–193, 198, 202, 204,
202; and Kobusch, 203
206, 216
in Kant, 40n64, 210–212
würklicheit ( Wirklichkeit, reality), 130

Document Outline
Cover
Contents
PREFACE
ABBREVIATIONS
Introduction
1. The Will as “Rational Appetite”
2. Aristotle’s Teleological Eudaimonism
3. Augustine’s Christian Conception of Will
4. Aquinas on Happiness and the Will
5. Meister Eckhart, Living on Two Levels
6. Meister Eckhart, Living without Will
7. Living without Why, Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Living Without Why - Meister Eckhart - S Critique of The Medieval Concept of Will

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Living Without Why - Meister Eckhart - S Critique of The Medieval Concept of Will

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Living without Why

Meister Eckhart’s Critique of the

Medieval Concept of Will

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by

Oxford New York

Published in the United States of America by

Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2014

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–19–935978–3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Eckhart, Meister, –1327.

2. Wil —History—To 1500. I. Title.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

four great teachers of history and philosophy

who opened the minds of many

and the lasting importance

W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

Robert J. O’Connell, S.J.

Ernst Konrad Specht

Hæte der mensche niht mȇ ze tuonne mit gote, dan

—Meister Eckhart, Pr. 34

1. The Will as “Rational Appetite” 5

2. Aristotle’s Teleological Eudaimonism 17

3. Augustine’s Christian Conception of Wil 42

4. Aquinas on Happiness and the Wil 86

5. Meister Eckhart, Living on Two Levels 129

6. Meister Eckhart, Living without Wil 168

7. Living without Why, Conclusion 206

O’Connel , S.J., who pointed out to us a tension between Greek eudaimonist ix

My personal admiration for the fourteenth-century philosopher, theologian, and administrator of

Smith College, a truly nurturing institution of learning, was extraordi-narily generous in

September 27, 2013

Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici ch. 24:23–31 (LW

2:229–300), Sermons and Lectures on Ecclesiasticus ch. 24: 23–31

Expositio Libri Exodi (LW 2:1–227) , Commentary on the Book of Exodus

Expositio Libri Genesis (LW 1:185–444) , Commentary on the Book of Genesis

Liber Parabolarum Genesis (LW 1:447–702) , Book of the Parables of Genesis

Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem (LW 3) , Commentary on John

Expositio Libri Sapientiae (LW 2:303–643) , Commentary on the Book of Wisdom

Prol.op.expos. Prologus in Opus expositionum (LW 1:183–84) , Prologue to the Work of

Quaetiones Parisienses (LW 1/2:37–83) , Parisian Questions Sermo die

RdU Die rede der underscheidunge (DW 5:137–376), Talks of Instruction

Other Works cited

De Anima, On the Soul

De diversis questionibus ad Simplicianum, To Simplician—On Various Questions. Translation,

Confessiones, Confessions. Translation, Maria Boulding, O.S.B., Saint Augustine: The

De doctrina christiana, On Christian Doctrine. Translation, James Shaw, Dover Philosophical

De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus manichaeorum, On the Life-Style of the Catholic

De Trinitate, On the Holy Trinity. Translation, Arthur West Haddan. In Nicene.

De diversis quaestionibus 83, Eighty-Three Different Questions.

Translation, D. L. Mosher (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,

(Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857–66)

Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus, On the Virtues

Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, On Truth

De Regimine Principorum, On the Government of Rulers. Translation, James M. Blythe

Quaestiones disputatae de anima, Disputed Questions on the Soul SCG

Scriptum super Sententiis, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

Sententia libri ethicorum, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Translation, C.J.