Abstract
What is the difference between a child eating healthily guided by their parents and an adult repeatedly choosing within contingent circumstances to take care of their body through eating and exercising? Does this child naturally become this adult? When and how does a virtue like temperance begin and end? While much scholarship has been offered on Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtues and their ends, much less has been written on how they are actually formed and further developed or lost. William C. Mattison III’s Growing in Virtue: Aquinas on Habit offers a tightly argued and comprehensive Thomistic account of growth in the virtues, both acquired and infused.
Growing in Virtue begins with an account of habituation. Habits are ‘the stable specification of a person’s powers to do certain activities in certain ways’, ‘deeper’ than particular acts yet inextricable from them (p. 7). Habits, as second nature, qualify existing, particular, underdetermined powers in the person. To return to temperance, humans—specifically their sensual desires—are ordered by nature to activities like eating and drinking, to the end of nourishing the body. Yet we all know too well that sometimes it is hard to discern what, how, and when to eat or drink. Habituation specifies that end through repeated, particular activities. Every person already has the natural, inchoate desire to eat for nourishment, but a habit of temperance stably qualifies her sensual desires towards choosing appropriate food and times for eating to best nourish her body in shifting circumstances.
Mattison’s precision particularly shines in the second and third chapters, in a careful differentiation between disposition and habit. Some lucky folks do not like sweets and so repeatedly and stably avoid sugar. Are they temperate? For Aquinas, these questions are matters of the difference between a full human habit and a disposition. While dispositions and habits may look quite similar outwardly, habits must engage rationality and will together, towards a particular end. In the acquired virtues, practical reason becomes akin to a telescope focusing on an object, sharpening a formerly blurry end while contextualizing it, as a person ‘grasps the ends of her actions in relation to other ends’ (p. 34). The contingency of human actions requires this contextual practical reasoning, as one sorts out, say, when it is happily celebratory to have a glass of wine, or when it is inappropriate. A person may naturally dislike the taste of alcohol or dessert and avoid it in a way beneficial to their health. But a full human habit of temperance requires the formation of practical reasoning to sort through the contingent, situational matters of food and drink, regardless of personal tastes and inclinations. These actions all have particular, ordered ends grasped by practical reasoning and sought by the will, then practiced.
Mattison’s careful distinction between habit and disposition clarifies questions of how acquired virtue is attained and grows. In Chapters 4 and 5, Growing in Virtue addresses how humans acquire virtues by repeated acts. This repetition sometimes resembles accustomization in education: an adult teaches a child to eat sweets sparingly and reinforces this behavior repetitively. But growth in the virtues is not only developed by increasing behavioral patterns. Simultaneously, humans are constantly learning how to reconcile and order different contingent ends in our life together. The role of practical reasoning, that same distinction between habit and disposition, also becomes part of how virtues grow: more precisely by what Aquinas calls, somewhat confusingly to us today, intensio. This word denotes not an intensity of feeling, as Mattison notes, but ‘intensification, or even extension, as in, toward the goal’ (p. 111). Intensio describes how actions become increasingly specified in their ends and in relationship with other ends as a person repeats them, guided by practical reasoning. As the child gets older, rather than unconsciously adhering to the one-sweet-a-day custom taught to her, she begins to choose it for herself, with variation on the setting, time, and actual sweet treat, because she better realizes the shape of a flourishing human life in her own particular context. We begin to witness the habituation of the sensual powers towards human flourishing, in order to act stably, promptly, and with pleasure in the service of that end: in other words, the acquisition and growth of temperance, the virtue. Mattison depicts how this relationship between practical reasoning and repeated acts reaffirms the importance of education, communal formation, and accustomization, while maintaining the central role of practical reason. This role of practical reason, and the virtue that qualifies the intellect, prudence, also ground Mattison’s thorough defense of Aquinas on a particularly contested topic in virtue ethics, the unity or connectivity of the virtues.
In Chapters 6 and 7, Growing in Virtue turns to the infused virtues, or supernatural habits. Unlike the acquired virtues, which qualify powers, grace qualifies the soul itself in infused virtues, directing a person towards an end beyond natural human powers. For Aquinas, there is no acquired version of faith, hope, or love, because the true object or end of these virtues is God. Moreover, unlike acquired virtues, these infused virtues can be suddenly given through baptism or other special grace, and suddenly lost, through committing mortal sin. However, the infused virtues remain virtues because despite their givenness by grace, they are habits. Here, Mattison addresses some thorny and debated questions, like the relationship of the infused virtues to the non-habit Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and whether acquired virtues remain in the person or are replaced in total by infused virtues. But these chapters are especially strong when he continues with the questions around communal formation and habituation raised in his prior examination of the growth of acquired virtues. For instance, can communal formation aid the development of the infused virtues? Mattison gives a moving account of the child who has received the theological virtues in her infant baptism but is unable to practice them due to the limitations of her body (Aquinas compared this circumstance to a virtuous person who is sleeping). Yet the church ‘supplies agency’ to this child, through God’s grace ‘operative through the Church as Body of Christ’ (p. 171). The child’s spiritual mothers and fathers of the faith practice the infused virtues on her behalf; she is nourished by them, and grows through this formation, like a baby in the womb receiving life through her mother.
Growing in Virtue is learned, technical, and intricately contextualized in the growing scholarship of virtue ethics. Yet, as Mattison points out himself, questions of learning how to live a virtuous life are anything but abstract arguments. As a teacher and mother of young children, I hope to see the further scholarship that develops out of Growing in Virtue expand into accessible accounts for a wider audience. For Mattison’s careful retrieval of Aquinas on the bodily, repetitive, practical-reason formed acquisition of wholly human habits speaks with some urgency in this age of artificial intelligence and increasing disembodiment of human practices.