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1 Introduction

In the Western tradition of political thought at least since Plato and Aristotle wrote in ancient Athens, there has been a tendency to equate the notions of justice and common good. In Aristotle’s words, “the political good is justice,” which is “the common advantage” (Politics III.12). Few would take issue with the analogous but not identical claim that Augustine of Hippo would make centuries later, that where there is no true, common theory and practice of justice or right there can be no real res publica, no common-weal or community of shared goods and hence no genuine, lasting peace (see City of God IV.4 and XIX) (Augustine 2003). Yet one may still wonder whether justice suffices for fully human common goods to subsist and for the persons, families, and other societies sharing in these common goods to flourish. Is attention to the truth of justice and its implications enough? If not, what other important sources and aspects of the common good should be understood, stressed, and supported?

This chapter takes up these questions from the vantage point afforded by the writings of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Western scholar deeply indebted to both the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions. Specifically, it will argue for two additional virtues that powerfully assist justice in its trajectory towards the formation and sustainment of common goods, namely, the virtues of love-charity (caritas) and mercy (misericordia).Footnote 1 Despite the irreplaceable role of justice in human society, Aquinas demonstrates in his classic work the Summa Theologiae (or Summa Theologica) that justice cannot suffice for fully human common goods. In varied and important ways justice must be founded, sustained, completed, and transcended by other moral forces, including most prominently mercy and love. In our contemporary globalized, post-traditional societies, it is critical that the sources of caritas and mercy be recognized, respected, and reinforced as indispensible educators for and aspects of the common good.

This chapter comprises three sections. The first provides an overview of Aquinas’s explication of love, mercy, and justice as divine attributes. In all God’s works from creation through the workings of providence in our lives and times, Aquinas argues, love and mercy are even more fundamental than justice. Near the end of the first part of his Summa Aquinas explicates the Jewish and Christian teaching, not without its philosophic analogues in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God (see Genesis 1:26–28). We may therefore expect that this priority of love and mercy in the divine works will carry over into human attributes and actions that do (or should) instantiate and contribute to the common good.

The second section of this chapter argues precisely that point, that justice among human beings cannot flourish if there is not a prior experience of and commitment to love-caritas and the openness it entails to compassion and to mercy as a moral virtue. Even were perfect justice possible to achieve in the absence of love and mercy, such justice would constitute merely a partial and ultimately frustrated form of common good for human beings. This argument is developed with reference to the second part of the second volume (the Secunda secundae) of Aquinas’s Summa, specifically those sections that inquire into and explicate caritas and misericordia as virtues of human beings.

The third section concludes this chapter with reflections on the life and work of William Wilberforce as a modern exemplar of the public benefits that love-caritas and mercy can lead to in modern social, cultural, and political life. Wilberforce’s legacy indicates that governments and cultures today will do well to respect and provide appropriate assistance to pre- and trans-political educators in these critical virtues. Mercy and love in their own right fill out important dimensions of the common good, and they inspire work for justice that has too often been hampered by the ascendency of forms of individualism and collectivism in global affairs as well as national politics. In our contemporary world, a compelling, shared understanding of justice and more generous work on behalf of justice may only be possible through the aid of the varied pre-political and trans-political sources of moral formation in charity and mercy such as families, schools, and churches.

2 Thomas Aquinas on Love, Mercy, and Justice as Divine Attributes

In the first part of the Summa Theologiae [ST I] Aquinas argues for the existence of God and for the possibility of an imperfect and partial yet true human understanding of certain divine attributes. This understanding may be obtained to a limited yet important extent through philosophy, but also and especially through Divine Revelation and the assistance it affords human reason in its search for the most important truths, desirable for their own sakes and as sources of wisdom to guide our lives and work (ST I 1 and I 12).Footnote 2 Three of the most beautiful divine attributes Aquinas identifies and explicates are love, mercy, and justice. These last two attributes are somewhat surprisingly considered in the same question of the Summa (ST I, 21) on “The Justice and Mercy of God,” which immediately follows Aquinas’s treatment of God’s love (ST I 20). I will summarize Aquinas’s explication of these attributes, at times quoting at length to render Aquinas’s meaning clearer to readers unfamiliar with these texts.

2.1 God’s Love

That God loves and indeed is love (see ST I 20, 1, s.c.) becomes intelligible according to Aquinas on account of God’s will and of His absolute, perfect goodness.Footnote 3 It is proper to will or intellectual desire to love what is good, and in an absolute, transcendent sense only God is perfect goodness; only He is perfectly good. God thus necessarily, according to His essence, loves Himself under the attribute of His goodness (cf. ST I 6; I 19; I 20, 1). God needs no other beings to love in order to be perfectly happy, which He is in his own perfection and goodness for all eternity. Yet will and love are free, and God freely out of His goodness and love calls into being the universe of creatures: inanimate, vegetative, sensitive, rational, and intellectual. Whereas we humans are moved to love creatures, persons, and common goods because of some goodness they already possess, God’s perfect love is the first cause of the goodness of creatures and indeed of their very existence. Love is at the source of our universe; it is the cause and the goal of our personal being and our lives.Footnote 4

God loves everything that exists, yet not as we love. Because since our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by [this goodness] as by its object, our love, whereby we will good to anything, is not the cause of its goodness; but conversely its goodness, whether real or imaginary, calls forth our love by which we will that it should preserve the good it has, and receive besides the good it has not, and to this end we direct our actions: whereas the love of God infuses and creates goodness (ST I 20, 2).

After their creation, it is again God’s love that sustains these new, finite beings in their existence. In the case of human beings God’s love goes farther still, manifesting itself most perfectly in the gift of God’s own paternal and friendly love. God calls human beings to converse and dwell with Him already on earth and most perfectly after death in heaven. In other words, God extends an invitation to us to be and to live as His friends. This form of love, amicitia, is among humans an especially perfect and fulfilling one whereby we long and work for the good of one who is our friend and are in turn enriched by the love and help of that friend. It is our human privilege, as the lone rational, spiritual creatures in material creation, to be friends of God, though again this is possible only on account of God’s free gift of His friendly love. God does not need our friendship in any way, but He freely loves us and calls us to be His friends from His goodness and for our happiness.

Friendship cannot exist except towards rational creatures, who are capable of returning love, and communicating with another in the various works of life, and who may fare well or ill, according to the changes of fortune and happiness; even as to them benevolence is properly speaking exercised. But irrational creatures cannot attain to loving God, or to any share in the intellectual and beatific life that he lives. Strictly speaking, therefore, God does not love irrational creatures with the love of friendship [amore amicitiae]; but as it were with the love of desire [amore quasi concupiscentiae], in so far as he orders them to rational creatures and even to himself. Yet this is not because he stands in need of them; but only on account of his goodness and the services they render to us. For we can desire a thing for others as well as for ourselves (ST I 20, 2, ad 3).

Aquinas goes on to argue that God loves all things “with an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same,” yet also that God loves human beings with far greater love than He has for other visible creatures, insofar as God wills for humans the perfect happiness of friendship and communion of life with him forever (ST I 20, 3).

2.2 God’s Justice

After explicating God’s love, Aquinas continues on to investigate whether there exist also justice and mercy in God and His works. Later in the Summa Aquinas will refine traditional definitions of justice as a human virtue to what he deems a more precise formulation:

justice is a habit [habitus, a rational, voluntary perfection of character rather than the impulsive or instinctive, uniform reaction the word often connotes in contemporary English usage] whereby someone renders to each one his right [ius] by a constant and perpetual will (ST II-II 58, 1).

While justice applies to God in a radically different way (all that creatures have and are, either are, or are on account of, a free gift of God whose being is infinite and transcendent; God is thus not one more agent on a level playing field of justice with human beings), nonetheless it can help us try to understand in some way the perfection of justice in God.

[I]n divine operations debt [debitum, lit. what is owed] may be regarded in two ways, as due either to God, or to creatures, and in either way God pays what is due. It is due to God that there should be fulfilled in creatures what his will and wisdom require, and that manifests his goodness. In this respect God’s justice regards what befits him; inasmuch as he renders to himself what is due to himself… God [also] exercises justice, when he gives to each thing what is due to it by its nature and condition. This debt however is derived from the former, since what is due to each thing is due to it as ordered to it according to the divine wisdom. And although God in this way pays each thing its due, yet he himself is not the debtor, since he is not directed to other things, but rather other things to him. Justice, therefore, in God is sometimes spoken of as the fitting accompaniment of his goodness; sometimes as the reward of merit. Anselm touches on either view where he says…“When thou dost punish the wicked, it is just, since it agrees with their deserts; and when thou dost spare the wicked, it is also just, since it befits thy goodness” (ST I 21, 1, ad 3, quoting Anselm, Prosologion 10).

Aquinas concludes in the following article that God’s justice is suitably referred to as truth: the truth God that works and establishes in created beings by His rule, in accord with His wisdom whence all created things exist and are intelligible in truth. Analogously, writes Aquinas, “in human affairs [we also] speak of the truth of justice” (ST I 21, 2).

2.3 God’s Mercy

In the following two articles of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas prepares and then makes use of one of the most moving and most powerful arguments in the Summa, his argument for the priority and greater power, to speak in human terms (the only terms we have available to us and can use), of mercy vis-à-vis justice in every work of God, i.e., in all God’s actions towards creatures. Aquinas first establishes mercy as a fitting attribute of God.Footnote 5 When we speak of human mercy (misericordia) we refer, writes Aquinas, to our being “sorrowful at heart (miserum cor)…affected with sorrow at the misery of another.” While God in His essence is spirit, perfect happiness, and joy, does not feel any passions, and so properly speaking cannot sorrow, He can do what the merciful human being does, and in a way far more perfect than any of us can. He can will to and in fact remedy the defect that is the cause of a human person’s misery: “[I]t does most properly belong to [God] to dispel that misery, whatever be the defect we call by that name, [for] defects are not removed except by the perfection of goodness: and the primary source of goodness is God, as shown above [in ST I 6, 4]” (ST I 21, 3).

Already at this point in the argument Aquinas anticipates perhaps the chief objection to the goodness of mercy, human or divine: that it undoes or obstructs the good of justice. To this concern, here regarding the possibility and justification of mercy as a divine attribute and a sign of the great goodness of God, Aquinas replies that mercy rightly understood does not oppose justice, but instead transcends and in a certain sense fulfills it.

God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against him, for in remitting it he may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission a forgiving: “Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32). Hence it is clear that mercy does not remove justice, but is in a certain sense the fullness of justice. And thus it is said: “Mercy exalts itself above judgment” (James 2:13) (ST I 21, 3, ad 2).

Mercy appears here as a gift that bestows more and better good than was due. It fulfills justice while moving beyond it in freedom and beneficence to turn unhappiness into happiness and lack into fullness without regard for the limit of what is owed, strictly speaking. Mercy’s measure, Aquinas argues, is simply other than the one proper to justice: as what is needed, and even more, what will bring true happiness and greater fullness of being, whereas justice properly gives what is already someone’s own by right, and properly speaking only that. If there are more needs, more misery or sorrow that cannot be remedied merely by rendering to another what one already owes, mercy motivates a person to alleviate that person by giving all that one can, by helping in every way that one can, entering into and sharing the other’s lack, his or her suffering.

This conclusion, which Aquinas first draws in justifying the attribution of mercy to God (ST I 21, 3), forms the crux of the following and final article of this question (ST I 21, 4), treating the existence of justice and mercy in every action of God vis-à-vis creatures and especially human beings. Given that the first and most lasting gift God gives to any creature is its being, where none was or could have been due, mercy emerges as more fundamental and more powerfully present than justice in God’s works of creation and providential governance of the universe (cf. ST I 44–49 and 103–104). This is especially so in the case of human beings who are capable of happiness properly speaking, by knowing and loving God. As we have seen, their rational nature makes them capable of receiving God’s free gift of friendship, His love of caritas; but this capacity in turn depends on the previous, equally free, and unmerited gift of life as a human being. So while Aquinas is adamant that justice is a form of God’s goodness and that it exists in all of God’s works, including those most obviously merciful (the creation of human beings, for example, and the forgiveness of their sins), he is even more adamant in this final article of the treatment of justice and mercy that justice in God’s works toward creatures depends in an absolute sense on God’s prior and so to speak even stronger gift of mercy.

Mercy and truth are necessarily found in all God’s works, if mercy be taken to mean the removal of any kind of defect. Not every defect, however, can properly be called a misery; but only defect in a rational nature whose lot is to be happy; for misery is opposed to happiness… God can do nothing that is not in accord with His wisdom and goodness; and it is in this sense, as we have said, that anything is due to God. Likewise, whatever is done by Him in created things is done according to proper order and proportion wherein consists the idea of justice. Thus justice must exist in all God’s works. Now the work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy; and is founded thereupon. For nothing is due to creatures, except for something pre-existing in them, or foreknown. Again, if this is due to a creature, it must be due on account of something that precedes. And since we cannot go on to infinity, we must come to something that depends only on the goodness of the divine will, which is the ultimate end. We may say, for instance, that to possess hands is due to man on account of his rational soul; and his rational soul is due to him that he may be man; and his being man is on account of the divine goodness. So in every work of God, viewed at its primary source, there appears mercy. In all that follows, the power of mercy remains, and works indeed with even greater force; as the influence of the first cause is more intense than that of second causes. For this reason does God out of the abundance of his goodness bestow upon creatures what is due to them more bountifully than is proportionate to their deserts: since less would suffice for preserving the order of justice than what the divine goodness confers; because between creatures and God’s goodness there can be no proportion (ST I 21, 4; emphasis added).Footnote 6

3 The Priority of Mercy and Charity for Human Beings as “Image and Likeness” of God

As a Christian, Aquinas holds as true what the text of Genesis clearly teaches, that all human beings, male and female, are made in God’s “image and likeness.” Aquinas argues philosophically as well as theologically that this divine image and likeness are chiefly in the human being’s rational soul with its powers of intellect and will. This is not to detract from the human body’s tremendous dignity but rather to understand and undergird it aright: since humans are unions of body and soul their bodies also possess a special value apparent in its many traces of the image of God imprinted on the soul “informing” that body (see ST I 45, 7, and I 93).Footnote 7 Thus, if Aquinas is correct, one would expect that as recipients of God’s love-friendship and mercy human beings would reach perfection and benefit other persons and societies especially through love, justice, and mercy, with mercy being even more fundamental and in some respects more excellent than justice in its capacity to express and act upon love-caritas. This is in fact what Aquinas argues in some of the first sections of the Summa Theologiae II-II, his detailed investigation into the virtues and vices of human beings.

3.1 Caritas or Love-Charity

At the heart of the Christian understanding of God is His great love for every human being and his desire to befriend us and bring us into His family as His children. That we can become friends of God, that God condescends in and through Christ and the Holy Spirit to offer us the gift of friendship, was most clearly revealed by Christ at the Last Supper when He told His closest followers, “I will not now call you servants…but my friends” (John 15:15, quoted in ST II-II 23, 1, s.c.). In endeavoring to understand in what such friendship could consist, Aquinas refers to perhaps the most influential discussion of friendship in the history of Western philosophy, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VIII and IX.Footnote 8 Aquinas follows Aristotle in highlighting that love can only constitute friendship when it seeks the good of the friend for his or her own sake, and so wishes good to him or her. In other words, friendship requires benevolence, here understood as a mutual and active “well-wishing…founded on some kind of communication.” Writes Aquinas,

Accordingly, since there is a communication between man and God, inasmuch as he communicates his happiness to us, some kind of friendship must needs be based on this same communication, of which it is written (1 Corinthians 1:9): “God is faithful: by whom you are called unto the fellowship of his Son.” The love which is based on this communication, is charity: wherefore it is evident that charity is the friendship of man for God (ST II-II 23, 1).

As a virtue of human beings, writes Aquinas, the friendship of charity is “founded principally on the goodness of God” rather than on “the virtue of man.” This seeming paradox becomes more intelligible when one considers, as had some of the ancient philosophers, that to be a friend beloved by God could only come about as a result of an extraordinary gift, grace, or mercy of an infinitely superior being. In the Christian understanding this takes place by the gift of God’s own love in person, the Holy Spirit. Yet charity remains a virtue or excellence of human beings and a genuine form and act of friendship on their part. Humans can love because they have been loved by God, but they must freely choose to accept and return that love. Hence Aquinas’s insistence that “charity is [in this sense, primarily] the friendship of man for God” (cited above), both voluntary and meritorious (ST II-II 23, 2).

In uniting a person to God, charity simultaneously unites him or her in a real way to all other human beings; for in loving God a person loves all whom he loves, and that is everyone without exception. Charity sees each and every “neighbor”—any other human being—as called by God to participate in a personal friendship with Him and so in a “fellowship of everlasting happiness” (ST II-II 23, 5). God and His goodness constitute the greatest good and the most common or “communicable” (sharable) among many persons, and the full happiness of human beings, their final end and perfection, is thus to be united with God and so with our fellows in friendship with the Divine Goodness. There are in the essence of love-caritas no grounds for distinctions among persons or exclusion of any of them from this fellowship. Aquinas explains this universal scope of charity by comparing it with honor as a form of good:

Love regards good in general, whereas honor regards the honored person’s own good, for it is given to a person in recognition of his own virtue. Hence love is not differentiated specifically on account of the various degrees of goodness in various persons, so long as it is referred to one good common to all, whereas honor is distinguished according to the good belonging to individuals. Consequently, we love all our neighbors with the same love of charity, in so far as they are referred to one good common to them all, which is God; whereas we give various honors to various people, according to each one’s own virtue, and likewise to God we give the singular honor of latria [worship] on account of his singular virtue (ST II-II 25, 1, ad 2; emphasis added).

Aquinas argues that charity is, absolutely speaking, the highest virtue of human beings (ST II-II 23, 6) and the form of all the other virtues, bringing them to their perfection and eliciting their full meaning by referring them to our final good (ST II-II 23, 7 and 8). Charity may powerfully motivate actions of rightly-ordered love of neighbor and even of self, acts of all the moral virtues. For example, out of love for God and thus for one’s neighbor, charity may motivate a person to risk his or her life to save another, an act of the virtue of courage but in its deepest form or meaning here an act also of love. Charity might motivate a mother in a country suffering from famine to eat a little less so that her husband and children might eat a little more, or so that she could share what little they had with a neighboring family suffering more dire want. These would be acts of temperance, mercy, and liberality, but in this case their deepest meaning would be love. Or to give a more properly political example to which I will return later in this chapter, charity did in fact motivate a previously rather vain and superficial, if immensely talented British parliamentarian, William Wilberforce, to work in the eighteenth century for freedom for Africans brought to the British Empire in chains. Wilberforce’s labors in and through politics and culture were surely on acts proper to justice as a virtue, but still more so were they acts of love for God and His children. Love even as a passion is a tremendously powerful force in human life, and so Aquinas reflects that charity is the maximum motor of the good life in all its facets. He writes that “Charity is said to be the end [qua perfection or fulfillment] of the other virtues… [Charity] is called the mother of the other virtues, because by commanding them it conceives the acts of the other virtues, by the desire of the last end [the love of God]” (ST II-II 23, 8, ad 3). Love-caritas functions in the moral life as a sort of “foundation or root in so far as all other virtues draw their sustenance and nourishment therefrom” (ST II-II 23, 8, ad 2).

Charity and benevolence (well-wishing) naturally issue forth in actions of beneficence, well-doing towards everyone whom we are able to benefit (ST II-II 32, 1 and 4). Aquinas concedes that, although “as the love of charity extends to all, beneficence also should extend to all” (ST II-II 31, 2),

[a]bsolutely speaking it is impossible [for a human being] to do good to every single [person]: yet it is true of each individual that one may be bound to do good to him in some particular case. Hence charity binds a person, even though not in the act of doing good to someone, to be prepared in mind to do good to anyone if time were available. There is however a good that we can do to all, if not to each individual at least to all in general, as when we pray for all, for unbelievers as well as for the faithful (ST II-II 31, 2, ad 1).

Of great importance is the fact that Aquinas sees these acts of loving well-doing as respecting and furthering the order which follows from the nature of human beings as familial, social, and political creatures. Charity reinforces natural, social, and civic bonds and motivates acts of filial piety, parents’ care for children, and even military and public service for the common good of one’s country.Footnote 9 Love-caritas does not undo these particular ties but rather strengthens all that is good and true and right in them, even while opening us up to the needs and well-being of all in the human family.

Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by divine wisdom.… Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us. Now one human being’s connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which human beings are engaged together; thus kinsmen share (communicant) in natural matters, fellow-citizens share in civic matters, the faithful share in spiritual matters, and so forth: and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he or she is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need (ST II-II 31, 3).

A final note of import for the common good is the connection Aquinas finds between charity and peace, both within a human being and in human society. Peace is, he argues, a direct effect of charity.

Peace implies a twofold union, as stated above (ST II-II 29, 1). The first is the result of one’s own appetites [appetituum] being directed to one object; while the other results from one’s own appetite being united with the appetite of another: and each of these unions is effected by charity—the first, in so far as man loves God with his whole heart, by referring all things to Him, so that all his desires tend to one object—the second, in so far as we love our neighbor as ourselves, the result being that we wish to fulfill our neighbor’s will as though it were ours: hence it is reckoned a sign of friendship if people “make choice of the same things” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IX. 4), and Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero] says (in De Amicitia or On Friendship) that “it belongs to friends to want and to refuse the same things” (ST II-II 29, 3).

Aquinas describes the human or social common good as attained through, sustained by, and in part comprising the (order of) peace, justice, love, and virtue (see ST I-II 99, 5; 100, 8; and 105, 2–3). Concurring with Augustine’s argument in his classic work The City of God, especially as developed in Book XIX, Aquinas accords peace a central role in his social and political theory. If there is no peace within persons and among them in their social and civic and international relations, there will be no full common good nor any flourishing order of justice and virtue. And if there is not charity, there will not be peace, as now Aquinas boldly argues that charity is even more central to this great good than is justice. Justice causes peace “indirectly,” by “remov[ing] obstacles” to its achievement and fulfillment. Charity surpasses justice, however, because “according to its very nature it causes peace” and does so “directly” by forging true and good union within and among human beings, and between them and God (ST II-II 29, 4, ad 3; emphasis added).

A famous and yet somewhat surprising contemporary exemplar of the social, civic, humanitarian and peace-building efficacy of love-caritas is Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, born in 1910 in Macedonia to parents of Albanian descent). Who would have imagined in the late 1940s when she first picked up a destitute, dying man and cared for him with love until his death, that this soft-spoken, diminutive founder of a Catholic religious community known as the Missionaries of Charity would receive the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, which she accepted only in the name of the world’s poor, and then on her death in 1997 a state funeral from the Indian government, an honor accorded only to Presidents and Prime Ministers, the sole exception to this policy having been Ghandi himself? And yet the consensus from representatives of the world’s religions and heads of state was that these honors were eminently deserved; that Mother Teresa’s great charity, in spite of and perhaps even because it was not specifically political in inspiration, scope, or aim, had made her a very great citizen of her adopted country and of the world (see CNN 1997 and Cooper 1997).

3.2 Mercy (Misericordia)

After the ravages of individualism and collectivism that twentieth-century civilization has suffered, it is perhaps not surprising that mercy is often today not a highly valued quality. Mercy, after all, connotes weakness, or pity for the weakness of others; and modern scientific rationalism and the hubris of its technological and social-scientific pretences have no patience with weakness. To rugged, autonomous individuals whose society is meant to maximize their freedom and strengthen their self-sufficiency, or to members of all-encompassing collectives whose strength is found in the historical progress of society and economics, or in presumed racial-ethnic superiority, mercy appears a laughable relic of the past, a memory of both the impotence and the “opium” of the people. How then could mercy truly be an outstanding moral excellence that powerfully conduces to the common good?

None of this, in general (since of course he could not have foreseen the specifics of our recent past), would surprise Aquinas in the least. For while God’s pity, His mercy, is “through love alone” (ST II-II 30, 2, ad 1) without any defect or any affection or passion (requiring corporality), for us mercy is truly an effect of the misery of another human being on one who likewise suffers or is apt to suffer “deficiency” and limitations. Mercy is a virtue for us because we are beings who long to be happy yet are fallible, finite, and changeable, in short, who suffer and can recognize, empathize with, and respond to the suffering of others (ST II-II 30, 1 and 2). And Aquinas views a lack of mercy, and the failure to recognize it as a virtue because it is a matter of grief for the sorrows of others, even though it be regulated by reason and work with the rule of truth and justice, as an indicator of excessive anger, thumotic zeal, or pride. “(Prov. 27:4) ‘Anger hath no mercy, nor fury when it breaketh forth.’ For the same reason the proud are without pity, because they despise others, and think them wicked, so that they account them as suffering deservingly whatever they suffer.” Following a Latin Father of the church Gregory the Great, Aquinas argues that this is “the false godliness of the proud,” “not compassionate but disdainful” of the misery of others. Contrasted with this is true “godliness” of friends of God who have received charity and mercy as free gifts, and so imitate God in love and works of charity and mercy. “Charity likens us to God by uniting us to Him in the bond of love; …mercy likens us to God as regards similarity of works.” (ST II-II 31, 1). No matter how high we may be placed in positions of authority in the family, town, political community, or spiritual fellowship, so as to be in a position to benefit others who suffer, we can only live virtuous mercy insofar as we remember that we too are humans subject to ill-fortune, pain, and disgrace.Footnote 10 Thus Aquinas distinguishes those who are truly “wise,” who like the “old” are aware “that they may fall upon evil times, as also feeble and timorous persons,” as those “more inclined to pity.” Opposed to these are “those who deem themselves happy, and so far powerful as to think themselves in no danger of suffering any hurt,” and so “are not inclined to pity.” Such persons, parties, or societies live in a dream world; they do not understand or accept the truth of their finite being and contingent condition.Footnote 11

4 Wilberforce as Exponent and Exemplar of Mercy and Love-Caritas in Culture and Public Life, and Some Implications for the Common Good Today

Since so far the chief example I have given of the virtues of mercy and charity in public life is Mother Teresa, one might legitimately wonder whether these ideals can also inspire men and women who are inclined to take what Pope Benedict (2009, sec. 7) referred to as “the institutional path—we might call it also the political path—of charity”—working through governmental, business, or cultural institutions and practices to advance justice, having the concerns of mercy and charity close to heart. One example indicating the possibility of this “institutional way” of contributing to culture and political life and powerfully advancing justice and peace is the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. A life-long member of the Church of England influenced by the Methodism of his aunt and uncle with whom he lived for a while after his father’s death, Wilberforce’s mother apparently worried about his excessive enthusiasm for religion and recalled him home, away from his aunt and uncle’s influence. His devotion cooled until as a young MP he was encouraged by a friend and travelling companion to consider the Scriptures open-mindedly, as well as popular and scholarly writings in the Christian tradition. He thereafter experienced a religious conversion and lived this out in evangelical Anglicanism influenced by the Methodism of Wesley.

Wilberforce was adamant that Christianity, if it mean anything, must be not only theoretical but also practical.Footnote 12 It must indeed be eminently practical in influencing everything a Christian does or says: every action, every work, and every ideal, even in the difficult sphere of political life. He lamented the Enlightenment tendency (or agenda) to circumscribe the range of charity and compassion and all the virtues of the Christian to a fraction of his or her private life. This was to suck the vitality out of religion and love-caritas and to put them on the path to indifference, perhaps extinction.

Though the Heart be its special residence, [true religion] may be said to possess in a degree the ubiquity of its Divine Author. Every endeavour and pursuit must acknowledge its presence, and whatever does not or will not or cannot receive its sacred stamp is to be condemned as inherently defective, and is to be at once abstained from or abandoned (Wilberforce 1996, pp. 88).

Human virtues like benevolence receive tremendous impetus and support from charity; who could reasonably deny this when he or she has experienced it or witnessed its effect in the lives of others? (ibid., pp. 136–137). Love-caritas motivates sacrifice on behalf of the common good and provides increased motivation to persist in difficult efforts for justice and the common good.

Wilberforce himself experienced and exemplified these principles throughout his long struggle versus the slave trade and slavery itself in the British Empire. A sincere but inconstant and timid proponent of abolition some years before his conversion, after his experience of grace and the love it infused he felt a force that sustained him in promoting this cause both in and out of season (see 1 Timothy 4:2) in Parliament. He soon realized that consciences must be touched and morals altered among the public for these measures to carry in the legislature, and he appealed to and encouraged compassion through disseminating information about the slave trade’s atrocities and bringing citizens, especially the most influential, into contact with those who had suffered these outrages or witnessed them first-hand in order to motivate many to recognize and support this just cause. He persevered despite chronic ill-health, ridicule, and death threats. And in the end he saw the slave trade outlawed and on his deathbed knew that the Abolition bill was on its way to passage. There were those who complained that this was dangerous meddling of religion in public life, but as in our country’s experience with the Civil Rights movement, for instance, few would complain in hindsight about the many salutary results. Moreover, Wilberforce always appealed to reason as well as to faith, to humanistic or moral principles, as well as to religion in his public arguments. His “practical” Christianity was not a form of fideism averse to “giving a reason for the hope that is in [it]” (see 1 Peter 3:15).

Wilberforce’s vision and legacy indicate that fully human, true, genuine common good should recognize and value mercy and love, for all human beings need them, and they are allies and aides of the common good of peace and justice. They motivate concern for the just and generous treatment of others and inspire sacrifice on behalf of others, the near and also the far when possible—and this is much more possible today in our global village. Local, national, and international authorities and political institutions should look gratefully on the religious communities, families, schools, and various civic associations where mercy and love-charity are valued, exemplified, and encouraged most closely and most personally, and where future leaders in culture, economy, and politics are formed and inspired, for good or for ill.Footnote 13 Mercy and charity are essential to the common good and yet they are not properly, specifically political.Footnote 14 Religious freedom and support for the institutions of marriage and family are today, I would argue, essential for the promotion of truly human common goods through politics and culture. If the pre- and trans-political sources of appreciation and exercise of mercy and charity are not despised by economic, cultural, and political power; if they are respected and given freedom to carry out their important tasks, then we may live to see not a utopia but a twenty-first-century common good that approaches more closely to true justice, fellowship, and peace. Some words from Benedict XVI’s first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love, 2005, paragraph 28b) seem most apt to conclude these reflections:

Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbor is indispensable. The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.