No Alien Good: The Common Good and the Truth of Love
In Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Virgil, the poet’s guide, says that in the highest spheres, “the more they are who say ‘ours.
What Joy of Living? A “Wonderful Feeling” or the Fullness of Action?
“A wonderful feeling” is the expression found in number 1 of the basic text of the Pontifical Academy for Life, entitled “A Theological Ethics of Life” published in 2022. The document includes several examples of experiences of joy to introduce an ethic of life. But what joy and what life are we talking about? While it is obviously legitimate to experience joy also through feelings, Christian joy cannot be reduced to a feeling. How can joy be a criterion for developing an ethic of life? We will first take up the notions of “life” and “joy” from a theological and biblical perspective so as to extract from them some criteria for discernment also to relate to certain questions addressed in the document of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
The Logic of Love and the First-Person Perspective in Moral Theology. A Response to Livio Melina
That love is needed for moral discernment is a central thesis in Livio Melina’s paper. An old Latin proverb says, Ubi amor, ibi oculus – where love is, there is the eye. According to St. Thomas, the rightness of judgment can come to be in two ways: in one way, following the complete use of reason, in another way, because of a certain kinship (connaturalitas) with what one must judge at present. And this connaturality or kinship itself comes to be through love.
The Dynamism of Action and the Truth of Love
Exploring the experience of the dynamism of action from the perspective of the “first person,” we are able to discover the logic of love as the original source of our aspiration toward the good. In this way, we can see that the logic of love is at the same time the logic of the gift. The gift is given freely. It is at the root of our freedom. The gift stimulates our freedom, so as to bring it to its fulfillment by giving itself in turn. The truth about the good, expressed by the law and realized in the virtues, is therefore not a limitation, but rather the condition for an adequate response to the vocation of life itself, which is the vocation to love.