Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

394 BRIAN JOHNSTONE
did not sin in willing to kill his only son Isaac. 24 Although killing
an innocent is commonly opposed to right reason, human reason
is right if it is governed by the divine will which is the highest
rule. Since in this case, Abraham was obeying the divine will,
he did not sin. However, St. Thomas was aware of the inherent
tension between the framework based on reason and this second,
will-based framework. He held that these dispensations
were not contrary to reason, but against the common order of
reason, just as a miracle is not against nature, but against the
common order of nature. But these “miraculous” dispensations
were required because St. Thomas, like his contemporaries,
believed he had to take the stories of the Old Testament literally
and so believed he had to justify somehow or other the apparently
immoral behavior of certain Old Testament figures. The
theory of miraculous dispensations is not a fully coherent element
of his moral theory as such: it was needed to account for
the troubling stories of the Old Testament.
St. Thomas himself did not use the expression, “intrinsically
evil acts.” His term was secundum se malum and cognate
expressions. But it was in the context of the discussion of the
question of divine dispensation, after the time of St. Thomas,
that the term “intrinsically evil acts” seems to have emerged. The
term, as far as I have been able to discover, was later taken from
the divine dispensation discussion and transferred into the good
intention-bad act discussion. Those acts which were bad in
themselves and so could not be justified by a good intention,
were now referred to as “intrisically evil.”
In the discussion of divine dispensations, it was established
that some acts have an inherent, stable meaning which cannot
be changed by (hypothetical) acts of the divine will. For example,
God cannot decree that to hate God could become a good
act. In the context of the bad act/good intention controversy, it
was determined that there are some acts which have an inherent,
stable meaning with respect to further intentions on the
part of the human will. For example, a lie cannot be changed
into a good act by a further good intention.
24
S. Th., II-II, 154, 2, ad 2.