IN HIS recent disturbing memoir of his days at prep school, A Very Private School (review here), Charles Spencer recounts his surprise that it was compulsory to address all female teachers as “Please”. The explanation was that “addressing a lady as ‘Please’ . . . will make politeness a habit that will stay with you forever”.

If Spencer had read W. C. Mattison’s authoritative exposition of Aquinas’s writing on virtue, he might have been slightly more careful about his terminology; for, in the strict sense, a “disposition”, like being trained to say “please”, or to eat certain types of food, is not in itself fully a habit, especially if, as in Spencer’s case, we are doing it to avoid being beaten. What Mattison terms “properly human habits” are stable characteristics, a “second nature”, governed by reason, and directed towards a “last end”: an apprehension of overall human flourishing. This gives the actions that flow from such habits order and coherence, so that we perform them with promptness, stability, and pleasure.

Properly human habits can be intensified through activity as we grow in the “cardinal” virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude; and, indeed, we can also decrease in these virtues and lose them. But, while these classical virtues, unlike the “theological” virtues of faith, hope, and love, can be acquired through the formation of good habits, Aquinas is a Christian theologian, and ultimately neither our own efforts nor the important formational work of virtuous communities are enough.

Hence, the so-called “infused” virtues (whether “cardinal” or “theological”) are not those that we develop ourselves, but are due to the grace of God acting within us, as a new and greater end comes into view: “a new life in Christ aiming toward a supernatural end demands a new set of virtues by which a person is related to that last (supernatural) end”. Charity, the greatest of the three theological virtues and the “form of the virtues”, assembles and connects the other virtues, directing them to God as our last end.

As, for Aquinas, grace perfects nature, Mattison maps out the ways in which the acquired virtues, the infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit work together in a non-competitive relationship between divine and human agency. The human person, created by God, remains an agent endowed with rational faculties, but, at the same time, is animated at every level by the grace of God, which comes gratuitously from outside us.

This is an assured and masterful study of Aquinas’s thought on these matters, which has very wide implications for the formation of Christian individuals and communities. I was left slightly dissatisfied, however. Mattison’s Introducing Moral Theology (2008), intended, as its name suggests, to be a primer in the subject is replete not only with reflection on the individual virtues themselves, but also with examples of the ways in which they come to life in real human situations. In comparison, this work, intended as an academic study for a specialist audience, is disappointingly abstract.

Such abstraction somewhat defeats the object. Mattison rightly and repeatedly reminds us that virtues are not substantial entities in themselves that are somehow attached to human beings. Rather, it is persons who participate in the virtues and become more (or less) rooted in them: human beings (and not the virtues) are always the acting subject. Thus, even in an academic work on virtue, it is vital to see worked examples of the virtues in action.

This is not entirely absent: there is a beautiful but, sadly, brief examination of the parts played by habit and grace in St Augustine’s account of his conversion in the Confessions. I would have welcomed much more of the same: for the author to have illuminated the many ways in which — in, for example, the lives of biblical characters, sinners and saints through the ages, and fictional writing — the virtues that Aquinas and Mattison expound with such clarity shine radiantly through.

The Ven. Dr Edward Dowler is Archdeacon of Hastings and Priest-in-Charge of St John the Evangelist, Crowborough. He is Dean designate of Chichester.

Growing in Virtue: Aquinas on habit
W. C. Mattison
Georgetown University Press £40
(978-1-64712-328-4)
Church Times Bookshop £36