Getting Unstuck: Advancing Aquinas, Conflict Analysis, and Complex Moral Theology
Too often we allow people to feel stuck. We don’t yet have ways to remedy all these situations in a way that allows them to move forward. After all, that’s what this is about. Working toward holiness is that long messy process where we learn how to course correct our tiny everyday (almost unperceivable) invisible actions that justify the self à and we learn to point them back toward God. (i.e. recognizing that inner bubbling anger when we’re sitting in traffic and about to honk the horn. The person next to you might not realize this inner-conflict is forming until after you have blown up in anger!)
That is because for the past 150 years, the Church has relied on a method of judging morality that is hyper-fixated on judging actions. For its time, this was an extremely important discipline, especially coming into an age of democratic revolution and massive technological change like the invention of the lightbulb, people were beginning to question everything. And naturally, the Church needed to lock these conversations down. The Church wanted to make sure people were firmly rooted in truth.
But over time, we’ve gotten a little bit stale. The moral questions people are facing are often more complex than what your average parish faced in 1879.
When we get stuck in a moral dilemma, a classic, rigid Catholic approach known as Neo-Scholasticism often tells us to look at three things:
· The action
· The circumstances
· The goal
Their thought was firmly rooted in Aquinas except that we shifted the spotlight right onto the action. The circumstances and the goal became after thoughts. Now most of the time, this works quite well.
For example. If we’re just judging the action by itself, we’d all say that telling a lie is objectively and always wrong.
Dominican Friar Fr. Samuel Lovas attempted to grapple with the very complicated dilemma that happened quite a bit during WWII. What is a Catholic in good conscience to do if someone comes to the door looking for Jews or others to round up? Fr. Samuel attempts to defend the idea that telling a lie is always wrong, no matter the circumstance or the goal:
“Of course, it would be understandable if the proprietor of the house in this situation of extreme anxiety did not react perfectly. But a morally impeccable answer to the menacing Nazis would be something like “Come and look,” which would fit well with Aquinas’s permission “to hide the truth prudently, by keeping it back,”
I understood his logic but it hurts to read. Is a Catholic in good conscience really supposed to believe that is an answer that prompts the virtues of faith, charity, justice, temperance, prudence. I hope not.
We have become stuck. Hyper-fixated on the action without trying to understand how circumstances and intentions play into that.
There has got to be a better way.
I’ve come to appreciate Fr. Aristide Fumagalli’s Symbolic theory of Action to keep advancing the theology of Aquinas just as Neo-scholastics did 150 years ago. He says that the Church has to understand the symbol behind the action.
It’s a lot like the example I opened this post with where I said, people are rarely fighting about what they tell you. Catholic theology has to look deeper and understand the second reason. The real motivation.
In the most recent podcast episode, we talked about a classic human resources situation where a supervisor might tell someone to stop hugging the female employees.
Why do you keep hugging them? The person replies, “To show my appreciation for their work.”
But when told that another person was working equally as hard and is comfortable receiving hugs, they didn’t seem interested.
It turns out that not every hug is really a show of collegial appreciation. Sometimes the action symbolizes power, boundary-crossing, and a disregard for personal space.
Fr. Fumagalli’s point is that we do not need to get caught up in a legal battle over whether an action is right/wrong, and if so, how at fault are they. He helps us recover the intent of Aquinas but expressing it in a more modern way. Understand why people are acting the way they are, and point out where virtue can be built (or where vice needs to stop).
It does not have to be as hard as we make it. Catholic theology has all of the tools to handle the modern problems we face.
Source: Symbolic Theory of Action by Fr. Aristide Fumagalli can be found
“Una Teoria Simbolica dell’azione”
Fumagalli, Aristide. "Il Giudizio Morale Sulle Azioni Umane: Dalle Fontes Moralitatis al Discernimento Prudenziale." La Scuola Cattolica, vol. 148, 2020, pp. 67-93.
