The Evolution of Moral Theology: Part 2

James F. Keenan, SJ
Professor of Theological Ethics, Boston College

Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Catholic Social Thought
Summer Lecture Series
July 9, 2008

In 1972, Giuseppe Angelini and Ambrogio Valsecchi wrote the first sustained
history of moral theology. They described the twentieth century as undergoing a renewal in fundamental moral theology unlike anything seen since the thirteenth century and yet they were, at that time, hardly able to anticipate its outcome. What were the constitutive elements that came to play in moral theology which prompted the renewal of the tradition by figures such as Lottin, Tillmann, Mersch, Gilleman, Häring, Fuchs, Janssenns and others?

The most significant influence was the shift in the nineteenth century of the self-understanding of the person as at once historical and yet autonomous. If we remember, in the moral manuals the point of departure for moral analysis was the action itself: the major task of the priest then was to help the lay catholic avoid committing wrong actions and if they were not avoided, then to absolve the agent of the effects of these wrong actions.
In the nineteenth century the point of departure for philosophers was the person: here in was the famous turn to the subject. This shift was welcomed in Protestant circles long before it was in Catholic circles. Its influence in Catholic circles emerged predominantly through the biblical scholarship of Protestants who introduced the historical critical method for our understanding of the bible, a revolutionary stance of our own self-understanding before the reality of revelation. Other scientific fields of inquiry, particularly from anthropological sciences like psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology began investigating the human being no longer as a philosophical object of analysis, but as an historical acting subject.

At the same time society itself was on the move: urbanization followed the dawn of the industrial revolution which in turn ignited rapid demographic shifts and these subsequently shaped our understanding not only of the family unit itself but also our duties and relationships toward that unit.

In this light moral theologians in the beginning of the twentieth century attempted to meet these challenges, but did so in the context of a continuous debate among themselves.
In Germany, from 1900 to 1930 a lively discussion arose about the sources of Christian ethics. In particular a question arose about authority, and German professors, enjoying a certain autonomy from Rome, began to question the right and extent of hierarchical authority. Simultaneously, Protestant philosophers and theologians began, in the name of and in defense of the Christian conscience, a sustained critique of the positivism of the Catholic hierarchy’s many ensuing regulations. In time this critique crystallized in targeting the casuistry of the neo-scholastics, who thwarted by their moral manuals the conscience of the laity.

These Protestants were not against casuistry per se, as much as they were opposed to how casuistry was being done. In 1927, for instance, the Anglican Kenneth Kirk offered probably the most significant defense and reform of casuistry in his Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry. Inevitably the Protestant critics believed that the integrity of the moral judgment of the Christian should not be compromised by moral norms imposed from without.

Catholic moral theologians responded to this critique in three different ways: acceptance, rejection, and an attempt to incorporate the Protestant critique into the traditional manuals (this was, for instance, the nature of Joseph Mausbach’s apologia). This last group saw in Thomas’s treatises on the virtues a way of turning to the subject; they sought to integrate these treatises into their manuals while at the same time prescribing norms for the subject, but Angelini and Valsecchi note that in the end their manuals were not notably different from the other manualists.

In this light if there was to be renewal, it would be in part by repudiating the neo-scholastic manuals and by seeking a specifically positive Christian identity for Catholic moral theology. There were four major steps, each with their own traliblazer: recovering history (Odon Lottin), recovering the bible (Fritz Tilmann), developing a Christology (Emile Mersch), and recovering the primacy of charity (Gilleman). In this presentation I will consider the first two: history and bible, but after each indicate the directions of continued contemporary research in history and bible..

Odon Lottin (1880-1965)
The Benedictine Lottin’s contributions shaped and animated the shifts that we will see over the 20th century. His four volume study of the morality and psychology of the scholastics of the 12th and 13th centuries amply demonstrated that the history of ideas is complex, that some notions go forward while others are arrested, and that progress can never be fully adequately preconceived because the discourse of ideas is subject to a variety of historical variables, intentional and accidental.

Lottin rendered moral theologians historically sensitive to the development of ideas not simply within schools of thought, but also within the writings of individual theologians. His claim, for instance, that Thomas Aquinas later in his life changed his position on the way that reason “moves” the will, challenged the belief that Aquinas’s works could be studied and cited without any attention to dates of publication. This belief might seem preposterous today, but sixty years ago it was easily assumed. Inasmuch as many neo-Scholastic manualists insisted on universal claims regarding philosophical assertions, Lottin’s historical claim that even Thomas developed his own thoughts significantly challenged the notion of objective truth held by some of his contemporaries.

In 1929 he founded Recherches de Théologie ancienne et medieval. From 1942 to 1950 he wrote the first three of his four volume study (roughly three thousand pages): Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siécles. (the sixth volume appeared in 1960.) Here he revolutionized our understanding of scholasticism in general and Thomas Aquinas, in particular. In 1946 he published the sources of the moral tradition and his first moral theological synthesis, the two volume work, Principes de Morale. Its index looks like the moral manuals: the moral act, the law, imputability, the conscience, and the virtues, but there are no ten commandments, nor are there any specific utterances about specific moral practices. In fact the entire work is an attempt to convey not what the neo-scholastics hold, but what the 12th and 13th century scholastics did. Rather than being a text for hearing confessions, the first volume of Principes was actually a theological foundation for anyone interested in the the formation of conscience. The second volume gave the historical debates and resolutions on twenty-eight topics, such as, synderesis, erroneous conscience, the connection of the virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, etc. It served as a companion to the first volume, historically engaging the development of foundational moral arguments but then commenting on their doctrinal significance. Here, Lottin was reintegrating moral theology into what was then called dogmatic theology, but today is referred to as systematic theology.

In 1954, he published his revolutionary Morale Fondamentale. On the first page of the text proper, he insisted that moral theology ought not to be divided according to the decalogue, but rather according to the moral and theological virtues, and that moral method ought to be inductive, not deductive.

In 1957, he published another work on religious life and then Au Coeur de la Morale Chrétienne. In the latter’s preface, he noted that Morale Fondamentale was not published as a manual for students but rather as an expose of the questions being discussed by moral theologians. Because of its success, he had been asked to write a foundational text for young theologians as well as educated, interested laity.

To appreciate his contribution to moral theology, let us look at him as an historian of moral theology, then as a critic of the post-scholastic period, and finally as the first true revisionist, who by discerning the actual historical roots of moral theology was able to renew the field as a truly theological enterprise.

Historian
Lottin’s historical-critical method was developed from a set of assumptions very different from those manualists who were his contemporaries in moral theology. He investigated how medieval theologians developed their arguments. Truth was not, for him, a series of always held, ahistorical, universal utterances. He did not believe he would find one position held by all always. He presumed, instead, that the scholastics did not all share the same understandings of free will, conscience, law, and norms, etc. On the contrary they debated and contradicted one another and sometimes even themselves. Though the concerns were similar, their quests for moral understanding and truth led them to differing positions. The tradition, then, was not monolithic: It was a series of debates and engagements that historically developed. He wanted to know that history.

For instance, could a pagan be virtuous? Did Socrates or Plato truly have virtue? The scholastics, from Peter Abelard and Peter Lombard to Albert the Great, held that true virtue could be found only in the Christian. Though there were four acquired cardinal virtues (justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence), the received position (from Augustine) was that without the infused virtue of charity, no acquired virtue was true virtue. Inasmuch as the gift of charity could only be found in those who had received the gift of faith, only those with faith in Christ could have true virtue. The pagans would not have been surprised to learn that the Christian scholastics did not think they had the theological virtues of faith, hope or charity; still, they would probably have been surprised that the scholastics denied that they had justice, temperance, fortitude or prudence as well. In short pagans were, according to the scholastics, completely without virtue.

Lottin noted that from the beginning of Thomas’s writing and teaching, that is, from his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Thomas differed from Augustine and recognized that the action of a pagan, if it conformed to right reason, was not only good but also merit worthy. For Lottin, as for Thomas, the questions regarding the domain of the acquired virtues had to be understood as matters of character development conforming to right reason. These virtues were different from the infused virtues which came through grace and united us to God. Perhaps, the pagan would not have charity, but the pagan could know and have the virtues of prudence and justice.

The premise of the development of thought meant, then, that our own understandings of moral concepts, judgment and truth are themselves tentative. Though we saw that the manualists, particularly the probabilists, appreciated the elusiveness of absolute moral certitude, they avoided considering the ramifications of the historicity of both their own judgments as well as the metaphysics behind their judgments. They were not inclined to consider that what we might hold today with moral certitude might not be what we would hold tomorrow, if we were to learn something new or to discover something as erroneous.

Thus as Lottin presumed that the scholastics contradicted one another, he similarly believed that individual theologians would have contradicted themselves. He presupposed what others thought was unthinkable: that Thomas would have changed significantly his own positions. To admonish those who could not think this way, he would remark that Thomas Aquinas was not a Melchizedek without mother or father, but a man.

Critic

Lottin was a sharp critic of the moral manuals. We saw in Moral Fondamentale, that he decidedly differentiated his work from all manualists; there he criticized the wretched past of moral theology blaming the priest confessor as the principal cause for the failure of moral theology to look to the good, but singularly to focus on avoiding evil. According to Lottin, the priest confessor had no interest in moral theology or even in the pastoral instruction to the laity to become better Christians; he was not interested in anything except that which directly affected his being confessor.

He then attacked recent developments wherein canon law had taken over moral theology, forcing it to focus exclusively on external acts, when in fact, historically speaking, moral theology had been primarily interested in the internal life. Overtaken by canon law, moral theology lost its moorings in dogmatic theology and in the biblical and patristic sources of theology. Moreover, by its insistence on avoiding wrong external acts, not only had it lost its purpose, that is, to pursue the Christian vocation, but it lost its deep connection to ascetical and mystical theology.

He then criticized the centrality of the Decalogue in the manualist method. He argued that the manualists used the Decalogue because it focused on what we should avoid. This was not an adequate vehicle for the greatness of the Christian moral life, and though he admitted that the Decalogue did have some prescriptions along with prohibitions, it had a rather incomplete set of responsibilities to God and neighbor, and none at all to self.

Later in Au Coeur de la Morale Chrétienne, he commented on the “poor manuals ad usum confessariorum” wherein not a trace of biblical inspiration can be found. Interestingly he returned to the question of why the moral manuals were so singularly interested in knowing what was a sin and what was not, and he noted that the responsibility for these manuals came not from their authors, but from the very numerous mediocre Christians who asked their confessors to give them minimalist expectations for the moral life. Instead if one were to turn to the great theologians of the middle ages, we would find their living dependence on the Scriptures, the tradition, and classic philosophy. Finally he noted that after Thomas Aquinas, moral theology fell into a terrible decline: “it separated itself from its living sources, Scripture and dogmatics; it amputated its limbs, of ascetical and mystical theology; it introduced a number of canonical questions which sought no solution in biblical texts; and it became much more interested in sin than in virtue.” Clearly, Lottin wanted to kick the dust of the manuals from his shoes as covers new terrain.

Revisionist Builder

As Lottin noted, after the scholastics, the moralists forgot the virtuous ends, both natural and supernatural, of the moral life. Instead, fixed on sin, the authors of casuistry and the later confessional and then moral manuals progressively uprooted moral theology from its dogmatic sources and eventually transplanted morals into the field of canon law. To get moral theology to its proper home, Lottin argued morality was deeply dependent on systematic theology. “Dogmatics, in a word, presents us God’s part in the work of our salvation, morals organizes our part.” Dogmatics and historical theology are Lottin’s theological companions, as was evident not only in the second volume of Principes Morale, but in all his writings.

Lottin saw the end of morality as the right realization of the person and the community in and according to God’s salvific plan. Far from writing a moral pathology, Lottin believed that morality conveyed humanity’s greatness: “the true grandeur of being human resides in morality, because one’s moral life is one’s own self manifesto, the fruit of one’s own personality.” Elsewhere he wrote that morality does not come from beyond the person, but rather is immanent and immanently changes and leads the person to becoming more of a Christian. Here then we see the necessity of the Christian conscience in making moral judgment.

For this reason the entire work of Lottin’s Morale Fundamentale pointed to the formation of the Christian conscience. What all ministers should look is to help the members of the Church to lead conscientious lives. This is why Thomas wrote the Summa; this is why Lottin found in history the validation of his own project. His striking break with the manualists is evident by the hermeutical context in which he establishes the conscience as foundational to the moral life. No longer do we find the manualists’ pathology of conscience: doubtful, laxed, scrupulous, uncertain, erroneous, etc. Here we find instead the “formation” of conscience, some forty-five pages. Here too we find the resolution of doubt, not by looking up what a probabilist permits, but rather by forming a certain conscience.

Thus after establishing that the end of morals is to form the conscience he dedicated the remaining one hundred and thirty pages to the virtuous life and the formation of the prudential judgment. The Christian conscience is formed by the virtues and these are acquired, developed and maintained by learning what prudence means.

By turning to prudence, Lottin liberated the Christian conscience from its singular docility to the confessor priest. He instructed the church members to become mature self-governing Christians and insisted that Christians have a life long task, a progressive one, as he called it, toward the ideals of both the natural and supernatural virtues. By turning to prudence, Lottin urged his readers to find within themselves, their community, their faith, the Church’s tradition and its Scriptures, the mode, and the practical wisdom for determining themselves into growing as better Christians.

The turn to prudence did not just involve the agent; it involved the entire notion of moral objectivity. Is the objectively right determined by particular ethicists who give their judgments on what is sinful and what is permitted or is it in the conscientious Christian’s prudential determination of the particular?

This will be the question that later leads Josef Fuchs to rethink his entire thought, and in a way to lead many moralists into the revisionist school. That school in many ways was started by this Benedictine monk studying the history of the moral theology of the scholastics. The more Lottin looked into these texts, the more he found the turn to the person, to virtues and to prudence.

But we should also acknowledge that Lottin’s emphasis on the personal right realization through the virtues was not a move away from community. On the contrary, though the moral manuals simply gave us what actions we should not perform and therein never guided us into becoming better neighbors (though they at least did aim to keep us from becoming worse neighbors), Lottin argued precisely from Thomas that our personal good was derived from the common good

After Lottin: The “Uses” of History

After Lottin, the Redemptorist Louis Vereecke led historians of moral theology during the last 30 years of the 20th century. For the most part, he restricted his research to modern history, from the years 1300 to 1787, concentrating especially on the writings of moral theologians from William of Ockham to Alfonsus Liguori. Vereecke’s studies focused on diverse topics such as the relationship between law and morals in Jean Gerson, dominical observance and medical ethics in Antoninus of Florence, the economic ethics in Peter of Palu and John Mair, and sexual and marital ethics throughout the modern period. Vereecke highlighted an attentiveness to local claims, the influence of specific circumstances in moral reasoning, the significance of historical context, and the inevitable development of moral doctrine. Vereecke insisted, by these studies, that these issues belong then to the proprium or the nature of moral theology. Most importantly, the formation of the human conscience stood as Vereecke’s primary concern as he investigated how modern theologians discerned the demands of the Word of God in the context of human responsibility.

Like Lottin, the historian of moral theology often uncovered the tools that liberated Christians to form and follow their conscience. In order to appreciate Lottin’s own legacy, let us consider the ways that history has since Lottin affected the field of moral theology.

At the beginning of Bernard Häring’s magisterial The Law of Christ, he presented a brief “historical survey of moral theology.” These pages served as a guarantee that his work was well within the tradition. Continuity with the moral tradition validated many Roman Catholic moral claims.

His decision to present a brief history was ingenious, precisely because he used it to establish his own innovative claims as traditional exactly as he broke with the theology of the historical period immediately before his, that is, the manualism of the 17th through the 20th century. Engaging history, Häring could claim that inasmuch as his theology squared with several key periods in the Catholic tradition, he was more traditional than his more immediate predecessors.

Häring’s break with his predecessors was not only about the matter and form of the manualists, but also about their use of history. The manualists presupposed that their teachings were universally true by virtue of their historical unchangeableness. In a way, they distorted and even attempted to destroy history’s claims by insisting that nothing changes over the centuries. The words, “as we have always taught” became overtime a rhetorical insurance for the validity of the truth claim.

Moreover, inasmuch as inevitably, every manualist depended on Thomas Aquinas as the well spring of moral teaching, each attributed to Thomas a variety of principles and concepts that were only formulated after Thomas lived. Without a sense of history and living in the metaphysical world, manualists easily made false attributions. Thus, though the principle of double effect was first articulated in the seventeenth century, manualists routinely referred to it as being in the Summa theologiae. Worse is the attribution to Thomas of subsequent positions inimical to his thought. Thus, the concept “intrinsic evil” was first expressed by the fourteenth century Dominican Durandus of St. Pourcain, the most significant opponent to the legacy of Thomas Aquinas, yet still, manualists referred to Thomas’s use of the concept, though he never did nor would have.

Over the past twenty years, three kinds of works have significantly undermined the validity of the presupposition regarding the unchangeableness of the moral tradition: (1) critical reviews of particular moral teachings have shown considerable traditional discontinuity and even incoherence; (2) studies of the manualists themselves have proven that inevitably the process of applying principles to cases prompted a developmental shift in any understanding of moral principles; and, (3) theological arguments have illustrated that moral theology must progress if it is to be faithful to its call to recognize and realize moral truth.

First, investigations into claims of historically continuous moral teachings have been often proven false. For instance, since the manualists argued that traditional teaching on masturbation was always consistent, Giovanni Cappelli asked whether that was the case. He found no comment on masturbation until the fifth century when, as monastic communities were developing, the sexual lives of monks came under scrutiny, especially with regard to the “vices” of the “solitary” life, particularly masturbation, sexual fantasies and even nocturnal emissions. As opposed to any others, John Cassian (365-433) and Caesarius of Arles (470-543) wrote extensively about the monks’ need to subdue any influence of sexuality at all. These writers’ concerns are not with the act of masturbation, but with the monks who vowed chastity. It was the monk’s promise that made masturbation an illicit act, the act itself was not considered sinful. In fact as Cappelli, Louis Crompton and James Brundage all observe, there were no writings against masturbation prior to Cassian; masturbation was simply not considered a sexual offence.

Other studies made similar claims. Mark Jordan examined seven medieval texts on homosexuality and concluded that far from being consistent, any attempt to make a connection among the texts proved impossible. Jordan called the tradition’s teaching “incoherent.” Bernard Hoose studied a wide array of church teachings on matters of life and death, sexuality, and even crime and punishment and found that claims to continuous teaching were simply not true. Another study betrays its very agenda by its long title: Rome Has Spoken: A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements and How They Have Changed through the Centuries. Behind these works were not simply claims of inconsistency, contradiction and even incoherence, but more importantly the insight that continuity with the tradition is not itself the guarantor of the truth of any teaching.

Second, studies of the manualists proved that despite claims to the contrary, manualists “developed” the moral tradition. Here, John T. Noonan, Jr., has set the standard for historical research in his studies of abortion, contraception, and usury. Noonan understood that history cannot leave a teaching or principle untouched: every application of a principle to a situation affects our understanding of the principle itself. Inevitably these historical applications led to developments in these principles and eventually in moral doctrines.
Now, Noonan has offered a new text looking at areas where the church, not only changed, but shamefully did not. Noonan looks at the church’s long-standing hesitancy to repudiate its teachings on the legitimacy of slavery and argues that inevitably love and faith moves us to change so as to arrive at moral truth.

Behind these claims of discontinuity and development, moral theologians have
been asserting a third claim namely that not only does history inevitably necessitate development, but that moral theology must also occasion it. This was Häring’s claim against the manualists: their resistance to development was a betrayal of moral theology’s mission which is the pursuit of moral truth. Josef Fuchs agreed and wrote that the Christian has received a new competency through Christ to overcome evil with good, and therefore is called continually to improve the human world through innovation. Likewise, Klaus Demmer argued that the moral task of reversing bias and decline in human history shares analogously in the death and Resurrection of Christ. Marciano Vidal studied recent papal statements to find an implicit endorsement of the necessity of moral development or what Vidal called “progress.”

Some others have turned to history to reclaim specific foundational insights that have fallen prey to unexamined, harmful presuppositions. Here research has focused on casuistry, natural rights, and natural law.

Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, through their study The Abuse of Casuistry, restored the credibility of casuistry by heeding the admonition of Kenneth Kirk: “The abuse of casuistry is properly directed, not against all casuistry, but only against its abuse.” Jonsen and Toulmin argued that contrary to earlier held assumptions, casuistry is an inductive method that grounds its truth standards in the experienced, well-solved, historical cases rather than in abstract principles with pretensions of universal claims.

Interestingly, the investigations of Jonsen and Toulmin were prompted by their involvement with a national commission in which participants from various philosophical cultures present in the United States achieved consensus not by the use of principles but rather by paradigm cases. Their experience led them to investigate whether their inductive logic had historical precedence. In one sense, their investigation of high casuistry validated their own contemporary claims. But because contemporary presuppositions about casuistry were so negative, they needed to investigate more accurately the nature of 16th-century casuistry.

Their ground-breaking work generated other foundational work that have made the study of casuistry remarkably rich. Edmund Leites provided a timely collection of essays from various academic disciplines that address the way casuistry mediates the tension between conscience and law that is found in a variety of cultures (both religious and civil). Thomas Shannon and I edited a collection of essays on the differing historical contexts of casuistry. John O’Malley’s study of the Society of Jesus provided the foundations for further studies on Jesuit casuistry, while Antonio Poppi investigated the moral theology of the early Franciscans and specifically on Franciscan casuistry.

Brian Tierney, through his investigation of medieval Church law, provided a vigorous defense of natural rights, arguing that while the Stoics and Cicero defined ius naturale as the universal, objective natural law recognizable by all humans, 12th-century canonists described it as a force, faculty, or power inherent in individual human persons. Concerned to protect individuals, these early canonists developed the first expressions of natural rights, not from voluntarist arguments invoking God’s will, but rather from an anthropological vision of the person as rational, self-aware, and morally responsible. In fact, contrary to the claims of Michel Villey, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others, Tierney proved that “medieval society was saturated with a concern for rights.”

Finally, Jean Porter, who relies on the work of Lottin, Vereecke, and Tierney demonstrated convincingly that from the 12th century, the scholastics’ idea of the natural law is embedded in the world of theology. In particular, the schoolmen routinely turned to revelation in the pursuit of natural law: to justify their appeals to the natural law; to derive much of the concrete moral content of the natural law; and to employ their overall concept of the natural law as a framework for interpreting Scripture as a moral document.

Porter helps us understand that the scholastics were not at all harnessed by the need to compartmentalize sources of moral insight. While they differentiated between the conventional and the natural, they saw no incompatibility between moral data emanating from rational insight or the natural order. Nor did they consider any difference between the rational and the pre-rational as more than one of degree. Rather, they recognized an affinity among rational reflection, the natural world, and the light of Scripture. Likewise, they did not exclude other sources of moral insight, e.g., from other religious and civil traditions; nor did they view their own findings as applicable exclusively to Christians. Finally, they would not have understood contemporary tendencies to bracket natural law theories from virtue ethics inasmuch as they understood the virtues as the right realization of natural inclinations.

Underlying all of these investigations are some remarkably similar claims. First, they are about fundamental moral concepts. These studies are not incidental investigations; they offer enormous foundational relevance for moral theology, on conscience, casuistry, natural law, and natural rights. Second, these concepts deal with methodological issues needed to ascertain moral truth. To some extent, we can see that conscience is the source, casuistry is the method, human rights and the common good are the stuff, and natural law is the context for moral reasoning. Third, each investigation asserts the theological relevance that these concepts enjoy: the historical research helps us to appreciate why and how faith and ethics are engaged so intimately. Fourth, these investigations for the most part are not about practices but about ideas. Fifth, similarly, inasmuch as these are the investigations of ideas, not surprisingly we find academicians investigating academicians. Tierney looks at 11th-century canonists, Porter at 12th-century scholastics, Toulmin and Jonsen at 16th-century university casuists, and Valadier at the Enlightenment.

Thus, moral theologians have yet to take advantage of the works of social history in grasping whether historical ideas were ever accepted by the public or whether they were even congruent with contemporary practices, a distinction that historians raised years ago while reflecting on the use of the confessional. We are only beginning to appreciate this possible “disconnect” between published ideas and public practices. Yet the disconnect is quite possible as Bryan Massingale has illustrated when he laments that precisely during the civil rights movement, American Catholic moralists evidenced no interests whatsoever in U.S. race relations. The academy and the public do not always share the same concerns, nor certainly the same discourse.

Still, we are only at the dawn of understanding how moral theology has functioned over the centuries and how much research needs to be done about specific practices. These investigations help us think more clearly not only about the past but also about the richness these concepts offer modern needs. By correcting earlier presuppositions, these authors effectively liberate the concepts from restricting interpretations that made them problematic for present-day research.

Who would have thought, following the demise of manualism, that we would be embracing casuistry and natural law so quickly? The turn to history made that possible, for we are embracing these foundational issues not as the manualists and canonists did, but rather as the theologians before them did.

Fritz Tillmann (1874-1953)

Until 1912, Tillmann was a successful and influential biblical theologian. The titles of his works evidence the research that he did: The Son of Man: Jesus’ Self-understanding of his Messianic Nature (1905); The Future Coming of Christ according to the Pauline Epistles (1909); and, The Self-understanding of the Son of God: The Foundation of the Synoptic Gospels (1911).

In 1912, because of a collection that he edited in which a contributing author defended the two source theory for the writing of the synoptic Gospels, Fritz Tillman was ordered by a Vatican congregation to leave exegesis and enter another field. He became a moral theologian.

In 1919, he wrote his first moral theological work: Personality and Community in the Preaching of Jesus. In 1934, he writes Die Idee der Nachfolge Christi, on the idea of the disciple of Christ. Tillman’s volume was a tremendous success. Seventy years after its publication, Karl-Heinz Kleber writes that in the search to rightly express what the foundational principle of moral theology ought to be, Tillman came forward and named it: the disciple of Christ.

In 1937 he published for lay people, Die Meister Ruft (The Master Calls). Both works were extraordinarily successful and for scholars and the laity, respectively. Tillmann demonstrated that it was possible to create a sound, moral theology based directly on Christian revelation. Certainly no moral theologian could have done this unless he was first a biblical exegete.

The Master Calls is divided into five parts: principles, love of God, love of self, love of neighbor, and social relations. The first four parts are roughly eighty pages each, the final is thirty-five pages long. Without a doubt, a work based on the threefold command of love, revealed in the Scriptures, was radically new. Tillmann’s entire tone is extraordinary: highlighting the immensity, the grandeur of the call: “The goal of the following of Christ is none other than the attainment of the status of a child of God.”

Highlighting the immensity and grandeur of the call, Tillmann wrote: “The goal of the following of Christ is none other than the attainment of the status of a child of God.” Here Tillmann offered three requisites: “realization of the very highest degree of religious demands and conduct,” “a willingness to undergo any sacrifices for the sake of the great task enjoined,” and an “absolute conformity to the will of God.” These conditions were not matters of privacy or isolation. “Christ’s over-all teaching concerning the new man, his duties, and his position with regard to God and His kingdom, excludes all isolation, whether in general or in particular, and points out directions and duties which tend toward the community.” The pursuit of Christ has never been in separation from love of neighbor or regard for needs of the world; Christ is the soul of a community.

How then could we respond to God's will to become disciples? Tillmann followed the lead of Lottin and suggested the virtues as the primary place to begin our life as disciples; Christ “pointed out the birthplace of moral actions, both good and bad, as man’s interior disposition.”

Tillmann stayed within the discourse of virtue, since virtue perfects the human. Moreover, he built with virtue a much needed bridge to ascetical theology, wherein we find the schools of perfection. Thus he proposed an integrated view of the moral challenges for a disciple; this view focused more on the character traits, inner dispositions, or virtues which the disciple should develop, rather than on specific external actions which had been the focus of the moral manuals.

His most innovative writing pertained to the respect for intellectual and moral life. Throughout, Tillmann has been appreciative of the fact that the virtues emerge in each person differently. Thus, the right realization of ourselves as intellectual and moral agents similarly “differs for every individual.” Still, the unique development of the person is not isolated from the needs and goods of the community.

Tillmann’s breakthrough is inestimable. First as a Scripture scholar he derived from the Scripture an appropriate identity for the Christian agent, the disciple. Second, he developed this in a vigorous scholarly text, Die Idee der Nachfolge Christi, that allowed him to engage colleagues on the very idea he was putting forth. Third, he made this idea accessible and made it concrete by The Master Calls. Moreover, he also made the text extraordinarily comprehensive, never departing from the double insight that the text had to be fundamentally (and exclusively) based on Scripture (there are no other types of citations) and the text had to give an anthropological shape to the vocation of discipleship.

Fourth, wisely he turned to the virtues, most appropriately because as any reader of Luke, John, Paul or others will note, virtue is the language of Paul and the Evangelists. Moreover, virtue is the language of the Hebrew bible as well. Thus, entering into moral theology, he did not abandon Scriptural language, but found in virtue the worthy bridge between Scripture and moral theology.

Fifth, coupled with this, the architectonic structure of the work, two parts bookending the three fold love command, places charity at the very heart of his ethics. Revelation conveys the singular primacy of charity.

Sixth, he never dismissed the basic pastoral call that the moral theologian had. Certainly, the manualists’s reader was the priest confessor, but Tillmann’s work while easily accessible to the laity seems especially attentive as, in the areas on suicide and in homosexuality, to the pastoral challenges of the contemporary priest, counselor, confessor and preacher. Finally, as a member of the guild of moral theologians, Tillmann has given to his colleagues a text that became a paradigm for others.

The Legacy of Tillmann

In 1983, William Spohn wrote What Are they Saying about Scripture and Ethics? At the outset, Spohn marked the specificity with which moral theologians read the Scriptures.
When theologians turn to the Scripture for moral guidance they are not acting like moral philosophers. They turn to a history rather than a theory of ethics, to a canonical text whose credential is inspiration by God and not merely logical consistency. Christians turn to Scripture to discover more than the right thing to do; they want to act in a way that responds to the God of their lives.

With great ecumenical breadth, the book quickly became a reference text for providing a typology of the various models of approaching the Scripture so as to understand its moral instruction. Therein Spohn offered six models which he described as "a sign not of scholarly chaos but of the irreducible richness of the Scripture itself."

The first model was the command of God, seen as a personal and clear call, best expressed in the twentieth century by the courageous and brilliant Lutheran pastor and resister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The second, "Scripture as a reminder," is so-called because Josef Fuchs suggested it specifically to Spohn. Spohn found this expressed in Fuchs' first major work on natural law. The natural law gives us moral norms, but the Scripture reminds us of their urgency. Later, one of Fuchs' best known students, Bruno Schüller insisted that Scripture provided no moral instruction but rather moral exhortation. The third model is the call to liberation. Here he turned to the pioneering work of Gustavo Gutierrez to describe the call to act for the oppressed because God is on their side. Spohn also saw in early feminist writings, particularly by Letty M. Russell and Phyllis Trible a similar hermeneutics in their approach to the Scripture. In the fourth approach, we find Scripture read so to understand how God is acting in our situation today. Spohn cited the responsibility ethics of H. Richard Niebhur who saw in the immediacy of our history God's action in the world. The fifth model is the call to discipleship. Rather than citing Tillmann, Spohn referred to the writings of three contemporary Protestants, Stanley Hauerwas, Sally McFague, and John Howard Yoder, who call us to reflect on the narrative theology of the Scripture so as to understand what God calls from us in Jesus Christ. The final model is Spohn's own, "Scripture as basis for responding love" which he described as giving us "the motive and the norm for loving others in the witness of God's love in Scripture that has been confirmed in the agent's experience."

Sixteen years later, Spohn published a sustained argument for this model. In Go And Do Likewise, Spohn insisted that virtue ethics was "the most appropriate avenue" for an approach to Scripture. As we will see later, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, virtue ethics becomes a significant alternative to principle-based ethics for developing a more personal and communal-based ethics. This should be no surprise, because we saw already in the hermeneutics of Lottin and Tillmann that the development of an entire ethical system based on virtue would inevitably have to emerge.

Roman Catholic moral theology which long considered Scripture as no more than a reminder of the moral life, now finds through the medium of virtue ethics the resources for living an animated life of love and justice based on revelation. The work of Lottin and Tillmann lives on.

Copyright Jim Keenan.