HUMAN ACT. — In a broad sense, any activity of man may be called human. In the proper and strict sense, the term human act is reserved to indicate those acts which depend on the free determination of the will and of which man may truly be called dominus. Only these acts are moral and susceptible of merit or demerit.
In human activity, three aspects or kinds of elements may be considered: the psychological, the moral, and the supernatural.
I. Psychological Elements
The human act is a voluntary and deliberate act. Insofar as it is voluntary, it is, in its originality, irreducible to impulses, instincts, and any other movement of the sensitive appetite, and it opposes every form of coercion. Insofar as it is deliberate, it is distinguished both from the spontaneous acts of the will itself, determined solely by its natural tendency toward the good (desires, hopes, fears, affections, etc., which are not fully deliberated), and from those acts which derive from an intrinsic necessity within the will itself. Therefore, not every act of the will may be called free, and hence human, in the sense indicated above. Indeed, the deliberate will is, at least ordinarily, preceded and conditioned by the spontaneous will, in which the initial attraction or complacency toward the good is realized before this good is freely accepted and willed. Moreover, the will, by its very intrinsic constitution and natural tendency, is necessitated by the good and by happiness, considered in their absoluteness, since it is not possible not to will one’s own happiness, and the will cannot will anything except what appears as suitable to the subject, whatever the concrete object toward which its act is directed. It follows that there can be no deliberation concerning the end, that is, concerning absolute value considered in its abstract indeterminacy, and that freedom essentially concerns particular values, and even absolute ones, but known imperfectly and indirectly, so that they may be, in human experience, aligned with other values and thus become objects of determination and choice. For this reason, in this present life, in which God is not seen but only known abstractly and analogously, the will is free either to tend toward Him or to reject Him (cf. LIBERTY).An essential condition for an action to be deliberate is the presence of the object in the subject’s consciousness and the awareness of the action by which it is pursued: we cannot will without knowing what we will, and we cannot will freely without being masters, and therefore conscious, of the act we perform. According to the greater or lesser intensity of this consciousness, and the greater or lesser clarity with which the object occupies the field of consciousness, the human act is more or less voluntary. In the language of modern psychology, when the object occupies the center of consciousness, attention is present, whereas it is absent when the object is at the margins of consciousness. But even attention itself may be more or less intense, just as its scope may be more or less extensive and its duration more or less varied. Moreover, for the human act to be free, it is not required that it be the object of a reflected consciousness; it suffices that it be perceived immediately in the very awareness of the object toward which it is directed. Indeed, given the natural limits of human consciousness, reflection on the human act diminishes attention to its objective content.
In the free act, it is necessary to distinguish between the cause and the motives of the will, that is, between the subjective cause and the objective cause. The subjective cause of the will is the free will itself, and the reason for such freedom lies in its activation, due to the fact that the will is not determined to act except by the absolute good. The objective cause or motive of the will is not merely the pleasure that accompanies action, as some modern psychologists have held, but any “good” known and evaluated by the subject as his own good. The deliberative process consists in the comparison of motives and, finally, in the definitive choice of one of them. This process is variously analyzed and described by the ancient Scholastics and modern psychologists, and the difference is not always merely nominal or formal, sometimes touching upon the very substance and originality of the voluntary human act, whose intrinsic and immediate principles must be sought, at the moment of intention and liberation, in the intellect and the will, while in the order of execution other elements may also be added, determined, directed, and informed by the former. According to St. Thomas (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 11), it does not belong to the intellect to know and evaluate the good, to make the practical judgment about its pursuit or feasibility, the evaluation and search for the concrete means to attain it, the determination to will (imperium), and the direction of the other faculties called to execute what has been deliberated. Instead, it belongs to the will to take delight in the known good, to form the effective intention to attain it, to determine to employ suitable means and to choose them, to apply the other faculties to the execution of the command, and to enjoy the good attained. Naturally, these acts, though distinct, are not separate from one another, as they condition one another and sometimes overlap, merging in the unity of the volitive and deliberative process. This process, moreover, in the concrete life of the spiritual life, assumes different developments, contents, forms, and expressions, whose classification, though certainly useful for a correct ethical evaluation of human activity, cannot claim to exhaust its rich and complex variety, even from this particular perspective.
Thus moralists are accustomed to distinguish the voluntary act: 1° into perfect and imperfect, depending on whether there is or lacks full awareness and full consent of the will; 2° into voluntary simpliciter or only secundum quid, depending on whether it is an effective will or merely an ineffective velleity; 3° into actual voluntary (if it proceeds from the present deliberation of the will), virtual (if the action is performed by virtue of a previous deliberation, which therefore persists in its effect), or habitual (when it is a matter only of a previous will, not retracted, but which exercises no actual influence on the action); 4° into positive or negative voluntary, depending on whether it terminates in an action or in an omission; 5° into explicit or implicit voluntary, depending on whether the object is explicitly or only implicitly willed, or whether a determined act is implicitly contained in another explicitly posited act (thus the purpose not to sin is implicitly contained in the act of contrition); 6° into voluntary in itself, which is the direct object of the will’s intention, and voluntary in cause, if it is an effect not intended but permitted as an indirect result of an action directly willed; 7° into voluntary propter se or propter aliud, depending on whether it is a thing willed as an end or merely as a means; 8° into expressed, tacit, and presumed voluntary, with regard to its external manifestation and knowledge, depending on whether the will is manifested by a sign, or legitimately inferred from silence, or only presumed on the basis of certain indications.
In this classification, which is moreover exemplary and incomplete, the first distinction, concerning the greater or lesser perfection of the voluntariness of the act, is of particular interest to the moralist and has fundamental importance in the evaluation of the actions we perform, considered in their subjective aspect.
The factors that may influence this qualification of the human act are various: some direct and immediate, others indirect and remote.
The direct and immediate factors are: ignorance, passions, violence, and fear.
Ignorance, to which error and inadvertence may be reduced in this context, may pertain either to the law (both its existence and its content), to the penalty, or to one of the factual elements of the action being performed. Its effect on the voluntariness of the act and on responsibility is naturally proportionate not only to the extent of the limits it imposes on the field of conscience but also to the nature of the cause from which it arises and to its particular efficacy with regard to the action performed. Thus, while one cannot be held responsible for what is done through invincible and inculpable ignorance, responsibility does not cease when ignorance is due to culpable negligence or to a direct will to remain ignorant (ignorantia affectata). Indeed, in this latter case, if this will is determined by formal contempt for the law, imputability is certainly greater. In other cases, however, it is more or less attenuated according to the degree of negligence or fault (v. IGNORANZA).
Passion, understood here as any movement or impulse of the sensitive appetite in its broadest sense, is certainly one of the elements that most readily affects the voluntary act. If it precedes the determination of the will (passio antecedens), it tends, through its attractive and distracting force, to diminish the evaluative indifference of judgment and, consequently, the very freedom that has its root in it; indeed, at times its vehemence may be such as to preclude any possibility of comparing particular good with absolute good and thus entirely remove freedom. If, instead, passion follows the voluntary act by simple redundancy (passio consequens per simplicem redundantiam), it does not affect the act itself but is rather an index of the intensity of the will. If, finally, it is directly excited by the will (passio consequens per directam excitationem), it not only does not diminish the voluntariness of the act but is placed at its service, thereby extending the zone of its influence and efficacy. Naturally, in the vital and fluid process of human activity, whose individual moments we consider separately for logical necessity, these various aspects of passion may coexist, conditioning one another (v. PASSIONE).
Nothing is more contrary to the spontaneity and freedom of the act than violence. However, violence cannot reach the will, and for it to be absolute it is necessary that there be no external connivance and no internal consent on the part of the one who suffers it (v. VIOLENZA).
Fear, on the other hand, although it may influence the determination of the will and may also conflict with the various moral freedoms enjoyed by man, does not oppose psychological freedom unless and insofar as it becomes passion. For this reason, an action performed out of fear is simply voluntary, even though it is most often accompanied by a full repugnance and ineffective contrariety, unless this is also overridden by the very efficacy of the fear: such, for example, is the fear of hell as a motive for the sorrow of sins (v. TIMORE).
The factors that indirectly and remotely influence the voluntariness of the voluntary act are habit, propensities and tendencies, and spiritual illnesses.
Habit may either aid or hinder the freedom of the will. For this reason, one must first distinguish between habits that pertain to external activities, which through their mechanism tend to diminish attention, and those that affect spiritual faculties and facilitate their operation without thereby diminishing voluntariness and freedom: even virtues are habits (v. ABITO, ABITUDINE). One may therefore say, in principle, that habits diminish the voluntariness of the voluntary act insofar as they hinder attention and influence tendencies and passions.
Similarly, propensities and tendencies, which may be either natural or acquired and depend both on temperament and on contracted habits, influence the voluntary by determining impulses and stimulating passions (v. TEMPERAMENTO). On the other hand, each person’s temperament is in intimate connection with all their activity and affects, among other things, their tone and particular coloring. Yet it, if it may at times incline one toward virtue or vice, is never the determining or primary cause of either.
Likewise, the so-called spiritual illnesses, insofar as they influence perception, conscience, ideation, judgment, instincts, in the sphere of emotions and in that of motor expressions, likewise influence the voluntariness and imputability of actions performed as a consequence of such disturbances. Naturally, moral judgment, already difficult under the normal conditions in which human activity unfolds, becomes even more difficult in these cases, both because of the indefinable variety of phenomena and of the physiognomy of psychological personality and because of the difficulty—often verging on impossibility—of defining the limits between illness and normality, and, in the sick themselves, between moments and elements of rationality and moments and elements of irrationality or of instinct and of uncontrollable impulses. Not to mention that at times (as, for example, in morphinomania, cocainomania, and alcoholism) the cause of the disturbances may be voluntary, and thus actions dependent on them may be imputable (v. MENTALI).
II. MORAL ELEMENTS
Authors do not agree about the metaphysical essence of morality, its constitutive norm, and its foundation (v. MORALITÀ). Nevertheless, Catholic philosophers and theologians all agree on the following points: 1) that the moral value of the voluntary act depends on its ethical norm; 2) that there are voluntary acts that are intrinsically good and others that are intrinsically evil, independently of any positive law; 3) that the ethical norm of human action is intimately connected with the nature and order of man and of other things and depends on the eternal law of God. Morality may be considered either in its objective aspect or in its subjective aspect. For the objective morality of the voluntary act to pass into the action as performed by the subject, it is necessary that it be present in the latter’s conscience. Yet while the malice of the object is contracted merely by its being known, good, in order to become subjective, must also be willed: no one can become good against or independently of his good will.Moreover, since goodness consists in the conformity of the act to its ethical norm and evil in its deviation therefrom, human activity can be said to be simply good only when all its elements conform to that norm.
Nevertheless, not every defect substantially corrupts the morality of the action, although it is disputed whether one and the same voluntary act can be both good and evil.
The elements from which the voluntary act derives its morality (sources of morality) are the object and the circumstances. Naturally, both the one and the other must be considered not in their material content but in their ethical content, that is, with regard to their particular relation to the norm of morality. From the object the act derives its primary and specific morality. The circumstances may add to the voluntary act a new moral species (in the theft of a sacred object, to the malice specific to theft is added that of sacrilege), or they may modify only accidentally the essential morality of the voluntary act.
Among all the circumstances, particular importance attaches to the end for which one wills and acts (fines operantis). This, no differently from the other circumstances, when it differs from the end to which the action is intrinsically ordered (fines operis), can vary in its impact upon the morality of the action. However, the goodness of the end does not purify the human act (a. u.) of any intrinsic malice it may possess (the end does not justify the means); whereas its malice, at least in the case where it is the sole and total motive of the action, necessarily deprives the human act of any objective goodness. It is, instead, a matter of controversy what its negative efficacy may be when it is only a partial motive of the action.
Likewise, there is no uniformity of judgment among authors regarding the moral value of the human act willed and performed for the pleasure derived therefrom and connected with II. When this pleasure is understood, in its natural instrumentality, as a mere stimulus to act, no Catholic author would dare to condemn it, just as none would dare to justify it when it is willed as the sole and ultimate end of one’s action. Many, however, further hold that it is not illicit to act for a pleasure recognized as honest, since even if in this case there is lacking an explicit reference to a further end, there is not lacking the implicit recognition of one’s subordination to the ethical norm, and thus the implicit will to tend toward the end to which it is ordered. Others, however, more rigid, condemn the action in this case, while for others it would lie outside the sphere of morality, i.e., it would be a morally indifferent action.
The problem, therefore, is in part connected with the other concerning the scope of morality. No human act is moral unless it is voluntary and free; but can it conversely be said that every voluntary and free human act, considered in its concreteness, is either good or bad? Many think so, deeming it impossible for a human act to be absolutely extraneous to the moral order, at least by virtue of the end to which the subject ordains it; while others do not find such a hypothesis impossible. The first opinion, by assigning identical boundaries to freedom and morality, seems more well-founded and more logical.
The moral value of the human act resides formally in the will, i.e., in good or bad willing. The external act, therefore, has no ethical value except insofar as it expresses and reflects the act of the will from which it proceeds. This does not, however, mean that it has no value or influence in the moral order; for, besides its objective value, which determines the very moral qualification of the interior act (to will to give alms is good because almsgiving is good; to will to kill is evil because homicide is sin), it, at the very moment of execution, constitutes the matter of the voluntary act and can thus nourish the will itself, influencing the increase of merit or demerit.
On the same plane of execution, it is necessary to distinguish the action that we perform from the effects that depend upon II. If these are willed or constitute the natural terminus of our action considered in its concreteness, they are imputable to us. If, instead, they follow accidentally from our activity, as the product of a twofold concurrent activity—ours and that of another agent, whether natural or free—they are not always imputable to us, but only if, in addition to having been foreseen (even confusedly), they can and ought to be prevented by us, and there does not exist a proportionate reason for which they may be licitly permitted.
III. SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS OF THE HUMAN ACT — The human act becomes supernatural when it is performed with the aid of grace (v.). Such aid can be granted even to one who does not possess sanctifying grace, and it can pertain to the supernatural order not only the deliberate human acts but also the ineradicable movements of the intellect and will: for it is in these indeed that the invitation and stimulus of prevenient grace are realized.
The human act, however, is meritorious only when it is free, and for the merit to be, as theologians say, de condigno, friendship with God is required (v. MERITO).
The meritorious human act is therefore at the summit of human activity in this life: it sums up in itself all the other characteristics of the human act (voluntariness, freedom, morality), elevates it to a higher plane, and enables it to attain its ultimate end and, together, its full meaning: for every action is essentially finalistic.
Main principal names: 'El, where the majestic plural 'Elohim suggests the idea of power (perhaps from the root 'jl' = to be strong). 'Adonaj (perhaps from a root 'dn = to dominate) is equivalent to Lord who rules and governs. Rô'eh (root 'r'h = to see) is the Seer par excellence, to whom nothing escapes and who is present everywhere. 'Eljôn (root 'lh = to ascend) indicates the supreme being who transcends all things. Saddaj (of uncertain root) is most likely to be understood as the exalted being who suffices to Himself and has need of nothing. Qadôs is the Holy One, the Pure; 'Ab is the universal Father.
But the name that encompasses and empowers all the others is undoubtedly the one that God revealed to Moses as His own (Ex. 3, 12 ff.); this name is the famous tetragrammaton (composed of four letters): jhwh, Yahweh, imperfect 3rd person form from the verb huj or hjh = to be, i.e., "He is." This fragile word encapsulates the mystery of the nature of God (v. DIVINE ESSENCE), who is pure being, without limits or conditions, and therefore simple, infinite, immense, immutable, eternal, and unique. Yet the divine properties are expressed in formal concepts both in the Old and New Testaments.
1. Simplicity and spirituality
God is the subsistent Being (Ex. 3, 12 ff.), invisible (Ex. 19, 16-19; Job 38, 1) who searches and weighs the spirits (Prov. 16, 2 and 21, 2), who infuses into Adam’s body a spiritual soul that must return to Him after death (Gen. 2, 7; Eccl. 12, 7); “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn. 4, 24; cf. Is. 31, 3; Wis. 1, 6; 6, 24; 9, 17). Nor do the biblical expressions that present God metaphorically, as a man who walks, speaks, etc., pose any difficulty (v. ANTHROPOMORPHISM).2. Perfection and infinity
Whatever beauty and grandeur exist in the universe is but a pale reflection of God’s transcendent perfection, for from Him all things derive by creation: “If, attracted by the beauty of these things (men) have taken them for gods, let them know how much more beautiful is their Lord, for He is the author of beauty” (Wis. 13, read in full). In Ps. 145 and 147 we read these exclamations: “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable”; “Great is the Lord and mighty in power, and His wisdom is without measure.” Cf. Eccl. 43, 29. St. Paul especially extols the incomprehensibility of God’s infinite wisdom (Rom. 11, 33).3. Imensity and ubiquity
“Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you attain the perfection of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea” (Job 11, 7 ff.). Beautiful is the testimony of Ps. 138, 7-9: “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will take hold of me...” In Jer. 23, 24 we read a very effective expression: “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord.” St. Paul in the Areopagus discourse in Athens firmly asserts: “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17, 28).4. Immutability and eternity
In Ps. 102: “Of old You founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You endure; they will all wear out like a garment... but You are the same, and Your years will have no end.” In Jas. 1, 17 God is spoken of as the Father of lights, in whom “there is no variation or shadow due to change,” and St. Paul (1 Tim. 1, 17) praises “the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God.”5. The unity of God is the fundamental idea of the Old Testament and remains firm in the Gospel despite the revelation of the Trinity, which posits three consubstantial Persons in the one divine nature (v. TRINITY).
The Father. — While repeating and defending the biblical concepts of the divine properties, the Greek Fathers began that elaboration of revealed data which gave rise to systematic theology. We recall the noble struggle waged by St. Basil and the two Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzus against the Eunomians in defense of the aforementioned properties. Important also is the teaching of the Alexandrians, Clement and Origen, who develop the seeds of Revelation in the light of Greek philosophy, especially Platonism. They particularly emphasize God’s transcendence and therefore His ineffability: “God is the one immutable, impassible, immense, eternal ‘avvizz’” (Origen, *Hex.*; ‘avvizz’, I, 1, 6; II, 1, 3; IV, 28, 29). The Latin Fathers, deriving from the biblical name Yahweh, deduce lofty concepts regarding the divine nature as pure being. St. Augustine summarizes the entire tradition in admirable pages: “God, however, is said to be great, good, wise, blessed, true, and whatever else may be said without impropriety; but His greatness is the same as His wisdom... and the same goodness as wisdom and greatness, and the same truth as all these, and there is no distinction between being blessed and being great, or being wise or true or good, or indeed between being and all these perfections” (*De Trinit.*, VI, 7, 8). Elsewhere (*De Civitate Dei*, VIII, 4 and 10) he presents God as the source of all perfections in the threefold order: physical, rational, and moral, and concludes epigrammatically that God is “the cause of the constitution of the universe, and the light by which truth is perceived, and the fountain from which happiness is drunk.”
III. TEACHING OF THE CHURCH
In the ancient symbols of faith, the unity of God and His omnipotent creative power are affirmed, which implies His personal distinction from the world and His transcendence. Through the centuries, the Church has progressively clarified the concept of divinity against various attempts by heretics to adulterate II. Thus, at the Third Council of Valence (855), the eternal foreknowledge of God in relation to the mystery of predestination is defended; at the Council of Sens (1140), the doctrine of divine freedom is confirmed against Abelard; at the Council of Reims (1148), the principle of God’s absolute simplicity is reaffirmed, by which He, being His own essence, is the same goodness, the same wisdom, the same eternity, etc. Against Manichaeism, which reappeared in various forms in the 13th century, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) recalls and consolidates the traditional doctrine concerning the essential properties of God with this formula: “We firmly believe... that there is one true God, eternal, immense and unchangeable, omnipotent and ineffable, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; indeed three Persons but one in will, substance, and nature entirely simple.”In the last century, against the aberrations of rationalism, spiritualistic and materialistic pantheism, the Vatican Council (1869–70) reaffirmed this formula and supplemented it with other appropriate clarifications.
IV. HUMAN REASON
Human reason, by its natural light, through the study of the perfections of creation, rises not only to simple knowledge but also to the dialectical demonstration of the divine attributes.God is supremely simple: the simple is opposed to the composite, and therefore supremely simple is that which excludes from itself any composition, whether logical, physical, or metaphysical. This perfect, positive simplicity must not be confused with a negative simplicity, which is the extreme limit of quantity, like a point, which remains always a quantitative element even though it has no dimensions. God cannot in any way be composite, because being composite: a) is posterior to the parts of which it results and, like them, is limited; b) is always caused by an extrinsic agent, which must unite the parts into an organic whole; c) is subject to the law of disintegration. Now these characteristics are repugnant to the First Being and the First Cause. Therefore in God, pure act, there is absolute identity between essence and being, between nature and personality (v. TRINITY), between nature and operation: He is being by essence, as divine Revelation suggests, He is His very operation, substantial thought and love, without possibility of division within Himself or composition with others. God cannot be either a whole or a part of a whole; hence the absurdity of pantheism.
God is most perfect: perfection (from Lat. *perficere*, “to make completely”) denotes completeness, richness, and excludes indigence, which Aristotle and the Scholastics call *potentia* (capacity for acquisition, for development). God, being pure act and pure being (v. GOD), is absolute fullness and richness, because no perfection can be conceived as existing outside Him who is Being itself: the world with its wonders would be an absurdity if posited in itself and by itself, independent of God the Creator. God, as He is the source of being, is also the abyss of all perfections, and since the good coincides with perfection and with being, God is also goodness itself, without any shadow of evil, which is rather a privation of being (v. EVIL), and He is holiness itself.
God is infinite in a positive and absolute sense: it is a logical consequence of His fullness of being and perfection, whereby He is pure act, not limited by any *potentia* and therefore not containable within the categories of finite being. Moreover, any limit or condition would imply an extrinsic subordination in the First Cause, that is, an outright contradiction.
God is immense, because His absolute simplicity and infinity admit no measure or limitation; indeed, they require that He not be circumscribed to any particular place, but be everywhere (ubiquity). Divine presence in every place, however, must not be imagined in an extensive sense, but is realized through action, according to the nature of spirit, which is present where it acts. Now God, as universal cause, operates wherever there is a particle of being, of created reality, which requires the continual divine influx to conserve its existence. And since God is essentially His very action, where He operates He is present with His whole self.
God is immutable and eternal. Change is the passage from one state to another and therefore is becoming, is the coming to be of what was not. But God is infinite being, who has all things in act, and therefore He neither becomes nor comes to be, but is in an absolute, immutable manner. Since there is in Him no ground for becoming, no succession, He is necessarily outside time, which follows upon becoming: He is eternal. Eternity is defined by Boethius: “The possession, whole and perfect, of illimitable life,” and as such it implies two essential properties: the absence of a beginning and an end (illimitable) and the absence of any succession, of any acquisition (whole and perfect possession). Time, with its vertiginous moments, is always and entirely present to the Eternal, who has in Himself no before or after, just as the indefinite points of a circumference, though succeeding one another, are all equally present to the center of a circle. Eternity thus conceived sheds much light on the mystery of God’s foreknowledge.
Finally, God is one, because He is infinite. Two coexisting infinites are mathematically absurd. For consider these hypotheses:
∞ = ∞
which, if added together, would yield an infinity double the infinity, which is meaningless.
∞ > ∞
one of the two, the lesser, would not be infinite.
Thus polytheism is refuted.
Conclusion. — Reason and Revelation marvelously agree in the formulation of these concepts concerning the Divinity, each of which is an aspect translated into human language. The so-called divine attributes have their ultimate formal reason in the divine essence conceived as subsistent Being, with which it is ineffably identified.