ABSTRACT

Virtue here includes the classic virtues celebrated by the Greeks, wisdom, justice, courage and temperance or self-denial, but also virtues that are foreign to Greek thinking but praised in the New Testament, namely faith, hope and charity. Augustine formulates a Christianised version of eudaimonistic virtue ethics, bound up with a version of the divine command theory. In non-rational manner, the divine command theory is turned into the idea that there is a natural law inherent in things and human nature, expressing God’s will for creation. The focus of the film, then, is very much on human nature as fundamentally corrupted by the physical appetites, inherently given over to sin and evil, and too weak to resist without divine assistance. Couple of issues issues notwithstanding, the preceding picture provides the background for Aquinas’s natural law view of morality. For all its potential criticisms, Aquinas’s natural law approach remains dominant within Catholic moral thinking.