¹ See my ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas's Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions’, Faith and Philosophy 28.1 (2011), 29–43. For a thorough and persuasive argument that Aquinas's ethics is not Aristotelian but in fact takes the second-personal as foundational for ethics, see Pinsent, Andrew, The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas's Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (New York: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar. See also his ‘Gifts and Fruits’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas (ed.) Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and his review of Robert Miner's Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, February 2010.

² ST I-II q.65 a.2 s.c.

³ Aquinas uses four words for love; in Latin, they are ‘amor’, ‘dilectio’, ‘amicitia’, and ‘caritas’. (Cf. ST I-II q.26 a.3.) The first of these is love in its most generic sense, which is included in all the other kinds; for Aquinas, even a rock falling from a higher to a lower place can be said to have love for the place to which it falls, in this generic sense of ‘love’. (Cf. ST I-II q.26 a.1.) The second, ‘dilectio’, emphasizes the element of voluntariness in the love of rational persons; and the third, ‘amicitia’, picks out the dispositions of love in friendship. But, for Aquinas, the fourth, ‘caritas’, is the word for love in its real or complete sense. Since Aquinas privileges caritas in this way, I will focus on caritas in explaining his account of love, although I understand his views of caritas in light of what he says about the more generic amor.

⁴ See, e.g., ST II-II q.25 a.3.

⁵ Cf. ST I-II q.26 a.4, where Aquinas says that to love is to will good to someone. Cf. also ST I-II q.28 a.4, where Aquinas explains the zeal or intensity of love in terms of the strength of a lover's desire for the good of the beloved.

⁶ By ‘union’ in this connection, I mean being at one with another, where, clearly, the kind of oneness brought about by two or more human beings is a function of what elements of life and psyche they are sharing. A mother shares some parts of herself and her life with her newborn; musically gifted friends composing an opera together share other parts of themselves with each other. Union comes in degrees at least in part because a human being, and a human life, is a composite; and it is possible to share some parts of this composite without sharing others. That is why it is possible to desire union with humanity as a whole: one can desire that all human beings be at one with each other, so that war, injustice, and all oppressive inequality cease.

⁷ Cf., e.g., ST I-II q.26 a.2 ad 2, and q.28 a.1 s.c., where Aquinas quotes approvingly Dionysius's line that love is the unitive force. Cf. also ST I-II q.66 a.6, where Aquinas explains the superiority of charity to the other virtues by saying that every lover is drawn by desire to union with the beloved, and ST I-II q.70 a.3, where Aquinas explains the connection between joy and love by saying that every lover rejoices at being united to the beloved. For an interesting recent attempt to defend a position that has some resemblance to Aquinas's, see Adams, Robert, ‘Pure Love’, Journal of Religious Ethics 8 (1980), 83–99Google Scholar. Adams says: ‘It is a striking fact that while benevolence (the desire for another person's well-being) and Eros, as a desire for relationship with another person, seem to be quite distinct desires, we use a single name, ‘love’ or ‘Agape’, for an attitude that includes both of them, at least in typical cases’ (97).

⁸ There are many other details of Aquinas's account of love that are important but that cannot be explored in passing here. For a fuller treatment, see my Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Chapter 5.

⁹ If there is a relationship between persons in which it is not appropriate for one person to desire the good for and union with the other, then the relationship is not a relationship of love. Insofar as it is possible to have a general love of humankind, however, then there is no connection between persons which is not also in effect a relationship for which some species of love is appropriate and therefore also obligatory. For some discussion of the claim that obligations and rights are not correlative, see my ‘God's Obligations’, in Philosophical Perspectives 6 (ed.) James Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1992), 475–492.

¹⁰ ST II-II q.26 a.6–2.

¹¹ For Aquinas's views on the nature of this union, cf., e.g., ST I-II q.28 a.1, where real union is described as a matter of presence between lover and beloved.

¹² Velleman, David, ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, Ethics 109 (1999), 353CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ The two desires of any love are therefore included under the more general heading of the desire for goodness, as Aquinas understands it. For detailed discussion of Aquinas's views of goodness, understood in this broad sense, see my Aquinas (New York: Routledge, 2003), Chapter 2.

¹⁴ The claim that the good desired for the beloved is an objective good therefore results from Aquinas's analysis of the nature of love together with his meta-ethics. It is not itself implied by Aquinas's analysis of love. I am grateful to Ish Haji for calling my attention to the need to make this point clear.

¹⁵ For more detailed discussion of forgiveness in connection with Aquinas's account of love, see Chapter 5 in Stump Wandering in Darkness.

¹⁶ There is by now a huge literature on forgiveness, which cannot be dealt with in passing here. A good recent review of the literature can be found in Griswold, Charles L., Forgiveness. A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. The differences between the account I give and Griswold's are sketched here. My account of forgiveness is not incompatible with the standard account of forgiveness as the forswearing of resentment, but it encompasses also forgiveness as including the desire for union with a wrongdoer.

¹⁷ In fact, although on my view love is necessary and sufficient for forgiveness, it is not the case that forgiveness is nothing but love or that forgiveness reduces to love. Analogously, being risible is necessary and sufficient for being human – anything that is risible is human and nothing that is not risible is human – but being human is not reducible to being risible. Risibility picks out human beings by an accident which is had by all and only human beings, but the nature of human beings is not nothing but risibility.  It is not part of my purposes here to define forgiveness, and so I leave to one side what else might need to be added to love for a definition of forgiveness. I am grateful to Michael Rea for calling my attention to the need to make this point explicit.

¹⁸ It might appear that Aquinas's account of love succumbs to the same problems as those that seem to some people to afflict an ethics of care. If the value of loving others or caring for others is the fundamental ethical value, then it is not easy to explain why it is morally acceptable to withhold care for others in the interests of pursuing one's own projects. And yet if there is no morally acceptable way of doing so, caring, or loving, can become deeply destructive, dreadfully unjust, with regard to the one doing the caring or loving. So, for example, Virginia Woolf describes the ‘angel in the house’ who loved others totally, who cared for them completely, in this way:

In my view, considerations similar to those showing that Paula is not loving Jerome in enabling him to harm her apply also to the case in which Paula allows herself to be harmed by myriad others. She is not loving others in allowing them to hurt her, even if the harm done to her takes the actions of a whole group to accomplish.

¹⁹ For more discussion of this claim, see Stump ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas's Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions’.

²⁰ I have argued for this claim at length in ‘God's Obligations’. To see the point here, consider, by way of analogy that if Paula were a very rich tourist traveling in a very poor country, she would be obligated to give some of her money away for charitable purposes in that country if she were solicited to do so; if she refused all such solicitations, she would be subject to appropriate moral censure. But it would not be the case that any particular recipient of her donations would have a right to her money.

²¹ Wiesenthal, Simon, The Sunflower: On the Possibility and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken Books, 1960)Google Scholar.

²² Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 169.

²³ Not everything that is morally deplorable is also culpable. That is at least in part because it is possible for a person to be in a morally bad condition without being responsible for being in that condition and therefore worthy of blame for it. A man in an isolated area of Mongolia in the time of the Great Khan might have been completely persuaded that wife-beating in certain circumstances was obligatory for him. When he beat his wife in those circumstances, his psychic state would have been morally deplorable. But most people would hesitate to consider him culpable or worthy of punishment for that act, because we would suppose that he is not responsible for his morally bad psychic condition.

²⁴ In this section of this paper, I am significantly altering the conclusion I argued for in an earlier paper, ‘Personal Relations and Moral Residue’, in History of the Human Sciences: Theorizing from the Holocaust: What is to be Learned? (ed.) Paul Roth and Mark S. Peacock, Vol. 17 No 2/3 (August 2004), 33–57. I stand by the arguments of that paper, but they now seem to me not sufficient to establish the conclusion. What else is needed, as I indicate in the conclusion of this paper, is a well-worked out theory of atonement.

²⁵ See John Newton, Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade.

²⁶ See, for example, Blustein, Jeffrey M., Forgiveness and Remembrance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.